School Names Buildings in Lesson of Racial Harmony : Education: Students at once predominantly black Carver Junior High honor three Latino heroes.

In 1943, William McKinley Junior High School was renamed George Washington Carver Junior High School, an acknowledgment of the predominantly black community that had grown up around the South-Central Los Angeles campus.

In the 1970s, parents and students, swept up by the civil rights movement, named the school’s social studies building after Malcolm X and the math and English building after Martin Luther King.

On Thursday, Carver’s staff and students acknowledged another wave of change. The school, which is now 87% Latino and 12% black, chose the names of Latino heroes for three buildings: the Cesar Chavez Science Building, the Father Luis Olivares Gymnasium and a Ruben Salazar classroom building.

That the student body voted to honor a farm worker organizer, an immigrant rights activist and a Chicano martyr testified to a decade of demographic revolution that has transformed schools in South-Central Los Angeles--and not always in a peaceful fashion. Carver, school officials said, has lived through tense moments, but now it is trying to educate students about their cultures and their common struggles.

“Los Angeles is a very racist and divided city,” said teacher Mabie Settlage, who helped organize the ceremony Thursday, “but this school isn’t. The kids mix well here, so I thought, ‘Let’s recognize this.’ ”

Principal Charles Caballero, who was a student at Carver in the early 1940s and returned as its top administrator in 1985, still marvels over the racial and ethnic transformation, which began in the 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s.

“It’s not an evolution,” Caballero said, searching for a stronger word. “Hell, it just happened. To have this kind of change in a decade is something.”

In 1980, Carver had 1,800 students, of whom 56.5% were black and 43% were Latino. The following year, the balance shifted, with blacks at 48% and Latinos at 51%.

Today, the school is apporaching 90% Latino. It operates year-round to accommodate more than 2,400 students and still buses out an additional 800 youngsters for whom it has no space. District officials cite rising birthrates among Latinos and continued high immigration from Mexico and Central America as the main reasons for the demographic shift.

Students speak freely to one another in Spanish in the hallways and on the playgrounds. On the weekends, the campus becomes “soccer central,” as hundreds of fans come to watch their favorite teams from community soccer leagues compete on the school’s athletic fields.

In the neighborhoods around the school, the signs of change are just as plain. Nearby Central Avenue was once the city’s hub of black culture, home of the famous Hotel Dunbar and nightclubs named the Downbeat and Club Alabam. Now, taquerias, carnicerias and panaderias share storefronts with soul food restaurants and rib joints.

In some communities that have undergone similar demographic shifts, conflicts have erupted. Last year, in Inglewood High School, for instance, black students disrupted a Cinco de Mayo celebration in retaliation against Latinos who walked out of a black history month assembly.

At Carver, students--black and Latino--say racial name-calling and other misunderstandings occur, both on campus and in the community. But they say the problems are not severe and that staff and students make efforts to promote more unity.

The school’s Community Club, which Settlage helped organize for the purpose of promoting ethnic and racial understanding, came up with the idea for naming the buildings after the prominent Latinos, Settlage said.

Students and parents developed a list of possible honorees, students researched the candidates and disseminated the information to all the classrooms, and then a schoolwide vote was taken.

Their efforts paid off Thursday, when about 150 students, parents and staff members gathered outdoors for a festive ceremony to honor Chavez, Olivares and Salazar and officially named three buildings after the men.

Carver students performed a West African tribal dance and a Latino folk dance, and then a skit that depicted Latino and black struggles for equality.

They presented Chavez, Olivares and Dorothy Herrera, a representative of the Salazar family, with plaques and school T-shirts.

Then, it was their turn to listen.

Chavez offered the students a message about the importance of self-pride.

“It is important that your dad, your mother, your teachers and your friends look at you as special and not talk down to you. . . . You as an individual are the most important thing. You can do anything you want to do. You can make a lot of people happy, or you can destroy lives. It’s up to you.”

Olivares, the former pastor of the influential Our Lady Queen of Angels parish downtown who recently has been afflicted with AIDS, pointed them in a different direction.

“Unfortunately,” he said in a strong voice, “those of us who have gone before you have not given good examples of how to accept one another . . . the recent immigrants, black brothers and sisters and the poorer classes. You must set a new example. How we take care of people in need is more important than how we take care of each other. You must know that.”

Herrera praised Salazar as a journalist who raised awareness of the Latino struggle and anti-war movement. He was slain in 1970 on Whittier Boulevard during an anti-war disturbance. At the time, he was a Times columnist and news director of television station KMEX.

“One of the best memorials for someone like Ruben Salazar,” she said, “is the work of the Carver Community Club . . . to bring together African-American and Latino people.”

Later, students said they believed that having these names on campus buildings would make a difference.

Jose Deleon, 14, said, “Some people think we (Latinos) are here to just butt in. But we are here to be something, like them.”

Keisha Gates, 13, agreed. “Now we know that everybody, black and Mexican, has worked for freedom,” she said. “If we try to help each other, maybe we can stop fighting and stop racism.”