She Saves Lives By Giving Kids a Home

Justin, 17 going on 30, has seen a lot in his young life. Abused and neglected as a toddler, he spent years shuttling between foster homes and living with his troubled mother. Before he could reach his teens he had a world-weary maturity and was most likely headed, he says now, for trouble.

Then, about three years ago, Justin caught what he calls the “biggest break” of his life. He was sent to a group foster home run by Cecilia Freeman, a psychologist he now calls his “other mom, the woman with the biggest heart I’ve ever seen.” She gave him stability, pushed him to succeed, and fed a dream to attend college that appears likely to come true, he says.

Freeman is a quiet woman who likes to work behind the scenes. But Saturday she shared the spotlight with a host of others who were lauded at the seventh annual Watts Community Image Awards.

“I’ve met a lot of people who say they are here to help, and that’s all it is, just words,” said Justin, off to work early Saturday morning, wearing a blue tie and six looped earrings. Freeman, he said, “not only says it, she lives it. When you’re a foster kid, you notice things like this.”

Starting 10 years ago, Freeman began building a trio of nonprofit agencies--run out of a headquarters in Compton--that provide an array of schooling, therapy and foster home services for inner-city kids.

“She’s one of the jewels of neighborhoods like Watts,” said Kathryn Perdue, who taught Freeman’s fifth-grade class in the late 1950s and has been her friend ever since. “She saves lives, literally, but doesn’t want a soul to know it.”

Freeman, 46, says she’s nothing special. Just a plain woman who loves people. Born in Watts, she graduated from Pomona College, later received her doctorate in psychology and never stopped living or working in inner-city neighborhoods.

“I’m just giving a hand where help is needed,” she said, in the hushed tone of someone not comfortable with talking about herself.

Freeman oversees a private school with 40 kids who have been kicked out of public schools for behavioral problems. She recruits and trains adults to become foster parents. She runs the Inglewood foster home that Justin has lived in for the last three years, and four others like it throughout South-Central.

To be around her is to see the wonders of quiet strength, others say. She’s the kind of woman who “walks in a room, doesn’t say a thing and just listens,” Perdue said. “Then, when she speaks, you know she believes and knows about what she is saying.”

Stacy Milliner, 23, spent his teen years at Freeman’s Inglewood home, where he is now a counselor. “She never, ever gives up on us,” he said, recounting a period in his life when he started running with the wrong crowd. “You can’t say that about too many other people in our lives.”

The Watts Image Awards honored a dozen people, including Rep. Maxine Waters, attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and singer Patti LaBelle.

Event organizer Jeffrey Coprich, who started the awards as a response to the 1992 riots to highlight the positive people in his South-Central community, said none of the stars he feted was as important or powerful as the unassuming Freeman, who was named Woman of the Year.