Understanding the Riots Part 4 : Seeing Ourselves : LOS ANGELES : No longer a bleeding-heart liberal--just a broken-hearted one.

When I was 24 years old, I took my English degree and my big ideas about racial equality and drove straight to Watts--or, more specifically, Jordan High School, situated at the dead end of 103rd Street, with the emphasis on “dead.” With housing projects on three sides, the area was considered so tough that even police didn’t venture in without backup. It was said that teachers were sent there for punitive reasons. The student body was overwhelmingly black. The Crips were just beginning to get organized. Ninety percent of the fathers were absent. The average household seemed to have five or six kids.

My first day, I arrived with my own poetry books and a new briefcase with my initials on it. I was assigned to an annex building where, the principal explained, the woman who taught there before me had been raped. During homeroom, it was determined that I had 78 students and 35 chairs. About 15 young men stood stoically in the back, wearing hats, chains and a couple of knives. My briefcase was stolen before noon. When an ominous-looking group of hoods arrived during fifth period, I staged an imaginary conversation with security on a dead wall phone, convincing the interlopers to leave. I later learned that security had been gambling in the basement.

It was abundantly clear that we had a shortage of paper, pens, pencils, audiovisual equipment, library books, textbooks and just about anything you could name that relates to learning. I was told that most of my students read at elementary school level. The literature books I was given were for 10th-, 11th- and 12th-graders. The conventional wisdom seemed to be that we were not in the business of teaching, but of surviving.

After school, I’ll never forget walking across the football field to the parking lot and coming across a group of well-scrubbed, anxious-looking sophomores sitting in the late-afternoon sun. This was their first day of high school, and a good number were decked out in new outfits and shiny shoes. It struck me how out of place their well-intended faces looked in this war zone. I asked what they were doing there. The response came back: “Man, we the ‘E’s’ (students whose last names begin with “E”). We didn’t have no home room, so they told us to come here. We’ve been waiting all day for somebody to come for us.”

The next two years were filled with many vivid impressions. The math teacher had most of his neckties cut off, his chairs thrown out a second-story window. A counselor was beaten half to death with a trash dolly. The band had most of their uniforms and instruments stolen.

I had a number of students who came with royal titles, some bestowed at birth and others simply adopted. In first period, there was a Prince Charles, and in fifth, a Princess Yolanda. Most refused to answer roll call without my using their full regal name.

Roll call itself was a kind of nightmarish battle-casualty assessment. On many occasions, after calling a student’s name, I would be informed offhandedly that “Anthony won’t be here any more, Miss Bloodworth. He was killed at a party last night.” I had one student, named Skip, who showed particular promise at writing poetry. He had a Dylan Thomas bent and was very angry. One day when I was calling the roll, someone answered: “Skip won’t be here any more. He was shot on the way home from school.”

I was astonished that in the midst of all this chaos and absurdity, so many of the students came to school actually wanting to learn. That they didn’t was our failure and not theirs.

But that was two decades ago, and as I watched the riots on television, I had to wonder if Prince Charles or Princess Yolanda or any of Skip’s friends were involved. I am no longer a bleeding-heart liberal--just a brokenhearted one. So much time has passed, and yet it seems to me that in terms of hope and promise for these forgotten kids, not much has changed since then. When I think of Watts now, what I remember most is not the riots or the violence, but the faces of those well-intended, earnest sophomores--the “E’s.” Twenty years later, they are, in many ways, still sitting in the bleachers--worn down by the hot sun of poverty and neglect, waiting for someone to come for them.