A new movie, a new album, and the legacy of N.W.A.
Illustration of Dr. Dre
On “Compton,” Dr. Dre balances tales of triumph with back-in-the-day stories.Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad

In the winter of 1969, Douglas Fairbanks Dollarhide, the recently elected mayor of Compton, California, travelled to Philadelphia to attend the annual meeting of the National Municipal League. For decades, the Los Angeles suburb had been admired for its affordable housing, its stable growth, and its prime location, between downtown and nearby Long Beach. The league had awarded Compton the coveted distinction of All-America City in 1952. But much had changed since then. The racist housing covenants that insured Compton would have an overwhelmingly white population had been overturned; the election of Dollarhide, the son of a former slave, was a symbol of Compton’s changing demographics. The city was now a beacon of middle-class possibility for its growing black population.

Dollarhide had come to Philadelphia to campaign for another All-America City prize. An article in Jet, earlier that year, praised Compton’s “constructive” vision of “exerting black power through politics” rather than through violent protest. Dollarhide had worked his way up from the post office to the city council, and he wanted to show that, seventeen years after the first award, Compton was still a jewel of a suburb. As part of his (ultimately unsuccessful) presentation, he played a simulated recording of what an L.A. paper described as “angry voices that one hears in a city.” “These are the voices that face Compton and other cities,” Dollarhide explained. Amid that clamor, he said, Compton was a model for what hardworking people with strong values could accomplish together.