Community Rallies in Drug Protest : Crime: About 200 people marched through the streets of Southeast San Diego calling for an end to drug-dealing and gang violence.

Robbie George is a single mother living in Southeast San Diego. She knows first-hand the problems of drugs and gangs. Her son, who is now in prison, was a member of the Crips.

He became a victim of the neighborhood, George said, “and now it’s time for us to take back the neighborhood, to stop the killing and the sorrow, and return these streets to normalcy.”

George was one of an estimated 200 people who marched for two hours Saturday morning through “the neighborhood,” the drug- and gang-infested area surrounding Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School at 415 31st Street.

George was joined for the march by Mayor Maureen O’Connor, San Diego Unified School District President Tom Payzant, City Councilman Bob Filner and dozens of others who joined the march spontaneously.

Marchers carried banners that bore such messages as “Stop the Killing!” and “No More Drugs!” Police say the area covered is among the worst in the city for drug- and gang-related violence.

Eddie Edwards would know.

He has lived in the area most of his life. Just last weekend, said Edwards, an artist who painted the dazzling mural of Martin Luther King Jr. on the school’s main wall, a man was stabbed to death on a nearby corner.

“It’s all too common,” he said. “This area has changed tremendously since I went to school here in 1956, in what was then called Stockton (Elementary) School. Then there were no bars on the windows. Drugs and gangs just weren’t a problem. People could come out and mingle after dark, sit down and play cards in the yard.

“Now, you see nothing but kids after dark. Adults wouldn’t dare go outside.”

Edwards said there’s something damaging about a child “finding needles in the street every day, of standing on the school grounds and watching drug dealers make a sale all year long, of waiting for drug dealers to stop fighting so they can walk out of their house and go to school.”

“It’s just insane around here--the cursing, the killing, the gunshots, the wounds . . . Kids suffer incredibly having to live through that.”

Edwards, one of the organizers of Saturday’s effort, said the march was a protest by neighborhood residents against crime “and the general decay around us. We can’t stand idly by and let it happen. The community is angered. We’re upset, very turned off right now.”

“We want our kids to grow up safe and happy, so finally, we’ve banded together.”

George, president of the Parents-Teachers Assn. at King Elementary, said her own son’s problems “just got away from me, like the neighborhood got away from the people.”

Her son now writes letters from prison to younger siblings--five of whom still live with George--telling them, in her words, “Whatever you do, don’t be messin’ with drugs and gangs. If you do, you’re messin’ with your life . . . just throwing it away.”

George said that her son, like so many others, “wanted to do what all the other boys were doing. He’s not a bad person. He’s a good person. He just got in with the wrong crowd. I don’t want what happened to him to happen to anyone else, in my family or anyone else’s.”

Cleo Malone, executive director of the Palavra Tree Inc., a substance-abuse recovery center on South 43rd Street, said the problems in the neighborhood, especially those of young men, are exacerbated by a feeling of doom.

Malone said most of the major chain stores and markets have long abandoned Southeast San Diego, reducing the likelihood of neighborhood employment almost to zero. At the same time, liquor stores abound, dispensing, in Malone’s view, society’s most lethal substance: alcohol.

“Most of these outfits around here sell these high-powered, fortified wines, which are all too easy to get,” he said. “A pint of Cisco is equivalent to five shots of 80-proof vodka. It’s carbonated, it tastes like tangy orange or grape soda pop, and you can drink a lot of it without realizing it’s putting you out of your mind.

“Some of these kids around here are getting acute alcohol poisoning from it. It got started by the crack dealers. If you smoke crack for two days or so, you can then taper off with a pint or a fifth of Cisco. It mellows you to the point where you go to sleep, but what it really does is knock you on your. . . .”

At points during Saturday’s march, Malone and fellow participants took pains to point out to the six San Diego Police officers who marched alongside what they consider notorious crack houses--”Blight in the neighborhood,” Malone said.

In horizontal rows of eight to 10, marchers shouted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, this crack house has got to go!”

The march proceeded without incident--a result, Malone said, of safety in numbers.

“I hope the police paid attention,” he said. “They’ll certainly be able to find the crack houses now. We made sure they didn’t miss them!”

Even so, he said, police are doing “all they can” in coping with a near-impossible mission.

“They’re not the problem,” Malone said. “What you gonna do? Build bigger jails to house our children? Why do I need a white policeman to protect me from a black child? The problem starts here, on these mean streets. They’re ours, and it’s our problem.”

At noon, when the march ended, people filed back into the school auditorium to hear a round of speakers, some of whom addressed the crowd in Spanish, exhorting African-Americans and Latinos to band together against gangs and drugs.

The Rev. George Stevens said residents need to foster better values for children mesmerized by the shallowness of television advertising.

Stevens drew laughs when he said, “$125 is too much to pay for a pair of tennis shoes, and $50 is too much for a pair of jeans that already have holes in them.

“You’ve got to start telling young people to stop the killing and start telling older people to start telling younger people to stop the killing.”

School Board President Shirley Weber said Southeast San Diegans needed to be more vigilant, all the way down to items bought for the home.

“Don’t buy a VCR unless you buy it in the store,” she said. “Don’t buy anything sold door to door. It may be stolen goods. By buying it, you’re perpetuating the crime. You may be poor and you may be hungry, but you should never be too poor or too hungry to contribute to the decline of the neighborhood.

“If the child next door has a mother on drugs, you’re going to have to nurture and support that child as if it were yours. Otherwise, the child may grow up to steal from you.

“Even though it seems like it’s raining mighty hard right now, we can make it.”

Malone said “black men bear a major burden these days” for the breakup of African-American families--a telling point of the new movie “Boyz N the Hood.” But he noted that society doesn’t understand the intense pressures shouldered by many.

“So many are not in the home, but on the other hand, the system rewards that,” Malone said. “If a young man is functionally illiterate and unemployed and unemployable and applies for family assistance, he has a better chance of getting them if he’s not in the home.

“It makes sense for him to leave, or to say he’s leaving, so he can feed his family. It’s a way of keeping people trapped, and the problem is just horrendous. I don’t want to justify black men not being home--not being there when needed--but the problem is more complex than it may appear.”

Greg Akili, president of the African-American Organizing Project, said the problems of drugs and gangs appear to be lessening in Southeast San Diego but that residents need the help of affluent whites as much as they do their own neighbors.

Akili’s group has been vocal in its opposition to San Diego’s efforts to bring in both the America’s Cup sailing regatta and the 1993 Super Bowl, saying that neither addresses the city’s real problems.

“We always hear there’s no money, no money for anything,” Akili said. “But we want to build a new (downtown) sports arena and bring in a professional basketball team, and those will cost money, won’t they? People tend to have money for what they want in life, but mention jobs and programs for the poor--real hope--and suddenly, everyone is broke.”

Akili said such programs would give the poor and the dispossessed promise for the future and lessen the short-term lures “of drugs and gangs as representing a way out of hopelessness.”

“We have to stand up,” he said, “and say, ‘This is our problem--not just the people who live here, but everyone in San Diego.’ That’s the only way we’ll fix it. And we have to start now.”