Leaders Speak, But No One Is Listening : BILL BOYARSKY

Last week, our leaders spoke and nobody listened.

Their words were weak and ineffectual against the huge tide of violence, anger, fear and hatred that swept through L.A.

Mayor Tom Bradley was actually booed and heckled when he called for calm Wednesday night. Gov. Pete Wilson and Police Chief Daryl Gates fired off orders to cops and the National Guard, but the security forces still were slow to hit the streets. Members of Congress and the City Council, taking their turn at the podium, were left equally impotent. Nor did anyone seem to understand the powerful forces working against them.

I listened to all of them--Rep. Maxine Waters, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, Los Angeles City Councilmen Mark Ridley-Thomas and Mike Woo, and others too many to mention. Although well-intentioned, their words were irrelevant, offering little comfort or hope for the sad and frightening scenes we had all seen on the streets of L.A.

Aid, Marshall Plans, programs, training, investment, blame. Tired words banging against our ears, the same words we had heard after Watts in 1965. But this is L.A. 1992, a far different place.

Since Watts, this city has been confronted with one of the most wrenching demographic revolutions in American history. But its leaders are poorly equipped to deal with it.

One reason is they are members of the low-turnout generation of politicians. Less than two out of 10 of the voters went to the polls in the last City Council election. Only slightly more than that voted when Bradley was reelected to a fifth term in 1989.

Among the non-voters are hundreds of thousands of Mexican, Central American and Asian immigrants. Their arrival has changed the three once solidly black City Council districts in South Los Angeles. They are now heavily Latino, with a large number of businesses owned by Asian-Americans, mostly Korean-Americans.

Most of those who actually vote in these three districts are African-Americans. Consequently, all three council members are black. That causes resentment on the part of the others, as I could see when I talked on Saturday to one of the organizers of the Korean-American rally in Mid-Wilshire.

“We are very disappointed in Bradley,” he said. “We make a lot of donations to the mayor and to the City Council but there was no response from them. They only care about their political futures. Their votes come from the African-American community.”

Given the low turnouts, the council members don’t even speak for a majority of African-Americans. As a poll worker at a practically empty polling place remarked on the last city Election Day: “People in the black community are angry. And I think a lot of them are staying home out of disgust.”

Another reason leaders can’t deal with these tumultuous events is that, like hidebound generals, they have prepared for the last war.

Just as they did in the ‘60s, the African-American leadership formed keep-cool teams. A command post was set up at the First AME Church and a community meeting was scheduled for the night of the verdict in the trial of the four officers accused of assaulting Rodney G. King.

But the leaders weren’t able to gauge the depth of feeling in the community. The anger of the huge crowd at the church exceeded the politicians’ ability to control it. That’s where Bradley was heckled. And the hot spots were so dangerous that the trouble-shooting teams were canceled.

Nor did city leaders anticipate the reaction of the Latino immigrants, packed into the city’s worst slums, working at some of L.A’s lowest paid jobs. From their impoverished ranks came many of the looters.

Poor blacks and Latinos--disenfranchised and unrepresented--exercised their resentment, hatred and frustration in a wave of lawlessness against another unrepresented minority, the Korean-Americans.

It was the multiethnic city’s first multiethnic race riot.

Now, the city’s leaders have spoken again.

Over the weekend, Mayor Bradley announced that Peter V. Ueberroth will lead the rebuilding effort, as chief--or czar--of Rebuild L.A., an organization that hopes to guide reconstruction of Los Angeles.

Ueberroth is smart, with excellent business connections to bring in outside investors. But the new buildings may also be looted and burned when the next legal or social injustice occurs.

That can be avoided only by bringing the unrepresented into the reconstruction effort. Until then, Ueberroth and the political leaders who enlisted him can talk--but nobody will listen.