In one of her final public interviews on the subject of the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles, with the Beverly Hills View in 2015, Roz Wyman described the political saga as a “battle royal.”

Wyman, who passed away last Wednesday at age 92, was a key figure in luring the Dodgers out of Brooklyn as a member of the Los Angeles City Council from 1953-65. Bringing Major League Baseball here was foundational to her campaign when she was elected at age 22, making her the youngest person ever to hold a seat on the council. By the time she left office, the mostly vacant hills of Chavez Ravine had been cleared to make room for Dodger Stadium.

As it concerned the land, the “battle royal” began before Wyman went to work in City Hall. Its fate was determined by many individuals over many years. When her side emerged victorious, Wyman enjoyed singular praise for the Dodgers’ presence long after the other power brokers of 1950s Los Angeles passed away. And history, as they say, is written by the victors.

In her 2015 interview, Wyman attempted to set the record straight about the most controversial aspect of the Dodger Stadium project: the city’s evictions of the last residents of Chavez Ravine.

“People don’t sometimes understand when they say, ‘well, people were removed out of Chavez Ravine,’ it was five years after the area was taken for public housing,” Wyman said. “The Dodgers didn’t know anything about what was going on at that point. The land lay dormant. It wasn’t getting taxes. Nothing was happening with it. We looked at it for a zoo. We looked at it for a police academy. We looked at it for everything. We also had no money to develop it. It was at a 35- or 40-degree angle, whatever it was.”

On the surface, the quote reeks of obfuscation. Holding the powerful accountable is a fundamental duty of the press, even more than publishing special commemorative editions on the rare occasions the Dodgers win the World Series. If an actual L.A. City Council member at the time is not to be held accountable for the Chavez Ravine evictions, who is?

To answer that question accurately, timelines are of the essence. So is the contemporaneous reporting from City Hall.

On Oct. 7, 1957, the L.A. City Council approved a deal with Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley by a vote of 10 to four. The following day, O’Malley formally announced the Dodgers were leaving Brooklyn. Eric Nusbaum wrote in his book Stealing Home that there were still a “dozen or so” families living on the Chavez Ravine site at the time.

Those families had been living in limbo for seven years. Indeed, before Wyman took office, the federally sponsored City Housing Authority designated the site for a public housing project that required the demolition of the existing homes and the relocation of Chavez Ravine’s residents. Community members protested the “Elysian Park Heights” project before and after it was approved by the planning commission in 1950.

Unpopular though it was, the threat of eviction is a powerful one. An assessor was tasked with appraising the value of individual properties. In the years that followed, most homeowners collected their checks and moved on.

In defense of the few who did not, where was the public housing? Its fate was apparently decided at the ballot box in 1952. A municipal referendum had defeated plans for the original 10,000-unit development, prompting Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron to fly to Washington D.C. to downsize plans for the 13-story towers, designed by Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander. But when Bowron was voted out of office in 1953, replaced by Norris Poulson — who explicitly campaigned against public housing — the plans were dropped entirely.

Where was Wyman in all of this?

On May 12, 1954, she joined the rest of the City Council in voting to buy back the abandoned Chavez Ravine housing site from the federal government, which had bankrolled the Housing Authority. It lay dormant, as Wyman noted in the 2015 interview, while the Council debated various public uses for the land.

To depict the remaining residents as mere squatters — the official line from City Hall — ignores two key points.

For one, they had owned the land long before the City Housing Authority effectively usurped their claim. Then, when the city reneged on its stated purpose for claiming the land, the residents could hardly be blamed for moving out to make room for ... well, for what, exactly?

For another, at least one land-owning family did, in effect, pay taxes on their land. The Arechiga family was the last to leave Palo Verde, one of the three Chavez Ravine communities that was leveled to create Dodger Stadium. Their dramatic, forcible evictions were captured on television in May 1959, the peak of a long battle between the family and the city that mostly played out in court. For the duration, the Arechigas had the right to a $10,050 check sitting in escrow in the city clerk’s office — minus $11 that had been deducted for personal property taxes.

Wyman was not unsympathetic to their plight. Before the evictions, the Housing Authority offered temporary residence to the Arechiga family. They declined the offer. Wyman, who did not represent the Arechiga’s district, was one of three council members who offered to help pay the family’s rent until they found a permanent living arrangement.

Wyman also voted against allowing the Arechiga family to stay in their home until after their Supreme Court appeal could be decided. (When the appeal was dismissed, in October 1959, construction of Dodger Stadium was allowed to proceed.) Following the evictions, it was reported that Wyman received “several telephoned threats.” A special police guard was assigned to protect her.

Could the City Council have authorized the Palo Verde holdouts a larger check for their land, overruling a judge’s earlier $10,050 assessment? Maybe. It was Wyman, after all, who progressively championed a privately financed ballpark. Dodger Stadium was the first in Major League Baseball to be built without public money after ground broke on Yankee Stadium nearly 40 years earlier. The council could have used that savings to make amends with its disaffected landowners.

Nusbaum argued that O’Malley, as the ultimate beneficiary of the various bureaucratic stumbles that allowed Palo Verde residents to persist on his acquired land, should have cut the check in grand fashion. Perhaps that would have catalyzed the healing process. It was not until the 1981 ascendance of Mexican-born pitcher Fernando Valenzuela that many in the Mexican-American community made peace with the Dodgers’ presence in Chavez Ravine.

Wyman largely dodged the fans’ ire. In a 1965 interview with the Los Angeles Times, she said the richest reward of her 12 years on the City Council was the “more than 15 million people who have enjoyed Major League Baseball” in the first eight years of the Dodgers’ time in Los Angeles.

The number had grown to 30 million by 1978, when Wyman again ran for City Council. According to the Times, her political opponents were using the construction of Dodger Stadium against her during the campaign — not for the evictions, but for the “so-called destruction of Elysian Park.”

Wyman’s death is a reminder that the Dodgers’ origin story in Los Angeles is a complicated one. She had a better view of it than most, ultimately taking pride in the fruits of her labor. Even if that view was prematurely rosy in 1965, it’s OK to acknowledge the fabric that was torn and the fabric that was knitted together by making Los Angeles a major league city.