LOS ANGELES — The streets of Leimart Park are filled with Black History.  

"This was just coming back home man," said Larry Morris, who spent several years here, but now lives in Memphis.

Morris was in Southern California for the memorial service of his longtime friend, Cliff Hall. Hall was a native Angeleno, who friends said had an incredible mind.     

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"If he had to be rated on an IQ level, he would be off the charts!" Morris said.

He says Hall asked him to put together a documentary about his life.  

"He started sending me a lot of different information and photographs, and I had to do it for him, mainly because he was my friend," Morris recalled.

He called it The Cliff Hall Story and posted it on YouTube in 2015. Hall spent 27 years as a photographer for the Los Angeles Sentinel—the largest black newspaper west of the Mississippi. 

"He created the society page, where all the people who were doing things in the community.  The doctors and lawyers and their wives would come and [he'd] take their photographs," Morris said.

Hall documented the lives of the rich and famous during a period when discrimination was rampant.  At times, he was one of only a few African-Americans in the room, but he became a well-known photographer in the community.  He even went on to train and mentor the late Robert Bingham, who became Muhammad Ali’s professional photographer. 

He also opened a photo studio with Lamonte McLemore, a founding member of soul group, The 5th Dimension. 

"[Cliff] had a van that he had converted and put a lab inside of it, a processing lab, so after the events were completed, he had the photographs ready," Morris said.

Still, Hall’s  biggest idea was yet to take shape.  

Edward Boyer is a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and knew Hall well.

"He would scribble out one idea and before you finish talking about it, he’s got another one," Boyer recalled.

In 1965, Hall came up with a fresh design for a sports car that the average worker could afford. A Beverly Hills businessman named Louis Corwin put up $100,000 to create a prototype. 

Hall named it the 'Corwin Getaway.' It was ahead of its time, predating future designs from Pontiac and Fiat.

"He said, 'If people are copying something that I did 30 years ago, what do you think I could be doing now?'" Boyer said.

Unfortunately, Hall never found the financing he needed to put the car into mass production. He wanted to be the Martin Luther King, Jr. of industry. His dream was to create cars made by black hands in the black community.

"There’s no shortage of initiative, entrepreneurial ship in the African-American community. There is, very often, sadly, a shortage of financing," Boyer said. "Maybe if Cliff were making his car in 2020, the story might be different." 

It's a story Boyer says is only now starting to get more attention, but one he hopes will continue to educate and inspire. Hall's car is now housed as part of the Petersen Automotive Museum’s permanent collection.

"People go over and see that car and say, 'What?  A black guy made this?' To this day, there are people I have spoken to who don’t believe," Boyer said.

But Hall always did…

"I mean, you could crush him today. Tomorrow, he had a new idea, and he believed that’s the one that’s going to work," Boyer said.  "He was always optimistic."

Hall died in Janauary, 2020 at the age of 94.