Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT SOUTH-CENTRAL LOS ANGELES : ‘I See an Erosion of Values, an Erosion of Caring’

I started working with Los Angeles County in 1960 as a probation officer. I did that for 7 1/2 years before going to the Human Relations Commission in late 1967. So I’ve been around.

The state of affairs in the greater South-Central area has been the major focus of my career. Tragically, education, housing, employment, even police-community relations, are all now as bad as they were in 1965, when Watts exploded.

A lot of this stagnation is due to benign neglect from the people and institutions in positions of authority. They’ve written off these communities. Since April 29, 1992, it’s been business as usual.

We’re still pretty much in a crisis mode. We handle things on an ad-hoc basis--something comes up, so we deal with it. We react. We need to get into proactive policy.

Look at the decline in student achievement scores, for example. Those in a position of authority just allow those conditions to worsen over time. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s what people don’t understand, people in the San Fernando Valley who say, “We gave them their shot, we tried to help those people already.” Well, what was that shot?

When you really examine it--who was really involved, and what kind of resources were there--you find that the money spent on poverty programs was misdirected. There needs to be some political pressure brought to bear to force a fair allocation of resources, but unfortunately that pressure does not exist.

It is one of the most devastating, tragic aspects of racism that those who are heavily oppressed do not take up the fight against that oppression. You would think they would say, “To hell with this.” But that only happens periodically. And when it happens, it’s sometimes more self-destructive than anything else.

We have two Los Angeleses. One is the so-called inner city and the other is the non-inner city. Those are two distinct realities and I do not believe there is the will, the desire, the motivation to deal with the problems of the inner city to avoid future conflagration.

In my 34 years working with the county and the city I have not seen that will. Programs come up and programs die. I have not seen real policy that deals with people’s problems. By policy, I mean directives that have kick, directives that have money behind them, that require people to do things differently. And the tragedy is that we have generations of youngsters who are going to live and die and never get a glimpse of the good life, just by virtue of accident of birth. I am not suggesting mollycoddling anybody. I am suggesting that people have to feel a sense of worth and dignity in order to participate in society in a constructive way.

In South-Central, I see an erosion of values, an erosion of caring, I see a callousness on the part of youngsters. I see youngsters who seem to be impervious to pain, to fear, to suffering. I see kids who are witness to accidents or shootings or stabbings and who, at a very early age, seem to be unaffected. And the implications of that are just huge. It’s almost like life doesn’t mean anything to them.

The kids in South-Central have more obstacles than I did as a black man growing up in Los Angeles. They feel less hopeful about themselves than the average kid did when I was coming up. There was a certain hope that was part of the scene back then, a hope associated with the civil-rights movement and the belief that things would get better. That doesn’t exist any longer.

You tell these kids, “Hey, man, you do this, you take care of this, you take care of that,” and they say, “The hell with you, I’m going to do something else. Because they don’t really believe you. Their experiences are that you have to do the conniving thing, you have to do the slick thing in order to get over--because they don’t even know about the substance, they’re strictly dealing with the form.

And they’re saying--and this is the ultimate tragedy--”My life is not worth it.” When I was a kid I felt my life was worth it. I got that idea from my family. These kids just don’t have that kind of experience; they’ve been beaten down to the point where they won’t even acknowledge, or can’t even see, the positive things that do exist.

We don’t take time. I mean, my God, imagine if some people had to stop in South-Central Los Angeles, if their car broke or something, if they had to get off at Manchester or Florence? Know what I’m saying? And yet people live there. I live in Inglewood, and there are folks who won’t even come to Inglewood.

I’m saying it’s a mind-set, I’m saying we have to come together to struggle with this thing. Because everybody is affected, that was dramatically demonstrated on April 29 of 1992, where the thing went well past South-Central.

It’s not a hopeful future that I see. I just think that we’re going to have to reassess and we’re going to have to be very uncomfortable for awhile as we try to carve out this new reality.