CSUN Students Urged to Spread Gang Peace

Two clergymen who have helped nurture the 6-month-old truce between rival African-American street gangs in South-Central Los Angeles urged a rapt audience at Cal State Northridge on Wednesday to help the peace spread to other neighborhoods.

“You can go to your own . . . communities, and . . . speak out against any type of violence,” the Rev. Carl Washington of the Ministers’ Coalition for Peace said.

The Rev. Roderick L. Ewell, a member of the coalition, urged the audience of about 125 mostly African-American students to also help sustain the truce in South-Central by visiting the area.

“Stop looking down at the people because they’re still in South-Central,” Ewell said. “Boost their morale and stop looking down your noses at them.”

Washington and Ewell have been visiting schools and college campuses in Los Angeles and other cities to talk about their efforts to halt the gang violence they said has claimed 2,500 lives in recent years. On Wednesday, they told students in a class called “Contemporary Issues in the African-American Community” that the gang truce is holding firm in the core area of South Los Angeles but that relationships among African-American gangs elsewhere remain tense.

“We all have to do something” to support the truce, agreed Damu Mike, a 19-year-old business major from South-Central Los Angeles. “All the organizations on campus, all the departments, can help.”

“If we keep it up, it’s going to spread,” said Kevin McClure, a 20-year-old sociology major from Pomona. “We have to keep it up and not let it go.”

Washington also urged the audience to become politically involved and to vote. “It’s time for a new guard, a new leadership,” he said. “We are the ones who are going to make a difference.”

That message struck a responsive chord.

“We all have a voice and if we’re going to sit back and talk about the system and not participate in the system, then we’re part of the problem,” said Lonnie Mason, a 20-year-old engineering major from Culver City.

Washington and Ewell said they will take their message later this month to Seoul, Korea, where they hope to gain insights that will help them deal with the Korean community in Los Angeles.

The ministers usually are accompanied on their travels by gang representatives of the Bloods and Crips honoring the truce. But those who were to attend the CSUN forum were no-shows. Ewell said one of the two gang members had been arrested by police on outstanding warrants.