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Jackson Carries Words of Hope to Mean Streets

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Times Staff Writers

Kim Smith, a 28-year-old welfare mother who struggles every day to raise two small daughters in one of the city’s meanest areas, touched the hand of the famous man who had spent the night in Watts’ troubled Nickerson Gardens housing project.

“Are you coming to help us?” she asked with hope, when she met the Rev. Jesse Jackson early Thursday morning.

For the record:

12:00 a.m. June 4, 1988 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday June 4, 1988 Home Edition Part 1 Page 2 Column 2 National Desk 1 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
A photo caption in Friday editions of The Times erroneously identified Gary Barner as a gang member. In his remarks at a press conference with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Barner said he was a former gang member.

The Democratic presidential candidate, in Los Angeles to campaign for votes in Tuesday’s primary election, answered her question, in a sense, when he met later with a group of community residents.

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“Nobody can save you but you,” Jackson is said to have told them. The meeting was closed to more than 100 journalists who waited outside, but Jackson and other participants later described it.

Calls for Coordination

Jackson also criticized government, which he said has set “a national pattern of abandonment,” and called for a greater coordination of local and national resources to fight urban problems.

“I offer you today a partnership,” Jackson said.

Some who attended the session wore the bright red that identified them as members of a gang that calls itself the Bounty Hunters. The housing project is situated on what is recognized in Watts as their turf.

They told of how even the most sophisticated weapons--Soviet-made AK-47 automatic rifles and Israeli Uzi submachine guns, for example--are readily available to anyone who has “cash money on Long Beach Boulevard,” Jackson said.

“With these weapons, you don’t have to be a marksman. You just shoot. You can’t stop shooting until you kill somebody,” he added.

“Some of the frustration and pain, of course, is misdirected,” Jackson said in an interview after his meeting with the Watts residents. “Right now, their rage is turned upon . . . each other, or the police, because the police crack down, or on the people who do not give them enough (government) services.”

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Urges Activism

The candidate who won national prominence in civil rights marches more than two decades ago urged a similar activism against today’s urban problems. “If you want to lash out and release your aggressive rage, march on the gun dealer . . . . March at the dock where the drugs are dropped. Then you’ll have the police focus on the drug- and gun-seller, rather than focus on you.”

According to participants at the meeting, some of the members of the Bounty Hunters gang recited to Jackson their complaints about living conditions that they said encourage crime and violence. Among them were what several gang members described as “rip-offs” by job-training companies that recruit from minority neighborhoods and encourage students to obtain federal loans but then provide inferior services, including no bus tickets or meals.

There were also complaints about the lack of a community recreation center in the area, a lack of coordination of social service agencies, the difficulty of surviving on minimum-wage jobs, and discussion about the endless cycle of unemployed men feeling as though they had to sell rock cocaine to survive--and subsequently feeling that they had to buy guns to protect their drugs.

Restricted Life

Other complaints were aimed at the restricted nature of life in Nickerson Gardens. Half of the children from Nickerson go to Locke High, the others to Jordan High, but because getting to Jordan requires venturing into an area claimed by a rival gang, many children simply don’t go to high school.

Jackson later met with Mayor Tom Bradley, who pledged to help “bring together the resources” to help the community.

Amid the hoopla over Jackson’s overnight stay at Nickerson Gardens, some asked whether he was a good house guest. Did he, for example, make his own bed?

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“A gentleman always makes his bed,” beamed his hostess, Denise Calhoun.

Jackson had come to the crime-plagued area late Wednesday night to dramatize his concern over the rising problems with street gangs, drugs and the poverty many Nickerson Gardens residents find themselves in.

While local street gangs may claim the area as their “turf,” Jackson was clearly in charge during his stay.

Several school-age youngsters rushed up Thursday morning to shake the candidate’s hand or get an autograph. “Come here, children,” Jackson at one point called out to 2-year-old Porsche Scott and two little friends. “Give me a hug.”

The giggling youngsters obliged.

He shook hands with Los Angeles police officers, who regularly are called upon to deal with the housing project’s chronic crime problems. One officer, Sgt. George Anderson, gave Jackson a DARE (Drug Abuse Resistence Education) lapel pin.

The graffiti-scarred complex was festooned with handmade signs and red campaign placards.

And most residents seemed genuinely proud that Jackson had spent a night in their midst.

“He has a lot to offer these people,” said Lela Robinson, a resident.

One father, holding up his infant son in a crowd, told the toddler, “See him? You’re looking at the next President of the United States.”

Touching the Flesh

One middle-aged woman from Compton, Lilly Mae Turner, waited patiently in the hot morning sun to watch Jackson emerge from the Calhoun apartment. When he finally did, shortly after 9:30 a.m., she got close enough to touch him.

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“I’d never seen him before, just on TV,” she said excitedly afterward. “That’s why I got up and came from Compton. I wanted to touch the flesh. He is a God-sent man. I love him.”

Inside Apartment 1078, Calhoun and her friends did everything they could to make Jackson feel at home.

They had his favorite dishes--fried chicken, fruit cocktail and juices--waiting for him when he arrived at the two-bedroom apartment late Wednesday night.

He nibbled a bit before taking some phone calls and chatting with friends, Calhoun said.

‘A Perfect Gentleman’

“He was a perfect gentleman, a perfect guest,” said the 27-year-old welfare recipient.

He turned in shortly before 1 a.m., but Calhoun didn’t check on him. “I wasn’t about to go in there,” she said.

Calhoun spent the night with her three daughters--Dyquesthia, 6, Martinique, 5, and Latasha, 2--in the other bedroom.

In the morning, she and a friend, Gladys Payton, used three kitchens--two in adjoining apartments--to prepare breakfast for Jackson, campaign aides and Secret Service agents.

“We had sausage and bacon going in one kitchen, eggs and grits in another and biscuits in another,” Payton reported. “We did get it done.”

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Calhoun, who is separated from her husband, said Jackson encouraged her to pursue her goal of becoming a cosmetician. “He told me to go for it,” she said.

Dukakis Debate Canceled

Jackson’s scheduled debate at El Camino College with Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic front-runner, was canceled when Dukakis flew back to Massachusetts to be with his wife during surgery.

Jackson said he hoped the debate would be rescheduled, but noted that some in Dukakis’ campaign “feel that the less public exchange he engages in, the better . . . . The whole idea is ‘bland is beautiful--say little and commit less.’ ”

He made a brief speech at the debate site to a large crowd that had gathered unaware of the last-minute cancellation.

Staff writers Bob Baker, Gayle Pollard and Iris Schneider contributed to this report.

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