Students Stage Peaceful Protests Over King Verdict

As frustration over the Rodney King verdict seeped into San Diego schools Thursday, more than 300 high school students peacefully protested in Southeast San Diego, while a quarter of the students were pulled from a junior high school in Allied Gardens after unfounded rumors of racial riots.

In a loud but peaceful expression of anger, 220 Morse High School students marched nearly 4 miles Thursday morning to neighboring Lincoln High in Southeast San Diego, where they joined 100 more students in a rally to protest the King verdict.

“We want everyone to understand that we’re upset, but we don’t want anyone hurt, no negatives but a nonviolent expression,” said Morse junior Ajamu Edmonson, one of the rally planners.

Although the majority of protesting students were African-American--many of them holding signs denouncing the not guilty verdicts returned against four Los Angeles police officers--many Latino, Filipino and white students marched as well.

“I feel the same way as” black students, Morse junior Valerie Garcia said. “They did an injustice, and we students want to make that point, but without violence.”

Added senior Jason Bell: “The violence in Los Angeles is absurd, disgusting. Protests did not have to be violent.”

But fears of violence simmered just below the surface all day not only among San Diego school officials and police officers who monitored the Morse-to-Lincoln march but at several secondary schools through the nation’s eighth-largest urban system.

At Lewis Junior High in Allied Gardens, a couple of racially motivated fistfights early in the school day Thursday provided the spark for a welter of rumors about race riots and injuries on radio newscasts that brought 250 parents, representing a fourth of the school population, to the predominantly white campus to pull their children out of school.

“The (fights) happened before school, and there were shoving instances but no real” problems, Principal Patricia Harris said. “But, later on, some of the children got the feeling that they were afraid and came into the office,” most of them white and most asking for blue slips that would allow them to go home early.

Harris asked the school district’s race-human relations counselors to talk with students about their fears and anger concerning the verdict. And, at Lewis and many other schools, teachers scrapped lesson plans to talk about the verdict and the violence that followed, encouraged in most cases by principals to have their students vent opinions and emotions.

Rumors popped up during the day about planned walkouts at several campuses but none proved true, schools Police Chief Alex Rascon said. In fact, actual incidents turned out to be few, he said.

The Morse march was the best-organized and most significant protest, pleasing even the principal, Russell Vowinkel, who had tried to talk students out of their march early Thursday morning.

“They came to me personally and said they were intent to lodge a strong protest, an expression of outrage against the King verdict,” Vowinkel said.

Senior Donald Wood said that, even “some of our teachers felt the system didn’t work here.” Another senior, Dennis Borie, said that, although teachers “told us they were told to tell us not to walk out, several encouraged us to do it but to do it peacefully.”

Many motorists and residents in the Paradise Hills and Skyline neighborhoods honked their horns or otherwise signaled encouragement to the students during their march. As they neared the east side of Lincoln and turned to circle the campus, Lincoln students poured out of class and cheered.

Lincoln officials at first planned to allow no demonstrations and no discussions of the King verdict, even though their school has the highest percentage of African-American students of any district secondary campus, at 55%, and has long been a symbol for the city’s black community.

“It’s business as usual, and I hope there isn’t even discussion” of the verdict because “it would stir up the kids,” Vice Principal Ronald Gallegos said Thursday morning. But Principal Virginia Foster later decided to permit the football field rally after Councilman George Stevens called her and suggested that she risked a walkout or other problems otherwise.

Stevens exhorted the students that “we cannot just be angry. We have to take the anger . . . and change the condition of these things.” He asked them to go back to school and write letters to the U.S. Justice Department demanding that federal civil rights laws be invoked to bring the four Los Angeles officers to a new trial.

Police Capt. Rulette Armstead, in charge of police in the Lincoln-Morse area, told students that she and her colleagues “don’t agree with the verdict. . . . The (Los Angeles) officers were guilty and they should have been put in prison.”

At Lewis, Principal Harris and her staff struggled to reassure concerned parents that all was well, and that their children were safe despite the slew of rumors that surfaced after the shoving matches. Lewis has a large contingent of nonwhite students who are voluntarily bused to the school from Southeast San Diego neighborhoods under the district’s integration program.

“All the kids know that the pride of a person’s color is at stake, and they need to get their aggression out somehow,” said Marti Medina, a parent who came to Lewis to pick up her son. Many white students called their parents and asked to be taken home.

Among the rumors that students spread, and officials spent hours knocking down, included those of a child stabbed with a needle and taken to a hospital, of another student knocked unconscious and of a full-scale race riot under way.

“School officials say they have the situation under control, so I’m not going to go and jerk my boy out of school because of a case of paranoia,” parent Bill Conniry said. “I think that would only make the whole situation worse.”

But some students said school police were underplaying the tension.

“The police here are acting like nothing is happening, just like they did with that whole trial,” said 14-year-old Justin, who asked that his last name not be used.

Lewis officials tried all day to help students struggling with their feelings about the King verdict.

“I guess the main concern for students is that they are afraid and angry about what is going on in Los Angeles,” English teacher Laura Richardson said. “As teachers, we are trying to bring them together and turn this into a learning experience.”

Students were given congratulatory letters at the end of the day, thanking them for their patience and good behavior.