Memories of a Haven Live On at UCLA : Education: Stevens House sheltered women from racial discrimination. Former residents will reunite to award scholarships.

In the beginning, fried chicken was used to fight racial discrimination at UCLA.

Money raised at chicken dinners supplied the $4,000 down payment on an old duplex a few miles south of the campus. Volunteers chopped through walls to join the two units, added hand-me-down furnishings and turned the building into a place where minority women students could live and study.

That’s how the Stevens House started a remarkable four-decade role as a shelter--and as a conscience--for many university students.

When the 22-bed residence opened in 1948, blacks, Asian Americans and Latinos could not find places in the school’s only dorm and were excluded from Westwood apartments.

“They wouldn’t say you couldn’t rent, they’d just say it was already ‘taken,’ ” said Hazel Hashimoto Dunbar, a Japanese American who lived at Stevens House in the 1950s.

The house replaced “an hour-and-a-half ride to class from where I lived over near Central” Avenue in 1953, said singer Barbara McNair.

It allowed state Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles)to live close enough to participate in campus activities during the same period.

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One Westwood landlady vowed that “over her dead body would any colored girls come in,” the Los Angeles Democrat said. “You could not live on Hilgard if you were black, except at the Y.”

Civil rights legislation and new on-campus housing eventually ended the need for Stevens House. Two years ago, it was closed and the building was sold for $500,000.

But at 3 p.m. Sunday, many of the 800 women who lived there over the years will gather at 580 Hilgard Ave. for a reunion--and to give scholarships endowed by the sale of the house.

The trustees of the house say a perpetual $40,000 grant for “underrepresented minority students” will be named for two house founders, Venye Corporal and Episcopal Bishop Bertand Stevens. He headed UCLA’s University Religious Conference, which spearheaded its creation.

Discrimination practices initially kept the Stevens House out of Westwood. Starting at a site near University High School, the center moved twice before ending up on Landfair Avenue next to the campus.

The house always operated on a shoestring budget, charging residents minimal rent. Residents did the cooking and cleaning. Volunteers struggled to keep the place repaired and to maintain an emergency loan fund for residents--many of whom were also living on a shoestring budget.

“It was a very difficult decision to sell. We all knew the work that had gone into it,” said Johnetta Jones, a retired View Park teacher and longtime Stevens House board member.

Board President Sheila Harkrider, a legal secretary from Agoura Hills, said those in charge finally decided that changing laws--and attitudes--had resolved the conflicts that led to its creation.

“Housing isn’t the most critical issue at UCLA now. Keeping up with tuition is,” said Twala Wells-Stewart, a university administrator from San Diego who moved into Stevens House as a freshman in 1965.

“The fact Stevens House existed was conscience-raising,” she said. “Until the campus and society at large caught up, it was a voice for students who had no other voice.”

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Dunbar, a semi-retired after-school playground program administrator from South-Central Los Angeles, said Stevens House was important to her 40 years ago--and still is today.

“If it hadn’t existed, I’d have had to travel four hours a day on a bus from Gardena,” she said.

She noted that the house always sought a mixture of races, including whites, to expose the women to all cultures.

“It helped me grow up and understand people from different backgrounds. That’s helped me all my life.”