King Case’s Stigma Still Haunts Simi

They have spent five years trying to ignore it and make the rest of the world forget too.

Simi Valley folks have labored to scrub off all trace of the controversial Rodney King beating trial, the incendiary April 29, 1992, verdicts and the explosive riots that laid blame on their doorstep and blood on their city’s name.

They gathered food and clothing for burned-out victims of the rioting.

They shouted and threw stones when a white supremacist came to town five months later looking for supporters.

And the predominantly white residents of Simi Valley launched a series of five annual Unity Games, reaching out to the mostly black residents of South-Central Los Angeles over softball diamonds and picnic blankets.

Yet nearly five years later, mass media outlets--from newspaper columnists to late-night comedians--sometimes wield Simi Valley’s name like a bludgeon. In coverage of the trials of O.J. Simpson, parallel references showed up repeatedly: the Simi Valley trial. The Simi Valley jury. Simi Valley justice.

The falsehood--that this is an inherently racist city that caused Los Angeles to burn--lives on in the minds of the uninformed and the ignorant, some residents say.

“We’ll forever have it as a negative impact, but the community has certainly taken steps to counterbalance that,” Caesar Julian, a longtime Simi Valley physician, says.

“The community realizes that we live in a total environment, not just our own little town,” says Julian, author of a short-lived proposal soon after the riots that would have protected the city from further stigma by changing its name to Santa Susana. “And regardless of how we are . . . we have to be careful not to be a lily white community.”

Council members and others hasten to point out that only two Simi Valley residents were among the 12 Ventura County jurors who acquitted four white Los Angeles Police Department officers of beating a black motorist.

The mayor pleads with outsiders to remember Simi Valley as a city of people, not the site of a notorious borrowed courtroom. As the home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. As a quiet bedroom community of affordable family neighborhoods just northeast of Los Angeles. As one of the three safest cities in the country.

Yet as the fifth anniversary approaches, Simi Valley finds itself gunshy and resentful, wondering whether the community has been forever changed.

Some Simi residents find themselves acting overly self-conscious about even appearing improper, former Councilwoman Vicky Howard says.

“People are aware of the unfair label we got, and perhaps we’ve become a little more careful,” says Howard, who represented Simi Valley on the Board of Supervisors and organized the food and clothing drive for the riot victims nearly five years ago.

Some Hypersensitivity Noted in Community

“They question themselves more--’Could that remark I just made be racial?’ ” she says. “You become a little sensitive.”

Keith Jajko, a longtime Simi Valley resident who helped coordinate the Unity Games until they petered out last year for lack of interest, says he finds himself acting differently too.

“Walking the streets, or at the store, subconsciously I tend to smile at an African American or Latino person,” Jajko says. “I don’t want to show any slightest indication of shining them on.”

All this hypersensitivity is unneeded, says Simi Valley Building Inspector Gaddis Farmer, a 7 1/2-year resident of the city and an African American.

“That’s unfortunate, that this situation has caused them to make sure they are sensitive to that,” Farmer says. “If they were just being natural and normal, they would find that they were doing fine.”

Even before the verdicts and the riots, Farmer says, “I didn’t notice any problems or any kind of negative behavior here toward me or my family or any other people of Afro-American ethnicity.”

Mayor Greg Stratton says Simi Valley itself is the same as it ever was: a good city with a bum rap.

“I don’t think the city’s changed, I didn’t think anything was wrong to begin with,” Stratton says.

“The public’s memory is pretty short,” he adds. “I usually test it by the reaction when you use a phone and you’re calling a 1-800 number, and you give them an address [of] Simi Valley. If they say ‘spell it,’ they don’t really know where you are. I’m getting more ‘spell its’ now than anything else.”

But among outsiders, the stigma lingers.

Moorpark High School Principal John McIntosh announced last month that his school’s basketball squad would move a game with Compton Dominguez High School from the Simi Valley High gym to a “neutral site” because of the city’s connection to the King verdicts.

And, oddly, the farther some Simi Valley folks get from home, the more vividly they hear the same accusations.

Simi Valley High teacher Robert Collins travels across the country to teachers’ conventions.

“When I tell people where I’m from, they say, ‘That’s the city that has all the KKK and white extremist groups,’ ” Collins says.

“And I have to tell them, ‘We may be more conservative than some communities, but we certainly don’t have any extremist groups here in big numbers.’ Simi Valley is ingrained in people’s minds.”

Pat Havens, Simi Valley’s historian, says her husband went on a medical mission and found the legend had even traveled into the jungles of Brazil.

“The interpreters were introducing themselves, and they asked where Neil was from, and he said, ‘Simi Valley,’ ” Havens says. “And a little boy jumped up and said, ‘Rodney King! Rodney King!’ ”

Stereotypes Linger Five Years Later

People, such as Simi Valley gun shop employees Tom Hammersley and Jeff Jordan, face the misconceptions every day.

“I don’t know where we got the stereotype that we’re a bunch of white supremacists,” says Hammersley, who works at Shooters Paradise. “It’s kind of screwed up that we’re linked with things like that verdict, and we’re stuck with that hanging over our heads.”

“I have friends in Oxnard come into the shop and joke, ‘How’s this white town doing?’ ” says Jordan, his co-worker. “And I have quite a few black and Hispanic customers.”

In fact, Simi Valley’s racial demographics are changing.

The city once boasted a strong community of Latino families--many of whom worked for white ranchers in the ‘40s and ‘50s. But as housing booms of the ‘60s and ‘70s lured urban refugees from the San Fernando Valley, the city grew whiter.

“For a long time, that physical barrier that the Santa Susana Mountains created caused our city to stay isolated, until the San Fernando Valley burst at the seams and they all came barreling over the hill,” Havens says.

The 1990 census showed 80% of Simi Valley residents were white, 13% Latino, 5% Asian American and 2% African American.

Now the pendulum is swinging back. Real estate brokers say more Latino families are moving into Simi, reflecting a larger trend of minority families settling in Ventura County.

By 1996, Ventura County demographers had estimated that Simi Valley had reached a Latino population of 14.5%, with 5.8% Asian American residents and 1.5% African American residents mixed in among the 78% white residents.

From 1991 to 1994, Simi Valley was second only to Oxnard in the number of homes bought by Latinos, according to DataQuick/Acxiom Information Systems. The number of homes purchased in Simi by Latinos grew from 73 in 1990 to 110 in 1991 and a peak of 133 in 1993.

Yet as the city welcomes minorities to its neighborhoods, charges of racism still pop up.

A white Simi Valley teen was convicted of vandalism in a 1993 incident when KKK was spray-painted on a black family’s mailbox and driveway. He later went on to win a gold medal in archery in the 1996 Olympics.

Racist slurs mar some public bathroom walls in Simi Valley today, racist leaflets were inserted into lockers at a local high school in 1993, and racist jokes pop up in workplaces, including the east-end electronics firm where literary magazine editor and former Simi Valley resident Jordan Jones worked until recently.

“There were people who were kind of Rush Limbaugh ‘ditto heads,’ who thought it was OK to tell racist jokes during meetings,” says Jones, who moved to Costa Mesa last year for a better job.

The jokes targeted blacks, Latinos, Asians and women, recalls Jones. “I found that aspect of the job very unpleasant.”

Council Criticized by Latino Activists

And last month, the City Council took heat from Latino activists for supporting the U.S. Border Patrol’s practice of rounding up illegal immigrants taken into custody during probation raids on gang members’ homes.

Latino activists, including Simi Valley attorney Daniel Gonzalez, charged the raids targeted only Latinos and violated their 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

City Council members and former Police Chief Paul Miller responded that the city’s only two gangs are entirely made up of Latinos, and INS officials said the only people they arrested and deported were illegal immigrants with criminal records.

But the activists accused the council members of racism, and today still contend Simi Valley has a higher than average number of biased people.

“When you have such a concentration of a white population--conservative, upper middle-class income--you’re definitely going to have a higher concentration of racists than you would in a more culturally diverse community,” Gonzalez says.

“Many of the white community here in Simi Valley fully supported the verdict,” he says. “They felt that Mr. King deserved to nearly get himself beaten to death because he didn’t stop” on orders from police.

But that racist label hardly fits the entire city, says Jajko, a former reporter for local newspapers and now aide to Supervisor Judy Mikels.

“We have the same amount of rednecks and bigots that every other community has,” Jajko says. “Everywhere in California, you’re going to get this representation of the old school who are going to pass on their fathers’ belief that minority people are inferior.

“I’ve personally heard of more cases of racism in the affluent rural communities in this county,” he adds, citing an incident when a black man’s house was torched in the early 1990s soon after he bought a home in the upscale Santa Rosa Valley of Camarillo.

For their part, some jurors in the Rodney King beating case say they had never even considered race when they found the LAPD defendants not guilty of assaulting Rodney King.

The question was whether the nightmarish vision of officers clubbing a prone man was proper under LAPD policy, former juror Henry King of Santa Paula said. And the answer, he said, was yes.

“When I saw that videotape . . . my first thoughts were that they were guilty. But then I had to put that out of my mind when I became a juror and try to follow the jury instructions,” King says.

As for the smear it left on Simi Valley, he says, “That’s too bad, really. It was an unjust accusation at their city, and [the city] shouldn’t be targeted for negative comments just because of the verdict that came from a jury that was made up of people from all over Ventura County.”

Lulu Means, a white homemaker, remembers the day of the verdicts.

She remembers how police hit the streets in riot gear and people worried openly that the killing, looting and destruction would spread to Simi Valley.

And she remembers how quickly the city was branded “a lily white community,” and how long the label has stuck.

“It kind of made me mad,” Means says. “It’s just generalizing people, saying that people who live here are racist or prejudiced.”

But she adds hopefully, “I think it’s going to fade.”

Times staff writer Lorenza Munoz contributed to this report.

Los Angeles Times