When Compton hired architect Harold Williams to design a new City Hall in 1968, it was anything but a smooth sail.
Over the next several years, the project went through three mayors, eight city managers and 10 council members. Each regime offered a different vision for a structure to serve a community that, in just a few decades, had gone from being almost exclusively white to being predominantly African American.
But Williams bird-dogged his clients because such jobs were rare for black architects like him and he was determined "to bring to that community quality architecture," he recalled in a 1993 oral history.