KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : Shovels, Brooms Become Tools of Healing and Hope : Community: Black, Anglo and Latino volunteers join to sweep up debris to reclaim their neighborhoods.

Chad Mac leaned into a shovel full of debris outside a row of burned-out shops Friday at Pico Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, clearing the sidewalk of smoldering embers that were once an appliance store.

“Just a year ago I was in the cleanup in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,” said Mac, 19, a member of the Marine Corps stationed in El Toro. “Now you have to turn around and do the same thing in your own back yard. It’s sad.”

Mac said his mother lives in the neighborhood, and “I decided to come out and give a hand.”

On block after burned-out block from the Fairfax district to Crenshaw Boulevard, from Leimert Park to Western Avenue, phalanxes of volunteers such as Mac ventured forth with tangible symbols of their commitment to their communities--shovels, brooms, water hoses, trash containers.

African-Americans, Anglos and Latinos working together temporarily put aside their pain and outrage over the wanton destruction and took to the streets to reclaim their neighborhoods.

“You gotta get together; you gotta get healed,” said Joe Connolly, 37, as he worked side by side with Mac on Pico. “The King verdict is not right. Looting is not right.”

Therrian Zeigler, 34, who also lives in the neighborhood, was driving by when he decided to return home and “grab my shovel. It has to start somewhere. At least people can say not everybody’s gone crazy.”

When the shops on Pico went up in flames Thursday night, Roberto Martinez, 8, and his family were evacuated from their nearby apartment on Fairfax.

“Today I decided to come help,” Roberto said as he pushed a broom across the hosed-down sidewalk. “I don’t want to have to go someplace else no more.”

But for the Rev. Fred Stoez, who led a group a volunteers cleaning up Vermont Avenue, the thought of moving at first seemed an idea whose time had come.

“My wife and I were thinking of leaving town,” he said. “We couldn’t stand seeing the violence or even watching it on TV. This is one way we can do our part by cleaning up and putting this behind us.”

Stoez, pastor of Celebration Church on Vermont, started out Friday morning in the 2800 block of South Vermont with half a dozen volunteers and a few brooms, cleaning sidewalks and turning off running water on the busy street.

By midafternoon, his work crew had swollen to 50, boosted by neighbors who wanted to pitch in. They worked with a van full of brooms and shovels donated by a neighborhood hardware store.

The scene along Vermont was an incredible reversal from Thursday night. What had been caravans of looters became caravans of people volunteering to go from site to site and clean up.

A woman pedaled a bicycle up Vermont carrying a broom and a dustpan on her handlebars. Near her, two men walked down the sidewalk with a freshly looted mattress and box spring on their shoulders.

Cars cruised Vermont and many occupants waved, honked horns and gave the peace sign to those cleaning up. At a mini-mall complex where several shops had been gutted, a truck pulled in carrying about 15 UCLA students who went to work with brooms and shovels.

They were joined by another volunteer group that included Elmore Dingle, 31. “I especially wanted to help the Koreans,” said Dingle, who is black. “I don’t want them to think so negatively about blacks. The violence last night wasn’t real.

“ This is real.”

At one point Dingle led Evelyn Binz, 90, a neighborhood resident, through the rubble and urged her to be careful.

“I haven’t been out in two days,” she said. “I had to get out. This (destruction) is really sad to see.

This was one of several multiethnic groups of cleanup volunteers. There was also a group of motion picture industry professionals, including a film publicist and a set designer. And two administrators at Antioch College in Venice were sweeping broken glass from the sidewalks across the street from burned-out mini-malls on Vermont.

“We’ve been going from area to area, cleaning up,” said Mitch Krindel, the film publicist. “This brings people into some sense of community. It shows we’re all one people.”

Laurien Alexandre, a dean of academic affairs at Antioch, said she and her friends “had a desire to help in some way. “We decried the verdict, but we wanted to do something that in a small way might build a more equitable society. If it means getting out with brooms and shovels to show that it’s not just us versus them, we’ll do it.”

In View Park, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park, residents donned dungarees, sweatbands and head scarves to tackle the cleanup job along a block of Degnan Boulevard best known as a center for black art galleries, a jazz performance space and Marla Gibbs’ Crossroads Theater complex.

“I was watching TV and feeling helpless when I saw Edward James Olmos leading a cleanup on Western Avenue,” said Jack Roberts, a retired human resources manager for First Interstate Bank. “I thought that was a darned good idea. It gets rid of this helpless feeling.”

The volunteers on Degnan ranged from elementary school-age youngsters to retirees, and they moved from shop to shop, shoveling smoldering debris off sidewalks before hosing them down.

“It infuriates me; it saddens me to see us do this to our own people,” said Cathy Bell, who came with friends to help clean. “There must be peace in a storm. Something good must come out of this. I pray to God that it does.”

Across the street, Alden Kimbrough sat outside his Congo Square Gallery providing lunch for volunteers who were cleaning sidewalks at each end of the block.

“We saw folks working here, and we knew they would get hungry,” he said. “We’re doing this for anybody in the neighborhood who wants something to eat. There’s a lot of good energy on this block.”

Sitting outside the gallery, Jackie Ryan said “people came out of nowhere” to save 2,000 masks, drums and other pieces in the Museum of African Art across the street.

They moved the art objects to the middle of the street to protect them from a fire threatening the museum Thursday, stood guard over them all night and moved them back inside when the building was spared, she said.

In another South Los Angeles neighborhood, about half a dozen ministers who belong to the Ministers’ Coalition for Peace encouraged residents to keep calm.

“The healing is going to take a long time,” said the Rev. Carl Washington of St. Mark’s Baptist Church. “It starts with sweeping up the mess. But it just starts there. Folks are demanding respect, equality, justice. Those things take time. We’re trying to get to their hearts. They’ve been acting on their emotions, their anger, their rage.”

At a Lucky supermarket on Figueroa Street and Vernon Avenue, Jimmy Giles Jr., 28, was volunteering to do what he does for a living--he owns a company called Faith General Services that cleans up businesses for pay.

He moved across the street to the Unocal gas station with no concern for who owned it. It was the station where he bought gas for his truck before the vandals hit.

“This is the community I live in,” he said. “Some folks are at home watching their new 25-inch TV set on their new couch, drinking a cold beer they didn’t buy. At least, I’m doing my part. It may not look good out here, but believe me, my man, it looks better than when I started.”

At a mini-mall on Western Avenue and 20th Street that had been ravaged by looters on Thursday, a dozen neighborhood residents--African-American, Latino and Anglo--trickled in during the day and volunteered to help sweep up broken glass and load debris into a dumpster.

By late afternoon, they had cleaned much of the mess.

“You can’t do anything (about the looting) so you come out and clean up. That’s all you can do,” said James Johnson Jr., 21, a USC student who lives a few blocks away. “You can’t communicate with them (looters) because they’re in a different zone. That’s why you feel so helpless.”

Robert Martinez of Sylmar drove downtown from the San Fernando Valley and sought out Western Avenue because “I heard on the news people were helping out.” He brought his two sons along with him.

Another resident, Billie Green, saw the cleanup and joined in. “I’m hurt and angry and upset about my community, so instead of continuing to cry, I’m cleaning,” Green said.

Teresa Martinez, who owns a seafood restaurant in the mini-mall and a 24-hour taco stand across the street, served hamburgers and soft drinks to the volunteers. The owners of a pest control company, Art and Georgia Washington, slept in their store Thursday night, still afraid that looters would return.

Looters were attracted to the mini-mall primarily by an athletic shoe store, which was stripped of virtually all its merchandise during an hour of looting by 50 people on Thursday.

“Too many innocent people,” Sharon Cameron, an unemployed security guard, said as she pitched in. “Innocent people should not have to pay.”