REGIONAL REPORT : Grass-Roots Groups Spring Up to Address Racism, Poverty : Riot aftermath: Multiracial coalitions strive for improvement, trying to find some good to apply to their communities.

Something stirred inside James A. White that Wednesday night, that infamous evening after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case were read and riots erupted in Los Angeles.

White, a Riverside tire dealer who is black, ran to his telephone and began calling everyone he knew in the community--friends, businessmen, school trustees--inviting them all to his house.

“I believed the rioting could have spread right into Riverside, and we all agreed it’s time for us to pay attention to our problems here,” White said.

In his home, white people sat with blacks and blacks with Latinos. In the model set forth by the late Saul D. Alinsky, a Chicago organizer for the poor and disenfranchised, they talked.

To White and others throughout Southern California, the verdicts and their horrific aftermath presented not only a clear warning, but the signal of opportunity--a chance to address long-festering racial inequalities and strive for improvement in their own regions.

From San Diego to Oxnard, multiracial, grass-roots coalitions have sprung up. What is particularly notable is the level of passion in these people outside Los Angeles County who are trying to dissect the heartache of urban unrest and find some good to apply to their communities.

To hear these people tell it, not since those Chicago days in the 1940s when Alinsky first helped the poor gain a voice for economic empowerment has such a groundswell of community organizing unfolded on such a broad geographical scale.

“Even if all the low-income parts of our population were organized--all the blacks, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Appalachian poor whites--if through some genius of organization they were all united in a coalition, it would not be powerful enough to get significant, basic, needed changes. It would have to . . . seek out (white middle-class) allies.”

--From Alinsky’s book, “Rules for Radicals,” published in 1971.

In White’s Riverside home, those who were summoned shared ideas well into the night amid a televised backdrop of the burning in Los Angeles. Within 24 hours an alliance of 250 elected and city officials, religious and community leaders--virtually a cross-section of Riverside residents--emerged and discussed how to improve conditions in the blighted sectors of the city.

“It was more than a feel-good session” said Riverside school Trustee Robert Nava, a Latino. “Never had this community ever met together this way.”

“What I saw was a very amazing rainbow kind of grouping or coalition,” said Robert Holstein, a white attorney in Riverside who went to White’s gathering and also attended the larger meeting. “It was an instinctive call for the power of organization.”

Because Riverside is largely a bedroom community, coalition members said they hold out hope that something positive can happen if requested of government, White said.

“Even though we’re smaller than Los Angeles, we still have our problems,” White said, referring to recent racial incidents.

In the last eight months, someone burned a cross on the lawn outside an African-American’s home, White said. Someone used a foam-like chemical to draw a cross on the exterior of another house owned by an African-American. Hate slogans have been painted on vehicles owned by blacks, he said.

If there is an advantage to these riots, it is that activists and leaders in outlying areas have been startled awake, and have admitted that complacency settled in after civil rights gains of the 1960s.

“It forced us to look at ourselves,” Nava said.

White said the group is planning its first project.

“We want to create 500 summer jobs for young people from disadvantaged areas. We did our homework in a day and identified that there really isn’t a recreation program for youths over the age of 12 years old. That’s one of the things we’re going to talk to the city about.”

In San Diego, more than 200 people came together to discuss ways to build bridges linking various groups in their city, just as the National Guard was taking up arms in Los Angeles.

“It’s created a consciousness here,” said the Rev. George Walker Smith of Christ United Presbyterian Church in San Diego, and head of the Catfish Club, one of the black community’s most respected political forums.

“We’re building coalitions with every segment of our community,” Smith said. “Last Friday after the riots broke out, we had a Catfish Club meeting that included the police chief, president of colleges, superintendent of schools, and we’re coming up with San Diego plans for justice, economics, education and social justice.”

“We’re not looking for politicians because politicians don’t solve anything. We’re just getting it together ourselves,” he added.

Smith, like many others who were interviewed, recalled previous riots and unrest and the subsequent explosion of the myriad social programs that were formed to combat urban ills still present in many of their communities.

“It would take a miracle for a lot of positive change to happen,” said Smith. Whatever happened to the McCone Commission report, Smith asked, and the Otto Kerner study?

“Read the McCone report (of 1965) on the Watts riot and it tells you about the same problems we have now. Then read the Kerner report (of 1968, for the National Advisory on Civil Disorders). They said that America was moving into two separate and unequal communities, one white and one black,” Smith said. “But what happened to those reports? As soon as the last building burned, they put them on the shelf and forgot about them.”

Thomas W. Payzant, superintendent of San Diego schools, said the speed and the volume of community leaders’ responses to Smith’s call for a meeting surprised him.

“With less than 24-hour notice, a number of community leaders responded and came together and spoke from the heart, and from the head, in terms of suggestions in what we needed to do in the days and months ahead. It’s a beginning,” Payzant said.

Andrea Skorepa, director of a San Ysidro social services center and chairwoman of the San Diego Citizen Advisory Board on Police-Community Relations, did not attend Smith’s meeting but said she agrees with the effort to share feelings on improving race relations.

“Our problem, because we’re so near the (Mexico) border is xenophobia,” Skorepa said. “Undocumented Mexicans are the scapegoats for everything down here.”

Even in Perris, a tiny western Riverside County city where King verdict-related rioting spurred several arson fires, residents--many of them for the first time--are gathering and discussing plans to combat a local gang and drug problem. They are also trying to find ways to close the economic gap, said Virniecia Green-Jordan, who grew up in Watts and moved with her parents to Perris 24 years ago, after the Watts rebellion.

“This is ironic. I moved out of Watts when I was an 11-year-old student at (Edwin) Markham Junior High School,” Green-Jordan said. “And I have to tell you, I just lost a son in February. He was 19, and a senior high school honor student and a 16-year-old stabbed him to death at a school bus stop.”

Green-Jordan said her son, Jermaine, was waiting at the bus stop with two white students when a suspected gang member walked up, argued, and then killed him.

“My son gets killed and then this disturbance,” said Green-Jordan, the area’s first black elected to the Perris Elementary School Board. “We have had some racial problems in our community.”

She said that two to three weeks before her son died, racial tensions flared after a group of Latino youths from nearby Romoland harassed a white Perris resident who got a gun and threatened them. The man was arrested but later had his car stolen.

On Monday, Green-Jordan joined a number of Perris residents who met to discuss ways to soothe inflamed emotions. “We know our problems and we’re going to get a plan of action,” Green-Jordan said. “We’re tired of talking. We’re going to do something. Some of the black residents are getting together and then we’ll go to our supporters in the white community for their help.”

“It was America’s wake-up call,” said the Rev. Broderick Huggins of St. Paul Baptist Church in Oxnard, who quickly helped amass Concerned Residents of Ventura County, which is holding a series of public forums to vent anger and find solutions to racial injustice and prejudice.

Huggins said many Ventura residents were quick to note they did not agree with the not guilty verdicts for four Los Angeles police officers in the King beating, despite the fact that the case played out in a Simi Valley courtroom. “Those jurors lived down the street and around the corner from Ronald Reagan’s library, whose doctrine states that everyone on welfare is lazy and black or Hispanic and who milks the country of its resources and hinders the country from balancing the budget,” Huggins said.

But at the group’s first meeting, white and black pastors and people “from all walks of life met under one roof,” he said. “It’s the first time this has happened in our community.”

In Orange County, where blacks make up less than 2% of the population, the Rev. John McReynolds, senior pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Santa Ana, said that more white residents have telephoned him in the past several days than “at any other time.”

“It has heightened their awareness, specifically in Santa Ana, where you have a big Hispanic community and urban problems,” he said. “I think that many people--including many white people--want to alleviate some of the problems as they exist.”

Not only can such coalitions offer forums to vent the frustrations of blacks and other minorities, and help plan projects, but for many white residents they offer an opportunity to renew social commitment, said many of those interviewed.

McReynolds said that during a Christian prayer breakfast, there was a desire among white business people to “lay aside the social isolationism” and become part of the solution.

“It’s a societal question. We have to decide if we’re going to spend money to build higher and stronger walls to protect us from this large body of very low-income people and their problems, or if we’re going to try and come together and improve race relations,” said Russell Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, which will encourage similar discussions at a public forum today.

“Isolating ourselves from the plight of immigrants and those living in poverty just doesn’t work,” Kennedy said. “It eventually boils over if we do.”