1,000 at Interfaith Rite Hear Call for L.A. to Move On

Sharing songs, dances and prayers, an estimated 1,000 optimists came together at a Los Angeles church Sunday night for what they hoped would symbolize a new era of ethnic and religious cooperation in a city strained by recent tensions.

“If we can come together in church, then that’s a starting point. Then maybe we can come together throughout the community,” declared Selma Williamson, 62, a longtime member of First African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the two-hour concert and service was held.

The gathering was scheduled months before last week’s verdicts in the trials of two men charged with beating trucker Reginald O. Denny and others during the 1992 riots.

But that trial’s coincidental end gave special meaning to the call by program participants--a diverse audience of Asian-Americans, Latinos, whites and African-Americans, Baptists, Methodists, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and Bahais--that Los Angeles must move on.

Williamson, a retired school district administrator and an African-American, said that just seeing the mixed crowd Sunday evening made her hopeful about the city’s future.

Lisa Lustgarten agreed. The 23-year-old Santa Monica College student, who is white, said: “The fact that we all came together here is important to me.”

The Interfaith Coalition to Heal Los Angeles, a clergy group formed after the riots, sponsored “A Celebration of Commitment” and invited an array of speakers and performers.

A Jewish children’s chorus, a Mormon choir and an African-American dance troupe, among others, had their turns in front of the congregation. A passage from the Koran was read, Buddhist prayers were offered and the shofar --the ram’s horn traditionally blown on the Jewish High Holy Days--was sounded.

Rabbi Harvey J. Fields of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple called for conciliation in the wake of the Rodney G. King and Denny trials. He urged the crowd “to rise up and help repair this city.”

The Rev. Mary Minor, a minister at First AME Church, said the Sunday service’s message was “let’s put the King trial behind us, let’s put the Denny trial behind us and let’s get on with the business of rebuilding Los Angeles.”

The Rev. Cecil L. Murray, spiritual leader of First AME, was out of town for a bishops meeting.

Earlier Sunday, the mother of the man acquitted of the most serious charges in the Denny beating drew cheers and “Amens!” from another church congregation as she praised Jesus for sparing her son life imprisonment.

“If anybody tells you that prayer doesn’t work, tell them to see Mama Williams,” Georgiana Williams told a gospel-singing crowd at the Greater Bethany Community Church in South-Central Los Angeles.

A multiracial jury last week acquitted Damian Monroe Williams, 20, of attempted murder and aggravated mayhem in the beating of Denny. Williams was convicted of felony mayhem and faces up to 10 years in prison. He could have received life terms for conviction on either the attempted murder or aggravated mayhem charges.