The Need to Hire Local Residents as L.A. Rebuilds

Danny Bakewell’s message on my voice mail was demanding, a summons from a man who won’t take no for an answer.

You have a moral obligation, he said, to write about African-Americans being denied work on riot reconstruction jobs in black neighborhoods.

Moral obligation? Isn’t that what they teach in divinity school? The concept went against everything I’d ever learned in the newspaper business.

Anyway, I had already written about the African-American job issue, featuring Bakewell, who heads the Brotherhood Crusade, a large and influential black community charitable and social service agency. The column described how he’d led a group of African-American contractors onto a job site in a protest about the absence of blacks. As a result, the job was closed down, and a Latino worker on a bulldozer lost a day’s work.

I thought it was a sad example of the poor consuming the poor, and of the miserable state of L.A.’s race relations.

I didn’t reply to Bakewell, but his message stuck with me, rattling around in the back of my mind.

It resurfaced a few weeks later when I was riding along with State Sen. Diane Watson while she campaigned for county supervisor. Late in the morning we stopped at the home of Barbara Fouch-Roseboro, who lives in Lafayette Square, an elegant, largely black Mid-City neighborhood south of the Santa Monica Freeway. Fouch-Roseboro and her husband, John Roseboro, the great Dodgers catcher, own a public relations company in Beverly Hills.

As we relaxed, sipping John Roseboro’s cool, tangy lemonade, the conversation turned to the jobs issue. I mentioned Bakewell’s phone message and said it had left me feeling that I might have missed something in my column about his work site protest.

“I read the column,” Barbara Fouch-Roseboro said, her warm manner turning slightly chilly. She thought I’d missed the point. I had described it as a racial dispute, blacks against Latinos. That wasn’t it, she said.

The others in the big living room joined the discussion. I don’t remember exactly what everyone said, but this was their point:

The contractors were to blame for refusing to hire workers and subcontractors from South L.A. They came in with outside crews in a move guaranteed to provoke outrage.

Adding to the tension was the construction business’ fondness for using Latino illegal immigrants, a relationship kept alive by the sad fact that the workers are so poor and frightened of deportation they’ll work for low wages and not argue with the boss. The men and women sitting around the Roseboro living room told me I should have written about economic oppression rather than relations between blacks and Latinos.

I saw what they meant a few days later when Los Angeles City Councilman Mike Hernandez took me on a tour of his district.

It extends from the overcrowded poverty of Central American immigrant neighborhoods west of downtown to the narrow, curving streets of Mt. Washington, home of many young professionals and their families. In between are miles of working-class L.A., blue-collar Latino neighborhoods extending east and west of Figueroa Avenue.

Hernandez, himself, is strictly blue-collar, measuring his progress as a councilman brick by brick, project by project. Hernandez, his wife and their children live on one of those streets off Figueroa in a modest house they picked out when they were junior high school sweethearts and vowed that one day it would be theirs.

As we drove near the old Taylor railroad yards, north of Union Station, he explained that his district also suffered from the curse of imported labor.

All around us were industrial plants, warehouses, and huge municipal facilities for repair, maintenance and other work. Too often, he said, employers have discriminated against Latino neighbors and hired Anglos who lived many miles away.

Race isn’t the issue. In South L.A. and around the railroad yards, the complaint is the same. Residents are being shut out of jobs.

That must end, Hernandez said. Pointing to where the Department of Water and Power plans a huge facility, he said there will be 900 new jobs and some of them had better go to the neighborhood. In the case of commercial projects, Hernandez is trying to get commitments from the developers to provide jobs for neighborhood people.

This effort won’t end joblessness in an L.A. gripped by recession. Nor will Bakewell’s protests bring prosperity to South L.A.

Hernandez and Bakewell know that. But in the short run, taking care of the people in poor neighborhoods may ease life in places where the daily search for work adds to dangerously explosive tensions.