56% of LA's Founders Were Black—Then America Erased Them On September 4, 1781, forty-four people founded what would become Los Angeles. According to the 1781 census, twenty-six of those forty-four settlers had African ancestry—56% of the founding population. Only two were of unmixed Spanish descent. Yet for two centuries, America erased this multiracial reality from its history books. The first Black settlers in what is now the American West weren't enslaved in chains. They were Spanish speakers