Damien Goodmon Has Spent Decades Fighting to Keep Crenshaw’s Small Businesses and Black Community in Place

Damien Goodmon is a community organizer, activist, and co-founder of Downtown Crenshaw Rising, a Black-led initiative based in Los Angeles, California. He is also the founder and executive director of the Crenshaw Subway Coalition.

Silver Lining commissioned this work from Damien Goodmon as part of the small.artists Mini Doc series, supported by Wells Fargo.

Goodmon has been organizing along the Crenshaw corridor since 2006, first to ensure that the planned Crenshaw/LAX light rail line served the community that built the neighborhood, then to fight the gentrification and displacement that followed the line’s arrival. His work is rooted in a simple principle: economic development that doesn’t benefit the people already there is not development at all.

In 2021, Downtown Crenshaw Rising placed a $115 million community bid to purchase the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall, a bid built, as Goodmon puts it, on 25 years of trust, networks, and organizing with integrity. The effort was part of a broader vision he calls the Liberty Ecosystem: a solidarity economy for Crenshaw and South Central Los Angeles built on cooperatives, community land trusts, and collective ownership. The land trust is named after Liberty Savings and Loan Association, a Black-owned institution that anchored the neighborhood until a hostile takeover ended its tenure in 1961.

For the small businesses that line Crenshaw Boulevard, Goodmon’s work is the difference between staying and being pushed out.