Dream Fulfilled : Years of Activism Culminate in Approval for Watts Library

It took a fiery insurrection, three decades of attending government meetings and countless hours of canvassing the streets and housing projects of Watts for Alma Reaves Woods’ dream to come true.

Now, thanks to her efforts and those of a handful of activists, a state-of-the-art library will soon be built at Compton Avenue and 102nd Street, bringing the power of books and language to the impoverished, racially mixed community.

Scheduled to open in 1993, the 10,500-square-foot library will rise from a vacant lot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have addressed residents in the wake of the 1965 riots, known to local residents as “the rebellion.” The City Council approved the $1.5-million project last week.

“We went to Board of (Library) Commissioners meetings, we went to City Hall, everywhere we thought we could be heard,” said Woods, a retired mother of three and a former Nickerson Gardens resident. “So it could be that they just got tired of seeing us there and decided to give us a library and shut us up.”

Woods has spent years working to encourage residents to read. She has taken stacks of books under her arm and carried them to the homes of Watts children. To those who will listen, she shares her love of literature and language, reciting from memory the poetry of her favorite writers, Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

She has helped persuade city library officials to send the bookmobile into Nickerson Gardens and other public housing projects. And she worked on get-out-the-vote campaigns for library bond measures.

“She has the power to move people with her words,” said Roy Willis, director of operations for the Community Redevelopment Agency, which is providing most of the funding for the library. “She has been the driving force to bring this project to fruition.”

The library, her biggest crusade, will include a community meeting room and stacks with 45,000 books, several times the collection housed in a tiny, outdated facility on 103rd Street.

Woods hopes that the new building will become a rallying point for community education. She foresees literacy classes for adults. Senior citizens will enjoy an expanded periodical section and reading room. In the afternoons and evenings, the library is to become a crowded study hall for young people, a place to do homework or just to browse through the books.

“If children are taught to read and they’re motivated to learn, I don’t see them getting involved in some of these undesirable activities” such as drugs and gang violence, Woods said. “I think that the monies that are spent for prisons could be spent for books and programs in our libraries.”

For years, Woods and other activists have been frustrated by the lack of a good public library in Watts. The first Watts library, a large brick structure built just after the turn of the century, was demolished years ago. The replacement opened in 1961, but it is small and nondescript. There is barely room for 35 people and many Watts residents do not know it exists.

It is a common problem in the city’s Latino and African-American neighborhoods, where many public libraries have been closed for renovation and earthquake stabilization, leaving communities without space for reading and literacy programs.

Woods said she has been driven by a desire to make sure every child and adult in Watts can read and has access to books, something people in other communities take for granted.

Watts has one of the lowest literacy rates in the city, she said, a symptom of the same urban poverty that fueled the 1965 riots and continues to plague the community.

“After the rebellion, it really became clear that we had to let people know we had some unmet needs,” Woods said. “We most definitely need reading programs.” Everyone in Watts must learn to read, she said, because “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”

Since 1965, even more unmet needs have arisen in Watts. The population is nearly half Latino. In the library, there is a small Spanish collection, with a handful of novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Latin American authors interspersed among the popular biographies of Malcolm X and King.

“In the new library, we’d like to have more books from the different cultures,” Woods said. “If there is an opportunity for each person to understand the other’s language and to share our customs, it will help cut down on any friction.”

Woods and the other members of the Friends of the Watts Library also hope that the library will become a center of cultural activity, playing host to poetry readings and exhibiting the works of Latino and African-American artists.

“We dream,” Woods said, “of our library being the heart of the community.”