Black Author’s Day in L.A. Marred by Another Killing

James Baldwin went to South-Central Los Angeles on Sunday, and the famous black author once billed by his publisher as “America’s angry young man” was moved by the neighborhood’s troubles.

Twelve hours earlier, another shooting had claimed a young man in the area. This victim, an unidentified 26-year-old black male, was discovered bleeding, face down, in the 600 block of 94th Street.

“It’s no different today than it was 25 years ago,” said Baldwin, the 60-year-old Harlem-born author who has long chronicled black suffering in books, short stories and poetry.

“This kind of killing is going on in the ghettos, the projects and all across poor, urban America,” he said. “Life in the inner city is still so claustrophobic--the unemployed, the addicts, the bored and frustrated continue to prey on each other, striking out for attention. Los Angeles is no different. We just can’t seem to stop it.”

Baldwin was interviewed at noon in a kitchen in the rear of the A. C. Bilbrew Library, where he was to be honored later in the afternoon as part of Black History Month.

The library is located near the intersection of El Segundo Boulevard and Main Street, roughly two miles from the site of the 94th Street attack. Homicide investigators said the victim had been shot several times in the chest around midnight Saturday after a dispute in front of a large, run-down apartment complex. By late Sunday afternoon, police had no suspect or motive.

“Mr. Baldwin can talk all he wants about equality and giving the black man a fair shake, but he ain’t going to stop this,” said Edgar Bowman, a 45-year-old unemployed tile layer who lives only steps from where the killing took place.

Bowman was seated on his porch, rocking in a chair and sipping coffee. On the street, children played with the remains of the police flares used the night before after the killing. A police car rolled slowly up the street every 10 minutes.

While Bowman said he had not “read many of his books,” he nonetheless was well-versed in Baldwin’s message of nonviolence.

“I do know this,” he said, “Mr. Baldwin speaks from the heart. But his words ain’t going to change anything.”

Ty Williams would not agree.

A 21-year-old college student, Williams had gone to the A. C. Bilbrew Library at 1:30 p.m. Sunday to hear Baldwin. He had read two of Baldwin’s best-known works, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and “The Fire Next Time,” the 1963 book that warned of the race rioting that erupted later in the decade.

Williams said he had taken solace in Baldwin’s writings two years ago, after a cousin had been killed by misdirected gunfire.

He and the cousin, named Daniel, had played together on a neighborhood fast-pitch softball team. They had shared a room for a time, shortly after they graduated from high school, and had double-dated often to Dodger games.

Then, in 1983, Daniel was struck with an errant bullet in a drive-by shooting.

“It was senseless. He was on a street corner. We had just walked out of a pizza joint and boom--he was down,” recalled Williams, fanning himself with a program in the hot, noisy library, which was rapidly filling with a crowd of several hundred people. “It really hurt me, left a hole in my life. I was angry. I wanted to strike back.

“I came close to taking matters into my own hands.”

Instead he turned to Baldwin. Williams said Baldwin’s accounts of struggling to cope with poverty and racism while growing up in Harlem had struck a chord. “He was frustrated, even angry,” Williams said. “But he channeled that positively. He started writing. I’ve tried to do the same thing by going to college. I came as a ‘thank you’ to Mr. Baldwin.”

Baldwin, who now divides his time between New York and France, where he has lived and worked since he was 24, said far too many youths choose guns over books.

“What they don’t understand is a gun will only get you as far as the nearest street corner,” Baldwin said. “Instead of guns, it has to be books.”

The hope, Baldwin said, rests with children. “It is in the schools,” he said, “that they will learn this is not a white world, but a world filled with all colors.”