Almost the last time I saw Tom Bradley, I didn’t recognize the slumped old man in the far corner of the City Council, whispering to a few friends. It was 1994, and he hadn’t been in City Hall since his retirement the year before. He’d returned for what seemed a strange reason: to counter then-Fire Chief Donald Manning’s claim that, as mayor, Bradley had permitted segregation in the fire department in the mid-1970s.Just how quickly Bradley had integrated the city’s most segregated department didn’t matter to most of us. The job had been done, and whether it had taken a few months or years was an issue for historians, not journalists. But it mattered to Bradley. As he stood to address the council, an amazing thing happened. The years fell away as he unstooped to his full height. His face became young and strong, and in a baritone that filled the entire room, he told us that he had spread black firefighters from their ghetto locations all over the city as soon as he took office. And that was that.He held on to this vigor as he marched out of the council chamber and into the elevator. You couldn’t know what that 15-minute self-rejuvenation had cost him, but you also wondered whether Bradley’s decline had really been that rapid. You wondered whether in his last three years in office, moving into his mid-70s, Bradley had not sometimes been, in private, the old man you now saw in public.
Source: How Los Angeles transformed – and didn’t transform – Tom Bradley | L.A. Weekly