Bridging Gaps : Lewis Strives to Overcome Social and Ethnic Differences Between Watts and Occidental

Robert Lewis could have jogged to his home in Watts in the amount of time he logged last summer calling family and friends from the telephone outside his Occidental College dormitory room.

Homesickness is not uncommon among college freshmen, but Lewis’ case was unusually severe.

He had discovered that street maps can be deceptive. To him, the chasm dividing Occidental and his home was a lot wider than 25 miles.

Lewis is black, and for the first time in his life the Locke High graduate was enrolled in a school where he was a minority.

Locke’s enrollment was 71.9% black. In 1987, blacks made up just 2.8% of Occidental’s enrollment.

It was something Lewis’ mother Wanda had warned him about.

“I said, ‘Robert, you know when you go to Occidental there aren’t going to be many blacks there, don’t you?’ ” she said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah. Yeah, I know. No problem.’ ”

But when Lewis arrived at Occidental’s training camp, he discovered that there were only 3 blacks on the team.

“It seemed as if there were no other black guys in the room and it was uncomfortable wondering what they thought of me,” Lewis said.

Lewis is a muscular 6-foot, 3-inch, 190-pound reserve linebacker. He wears his hair in long jheri curls and has a light goatee and mustache. A faint blue tattoo reading “Payback” is etched across his right bicep. It’s a nickname that his Locke teammates gave him in reference to Lewis’ tendency to lose his temper on the field.

But Occidental coaches say Lewis is pensive and quiet off the field. His new surroundings are equally serene.

Occidental is a private liberal arts college tucked in the hills of Eagle Rock. It has 1,650 students, 120 faculty members and a tiny graduate school. The 120-acre campus is so peaceful, professors often conduct classes outside.

It is not uncommon for athletes to miss practice for science labs, or to discuss politics between drills.

Lewis’ high school setting had been much less academically oriented.

In 1986, Locke had a 48.8% dropout rate, the highest in the Los Angeles Unified School District, and sent just 30% of its seniors to 2- and 4-year colleges--the second-lowest percentage among the 49 regular high schools in the district. Last year, only 3 students scored better than 1,000 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Lewis, who graduated with a 3.2 grade-point average, was one of them.

Few of Lewis’ friends had even heard of Occidental.

“Every time I told them it was like, ‘What? Occi-what?’ ” Lewis said. “A lot of people asked me if it was a dental school.”

The Occidental administration is hopeful that attracting students such as Lewis will help raise the school’s profile within the inner city.

Tuition at Occidental, including room and board, is $16,577 a year and athletic scholarships are not offered. Although part of Lewis’ tuition is subsidized by state scholarships and work awards, he will be paying off student loans long after he graduates.

The quiet, well-kept neighborhoods surrounding the campus are a long way from the gang-infested streets of South-Central Los Angeles.

“I’ve had friends that joined gangs and ended up in jail,” Lewis said. “They never said, ‘Hey, Robert, come join this gang.’ They’d just say, ‘Come around here with me and such and such and we’ll just kick back.’ ”

In June, 1987, a high school friend of Lewis’ was killed in a drive-by shooting.

Still, Lewis says people who are unfamiliar with the area surrounding Locke often distort the situation.

“A lot of the fights are just high school quarrels--boys over girls, girls over boys,” he said. The catch-all term “gang-related incident,” frustrates Lewis.

“We’ve become so accustomed to it,” he said. “It’s almost like we laugh, not because we think it’s funny. We laugh because it’s like, ‘There they go again. They don’t know what they’re talking about.’ ”

Lewis wasn’t lured into a gang, but he briefly considered leaving school his junior year. But the fear of living without direction kept him at Locke.

Although Lewis cannot pinpoint a reason, his priorities changed in the summer before his senior year.

“I dedicated the year to going to school, playing ball, being with my friends and just being reserved--more of a loner type,” he said.

Playing football for Occidental has pulled Lewis out of his period of solitude and helped ease the transition to college.

“Because I came early, I feel like I got a head start on the other freshmen,” he said.

Occidental Coach Dale Widolff agreed.

“They come out here and in a matter of a couple weeks they get this big support group and when school starts, it’s not like they jump right in there,” he said. “They get upperclassmen instructing them on what classes to take and how to study. I think it really makes it easy for them.”

Kevin Blue, 23, a 1987 graduate of Occidental, says that playing on the basketball team gave him more than a head start. It helped him find an identity.

“It was a place where I saw the most black faces together at one time,” said Blue, the only black in his freshman dormitory. “I think there’s a lot to say for that--seeing yourself reflected in the population around you.”

Blue says many minorities go through a period of loneliness when they come to Occidental.

“There are feelings of alienation and just basic fears that come up in terms of relating socially or even doing well academically,” said Blue, who is active in a movement to diversify the school by helping minority students integrate.

“The environment at Occidental, particularly for black and Latino students, works as a multiplier,” Blue said. “Normal fears for incoming freshmen, like the ‘Can I make it at Occidental?’ kind of question . . . or not being socially accepted, are multiplied by the environment. So the fear of not being able to succeed becomes an enormous one. It’s kind of like putting a magnifying glass on the stuff.”

In the summer of 1987, the college began the Multicultural Summer Institute to help minority students make the transition to a predominately white school. The program houses incoming freshman of diverse backgrounds in dormitories where counselors conduct activities designed to help the students adjust to the Occidental environment. Though he applauds efforts such as the MSI, Occidental’s newly appointed president, John Slaughter, says the school’s attempts to diversify are at a standstill.

“I don’t think Occidental has made progress over the past couple of years at all in terms of attracting minority students,” Slaughter said. “The relative presence of black students, for example, is the same today as five years ago. It’s part, unfortunately, of a national trend where black students’ enrollment has been declining throughout the country.”

Jim Root, then Locke’s defensive coordinator, helped turn things around for Lewis. Root knew Lewis was intent on enrolling in a 4-year college and playing football but also saw that Lewis lacked the speed to land an athletic scholarship.

He suggested that Lewis apply to Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference schools such as Pomona-Pitzer, Redlands, Claremont-Mudd and Occidental.

Root, who played at Whittier, another SCIAC school, checked the conference standings and saw the Tigers had the best record. Next, he called Widolff and said he had a prospect.

“With most college coaches, when you call them up and talk to them, the first thing they ask is ‘How big is he?’ ” Root said.

Widolff had different priorities.

“His first question was, ‘What’s his SAT score?’ ” Root said. “Before anything else it’s, ‘Don’t waste my time unless we’ve got an SAT score.’ ”

Root gave him the rundown and Widolff, duly impressed, invited player and coach to an Occidental game. Afterward, Root and Lewis met the coaching staff and Widolff was overwhelmed.

“He looks like a Division I player,” Widolff said. “The kind of guy you’d see playing in the secondary at USC.”

Lewis was so physically impressive that Widolff was skeptical.

“He looked too good to come here,” Widolff said. “And I thought he might be too stiff--not a good enough athlete to play even linebacker.

“That was the biggest surprise of all. He’s not stiff at all. He’s a real knee-bender and he can hit you.”

Brian Day, a senior defensive back at the University of San Diego learned that the hard way. Last Saturday night Lewis, who plays primarily on special teams, leveled Day on a kick return and Day had to be helped off the field.

But Lewis’ biggest impact might be out of pads.

“Any time you get a kid from a school where you’ve never had a kid before and that individual can come here and be successful academically, socially and athletically, it opens the channels,” assistant coach Bill Dobson said. “Robert can only serve to help us develop that link with players from his area.”

The word around the old neighborhood is already starting to spread. Derrick Wickliffe, a former teammate of Lewis’ at Locke, hopes to play for Occidental next year.

“When I found out Robert was going there that spurred me on,” Wickliffe said. “I wanted to play there with him so we could make a name for our school.”