Jerry’s Flying Fox, the last sugar shack in the city that marked Black Angelenos’ westward migration from storied Central Avenue to Crenshaw Boulevard, will celebrate its 50th anniversary Sunday and the joint is expected to be jumping, as usual.

The Flying Fox, 3724 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., has actually been in existence and in that location for 52 years, but its owner, Jerry Edwards, is just now getting around to observing the club’s golden anniversary, thus directing attention to exactly what the club was to African-Americans in the 1950s, what it means today and what could happen to it in the future.

Given Los Angeles’ segregated housing practice at the time, the Flying Fox was originally established just off Crenshaw by an unknown White man.

“At the time, of course, Black people were not welcome there,” Edwards said. “When I came here from Houston in 1955, this was a place where we could not go. At that time we had to go to places cautiously in order not to be insulted or not served.”

Central Avenue, with its legendary Dunbar Hotel and its numerous nightspots held sway as the center of the universe for Black residents of Los Angeles throughout the 1940s and they tended to live, love, worship and party on, along and beside that avenue from downtown south to Slauson Avenue.

But in the 1950s, things began to change and African-Americans discovered they could live — not hassle-free, of course — farther west, to say, Western Avenue, where the Watkins Hotel at Western and Adams began accepting Black guests and its Rubiyat Room became a place where Black patrons were no big deal.

Now, Blacks had encroached upon Crenshaw and ran smack dab into the lily-White Flying Fox, and inasmuch as the neighborhood was “turning,” as they say, the club turned Black in 1959 when Hildegard Bostick, wife of saxophonist Earl Bostick, bought it. As a famous musician, Bostick attracted other musicians, singers and entertainers to his wife’s Flying Fox and it became the premier place for Black L.A. to see and be seen.

Bostick owned the club for eight years and then sold it to a Black liquor store owner named Nate Jordan, who was an introverted fellow who didn’t fit in with his clientele. Jordan is said to have been an anti-social person, which is not an asset for somebody running a nightclub.

“But it was still the place,” Edwards said. “We all hung out there and we just loved it.”

Then Edwards, who was a highly successful insurance salesman at the time, made Jordan an offer he couldn’t refuse and bought the Flying Fox in 1970 and embellished and solidified its role in the community.

The Flying Fox was never anything more than a place with a bar, a juke box and camaraderie (read: folks lying to each other) — where friends enjoyed each others’ company. But Jerry’s Flying Fox became something even more special. Edwards added meals — lunch, dinner and chef Eddie Oliphant’s amazing gumbo — to the club’s bill of fare, and added live entertainment after doubling the size of the club in 1980. Singer Johnnie Taylor was his first live act, followed by many others such as Little Milton, Sam Fletcher, Earl Garner, Lou Rawls, Joe Turner, Joe Williams and Ernie Andrews, who still hangs out at the club.

“We had all of them,” Edwards said. “If they lived in Los Angeles or played in the city they came in here.”

And so did the athletes: Muhammad Ali, Oscar Robinson, Jim Brown, Larry Holmes and Sugar Ray Robinson, etc., often frequented the club. And oh, did the politicians make the Flying Fox their favorite hang! The New Frontier Democratic Club, the oldest and largest Democratic club in the state, was organized in the Flying Fox. Tom Bradley’s mayoral campaign was developed at the club, as were the campaigns of the late Rep. Julian Dixon and retiring Rep. Diane Watson and many other seekers of offices and political appointments and favors.

Currently, the Flying Fox, Edwards, his gumbo cooker of the past 35 years and his long-time bartender, Ben Stokes are at the nadir of their existence. Where the club was once a prominent feature of a commercial area known as San Barbara Plaza, it is now and has been for the past 15 years virtually the only business of significance sitting in 25 acres of blight in the heart of the African-American community.

“The city [Community Redevelopment Agency] came in here 15 years ago saying they were going to develop this plaza. They destroyed it,” Edwards said. “Before the city came, we had 200 healthy small businesses operating here, in addition to a bank, a supermarket, and a 24-hour telephone company facility full of telephone operators who flocked to the club for lunch and dinner after their shifts. This is where a lot of them met the men they married.

“But now, since I’m in a ghost town with no businesses around me, I’m
losing $3,000 to $4,000 a month,” Edwards continued. “People still come in here, but basically, all I’m doing now is throwing bucketloads of water out of a sinking ship until the city decides what it’s going do about replacing what it destroyed.”

In the meantime, Councilman Herb Wesson has arranged for the city to honor Jerry’s Flying Fox upon its 50th anniversary, and on Sunday, the club’s regulars and guests will show up after 5 p.m., dressed up and ready to celebrate like it was 1959 — the year Hildegard Bostick turned it Black.