Parents Seek Answers to Children’s Questions : Images: They worry about the effects that the verdict and the violent scenes will have on their young ones.

Devastated themselves, parents in the black community say they worry how the police acquittals in the Rodney King case and exposure to the subsequent violence will affect the children.

In Los Angeles and Orange counties, some parents voluntarily kept their children home from school, fearing chaos. Others called one another on the phone for mutual support.

“We are all very afraid for our young men,” said Pamela Hills of Huntington Beach, who kept her 16-year-old son home from school on Thursday. “The message that came across has definitely been an insult for the black man.”

Parents said younger children were learning for the first time what a riot is, and posing questions such as whether police are bad and “would this have happened if Rodney King were white?”

For them, it appeared easier to denounce the looting and rioting than to answer their children’s questions about the injustice of the verdict.

“It’s hard when they’ve seen the tape,” said Annie McGill of Placentia, mother of a 9-year-old boy. “In their little minds, they’re saying, ‘I don’t want the police to have anything to do with me. They will kill me and leave me and it wouldn’t matter.’ ”

McGill said she tried to avoid perpetuating rage in her child, despite her own disappointment over the verdict. “He asked me, would that have happened if that was a white man? I told him I didn’t have the answer for that. It’s not the way we should even look at it. . . .

“I don’t want that rage. It can easily come up inside of you if you sit and dwell on a fact of injustice.”

Inner-city parents worry about the violence the children are witnessing in their neighborhoods. Brenda Richardson Mitchell, an inner-city parent and a schoolteacher, said children witnessed looters emptying a grocery store while police watched near her home around the corner of Normandie Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard. “I just wonder what they are taking to heart, what they are beginning to believe. That it’s OK to go wild and crazy and justify it by saying we’ve been mistreated in the past?”

Mitchell said the verdict brought back to her the “familiar hurt” of injustice suffered by her black relatives and ancestors since slavery. “We swallow and continue to pray. . . . In the long run, God doesn’t intend for us to always suffer,” she said.

John McReynolds, pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Santa Ana and a father of two, said, “We have to tell the truth and (still) provide a means of hope.”

He said he told his children “how bad it was, that we believe (the verdict) was not just. Now we have to trust the federal courts, and go through the system and see if there are any civil rights violations.

“We also look at the other side of the fence. Rodney King had no business being intoxicated, no business speeding, not following the direction of the officers. So you’ve got to look at both sides: how important it is for us to be good citizens.”

Some parents said they offered religious answers to their children, others said they used the events as an object lesson to demonstrate the value of an education.

“You tell them that’s why you have to get more educated. The more you know, the better you are,” McGill said. “I’d be willing to bet you the people setting fires were people who either dropped out of school or were parts of gangs. You didn’t see anybody in suits and ties.”