 But here's what the Parks didn't know about Compton. Way back before World War II, Compton was overwhelmingly white. And when Black families started moving from the South into the neighborhood, they were met with hostility by white families, a lot of whom then left Compton. And this was a pattern playing out in a lot of American cities in the 1950s and 60s. After a while, middle-class Black and Latino families left too. So by the 1980s, working-class jobs in Compton were scarce.