A Model for Racial Harmony

Earlier this month, there were probably more streets blocked off for Cinco de Mayo festivities in the inner-city neighborhoods south of the Santa Monica Freeway than anywhere else in the city. This surprising development may point a way to social harmony as Los Angeles continues to diversify racially and ethnically. For it was black-run organizations that, as part of their mission of community service, mounted many of the Cinco de Mayo celebrations. From churches and hospitals, to service and civil-rights groups, a network of African American organizations is quietly tending the needs of mostly poor Latino newcomers who have settled in formerly black neighborhoods.

Yet, ironically, some of these organizations have been criticized by funders for not having integrated boards, no matter how integrated their staffs or effective their programs. These funders are unable to see that there’s no contradiction between being a black organization and serving the whole community well.

Steady black outmigration and the arrival of Latin American immigrants have transformed South L.A. “The notion of a geographically determined black community is no longer correct or viable,” asserts a recent United Way study. The growing population of Latino immigrants, by and large, lacks access to power and the resources needed for upward economic mobility. But when that access is provided, it is often by well-established African American organizations that remain in the area. “Don’t move, improve” is their unofficial slogan.

Some of these organizations encourage new forms of civic participation. For example, a coalition that includes Ward AME Church, Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles and the Brotherhood Crusade initiated the Census outreach among Spanish-speaking South L.A. residents.

The Community Coalition to Prevent Substance Abuse in the Vermont Slauson area focuses on ending violence, drug trafficking and poverty. Karen Bass, its executive director, calls the group’s approach “a new kind of affirmative action” to build a social-justice movement of blacks and Latinos.

The greater Los Angeles Southern Christian Leadership Conference takes its inspiration from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of inclusiveness. One program, Project Ahead, seeks to build partnerships among low-income African American and Latino parents and the 10 schools their children attend. The Rosa Parks Sexual Assault Crisis Center, the only rape center serving women of color in South L.A., receives 100 calls a week and works with the East L.A. Rape Crisis Center to better understand Latinas’ responses to rape; 60% of the clients using the SCLC Dispute Resolution Center are Latino.

Other black-run organizations target practical needs. Historic First AME Church regularly provides food and other services to indigent residents, a majority of them Latino. In addition to delivering health care, Watts Health Systems, Inc., sponsors an art exhibition that celebrates “the global village of African, Latino, Asian, European and Native American creativity,” according to Harold Hambrick, a public-affairs official. Broadway Federal Savings, founded after WWII to provide loans to African Americans, now mostly serves low-income Latino families. Community Build, established in 1992 by an African American board of directors, provides job training to 4,000 youth and their families, half of whom are Latino.

To help promote greater tolerance, there is a strong emphasis on youth development among all African American organizations serving Latino residents. Some organizations begin with the very young. Second Baptist Church established The Children’s Center to provide day care for qualified low-income parents in 1966. Since 1986, Latino use of the facilities has grown from 30% to 70%, and the center has responded by hiring more Latino staffers and adopting a bilingual strategy. The Urban League’s Headstart program has followed suit.

These African American-run organizations have been able to adapt to their changing communities for two reasons. One, the mission of the best of them reflects the venerable sentiment of the black freedom movement, a commitment not just to group advancement, but to justice. Two, despite an appearance of dwindling influence, the African American tradition of institution-building has created a strong civic infrastructure, often hidden from the outside world, made up of private/public organizations, sometimes loosely interlocked through their memberships. With their history of nurturing black talent against great odds, these associations are highly skilled at providing the resources immigrants need to adjust to their new environments.

Black outreach to Latino immigrants is all the more remarkable because past relations between the two groups were tense. For example, after the Watts riots in 1965, a member of the McCone Commission, formed to study its causes, observed that the “Mexican American feels that the Negro is advancing at the Mexican’s expense.” Today, friction persists in the form of gang-turf wars, economic competition or political jockeying for power. But the increasing presence of newcomers from Central and Latin America in South L.A. neighborhoods has shifted the black-brown axis significantly.

For example, experience has shown African American leaders that there is no generic Latino population, that it makes as much sense to lump people together because they speak Spanish as it does to lump them together because they speak English. During last year’s Hispanic Heritage Month festivities, the Latino staff of the black-run Community Build created a portrait of their clients, which included residents from 17 different Latin American countries. Executive Director Brenda Shockley says the effort “expanded everybody’s notion of who was in the community.”

Brown and black elites do join in ceremonial acts of unity, such as last April’s King-Cesar Chavez activities. But it is at the grass roots where cooperation, though harder won, brings results. After the Watts riots, African American and Latino families began working together to prevent “teenagers from fighting and killing each other,” as Parents of Watts founder “Sweet” Alice Harris recalls. Today, Parents of Watts, incorporated in 1979, operates GED classes and child-care facilities, delivers emergency food, conducts family-counseling sessions and works with at-risk youth. The group serves about 1,500 residents a month, about half of them Latino.

The new immigrants’ culture, in turn, affects the development strategies of the African American organizations. For example, Concerned Citizens of South-Central Los Angeles, an environmental group formed in 1987 after a successful campaign to halt construction of a waste incinerator in Vernon Central, operates the Antes Columbus Football Club, which fields two youth soccer teams. But Concerned Citizens offers its players and their families more than sports. The organization is working with environmental groups, private funders, the city and county to convert an eight-acre Metropolitan Transit Authority storage facility into green space for soccer games and family use in this park-poor community.

Their contributions to the relatively peaceful transformation of South L.A. have not deterred some philanthropic institutions from pressuring the black organizations to integrate their boards of directors or lose funding. In response, these organizations cite their original charters and charge that a double standard is being applied. They claim other ethnic organizations are under no similar pressure to integrate their boards, even if they serve only their own in a multiethnic community.

These funders may be suffering from a disease found throughout much of U.S. society: They are unwilling to see the value of the African American experience as a model for others. As one organization head said, “Because I’m black, does that mean I don’t know how to serve my community?”

As the Latino population in L.A. has grown, some African American leaders in the city have made a shared destiny part of the social agenda of the organizations they run. Their response is of great relevance as Los Angeles becomes a society in which no group holds an absolute majority, and all neighborhoods are becoming increasingly diverse. The work of some of L.A.’s black-run organizations is showing how changing neighborhoods, and the families and individuals who live in them, can be woven into what Juanita Tate of Concerned Citizens calls “a community quilt of many colors.”