Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : LOS ANGELES : Rage: The visions of a life in L.A.

I grew up in Compton. When my family moved there, in 1950, the city was all-white. I can still remember the day we heard that the first black family was moving onto our block. Their name was Perkins. The man was a retired Army sergeant who had become a school teacher; his wife was a registered nurse.

My neighbors cut the initials KKK in their front lawn, stuck a hose in their mailbox and turned the water on--before they’d even fully moved in, if memory serves.

Their floors and carpets were ruined.

I was 10 or 11 at the time. I was horrified. I walked down to their house at some point, not knowing quite what to say or do. So I knocked--and started crying and said I’m sorry.

Four or five years later, I was in my junior year at Compton High School. Whites were still the majority, but the black population was growing fast--fast enough that when white students split their vote among four white finalists for homecoming queen, the fifth finalist--a young black woman named Naddie Smith--rode a wave of black votes to victory.

Whites were speechless--at first. By the time of the homecoming game, some had regained their voices; I was later told that several white linemen on our football team told the black running backs, “We’re not blocking for you n------ tonight.”

I only remember two other things about that game: We lost to a weaker team. I heard reports that someone was shot going home from the game.

So I’m no stranger to racism and violence in Los Angeles. I’ve lived all over the city and its suburbs--Long Beach, Compton, Lynwood, Mar Vista, Huntington Park, Cudahy, Rancho Palos Verdes, the Vermont/Beverly area, Silver Lake--and I’ve never believed all that foolish talk about Los Angeles as the model for a new, happily integrated, multicultural society. I’ve never lived in South Los Angeles and I wouldn’t presume to suggest that I (or any other white person) can even begin to understand the pain and the rage that blacks must feel every day. But I live in an integrated neighborhood 10 minutes from downtown now, and I talk with black friends and colleagues and I can read and think and see and I go into South L.A. at least once every few weeks or so, if only to have barbecue ribs for lunch, and you’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind (especially dumb) not to have realized that the level of rage there was so high and the fuse so short that the slightest spark would turn the city into a murderous inferno.

Rage.

I can remember taking my best friend from Compton High, basketball star Freddie Goss, to a motorcycle race at old Ascot Park in Gardena when I was a year or two out of high school. I was the editor of a weekly motorcycle newspaper then, and I left Freddie in the small section of the stands reserved for VIPs while I went up to the press box to check with the announcer, who wrote a column for my paper.

I had occasionally discussed racial issues with the man, and he had repeatedly assured me that he wasn’t really a racist; he just wanted blacks to “behave themselves, be responsible.”

I arrived in the press box just in time to see my columnist pointing at Freddie--soft-spoken, model student Freddie, the only person wearing a suit and tie in the entire stadium--and asking, “What the hell is he doing there?”

Rage.

I spent my first two years of college at Pepperdine University--back when it was Pepperdine College, before it moved to Malibu, when it was on Vermont, just a few blocks from the Florence and Normandie intersection where I ate chili dogs twice a week at Art’s, and where L.A.’s riots started. I can remember the faces of despair in the community even then, in the early 1960s--and I can remember the sneering disregard some white professors on this “Christian” campus had for the few blacks on campus, even though the campus was in their community.

Rage.

I remember spending several nights in Watts during the 1965 riot. I remember in particular the night I spent outside Watts, in neighboring, then-all-white Lynwood, riding around with Lynwood Police Chief Ralph Darton in his unmarked car. Every few minutes, the police radio crackled with another report of a fire, a beating, a shooting by marauding blacks from Watts. Except there were no marauding blacks from Watts in Lynwood that night. Every call turned out to be either a false alarm--or a fight between drunk whites.

Finally, late that night, we roared up to the scene of a real fire. The owner of the house was stomping around his driveway, brandishing a gun, screaming racial curses and howling that he’d heard blacks plotting an attack at his business that day and he “damn well” knew they’d thrown a Molotov cocktail on the roof of his garage that night.

As he ranted and raved, a fire inspector calmly motioned the police chief into the garage. There, in the corner, was a still-hot portable barbecue on which the enraged citizen had cooked his dinner that night . . . just before wheeling it into his garage, up against a wooden stud.

So, no, I wasn’t surprised by the riot. I wish to God it hadn’t happened. I don’t defend it. I don’t think that even racism--the most horrid cancer on the body politic--justifies murder and arson and looting. But I understand it. Or at least I try to understand it, as much as any white person can. And while I don’t expect that Los Angeles, in my lifetime, will be a model, multicultural city, I desperately hope that my 2-year-old son will live to see a reality that is closer to that image than what Freddie and Naddie and Ralph and the Perkinses and I have seen.