Jesse Jackson in South L.A. to Generate Voter Power : Politics: He speaks to students at Fremont High and groups of welfare recipients in registration campaign. ‘Nobody will save us but us,’ he says.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, in Los Angeles as part of a nationwide effort to register new voters, told groups of welfare recipients and inner-city high school students Friday that by voting, they can control “the destiny of America.”

“We face tremendous odds in urban America,” Jackson told the 800 students gathered in the auditorium of Fremont High School in South-Central Los Angeles. “Nobody will save us but us. And by voting, you can take back some of that power. The destiny of America is in your hands, it’s in your minds.”

On his three-day visit to Southern California, Jackson has held voter registration rallies on the campuses of UCLA and UC Santa Barbara and visited churches and housing projects in San Diego and East Los Angeles, reaching out to groups that could provide key support to the Democratic Party in next month’s election.

Friday morning, speaking in front of a Department of Public Social Services building in South Los Angeles, Jackson lashed out at supporters of Proposition 165, Gov. Pete Wilson’s initiative to cut welfare benefits.

“The welfare debate is a diversion to shift attention away from the real crisis in the economy,” Jackson told the crowd, adding that 10 million Americans are unemployed and one in 10 Americans receives food stamps.

“People on welfare are being scapegoated,” he said. “They had nothing to do with America losing a large share of the automobile market. Or losing 500,000 textile jobs. Or the savings and loan scandal. People on welfare do not need to be threatened by workfare, they need jobs.”

His comments calls of “Amen!” and “Tell ‘em, reverend!” from the approximately 40 people who showed up before 8 a.m. to shake his hand.

But when the time came for Jackson to coax the non-registered among them to sign up to vote--as he does at each stop--he was greeted by a nervous silence. After a little more encouragement, a woman who said she was not registered finally stepped forward.

When Jackson planted a kiss on her cheek, other women pushed their way up for similar treatment, and suddenly voter registration forms became a hot item.

Jackson’s visit is part of his National Rainbow Coalition’s nationwide registration drive, which aims to persuade larger numbers of the young, the poor, ethnic minorities and women to register and to vote.

In South Los Angeles--the focus of voter sign-up efforts by several groups aligned with the Democratic Party--registration volunteers say they were swamped with people interested in registering in the immediate aftermath of the riots, but the pace has slowed since then.

Although representatives of those groups say they have signed up more than 65,000 new voters in the area since the riots, the county registrar of voters reports that only 16,000 people joined the voter rolls between May 1 and Sept. 4 in the six state Assembly districts based in South and East Los Angeles.

Joe Ortiz, a spokesman for state Sen. Diane Watson’s campaign for a seat on the county Board of Supervisors, said Thursday that the campaign had registered 15,000 immediately after the riots and another 13,000 since then.

But on Friday, trying to explain the discrepancy in registration numbers, he said those figures were “guesstimates.”

Sharon Delugach, director of Jobs With Peace, said her organization has registered 28,200 voters in South Los Angeles in the past two months--most of them not included in the registrar’s tally, which ended on Sept. 4--but is encountering rising apathy among potential voters.

“What little interest was out there (immediately after the riots) has seemed to dissipate,” she said. “Most people don’t care to get registered because they don’t trust the system. They don’t think things will ever change.”