L.A.’s time of harmonic divergence

When I met my long-lost African American godfather last week, it was a bittersweet experience.

It was undeniably cool to listen to Booker Wade’s stories of meeting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and of fighting to desegregate 1960s Memphis, Tenn..

Like a lot of college-educated Latinos of a certain age, I’d grown up identifying with African American history. Discovering that I had a personal connection to that history seemed like some sort of karmic gift from the gods.

But then my conversation with Wade turned to the present. And we both expressed a sense of powerlessness and despair.

I asked Wade how he felt about his old home, Los Angeles, and the often open distrust in neighborhoods where black and Latino people live next to each other.

Writing about Latino-black tension was what led me to Wade in the first place. I had told readers the story of the late-night ride he gave my Guatemalan immigrant mother to an L.A. hospital in 1963 -- to have me. He reached out across language and race barriers to help my family. He was an example of the L.A. that was and the L.A. that might still be.

A reader soon tracked down Wade for me.

Now, sitting in his office in Palo Alto, he brought his hands together.

“I see the conflicts,” he told me. “What I don’t see is the accommodation.”

Wade, now 66, travels to Los Angeles often to see relatives. Each visit is fraught with a sense of loss and cultural confusion.

His elderly aunt lives on a South L.A. street where “hers is probably the only black household on the block because it’s all Hispanic.”

And some of his Los Angeles relatives “see these irreconcilable differences” between the two groups, Wade told me. “I don’t know many [black] folks who’ve embraced the diversity as an opportunity.”

It was all so different when Wade arrived in L.A. from Memphis nearly a half century ago. In the 1960s, L.A. was for him a place of hope. A son of the segregated South, he was determined to find a way to educate himself and to fight for his community.

He was a teenager when he met my mother and father in East Hollywood. My mother says he wore a bright blue suit to my baptism, and she is grateful for the respect he showed our family on that important day.

Wade was taking classes at Los Angeles City College then. He transferred to Cal State L.A., graduated, and briefly published an Orange County black newspaper -- until someone scrawled KKK on the newspaper’s front door.

He applied to Stanford Law School in 1971.

Wade wasn’t the first black student at Stanford Law. “I think I was the 13th,” he told me. Still, he was in a small group of pioneers. “We knew that if we didn’t succeed, it would make it more difficult for the people coming after us.”

He graduated in 1974 and joined the Federal Communications Commission, where he fought many quiet battles to increase minority and female hiring in television and radio stations.

But after a lifetime of struggle on behalf of black empowerment and cultural diversity, he said, living in the new California is a letdown. Wade is aware of the dwindling black share of the population (about 7%) in a state with larger, fast-growing Latino and Asian communities.

“Most African Americans feel like we’re going to get lost in the melting pot,” he told me.

A doctor friend of his, he said, left her practice and moved to Atlanta after witnessing what she called “the removal” of blacks from her L.A. community. Wade sees himself as an outsider to L.A. now. “I haven’t lived there for a long time,” he said. Perhaps time and distance were skewing his views.

You live there, Hector, he told me. What do you think?

I thought about this for a moment and said: “The problem is that no one in L.A. wants to talk about the future.”

This statement surprised him a bit. Back in the 1970s, when Wade last lived here, L.A. was synonymous with the future. It was a younger city then. Now we’re in a kind of middle age.

L.A.’s leaders have failed to cope with the arrival of millions of people from Latin America in the last 30 years, I said. The institutions that helped assimilate previous generations are overloaded and exhausted, and we’re caught up in a stalemate over what to do about it.

Half of L.A. doesn’t want to spend another dime on immigrants and their children -- and the other half doesn’t want to admit to the vast scope of the problems caused by the city’s transformation. So the gap between rich and poor in L.A. increases, along with the number of conflicts born of ignorance.

“I wish I knew an answer,” Wade said finally. “We need to find a way to come together and bridge these gaps.”

Before I left, Wade gave me a tour of the television station he manages. The offices and studios were filled with Mandarin speakers. The station dedicates one of its signals to the language, to serve the Bay Area’s Chinese community.

“We’ve always embraced diversity,” he told me.

Wade has lived his life that way too. He said he wishes he spoke more Spanish and at least some words of the many Asian languages around him.

I’m grateful I got to sit down with Booker Wade -- and that my mother found him all those years ago.

A Latina immigrant arriving in L.A. today might not be so lucky.

Sure, she’d encounter plenty of Spanish speakers to help her, and probably wouldn’t need to depend on the kindness of an English-speaking stranger to get to the hospital. She might not be forced to step across the barriers of race and language to hear a stranger’s story. In a lot of ways, she’d have it easier.

But she’d lose something, too, by not listening to those American stories that connect her to her new home.

hector.tobar@latimes.com