Activist Shows South-Central and Valley Aren’t Miles Apart

The topic of a recent discussion in the San Fernando Valley sounded intriguing: “What’s Happening in South-Central L.A.”

Would busloads of Bloods and Crips be there to describe gang warfare? Would drug dealers be there to describe the lure of a quick buck for undereducated teen-agers?

Would cops be warning of perilous streets?

No, none of them were there. Instead, a lone, veteran community activist was there with an equally intriguing, but simple message: “All the things you’ve heard about South-Central are not fact,” said Lois Medlock, who has lived for more than 40 years in a bungalow near 49th Street and Avalon Boulevard in the South Park area.

In fact, Medlock told the monthly meeting of Seniors For Action, people in South-Central are very much like people in Encino or Sherman Oaks or Van Nuys: Decent folks who want government off their backs, bad politicians voted out of office and developers to leave their neighborhoods alone.

The similarities rather than the differences between South-Central and the Valley were one of the reasons that Belle Palmer, the program chairwoman, invited Medlock to speak to her group of political activists, which is officially nonpartisan although most members espouse liberal views.

“I had heard her speak at another function, and I thought she was a dynamic person,” Palmer said. “Her community has similar issues to which we can relate even though we are separated by freeways.”

As if to prove the point that people in the two communities are similar, just prior to the talk a moderator, who had been making announcements of coming events and recent political developments, asked whether Medlock had yet arrived.

“She’s sitting in the third row,” someone yelled from among the three dozen or so Valley people in the audience at the Senior Center at the Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Recreation Center.

After a brief self-introduction, Medlock, a native of Louisiana who still has a Southern accent, quickly hit a familiar chord when she criticized the Community Redevelopment Agency, which she described as one of her pet peeves.

“The CRA is not there to make the land prettier, it’s there to shove you off your land,” she said as several people in the audience nodded in agreement. “I’m tired of it. Everything is becoming concrete.”

Medlock said that like some Valley residents, she, too, has had to fight to save her neighborhood from proposed freeway and rail lines and large developments.

“They think we’ve all moved to Baldwin Hills,” she said, referring to the African American middle-class community in the Westside. “They plan to take South-Central.”

But she suggested that a coming together of all people and communities could repel such efforts in both South-Central and the Valley.

“We must come together as human beings, and together make things happen,” she implored. “If we don’t hang together, we’re going to hang separately.”

There were times, though, when it became clear that hanging together does not necessarily mean sharing all the same opinions; when it became clear that Medlock saw some issues entirely differently from her Valley audience.

When a man in the audience suggested that children in South-Central should be bused to schools in the Valley to get a better education, she snapped back: “Instead of busing the children out of the area, just bring the materials in and they’ll learn.”

Another audience member asked about the proliferation of liquor stores in South-Central.

“Liquor built this country,” she retorted, adding that she is a teetotaler. The major supermarkets “don’t want all those liquor stores because they compete against them. They’re not helping me, but some of them are black-owned businesses and that’s good.”

When another member of the audience asked her what she thought of LAPD Deputy Chief Mark Kroeker, the popular former Valley bureau chief who now heads the South bureau, which includes South-Central, Medlock replied: “Who? I’m not impressed with the police. I don’t like gun smoke for breakfast.”

“The man is a saint,” someone in the back of the room muttered.

While acknowledging that there is crime in her neighborhood, she added, “If someone wants to snatch my purse, he doesn’t have to be black.

“The black man is accused of being everything but what he really is: a member of this society,” she said. “The scales of justice have to be balanced.”

Yet Medlock didn’t mince words when it came to criticizing African American community leaders.

The City Council representatives from her area, Rita Walters and Mark Ridley-Thomas, are “the worst people on the City Council. . . . All politicians lie, but they don’t have to lie all the time.”

And as for African American celebrities who lend their names and time to help rebuild South-Central, Medlock said, “They go to Cecil Murray’s church and stop right there.” Murray is pastor of the First AME Church, a socially and politically active church in South Los Angeles.

Medlock, like community activists in the Valley, fiercely defends her neighborhood because she loves it. “It’s the most beautiful part of the city,” she says.

But she traveled up two or three freeways to meet with her contemporaries in the Valley because she knows that preserving one’s back yard is going to take more than just your next-door neighbor’s help; it’s going to take the help of your neighbor across the freeway.

And one way to get that help is to show up in your across-the-freeway neighbor’s yard and show them that you are much like they are.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, because I’m not afraid of you,” Medlock said.