Ozie B. Gonzaque

Ozie Gonzaque and her four sisters grew up in Louisiana where her grandfather worked as a farmer and her father worked as a laborer for a gas station. While her parents were respected in the community, after an incident where her father couldn’t get the deed to his own property, the family decided to move to Los Angeles in 1944. While visiting two of her sisters who already lived in Los Angeles, Ozie became responsible for finding a house for her parents. Discrimination against her race prevented her from buying a house West of Main, so she purchased a house in Watts, South Los Angeles. After moving to Los Angeles, Ozie got a job working at Club Alabam. It was while working there that she befriended Tom Bradley, who was a young police officer who would check in on her. Ozie’s second husband was a White police officer who was fired from the force and harassed for marrying a Black woman. The stress of the situation eventually led to his death. Ozie decided to go and work with the police force, having been taught by her mother that if she was going to complain about a situation, she had to be prepared to do something about it. During her 30 years working with the force, she befriended police chiefs William Parker and Daryl Gates, who both had reputations for being racists. These relationships empowered her to advocate for her community. Daryl Gates eventually asked her to lead sensitivity training for his officers and to serve as commissioner for the housing authority, which Ozie did for 20 years. In this role, she was approached by a woman about drug violence in the public housing project where she lived. Ozie went to congress and advocated for funds to tear it down and convert it into mixed housing, and she pushed for the housing authority to employ residents there. For her efforts, Councilman Rudy Svorinich honored Ozie Gonzaque by renaming the Hacienda Village, a public housing project in Watts, to the Ozie Gonzaque Village.