RFK’s Legacy: Attacking Social Ills Step by Step

During the 1968 presidential primary, when Robert F. Kennedy campaigned in East Los Angeles, the country was in terrible shape.

Demonstrations against the Vietnam War were sweeping the United States. That April, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, causing rioting, looting and killing in more than 120 cities, including an area just 10 blocks from the White House. And, shortly after Kennedy’s last visit to L.A.’s Eastside, he himself was assassinated in Los Angeles.

As I covered the antiwar demonstrations, the aftermath of King’s murder and Kennedy’s final campaign and death, I often wondered how the country would survive such violence.

It did, of course. Now those events have faded into history, and I am writing about another kind of trauma, another kind of violence. This is the violence of the young gangs, fueled by the availability of drugs and guns. It is a sort of violence we never dreamed of in the 1960s, intractable and immune to hard-line law enforcement, baffling to social scientists and to those who still subscribe to the liberal politics that dominated Kennedy’s Democratic Party almost 30 years ago.

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I couldn’t help thinking of Kennedy last week when I visited Proyecto Pastoral, a conglomeration of activities designed and directed by East L.A.’s Father Gregory Boyle, who has long been trying to end gang and family violence.

Robert Kennedy may be history elsewhere, but he’s a presence here. There are pictures of him on the wall and sometimes phone calls from Ethel Kennedy, his widow, ordering caps and T-shirts from Homeboy Industries, a Proyecto Pastoral-

sponsored small business. Homeboy runs a clothing manufacturing operation, producing sharp-looking caps and striking silk-screened T-shirts. The Raiders called recently to order silver and black polo shirts, with the Homeboy logo, to wear around training camp.

In a storefront in the heart of heavily Latino Boyle Heights, I visited a Proyecto Pastoral project called Imaginando Manana: Pico-Aliso Community Team Outreach, or IMPACTO. The organization, working with 9- to 12-year-olds in the Pico-Aliso housing project, was created by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, established by his family and friends.

Rebecca Crocker, 25, the director, was just finishing a staff meeting. Sliced melons and mango were on the table as she and her small staff, recruited from the housing project, discussed the coming day.

Afterward, we talked. I expressed my skepticism about such small efforts in the face of the gangs that seem so entrenched in Pico-Aliso. All you can do is a little bit at a time, she replied. Start with the home. There’s much domestic violence in Pico-Aliso. Men slug their wives. Parents beat their kids. Kids beat up on each other. Start with the home.

To reach into the homes, IMPACTO conducts parenting and conflict-resolution classes, and violence-prevention meetings, in addition to teaching peaceful ways to small children. This is not a new idea. But IMPACTO’s entrance into the field, with its support from the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, is increasing the amount of help available to Pico-Aliso’s troubled families, which have been ignored, or even written off, by much of L.A.

One of Crocker’s recent experiences illustrates the complexity of the task.

She and her co-workers heard about a woman beating a kid in the projects. They went to the home. The woman was caring for 12 kids. She had lost her temper.

Think of the layers of problems involved in that one incident. Working parents in need of child care, caught in the low pay and long hours of the lower depths of our sweatshop economy. Neglectful parents--often little more than children themselves--who are unfit for parenthood. Caretakers without the emotional strength or skills to care for children. Multiply this situation by dozens, by hundreds, by thousands.

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Such an exercise in multiplication makes the problems of violence and gangs appear insoluble. Sometimes, it helps to think small.

That’s how Robert Kennedy often attacked things, a little bit at a time. The Kennedys are identified in the public mind today with the huge liberal programs of the ‘60s. But one of his old friends reminded me that Robert Kennedy was most comfortable with smaller steps--improving summer jobs and anti-dropout programs in Washington, D.C., helping a single slum neighborhood in New York.

This is leading by example. The examples show the country that not every kid in Pico-Aliso wants to be a gang member for life and that there are lots of young men and women who will work if given a chance, even at humble jobs like making T-shirts.