The Breeze of Freedom : South-Central gang truce brings a new liberation to law-abiding residents

Too many African-American and Latino neighborhoods in Southern California have been held hostage for years by gang terrorism. Now, due to a most welcome, though tenuous, truce between the Crips and the Bloods gangs, many law-abiding residents are beginning to take their lives back. They are regaining their freedom to go about their business without fear. It’s both a psychological and a physical liberation that’s long overdue for the innocent people held virtual prisoners by the violence that overtook their neighborhood streets.

Fear of gangs has intruded into the most personal of decisions--such as what color shirt one wears, because red and blue came to symbolize Bloods and Crips. Times staff writer Andrea Ford noted how one Watts man, because of the gang truce, was flaunting his sky-blue T-shirt and his red-striped shorts as he ate lunch in a fast-food restaurant. Such a small freedom. But one that had been denied to him and others.

It has been denied not just in sections of Southern California. In the journal Reconstruction, Mark Naison recently wrote how “angry young men, armed with automatic weapons, have turned traditional centers of black sociability--street corners, playgrounds, stoops, storefronts and even the steps of churches--into dangerous and forbidding places. . . . A retired postal worker in Chicago spoke for many when he recently complained, ‘Just going out at night to get something, I can’t tell you when I last did that. If I ain’t got it by nightfall, I don’t get it.’ ”

That postal worker still speaks for many residents of South-Central Los Angeles, especially the elderly. Too many still live behind drawn blinds, terrified of young people who could be their grandchildren.

It’s no way to live. The people under this urban version of house arrest are the forgotten victims of the gang wars. Perhaps they haven’t been shot or robbed, but they have lived as if they expected it at any moment.

It’s not uncommon to hear women who live alone talk about the precautions they take at night and how they hate it when daylight-saving time ends--because darkness can easily hide predators. The people who have lived in gang neighborhoods have had to live with that kind of precaution and sometimes paralyzing fear night and day, spring and fall.

So here’s a salute to the people who are rediscovering the simple freedoms of walking their blocks and wearing what they please. It’s about time. May those freedoms never again be allowed to be taken away.