String of Racial Incidents Led to Student Walkout

The incidents became more frequent about a year ago.

A mannequin of a dead black man, castrated and mutilated, was confiscated by school officials in April after it was displayed at Hawthorne High School. A black English teacher received a threatening note the same month after suggesting that the department’s reading list include a minority author.

Several months later, the leader of the predominantly white teachers union called the black superintendent of schools a “Stepin Fetchit,” referring to a black actor in the 1930s who fawned over his white bosses.

The flurry of racial unrest this week in the Centinela Valley Union High School District has been played out against a bitter backdrop of racial disharmony that teachers, students, parents and administrators say has haunted the district for years.

There is little agreement over the source of ill will. Some blame bigotry among a handful of white teachers who dislike working under minority administrators in a district with an 80% minority enrollment. Others say it reflects strained race relations in society as a whole. Still others point the finger at school district politics.

Regardless, most agree there were telltale signs that racial problems at Hawthorne and Leuzinger high schools were barreling out of control long before 2,000 students took to the streets Monday to protest the resignation of popular Hawthorne High School Principal Ken Crowe.

There have been 40 alleged incidents of racial harassment--involving administrators, teachers and students--at the two schools during the past two years, district Supt. McKinley Nash said in an interview Wednesday. The incidents and other complaints cover a broad spectrum of allegations, including claims that teachers have referred to blacks in derogatory terms and have said they are intellectually inferior, school officials said.

Crowe said the harassment began the day after he was promoted to principal in March, 1988, when a cartoon was anonymously circulated throughout the district depicting caricatures of blacks standing around a grave identified as Hawthorne High School. Later, Crowe said, he was approached by a teachers union representative, who told him some faculty members were unhappy because he is black.

“How long can you fight this sort of thing?” asked Crowe, who said he decided to resign after being told that the school board planned to remove him.

At least two white teachers have been officially reprimanded by the district because of racial incidents, and in three other cases teachers have had letters of complaint placed in their personnel files, according to a brief summary of incidents released by district officials. Cases are also pending against several other teachers, officials said.

One teacher was reprimanded for describing a black job specialist “as a spy for the superintendent,” and another for using abusive language and threatening a black security official, according to the summary. The letters of complaint related to the use of abusive language by one teacher and harassment of administrators by two others.

Last year, the school board hired an attorney and a private investigator to look into many of the allegations.

“There was very clear and strong evidence that there were some older white teachers in the school district who had a lot of resentment toward the changes that had taken place in the school district and that they were acting out a racially charged agenda with respect to students and staff,” attorney Melanie Lomax, who conducted the investigation, said in an interview Wednesday. “The fact that they have a black superintendent (and other administrators) has not gone over very well.”

Lomax’s investigation was interrupted by elections in November, which saw three of the board’s five incumbents ousted. She said she presented her findings to the new board in January along with a warning that racial tensions were “not going to go away” and that the board should “not let this problem fester.”

Lomax said she further advised the board to take a strong public position deploring discrimination and racial harassment in the district and to ask an outside agency to conduct a districtwide investigation. “There was clearly too much smoke for there not to be any fire,” Lomax said.

That was not the first warning the newly elected board received. More than a dozen parents, educators and community leaders complained about racial tensions at a meeting in November when the three new board members were sworn in.

Several speakers, most of whom were black, indicated that they would fight any effort by the new board to fire Nash or any minority administrators. During the election, two of the successful challengers were supported by the teachers union, which has repeatedly clashed with Nash, Crowe and other administrators.