Next Weapon Against Gang Violence: Unity

Killings by street gang members claimed 78 lives in the city of Los Angeles in the first three months of the year, a pace well ahead of the record set in 1988 .

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The hardest thing these days is to keep trying. The hardest thing is looking at the numbers and resisting the temptation to say the hell with it.

The police have tried their sweeps and the ministers have tried their gang “truce” talks and the sociologists have argued over whether the street gang plague is being caused by drugs or unemployment or the disintegration of the inner-city family and whether the criminals are really victims themselves, and all the while the numbers of the dead swell, with no end in sight.

The older men and women, the ones who worked in the civil rights movement or simply watched it evolve, remember this feeling of hopelessness, and they remember what people did. They kept trying.

Sunday afternoon they will try once again.

In the cafeteria of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church on South Harvard Boulevard, a couple dozen community organizations that regularly feel the heartbreak of what life has become in South Los Angeles will set up tables. They’ll be there to offer advice to people who are desperately, sometimes frantically, seeking an antidote to the gang violence that stains their families and their neighborhoods.

It’s called “End the Nightmare, Save the Children, Reclaim Your Community.” Flyers have been distributed to most of South Los Angeles’ black churches. The organizers hope to draw 500 people to what is billed as the black community’s first unified, town hall-type meeting about gangs.

You may find it difficult to believe that there are any more “firsts” left in Los Angeles’ gang saga, that all forms of tragedy and response have been played out. There are a couple left.

One involves the nasty little turf war between a variety of private and public organizations that counsel parents about gangs, that work with ex-gang members and that train people like teachers on how to cope with gang behavior.

Their war is over money and, in some cases, pride. Shrinking government funding has meant more competition for grants. Increased public furor over gangs has meant more new hands grabbing for the smaller pie.

“We have to come together if we’re going to solve the problem,” says Chilton Alphonse, the founder of the Crenshaw-area’s Community Youth Sports and Arts Foundation, who dreamed up Sunday’s meeting. Alphonse, whose foundation runs educational programs for teen-agers with gang problems, is a prideful man who has long participated in the my-program-is-the-best-answer-to-gangs game. But he’s not talking that line these days. “The problem is too big for one person to solve. It has to be done with solidarity,” he says.

The meeting will also try to challenge the pervasive rationalization that unemployment, poor education and broken homes justify selling drugs and “gang-banging.” This theme has been heard often in Los Angeles during the last year as the city’s gang phenomenon came under intense media examination. You hear it not merely from angry gang members but often from people like probation officers, counselors and even sympathetic cops. It takes the form of a rhetorical question: What other choices do these kids have ?

“What we’re going to do here Sunday for the first time,” says Joseph Duff, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, one of the organizations co-sponsoring the event, “is to make a statement indicating that the related problem of gang activities and the selling and use of drugs is something to be condemned as a civil wrong in the community.”

To those outside the vortex this may sound obvious, but a subtle, painful distinction is at work here. Black leaders have long been torn between the need to speak out against urban America’s nightmarish wave of violent crime and the need to remind the nation of the nightmarish poverty and despair in which crime flourishes. The tension between these opposing arguments creates ambivalence.

“When we constantly talk about excuses for this kind of behavior, we simply make it worse,” Duff says. “The excuses grow in the eyes of people. We’ve got to apply the same pressure to civil wrongs that we applied in seeking our civil rights.”

That will take some trying. And trying is the hardest thing to do these days.