Board’s Job--Getting People to Be Nice

There was the black woman who opened a delicatessen in mostly white Glendale, only to find her building defaced by racist graffiti.

There was the gay man who was shopping with two friends in a Marina del Rey grocery store when someone said over the market public address system, “Faggots get out of the market.”

And there was the winning entry in a Long Beach sand-sculpture contest, a caricature of a grinning Chinese man emerging from the other side of the earth, titled “Wrong Beach.”

Each of these small crises crossed the desk of Eugene Mornell, a pleasant ex-probation officer whose job sometimes sounds like the toughest one in Los Angeles: Getting people to be nice to one another.

Mornell is executive director of the county Human Relations Commission, which spends $975,000 of public funds each year in hazy pursuit of a more tolerant society.

The commission, made up of 15 appointees of the Board of Supervisors, trudges through a host of idealistic activities that seem dull on their face and often just as dull underneath.

Commissioners, who earn $25 for each meeting they attend, hold public hearings on subjects such as housing discrimination, vocational education and treatment of American Indians. They compile statistics on racial and religious violence. They pass resolutions against ideas they find discriminatory, such as the English-only initiative. They ask staff members to mediate disputes, such as tension between blacks and Koreans in South Los Angeles or protests by Asians against a West Hollywood hair salon that used the name J.A.P.S.S.

The commission’s mostly anonymous efforts receive little public notice. Some of the most concentrated attention the commission received this year came not from anything it did to reduce prejudice, but from a well-publicized ruling by a Superior Court judge, who said that the commission had unfairly demoted its highest-ranking black woman employee because of statements she made on race and religion.

Commissioners employ a staff of a dozen full-time “consultants,” some assigned to monitor specific racial groups, others assigned to topics such as job discrimination against women. But the consultants are far outnumbered by the county’s myriad of ethnic and economic layers and daunted by Los Angeles’ frenzy of demographic change, in which a neighborhood can shift from black to Latino to Asian within a decade.

The commission’s mission has also been throttled by society’s hardening attitude toward the notion of spending tax dollars on social programs--let alone on something as invisible as attitudes.

Between 1975 and 1978, the commission’s staff was sliced from 65 to 34. In 1977, one county supervisor proposed dismantling it altogether, arguing that the growth of other government civil rights and anti-discrimination agencies made it unnecessary. The next year, in the wake of Proposition 13, the county’s chief administrative officer recommended the same thing. The Board of Supervisors resisted, but today the staff is down to 20, and the ever-present question remains: Where’s the proof that the money is well-spent?

“The problem with this work,” admitted Lionel Martinez, a consultant who is one of Mornell’s assistants, “is trying to justify it.”

Every once in a while, though, some shard of evidence makes itself visible, at least to those who try hard enough to see it.

Consider the case of Arletha Davis.

A few weeks ago, several commissioners held a hearing in Pasadena to solicit ideas on “what works” in human relations. The seminar produced few specifics and many generalizations.

Then Davis, a teacher at Markham Junior High School in South Los Angeles, began talking about a student human relations council she had formed in 1983 to smooth tension between youngsters in a largely black school with a growing Latino enrollment.

Davis talked about how she had been helped along the way by a Human Relations Commission staff member, who visited weekly to help organize discussion groups about topics like racial stereotyping, self-esteem and street gangs and provided relevant reading materials for the children.

And then Davis trotted out five students--a black, two Latinos, an Asian and an Indian--to testify.

Shyly, hesitatingly, they spoke.

Michael Shin talked about how Davis’ council of 50 students “has taught me not to judge other people by how they look.”

Johanna Garcia talked about how she had learned to “overcome my fear of talking to other people.”

To the rest of the world, on a day when the U.S. Senate was approving a $576-billion spending bill and Israeli jets were attacking Palestinian bases, it was small change.

Rare Evidence

To the commissioners, who beamed proudly and applauded the students with gusto, it was that rare show of evidence that out of all the report-writing and paper-shuffling and concern, something had trickled down and made a difference.

Most of the time, it’s harder to tell.

For example, three years ago, shortly after assuming his job, Mornell decided to hold public hearings on “the state of the county” in each of the five supervisorial districts.

At one hearing, a Korean store owner complained about crimes committed by residents in his Southeast Los Angeles neighborhood. Then a black resident complained about being treated rudely and arrogantly by Korean storekeepers, hundreds of whom have set up shop in low-income black neighborhoods in recent years because of the area’s cheaper commercial property.

That planted enough of a seed for the commission to try to put together what it calls a “model” of a black-Korean group--to find a way to get suspicious residents and merchants to begin talking to each other.

“There was very little documented evidence of these problems,” said Larry Aubry, who has been a commission consultant in South Los Angeles since 1967 and was assigned to the project. “And there’s no great amount of people knocking on our door. No groundswell. But that’s our job--to deal with it before it reaches a crisis.”

Reason for Staying

Aubry, a black who better fits the stereotype of a banker than a social worker, says he has stayed with the commission for so long because it’s one of the few jobs where “the distinction between my professional and personal concerns is very blurred. The whole thing of social-political change is a vital part of what I’m all about.”

Aubry found that a local Baptist clergyman, the Rev. Huey Rachal, and a Korean merchant, Chung Lee, had informally attempted to ease tensions during the previous two years. He enlisted them in the formation of a coalition. A basketball game between the two sides was arranged. A couple of church exchanges were held.

And then, last January, came a triumph, at least by Human Relations Commission standards. There was a dispute between a Korean store owner and a black teacher who felt that his children had been harassed by the merchant.

“The parent was threatening to picket the store on the first Martin Luther King birthday holiday,” Aubry said. “But the coalition intervened. A mediation was held.”

It was one of the commission’s finest moments, said Morris Kight, a Human Relations Commission member for six years and one of Los Angeles’ oldest and best-known gay activists.

“Has it brought peace to the streets? No, of course not,” Kight said. “But it’s brought some peace. It’s brought some intercourse. I think it’s a seed that can grow.”

Rash of Murders

Those initial contacts paid off later this year, Aubry said, when four Korean merchants in South-Central were murdered during robberies. While Korean and black leaders, as well as police, quickly discounted any racial motivation, the attacks refocused attention on the tension between merchants and their customers.

In response, Aubry and the black and Korean participants in the small Southeast Los Angeles coalition expanded their group to include merchants and residents in the larger South-Central area.

“At this point, I don’t think it’s made much difference,” Aubry said, “but this kind of thing takes time and that’s why we got involved. I’ll tell you what, though: There are some people interfacing who didn’t interface before, and that’s something.”

Rachal said he is impressed by the commission’s commitment to improving black-Korean relations.

“I’ve been critical of the commission, but I have re-evaluated it,” Rachal said. “They have really proven themselves to me. Larry Aubry was not neutral. He was very much involved. I have to give him credit. He instigated certain meetings in which he was able to open up some people that I had not been able to get to--blacks and Korean.”

‘We’ve Been Lucky’

“I think we’ve been lucky,” Aubry said. “I don’t think the government and private resources that are going to be necessary to deal with this have been brought to bear. . . . A lot of the time, I feel like we’re (the commission and its staff) actors on the stage and a lot of other actors--public and private agencies--are just standing back, watching the drama go on.”

A decade ago, in headier, more expansive times, the Human Relations Commission plunged aggressively into resolving neighborhood conflicts, employing the broadest interpretation of human relations. It looked at poverty, gun control, drugs, crime. In 1975, three years before mandatory busing began, the commission passed a resolution condemning the Los Angeles Board of Education for encouraging and condoning segregated education by refusing to develop a desegregation program. By 1982, a county management audit was sharply critical of the commission for overextending itself.

Today, under executive director Mornell, the approach is low-key and the emphasis is on public hearings. Fair housing groups, religious leaders and local human relations groups are asked to shoulder the burden of case-by-case intervention. A telephone counseling service that dealt with individual allegations of discrimination is gone. Occasionally, when the Board of Supervisors encounters a particularly sticky problem--allegations of anti-Semitism in a city zoning decision, arson at a center for the homeless, the specter of Lyndon H. LaRouche--the commission may be asked to step in or issue a report.

Flagrant Example

So it went in the case of the 20th annual Great Sand Sculpture Contest in Long Beach last year.

The contest’s winning entry was, to Mornell, the most flagrant case in which the commission has intervened during his four-year tenure.

The first problem with the sand sculpture was the racially demeaning, larger-than-life Chinese caricature itself. The second problem was that when a local newspaper reported the results in a feature story, it described the caricature as a “buck-toothed Chinaman.”

At the commission’s request, the newspaper’s editor one month later published a column apologizing for the choice of words and making it clear that the newspaper--which co-sponsored the event--did not endorse the theme of the winning entry.

“What was so astounding was that it could happen in 1985,” said Mornell, a commission staff member in the 1960s who left to work for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for nine years before returning here in 1982. “I’m convinced that all these people (associated with the sand sculpture incident) were well-intentioned. They were not racist.”

What were they?

“Unaware,” he said.

And that, in Mornell’s eyes, is the big problem.

“How do we change people?” he wondered aloud. “People are inundated with various inhumanities. Pretty soon, hearing all of these horrors, people tune them out. They desensitize themselves. People are tired of hearing about problems.”