KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : Born From the Ashes of Watts, Center Dies in Flames of Riot : Destruction: A mob chases the Watkins family from their anti-poverty group’s headquarters. The founder watches from home as fire snuffs out his dreams for change.

An anti-poverty organization that has brought jobs, social services and hope to Watts since the 1965 uprising fell victim to this week’s violence when its 68-year-old founder, his family and staff were forced to flee a looting mob that later burned the group’s headquarters.

The attack came at midday Thursday when about 200 blacks and Latinos smashed through the gates of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee’s L-shaped main complex at 109th Street and Central Avenue. The committee was founded by Ted Watkins Sr. in 1964.

“We’ve been here for you; we’re black! We’re helping the community!” Teryl Watkins, the center’s administrative assistant and the founder’s daughter, said she and the others shouted to the crowd in a vain effort to protect the organization’s administrative offices and commercial center.

“But they didn’t care,” Teryl Watkins said Friday as she stood in the parking lot with her family and a few staff members, waiting for a promised appearance of National Guard troops to protect what little was left of the smoldering buildings.

“We had been calling for the police and the Fire Department, but they never came,” she said. “When the crowd started to crash through the gates, we got guns and held them off for maybe five minutes. Then they broke through. They had guns too. Some of them chased us down Central Avenue, shooting at us.”

The family made it to Ted Watkins Sr.’s home a couple of blocks away and watched in agony as smoke rose from the direction of the center. As soon as dawn broke Friday morning, her brothers--Teddy, Tim and Tamlin--returned and doused the still-burning buildings with garden hoses, Teryl Watkins said.

In the parking lot they found four of the organization’s vehicles--used to provide free or low-cost transportation to shopping centers and medical offices--had been burned, another 12 vandalized. The offices were nothing but a pile of charcoal between roofless walls. Looted and burned too were the contents of the commercial center, which included a coin laundry, chili parlor, toy store, youth enterprise project, a furniture and appliance shop, building supply store and food stamp office.

Earnings from the commercial center helped pay for some of the nonprofit organization’s other projects, such as a homeless shelter, a job training center and a senior citizens’ housing project nearby.

“This has been Ted’s life,” Teryl Watkins said as her father and mother, Bernice, sat quietly in a nearby van, accepting cellular phone calls and visits from Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and an aide to Mayor Tom Bradley. “We think we can repair the buildings, but what’s lost is almost 30 years of history . . . the pictures, the commendations.”

Watkins founded the organization with the help of 50 labor union members, determined to create housing, jobs and a better life for the then-all-black communities of Watts and South-Central Los Angeles. The organization, funded largely with government grants, started operating small businesses and buying land to build low-cost housing. In the late 1970s, Watkins tangled with Willowbrook neighbors over his push for a big redevelopment project, with the group at the helm, on land that included their houses.

But Watkins over the years has found more commendation than controversy. John Phillips, an attorney prominent in the fight for compensation for residents displaced for the Century Freeway, once called Watkins “the most effective housing provider in South Central.”

On Friday, a weary Watkins surveyed the damage, pausing briefly at the spot where his office had been. At his feet lay a battered sign with the organization’s logo. Smoke still rose from the charred heap that had been his desk, his file cabinets and his framed proclamations.

“Twenty-eight years of work was involved in this,” he sighed quietly. But he took a deep breath and continued:

“I’m going to start rebuilding right away. I’m not going to let this stop me.”