A Jazz-Filled Memorial to Watts Activist : Tribute: Residents pay homage to Ted Watkins Sr. for jobs, housing and hope.

With a blues band, laughter and red beans and rice, Watts said goodby Saturday to Ted Watkins Sr., a legendary community activist who ran a mini-empire of anti-poverty programs for nearly three decades, bringing jobs and housing to two generations of South-Central Los Angeles residents.

Several hundred people gathered to march in his memory and talk of the self-described “po’ boy from Mississippi” who became a master at coaxing money out of the federal government and succeeding where others had failed. While hundreds of other groups fell by the wayside, Watkins’ organization, the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, endured to become an institution.

Watkins, who died late last month at age 71, was remembered as someone who would not give up, even after his headquarters was burned and looted by a mob in last year’s rioting.

“I had to be here. He was so great in my life at a time when I really needed him,” said Emory Cenance, finishing off a plate of fried chicken, beans and rice after the memorial service at the action committee complex on Central Avenue. “I don’t know why the whole community of Watts isn’t here, he did so much.”

After the 1965 Watts riots, Cenance said, her three sons had gotten work cleaning up vacant lots as part of a summer project run by Watkins. Her daughter had gone through bank teller training in another program. And her widowed mother had found pleasure and diversion in the WLCAC’s senior citizen program.

“It touched a lot of hearts,” Cenance said of Watkins’ work.

Saturday was not for mourning. Instead, it was a day of informal celebration, as the Curtis Kirk Allstars Band led a procession from Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital--which Watkins helped bring to the area--to the WLCAC headquarters 25 blocks away. The Allstars played the kind of jazz Watkins loved: “Down Home Blues,” “Chicken Shack,” “One Mint Julep.” The pace was set by costumed high-steppers holding aloft parasols as they walked past well-tended homes and graffiti-splashed stores. Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, clad in jeans and a T-shirt, was among the marchers.

At the WLCAC headquarters, the crowd gathered in a cavernous concrete-floored building still under reconstruction from riot damage. Black water stains streaked the cinder-block walls and the scent of smoke occasionally drifted by.

Watkins’ admirers watched a recently completely Ford Foundation film about Watkins, chronicling a career that brought him influence and powerful visitors as well as enemies. With humor and gruffness, he went after what he wanted. When he needed water for a community garden, he simply took it from the fire hydrants. He lobbied for construction of King Hospital, and bought for $1 apiece 39 houses that were in the way of freeway expansion, then moved them down Imperial Highway at 3 a.m. They became Franklin Square, a serene cluster of subsidized housing that will be turned over to the renters after 20 years.

Long before the 1992 riots, he looked around at a community in some ways worse off than it was in the 1960s and predicted that there would be more disturbances. When they erupted and he lost several buildings, he toured the ruins in his motorized wheelchair, planning the reconstruction.

As speakers went to the flowered podium to pay homage to Watkins on Saturday, they held him up as inspiration for the ‘90s as well as a hero of the ‘60s.

“No matter how bad it seems,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) exhorted the crowd, “we can do again what Ted Watkins led us to do in the past. . . . Just get up and stop bemoaning the fact that we have pain and problems and recommit to doing something about it.”

Former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lauded Watkins for running “the best community action program in the nation.”

His wife, Berniece, six children and 21 grandchildren, wearing T-shirts bearing an image of a smiling Watkins, also climbed to the stage for a song and remembrances. For his father’s 71 years, son Tom recited 71 of his father’s favorite things. The list ranged widely: orange soda and Mississippi, flea markets, arguing, politics, soul food, family and finally, the WLCAC.

Listening was Annette Brown, who had worked for the community group for several years in the 1980s. “I loved him,” she said. When she first went to work for him, he did not seem that lovable--”So gruff and he argues and he screams. But deep down he was a sweet person, heart of gold.”

Byron Barker drove up from his fire-ravaged neighborhood in Laguna Beach to pay his respects. “He stayed with it because he knew you had to stop (fleeing) and start somewhere,” said Barker, a property manager who worked with Watkins over the years. “It’s important . . . to honor people who remain consistent in their commitment.”