Gang Truce Lets Residents Rediscover Their Freedoms : Cease-fire: People in Watts feel safe going out at night. And their clothing colors no longer make them targets.

Inside a Pioneer Chicken restaurant at Martin Luther King Jr. Shopping Center in Watts, Roosevelt Williams was having lunch, flaunting a sky blue T-shirt and red-striped shorts that once could have gotten him killed by two of Los Angeles’ major gangs.

“I hear you still can’t wear green,” another customer called out to him, reminding Williams that green is the color of a small Latino gang faction--just as red and blue have been long associated with the city’s Bloods and Crips gangs that dominate this neighborhood around 103rd Street near the Metro Blue Line tracks.

Williams tipped his lime-green baseball cap to the speaker, an acknowledgment that he was well aware of the risk he was taking. “I’m wearing it, ain’t I,” he retorted.

Since the Crips and Bloods declared a truce during last April’s riots, the rules of life have changed in this part of Watts. While police chart the progress of the cease-fire in the fluctuations of drive-by shootings, residents are gauging its effectiveness by another measure--the small freedoms that have been returned to them.

In a place where warnings of a long, tense summer came on the heels of the most deadly urban riots of this century, the summer months have instead brought a heady sense of liberation to residents whose daily routine was once lashed to the deadly rhythms of gang life. Although no one here can predict how long the relaxed pace will last, residents are cherishing it as a gift they never expected to receive.

“I’m praying it stays together,” says Williams. “I see them (gang members) walking together with blue and red rags (bandannas). A few months ago, whenever you saw a red rag, he was looking for a blue rag to kill.”

For the first time in memory, people who had grown accustomed to holing up in their houses at night, carefully choosing the colors of their clothing and warily answering questions about what neighborhood they came from are now daring to wear anything they want, going to evening church services and readily identifying themselves to strangers.

This section of Watts, a densely populated sprawl of housing projects and tiny bungalows bisected by Blue Line and Santa Fe Railroad tracks, is at the convergence of the turfs of several gang factions. Dominated by the Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts and Nickerson Gardens low-rise projects, the area is also where the truce began--and where the pact appears to be holding up most firmly, say gang workers and police.

Gang members are still familiar fixtures in the neighborhood, hanging out on project grounds. They continue to be the source of much of the area’s criminal activity, police say--including drug dealing and other street crimes that have shown no sign of letting up.

But the gang factions associated with the Crips and Bloods, the most notorious of the city’s black gangs, have sharply curtailed the brutal, tit-for-tat blood feud they engaged in for years, police and residents agree.

Despite some occasional feuding between smaller Latino gangs based in Watts, the prevailing truce has given neighbors “a better chance to live like people,” one resident says.

The only funeral home in the neighborhood, the Ashley-Grigsby Mortuary at Century Boulevard and Central Avenue, has not scheduled any gang rites since the the truce took hold in early May, said operations manager Betty Edwards.

Gang funerals were once a staple of the mortuary’s business, she said, adding that she could not say precisely how many gang funerals had been held each week.

“It felt like (we were) burying our own kids because, literally speaking, they are our kids,” said Edwards. The truce “is so beautiful,” she said. “God has his hand in this.”

At Markham Middle School, on 104th Street between Compton Avenue and the Blue Line tracks, Assistant Principal Jim Molina said the truce dramatically changed conditions at the school in the eight weeks between the riots and the last day of classes, June 30.

In those weeks, he says, fights over gang loyalties that once were a common occurrence on the campus nearly disappeared overnight. “We just didn’t have those issues anymore,” he says. “The red-blue issue is nonexistent.”

And in the final weeks of school, students who once were loathe to cross the Blue Line tracks nearby tentatively began making forays into other students’ neighborhoods.

If the truce continues into the new school year, Molina says, administrators plan to discuss whether they will allow students who are not associated with gangs to wear clothing in the once-forbidden colors of red and blue.

The school draws its 1,600 students from territory claimed by four major gang factions--two Crips and two Bloods “sets”--one from each of four housing projects clustered within walking distance of the school.

In past years, schools were not the only places where color mattered. Residents who ventured outside their immediate neighborhoods risked their lives if they were caught by gang members wearing the wrong colors--tantamount to painting bull’s-eyes on their chests.

Gretchenal Rice, a businesswoman who is part owner of the Pioneer Chicken franchise in the King shopping center, recalls the time last year when a worker absent-mindedly left the restaurant wearing one of the restaurant’s regulation red caps and was caught on the Crips side of the tracks.

“These guys confronted her on the street and wanted to know what was ‘with all the Blood?’ ” Rice says. Thinking quickly, the young woman told them the red stood for the blood of Jesus. “And they bought it and let her go,” Rice said.

From then on, the businesswoman said, she made sure to remind her workers never to wear their uniforms outside the store. That prohibition seemed to solve the problem, Rice said.

Vamonica Baker, a 16-year-old Jordan High School student who lives with her family near Jordan Downs, said that as drive-by shootings grew rarer this summer, turf lines began to blur and disappear. Now, she said, she feels free to go anywhere.

Williams, the customer who wore green into the Pioneer restaurant, also has noticed the relaxed atmosphere, saying he has been surprised to see older people return to the streets--sometimes, after dark.

“It was really a shame how they had those old people cooped up in their houses,” he said. “They were afraid to go to church at night because it was too dangerous.”

Mamie Mayo, 60, who owns Mayo’s Kitchen at Compton Avenue and 108th Street, no longer flinches before heading outside. “You don’t have to do this anymore,” she says, demonstrating by hunching her shoulders and furtively looking from right to left.

The truce’s impact on her business, she said, was immediate and dramatic.

“We opened back up on the Sunday morning after the riot,” she recalls, “and (the restaurant) filled up with people. I hadn’t seen some of them since they were in elementary school.”

It took her a few minutes to figure out what had happened. The truce had emboldened people from across the railroad track to come in and sit down for a hamburger dinner or pick up a soda or a pack of cigarettes. Business has been brisk ever since.

“One guy was so happy, he came in with his pajamas on,” said Mayo’s daughter, Sundra 38, who works at the restaurant as a waitress.

Mamie Cephas, who lives near the King shopping center, said the truce has had an impact on her family. She has watched her hardened 27-year-old son, a longtime member of the Grape Street Crips, grow optimistic about his future.

“The first thing he said was that he was going to change,” she said. At first she was skeptical. Cephas had heard so many promises from him in the past that she figured all she could do was “keep up the payments on (his life) insurance and turn him over to God.”

But two months ago he came home and announced proudly that he had been hired for a temporary forestry job near Palmdale. He is still working.

“I really can’t believe it,” said Cephas, who supports herself selling used clothing on the lawn of her apartment complex. “This is the first job he’s ever had.”

That optimism is tempered in Watts by worries that the neighborhood’s new-found freedom from fear cannot last. Residents know they have little real power to maintain those freedoms because they are dependent, in the end, on the will of the gangs.

Leon Watkins, a community activist who operates a hot line for families of gang members in South Los Angeles, said gang members’ determination to keep the truce depends upon the help they get from government and society.

“If don’t address the issues of unemployment and underemployment and poverty, we are inviting (the warfare) back.”

Even if the lull comes crashing to an end, residents say they will have no regrets.

“If the truce ends tomorrow,” says Williams, “I’ll be grateful for the little peace we did have.”