Arrival of Latinos Spurs Black Self-Examination : Neighborhood: As South L.A. changes again, longtime residents feel uneasy emotion of intolerance.

There is an emotion stirring within South Los Angeles that seems vaguely reminiscent of a time many years ago when the complexion of the community was changing from white to black, when prejudice overwhelmed brotherhood.

Back then, thousands of whites sold their homes rather than coexist with blacks who had begun moving into the area. Because many of the newcomers had fled the Jim Crow racism of the South, they were disappointed--though not surprised--by their chilly reception here.

Today, South Los Angeles is again in transition. This time, as thousands of Latinos arrive, it is the blacks who are entrenched and harbor feelings of intolerance. It is an emotion that makes many of them uneasy, given their own experiences.

They are learning that having been a victim of prejudice does not make one incapable of prejudging others.

“We’re just human,” said Mary Clark, who has lived on West 51st Street for 37 years. “We’ve been here a long time, so we feel we’re the ones who are supposed to be here.”

Just the other day, Clark said, she remarked to a friend: “Now I see how they (whites) felt about us when we moved in. They felt like, ‘Oh, God, everything’s going down.’ ”

“What’s ironic is that we’re so used to not belonging in the white society, it’s a normal feeling there,” said Beverly Blake, who was raised in South Los Angeles. “But we’re not used to not belonging in our own community.”

“It makes you stop and wonder,” said longtime South Los Angeles resident Artimese Porter, “who would you rather live beside? One of your own, or someone else. And you have to think, am I being prejudiced?”

Although such thoughts are wrong, the three women say, they are perhaps understandable as blacks learn to share a community with people who seem so different in the way they speak, in what they eat, in where they come from.

The ethnic changes in South Los Angeles have left some, such as Blake, yearning for a time when the bonds of color and culture forged a feeling of familiarity, even with a stranger.

“When you look at someone of your own ethnic background, you know them to some degree,” said Blake, who is in her late 40s. “But when I see someone and I don’t know something about them personally, or culturally, there’s a distance there.”

The most harmless of situations can create insecurities and misunderstandings. People hear a language they do not understand and wonder: “Are they talking about me?” Inevitably, suspicions and stereotypes creep into casual conversations.

“They play that music until 2 or 3 in the morning,” an elderly woman was overheard complaining one recent evening. “It’s a part of their culture to have fun. But we don’t need culture at midnight.”

“I heard there’s a Latino family on the block who won’t speak to black people,” said another. “I think they’re more prejudiced than blacks.”

“They live like they’re in a commune,” groused a third South Los Angeles old-timer. “They put things on my fence. I bought a clothesline and gave it to them.”

Despite the uneasiness and occasional friction between blacks and Latinos, many say they are determined to overcome the cultural barriers, to put aside preconceptions and to focus on mutual concerns about crime, schools and jobs.

“I was once in the same boat they are,” said 70-year-old Gilbert Lanoix, who moved into his home on West 54th Street in 1952, when the neighborhood was predominantly white. “I don’t mistreat them because I didn’t want to be mistreated.”

It is gradual, this coming together of two peoples. But examples abound of friendships built, customs shared and differences forgotten.

In a vacant corner lot, black and Latino children find unity in a game of make-believe. Block clubs spread news of meetings and activities in flyers written in English and Spanish. Longtime residents help immigrants navigate the confusing and intimidating local bureaucracy, while black-owned businesses offer work to jobless Latinos.

St. Brigid Roman Catholic Church, long a nexus for black Catholics, now holds three Masses--two in English and one in Spanish. Father Fernando Arizti had just arrived there to accommodate the growing numbers of Latino worshipers when he noticed something odd.

He said that when Latinos would leave their service and blacks would file in for theirs, scarcely a word or nod passed between them. “It was like a subway in New York, where everybody’s waiting in line and when this line comes out, zoom , the other line comes in,” the priest said.

Then, one Sunday, he said he donned his vestments and preached in separate services to the Latino and black members of St. Brigid about what he had seen.

“I told them: ‘We are not a subway. We are a family.’ . . . I told the Spanish community: ‘If you don’t know how to speak English, repeat after me: Good morning. That’s all you have to say,’ And I told the blacks: ‘If you don’t know how to speak Spanish, repeat after me: Buenos dias.”’

Arizti smiled as he remembered the outcome. “Do you know that since that time, they don’t leave church without shaking hands.”

Community activist David Henry tells a story that illustrates how the two ethnic groups, in seemingly small ways, are making a good-faith effort to create a sense of unity.

A couple of years ago, Henry said, the 52nd Place block club threw a street fair. The neighborhood’s black families cooked all sorts of dishes and spread them across picnic tables they had set up along the street. A Latino family, standing in front of their home, watched the spectacle unfold--and then headed for the kitchen.

Henry said they “went in, cooked a big pot of menudo and brought it to us.” Last year, he said, “they beat us to the streets. They had the tables set, the barbecue set up (and) a pinata. “

Sometimes, in forging new friendships, discomfort comes with discovery.

Major Cobb, a longtime South Los Angeles resident, remembers the night he and his wife went to a quinceanera --a Latin American birthday celebration for a 15-year-old girl--that was being thrown at a local church by their next-door neighbors, the Maldonados.

When the Cobbs arrived, the red-brick church was filled with the voices of dozens of celebrants and the throbbing sound of hip hop and Central American dance music. Cobb said it never crossed his mind that he and his wife would be the only blacks there.

“When you walk in, all eyes look at you,” said Cobb, an affable man who looks younger than his 55 years. “It just didn’t feel right. It felt funny. I had butterflies in my stomach.

“I’ve been in places like that before where I had that feeling,” he said, “especially when you’re traveling and you stop at a restaurant off the side of the road and there’s nothing but whites inside.”

But the couple did not leave. They danced a few times and chatted with other guests. Slowly the butterflies floated away.

“They’re good neighbors,” Dorothy Cobb said of the Maldonados, and “we didn’t get one snub.”

Catherine Williams, 68, who has lived in the community since 1943, said her new Latino neighbors taught her about the cultural transcendence of kindness. Not long ago, she recalled, an elderly black woman wandered away from her convalescent home and ended up lying on a front porch couch at a nearby house.

The neighbor, a Latina, did not panic, nor did she call police. She called on Williams. As it turned out, Williams said, “I knew the woman,” who once lived around the corner on West 50th Place.

Long after the woman was returned to her nursing home a few miles away, Williams remembered the consideration her new Latino neighbor showed a black stranger who once called the neighborhood home.

“She could have made a big stink (and) said: ‘What’s this woman doing on my couch?’ But they were very patient,” Williams said.

The blacks who integrated the neighborhood in the 1940s and ‘50s were not always shown such kindness.

Like the thousands of Latino immigrants who came from Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico during the 1980s, African-Americans also came to Southern California in search of economic opportunity and to escape Southern racism that kept many mired in poverty.

“This was an all-white neighborhood,” said Gilbert Lanoix, a retired carpenter who was 30 when he settled here. “But it didn’t take long to change.” He said unscrupulous real estate agents would tell whites that “blacks are coming, you’d better move.”

In a failing effort to stop the black influx, Lanoix said, some whites passed out flyers urging that homes not be sold to blacks. “They said our culture was not in line with their culture,” Lanoix recalled.

“Some of the blacks who got those flyers were outraged something like that could happen here,” he remembered while sitting inside the rectory of St. Brigid Church, where he is a deacon. “We moved from the South thinking this was a better place.”

Mary Clark, one of only a handful of black families on her block when she moved there in the 1950s, said there is a key difference between many of the whites who lived in South Los Angeles then and many of the blacks who are there now.

“They didn’t wait,” she said, “to see if we’d be good neighbors or not.”

A small number of whites, however, did buck the trend. Among them were the folks who lived on either side of Irene White, a black woman who with her husband moved to West 53rd Street in the early 1950s. On one side was an Italian-American woman; on the other an elderly couple by the name of Tucker. Mr. Tucker would often drop by to watch “Queen for a Day” on their black-and-white TV and play marbles with White’s youngest child.

Now a widowed great-great grandmother, Irene White still lives in the same two-story home, where her cat, Smokey, lolls on the front porch. The neighbors who ignored the scare tactics and stuck it out, are gone. They died a while ago. Today, living on either side of White, are two Latino families.

The white families did not run from her, and Irene White says she is not running from her new neighbors. “The Lord made us all,” she said. “We’re all just human beings.” Besides, “all I know is this neighborhood.”

Artimese Porter, a Mississippi native, has lived on West 53rd Street for nearly two decades. Although there are other blacks in the neighborhood who have been there longer, she has distinguished herself as a doer, a leader.

She treats the neighborhood children as her own, gently scolding them when they use profanity and toss litter into the street. Occasionally, she has had to scold an adult or two as well when they start talking about “those Mexicans.”

“Wait a minute,” she says she tells them, “that’s the same thing (whites) used to say about us. . . . Who does the state of California really belong to? If they want to claim their territory we are the invaders.

“If one has the opportunity to move and advance, that’s a happy time,” Porter said. “You should be happy for anyone who can upgrade themselves. And if I were to move to Westchester I would want someone to be happy for me, instead of thinking: ‘Here comes another one.’ ”

About This Series

In little more than a decade, what was once the largest black community in the western United States has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing Latino communities. By the turn of the century, experts say, Latinos will outnumber African-Americans in South Los Angeles, marking a milestone in the city’s ethnic history. Behind the statistics are thousands upon thousands of people coping with the change. To chronicle these difficult days of transition in South Los Angeles, Times staff writers Charisse Jones and Hector Tobar lived next door to each other for a month on the 900 block of West 53rd Street, where the changes are in full swing. Jones reported on the experiences of blacks while Tobar explored life for the neighborhood’s Latinos.