L.A. Story: Olmos’ Role of a Lifetime : Activist-Actor Remembers Despair and Hope That Drove Him to Take a Broom to the Riot-Torn Streets of L.A.

For years, actor Edward James Olmos has received high marks for his stage, film and television work on such projects as “Zoot Suit,” “Miami Vice” and, perhaps most notably, as former Garfield High mathematics wizard Jaime Escalante in the movie “Stand and Deliver,” for which he received an Academy Award nomination as best actor. He also has been a tireless worker on behalf of social causes from anti-drug and stay-in-school campaigns to broad issues facing Latinos.

But when Olmos picked up a broom to begin cleaning up Los Angeles as Day 3 of the riots dawned three years ago this weekend, he became both a literal and figurative symbol for healing in a city that desperately needed it. During a break in the filming of a television pilot on gang life called “Babylon,” Olmos revisited those dark days with City Times staff member Mark Sachs.

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Q. Take us back to that day three years ago when you walked out your front door, broom in hand. What kind of thought process led you to take that kind of action?

A. You know, I haven’t reflected on this for a while, but the thing that sticks in my brain was the sense of hopelessness I had. I had been trying to do my part in keeping people from participating (in the riot). Some of us (in the entertainment field) were on almost every television and talk show in the city, and nothing was helping, nothing was working.

By Thursday night, over 24 hours had passed since the riot had started, and things were still going head-on. I was driving from Channel 7 to Channel 5 when right in front of me, I came upon a man whose head had been blown off. It was all I could do to stop from running over him. By that time, I was completely dismayed, completely gone. The next morning came, and I hadn’t been able to sleep all night.

At that point, I decided to just get up, get a broom and go down to the First A.M.E. Church parking lot and started cleaning up. The church had been doing so much to help in that area, and that was all I could think of to do. And when I was finished there, I carried the broom from the parking lot to the street and just kept on sweeping.

First there was just me, then there were three people, then there were 20, then, by the end of the second day, there were tens of thousands.

Q. In looking back, what were some of the undercurrents that might have helped create the right sociological environment for the riots to take place?

A. I think that any time you have disproportionate pain between the people who have and the people who don’t have, a tremendous amount of pressure is placed on the morality of society as a whole. For instance, most recently we’ve had the Proposition 187, a very difficult issue to deal with. And once again it started to cause a moral imbalance within our society, as did the right-to-life, right-to-choose issue.

The next moral issue I see coming up is greater than any one I’ve seen in many, many years, and it involves the simple line of “You do an adult crime, you do adult time.” That sounds correct, but then you get into the question of when do you start? Do you start at 12 years old? Ten years old? If a child who is 8 kills someone, is that child then judged as an adult and dealt with accordingly? There are some people in this country now who feel that’s the way it should be done.

But what this really all points to is the fact that we have a health problem called violence that is going on here in this country. It’s just like cancer or pneumonia, polio or any other disease. We have to develop a vaccination for it, and the vaccination is really us as a society starting to teach conflict resolution and to do it at an early age--before the children are born. When women are in abusive situations, before children are born into that situation, we should teach conflict resolution and continue that instruction after the children come and then throughout the lives of those children.

I have been to retirement homes where you see 75-year-old people needing to know how to deal with conflicts within themselves because they have never learned how to handle their problems without getting physical. Educating people how to cope with their problems should be ongoing and taught through every age range.

Look what happened in Oklahoma. We have a lot of soul-searching to do as a country.

Q. Some predicted that civil unrest would break out in the Latino community in the wake of the passage of Proposition 187 last fall. That didn’t occur. Is there ever a place for civil disobedience in a civil rights movement?

A. Violence has never been an answer to anything. The understanding that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind is true. But civil disobedience can help make others understand some things that they need to understand. If the entire Latino work force were to stay away from work for three or four days, whether you are a professional or anything else, it would make the rest of the country sensitive to the amount of work Latinos do and bring about a level of understanding about Latinos that is sorely needed. We cannot have riots or revolts over the 187 issue. Violence is not going to help at all. But it is coming.

Q. In assessing the trends and pressures that have buffeted Los Angeles in recent years, is there any reason to feel optimistic about life here in the 21st Century?

A. I think in a lot of ways we are definitely moving toward becoming a more tolerant society, but while there are more tolerant people today, those that are not tolerant are much more violent and physical than they were three or four years ago--so you have situations like the one that occurred in Oklahoma City.

You have now very few people on the planet that would ever try to do this, yet somebody planted bombs and decided that they would take out their feelings on this building. There are less people participating, but the type of behavior is much more animated and exaggerated and deadly. This is a most extraordinary time, and it’s just the beginning of an era in which we will have to begin dealing with these problems.