Beacons of Change : Rebels With a Cause, These Four Activists Tell How They Want to Reshape L.A.--and the World : DARRELL STRAIGHT JR.: YOUTH ACTIVIST : ‘I got tired of seeing the kids around here just going down the drain.’

They are solitary voices shouting to be heard, pleading to be supported, but willing to stand alone.

They are activists--like Californian Harry Wu, a human rights advocate who spent 19 years in Chinese labor camps before immigrating to the United States in 1985. He risked his freedom in June while entering China in his continuing efforts to draw attention to human rights violations.

What makes activists take such risks?

Activism is a lifelong pursuit, says Craig Jenkins, a sociology professor at Ohio State University. Those who take up a cause rarely let go. The causes are as diverse as the activists, says Jenkins, who chairs the Collective Behavior and Social Movements section of the American Sociological Assn.

Activism in the 1990s has taken a more local focus. While few gain the international attention of Wu, who remains jailed, many are at work in the neighborhoods. The following are four Angelenos who live their lives committed to bringing light to darkness.

* Darrell Straight Jr. is making the rounds in the Nickerson Gardens area of Watts.

Straight, 23--a former high school dropout and onetime drug dealer--is the founder and virtual one-man operation of Fresh Start, a program he started last year to provide productive ways for boys 14 to 19 to spend their idle time instead of hanging out.

Straight, who grew up here, lives here and volunteers his time as a street-savvy activist, is their guardian.

He got the idea for Fresh Start “because I got tired of seeing the kids around here just going down the drain.”

What Straight saw--homeless kids, kids stealing and destroying property, kids with no direction in their lives--all hit too close to home. At 14, he dropped out of school and was arrested while making his first drug sale. (The charges were dropped after he agreed to take part in a program for high-risk kids.)

Getting busted saved his life. So did spiritual guidance from his parents, Sandra and Darrell Sr., and his grandmother, Agnes Reese, who died last year.

What drives him to be an activist at such a young age?

“No one ever gave up on me,” he says. “And my grandmother always told me, ‘You’re gonna be a strong leader in Nickerson Gardens. God is gonna use you in your community.’ ”

On his daily walks, Straight encourages kids to hit the books, the pool, the gym--anything that will possibly keep their minds off trouble. But they also dream of doing things outside Watts, a place where they feel trapped.

Before he was laid off from his job two weeks ago with the Los Angeles Cities in Schools program, Straight could afford to pay for field trips to the beach, movies and camping.

Straight, who remains as Fresh Start’s volunteer director, is working on a few ideas of his own, including a radio-controlled model airplane project. The kids would fly the planes off the San Pedro cliffs, a place he likes to go “to be there, just me and the ocean and God.”

“I won’t give up on these boys,” says Straight, who received his high school diploma last year. “When I look into their eyes, I always tell them there is hope. Sometimes, that’s the first time they’ve ever heard that.”