Martin Luther King’s dream thriving at Inglewood High School

I went to Inglewood High School last week looking for a Martin Luther King Day story.

I found three: Carmen Barbee, Loan Dao and Norland Tellez.

They are the dream.

Charming, talented kids who give off sparks of energy and intelligence as they talk about school, themselves and race relations 21 years after King’s assassination. They are dreamers from cultures that have lived nightmares. They are the pride of a proud city that embodies the multi-ethnic American experience.

All three won first place in this year’s school district contest on the King day theme of freedom and opportunity.

Loan, who is Vietnamese, won the speech contest and will give her speech on King’s legacy Monday at the holiday ceremony at First Church of God in Inglewood.

Carmen, who is black, won first place in the written essay competition .

Norland, who is Nicaraguan, won the poster competition for the second consecutive year.

Listen to them.

“In the first version of my speech, I said it was a myth that racism doesn’t exist any more, that Dr. King had erased everything,” Loan Dao says. “A cruel myth.”

She is an 18-year-old with a soft accent and a poetic air. A determined contender for valedictorian, she enjoys public speaking. She is nervous, she says, until she takes the microphone, then “the trepidations go away.”

Her parents want Loan to be a dermatologist. Her teachers encourage her dreams of becoming a writer or a journalist. She says she writes “vignettes” about memories of Vietnam.

“We lived in the country near a little lake. When I was 8 years old, I would wake up and go out by myself about 3 o’clock in the morning and fish. It was kind of strange for an 8-year-old girl. I set up the net at night to catch fish. In the morning I would come out at dawn and gather up the net before I went to school.”

Loan does not have memories of combat because she lived near Long Xuyen, an area that remained largely peaceful. But she remembers the post-war oppressiveness of rationing and long lines, an atmosphere in which “they control your every move.”

Her family came to the United States eight years ago. They were teachers in Vietnam. They own a nail salon in Watts, where Loan has worked part time.

She talks frankly about racial prejudice in the United States in all its forms, including anti-Asian taunts at school.

“I feel really emotional about this,” she says. “I don’t think it’s just whites against blacks, it’s every race. My race too, we discriminate.”

Maurice Wiley, Inglewood schools counseling director and an organizer of the King Day festivities, said the contest judges were extremely impressed by Loan’s speech. But she was asked to rework it to focus more on the theme: how Martin Luther King’s achievements created opportunities, rather than her personal perspective on racial issues.

The result was a passionate challenge to the mostly black judges from an Asian, a minority in a predominantly black and Latino city.

Lao began the revised speech by saying teachers and friends liked her speech, but told her she would not win because she is not black:

“They said it wouldn’t be right for a Vietnamese leading a commemoration of Martin Luther King, a black man. I was appalled and I was hurt. Didn’t Martin Luther King fight and give his life to get rid of this racial discrimination?”

The prize-winning speech goes on to laud King and describe how Loan feels she is part of his legacy.

She concludes: “Until America faces this bleak problem of race and color, it is ill-prepared to help other nations achieve freedom. Until America seeks an answer to its racial problem, it will never be a true democracy.”

Of the award she was told she wouldn’t get, Loan said: “It warms my heart.”

Carmen Barbee’s parents are from Tennessee. She remembers her mother telling her what it was like to work as a maid, how she had to enter her employer’s house through the back door.

The 16-year-old junior says she did not need to do much research when she got the English class assignment on this year’s Martin Luther King day theme: “I am Free to become.”

King’s legacy “is embedded in you from when you’re little,” she says.

Carmen came to Inglewood from Compton, parts of which she cheerfully describes as a “war zone.” Carmen talks exuberantly about Shakespeare, Euripides and her “close relationship with Jesus Christ.” She directs the choir at the Compton Wilderness Table Apostolic Church. She has no doubt about where she will go to college: Oral Roberts University.

“It’s good in science and math and it’s good in theology too,” she says. “Other Christian colleges don’t have that.”

Her career ambitions are less definite.

“I love everything,” she says. “When I’m in science class I want to be an engineer. When I’m in drama class, I want to be an actress.”

English teacher Dan Haefele calls Carmen one of his better writers.

“I wish more people could do the things she can do,” he says. “She has well-planned thoughts that she expresses quite clearly. She’s prepared.”

Carmen wasn’t prepared for the news she had won first place. She says she wrote the essay and forgot about it.

The essay reads in part: “While all of Dr. King’s legacy is a benefit to my life both physically and mentally, I find one aspect of it the greatest: to love. Dr. King stressed peace toward all men through love. Love others whether you are loved by them or not. A prize too worthy on which to put a prize, love will help me in life always.”

That sentiment reflects her religious convictions. She says she is affected by the exploration of evil in literature, like the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. She thinks highly of such works, but tries to keep them at a distance.

“There’s always a part of a person drawn to things like that,” she says. “It was kind of brutal. It gave me nightmares. I don’t read a lot of stuff like that.”

As for race relations, she says there is always need for improvement.

“As long as there are people, they’re going to have prejudices. It’s up to the individual.”

Norland Tellez remembers sitting 10 years ago in a neighbor’s well-fortified home in a middle-class neighborhood of Managua, Nicaragua, listening to the guns and bombs of the approaching revolution. He was about 7. He thought the pyrotechnics display was neat.

In the three years since leaving Nicaragua, Norland has made a name for himself at Inglewood High School.

“The revolution looked OK at first,” he says. “We (his family) disagreed in some things.”

After years of rationing, economic hardship and some political tension, his family joined a growing stream of emigrants. Rather than feeling anger toward the Sandinista revolution, he says his family feels “disappointment” about Nicaragua’s frustrated hopes and promises.

Norland’s father is a painter and photographer who worked in advertising and for Nicaragua’s major newspapers. Norland, as well as his younger brothers Yorland and Carlos, have been painting and drawing since they were very young. All three won recognition in this year’s King-day art competition--just as they have in past years.

Norland “has to rank as one of the best if not the best student I’ve had,” says graphic arts teacher Clifford Johnson. “Based on raw talent, creativity, the neatness of his work, his thought and energy.”

Fellow students know Norland as a Michelangelo of classroom doodles. He is known for his caricatures of teachers; while generally well-received, they occasionally have chilled relations with their subjects, he says. He is drawing caricatures of popular teachers for the yearbook.

“In Nicaragua, people recognized I could draw,” he says. “But they never made a big deal of it like they have here.”

At the urging of a teacher, Norland studied animation in a summer arts program last year. He has decided he wants to study at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, a school whose students often get hired as animators for Walt Disney.

“I take it very seriously,” says Norland, who also plays varsity tennis.

His prize-winning poster this year features two powerful hands breaking their chains while a crowd surges in front of Martin Luther King. The poster evokes heroic Latin American popular art which is seen in the new Nicaragua. Norland acknowledges such works may have had a formative influence.

But above all, the relentlessly enthusiastic youth is grateful for the opportunities in the United States.

“I’ve never had any problems with anyone,” he says. “King’s legacy gave me the opportunity to go as far as I want to go.”