Somewhere Over the Rainbow

At age 15, Tanya Turner was quite clearly on her way to hell.

Already a tested member of a gang called the Inglewood Family, the tiny girl was flying on booze and dope and spoiling for trouble.

She was the kind of kid any cop could tell would wind up toe-tagged and forgotten in a county morgue, one more victim of the dynamics that make L.A. the gang capital of America.

Tanya regularly joined in robberies and beatings on other gangs’ turf, arrogantly flashing gang colors to draw a response from rivals and then violently reacting to the tensions she helped create.

If there was recognition that she was fulfilling the devil’s will on the bloody path she was walking it came one night when she realized that the person they had taunted into violence was a friend from school.

Tanya joined in the beating anyhow.

“There was nothing I could do about it,” she said the other day. “At the same time I was inflicting pain, I was trying not to look in the eyes of the guy we were beating. I had to be tough. I had to make the others think I could do it.”

She doesn’t know if that flash of humanity ultimately led her in a different direction, but it didn’t at the time. It took a much more violent act to make Tanya Turner what she is today.

She killed a man.

“He was trying to make trouble between me and a lover,” she said, staring out the window of a Hollywood coffee shop. The memory was unnerving. “I got a gun to scare him. The gun went off. I did four years and two months for manslaughter.”

It’s hard to imagine her as a killer. Now 23 and painstakingly articulate, she stands 4 feet 9 inches tall and weighs less than a hundred pounds. And every inch of her, every pound of her, is dedicated to social reform in the black and Latino communities of Los Angeles.

A vehicle of that reform will be a newspaper she wants to start called the Radical Rainbow, directed toward minority youths who might be on the same trails that Tanya once walked and named for the racial mix the publication hopes to attract.

She looks on it as a new attempt to free the slaves.

“Black people are still in bondage,” she said. There is a nervous, almost furtive manner about her. “We’re not physical slaves but mental slaves. Slaves to welfare payments, slaves to drugs and alcohol, slaves to a white culture that diminishes our self-esteem.

“Some of those selling us into slavery are our own tribal leaders. The highest bidders on the auction block are the drug dealers.”

Tanya was in prison when she began to reassess her life. The turning point is obscure. She signed up for classes, but whether they were the architect or the result of reassessment is unclear to her.

“It just occurred to me one day that the person I killed was black,” she said, “and I started thinking, why are we always killing each other? I didn’t have an answer.”

Out of prison with 30 units of junior college credit and an A-minus grade average, Tanya met Monica Lopez, a bright, 20-year-old Chicana who had entered UC Santa Barbara on a scholarship and dropped out a year later from sheer boredom.

Monica’s parents were student radicals during the 1960s and, though subsequently separated, planted the seed of reform and political activism in their daughter.

Tanya and Monica met in an English class offered through the L.A. Conservation Corps and turned it into a class of political awareness.

“I’ve been told,” Tanya says, “I’m distantly related to Nat Turner, who led the slave revolt in the South. Maybe this is my revolt.”

It was Tanya’s idea to start a newspaper and Monica eagerly offered to help. They’ll begin publishing the Radical Rainbow once a month starting June 1, writing and reprinting articles they hope will inform, assist and inspire. It will be turned out on a copy machine and distributed by hand outside of schools and colleges.

Tanya has already written editorials that raise unsettling questions about proposed anti-gang laws she feels are aimed at warehousing minorities, and about the dichotomy in police attitudes toward places like Westwood and Watts.

“We’re just two of us at first,” she said, “but we’re going to get stronger.”

The fires of youth light torches that can either burn villages or illuminate dark places in the human soul. As Tanya Turner emerges from a darkness of her own, she’s hoping the torch she carries will show the way to redemption.

For herself and everyone else.