Kind Crusader Honored

The fields vanished and the neighbors grew old, but there was always life in those rheumy eyes, a singsong fight in the soul of Clymar Avenue, and in the soul of Marguerite Lewis.

Right to the end, Lewis tried to chase them out--the chemical companies and die casters, the diesel trucks and waste dumps that kept creeping up on the little nest she spent half a life defending.

She came fluttering and chirping out of her ranch-style home, a mockingbird after a hawk. Yet even in the scrappiest battles, she never dropped her Creole manners, never called her foes anything but “Mister” and “Miss,” never let venom seep into her song.

As her hair withered and her full curves retreated into sinew, she bowed to the cancer that had long haunted her thoughts. She died Monday at age 68.

“I spent my whole life fighting this,” she said months ago in an interview. “And it finally got me.”

Under that wistful winter light, she gazed back on the four decades since she and her husband, Shelton, looked to buy their piece of suburbia, the four decades since real estate agents less-than-subtly steered them into this little county backwater just west of Compton.

With the G.I. Bill in hand, they proudly purchased one of the 35 “Joy Homes” on Clymar, away from the tracts for white folks. They quickly built the neighborhood into their own Southern image, as if planting a banyan tree in the scrub.

They prayed in their Southern-style churches, they cooked rabbits caught in the fields, they fished crawfish out of a hole. Lewis successfully pushed to get a new park and a new school, luring nuns from her old Catholic church in New Orleans to come teach.

“I put my soul in this place. This is home to me,” she said. “I’m not going to leave.”

On Saturday, Lewis was remembered in the church, St. Albert’s the Great, to which she devoted her last 40 years, in the community she helped build.

“I know she’s sitting next to God Almighty and she’s probably trying to figure out what committee she’s going to join next,” said Reginald Beamon, who grew up in the neighborhood.

Under the A-frame rafters, with old steel fans whirring, about 200 family members and friends filed into the well-varnished pews to pay their respects.

“Her tireless campaign to rid our area of industrial blight and to beautify our neighborhoods made her an inspirational figure,” said William Brooks, who grew up next door. “But it is her kindly and happy demeanor for which she will most be remembered.”

Remembering her life is like pulling at a thread of L.A.’s history. Real estate discrimination, white flight and what some now call environmental racism all come unraveling in one ragged strand.

“She may not have known the term, but Marguerite was really the one to bring the issue of environmental justice to the community there,” county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said earlier in the week.

Back in New Orleans, Shelton saw the fighting spirit in Marguerite’s light-brown eyes. But when he first glimpsed the apple-faced girl at a softball game, he swooned over something else.

“Between you and me, she had a nice figure,” the 70-year-old explained. “She was wearing shorts.”

Both were “poor but didn’t know it,” living in their families’ little “shotgun” duplexes. They quickly fell in love and married. As with so many Southern blacks of that era, they were drawn to Los Angeles by the promise of a better salary.

It was 1956 and Shelton read meters for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. They moved into a little apartment on 53rd Street, but longed to own a bit of the booming postwar suburbia.

In southeast Los Angeles County, the pastures and dairy lands that once made this the biggest cow county in the nation were giving way to stucco subdivisions.

The Lewises searched for homes in their ’57 Chevy Bel Air, driving down boulevards yet to shake off the rural dust.

Marguerite Lewis, who was light-complexioned, usually walked first into the real estate offices to inquire. Looking more French than black, she charmed the real estate agents. But when Shelton stepped in, their mood changed.

You wouldn’t be comfortable here. . . . Actually, that one is already sold. . . . You’ll have to talk to someone else about that one.

The couple then turned to a developer, Ray Watt, who was building homes for middle-class “colored folks.” “Luxury Joy Homes in Compton,” the orange brochure read. Three bedrooms, two baths and a two-car garage for $15,450.

They were yet to be built, their lots just graded pads on a tiny nub of a street near a dairy, McKinley Elementary School and a lot of swampy land where people dumped their junk.

What the Lewises did not know was that much of that empty land, an unincorporated area between Compton, Carson and Gardena, was zoned for heavy industry.

The Lewises bought their Joy Home,. and in 1959 they moved in, with their three girls and a little boy.

Their neighborhood was a black and Creole haven. The neighbors’ children played together, parents competed for the nicest lawns and barbecued under a sweep of stars that still prickled through the night sky. And when Shelton Lewis took the day off, he and his wife would take some chicken livers and catch crawfish in a pond that is now buried under the Artesia Freeway.

They called the block Roseview Gardens.

“With the idea it takes a community to raise a child,” Beamon said, “you could get a whoopin’ from anybody’s parents.”

Marguerite Lewis and the neighbors pushed to get street lights, and got them. She approached then-Supervisor Kenneth Hahn about creating a county park and got that too. Legendary Dodger Roy Campanella looked on as the park was dedicated in his name.

With people working and raising kids, they didn’t pay much attention to the changes surrounding them. The Watts Riots of 1965 seemed a distant nightmare. Houses were popping up to the east, but on the west, industry came creeping in. The quiet country road had disappeared in a din of truck traffic.

Soot was settling on Lewis’ roses.

Then in 1983 came the first fight against something. Earlier fights had always been about equity--the park, the street lights.

But now Compton Energy Systems wanted to build a “trash-to-energy” plant across the street from Lewis’ Roseview Gardens. In essence, the plant would burn garbage, 1,500 tons a day.

“From that point on,” Lewis recalled, “it made us conscious of where we live and how we had to protect our area.”

She mobilized. She organized meetings in the community room of Campanella Park. She wrote letters and lobbied the Compton City Council. She brought a television news crew to film rats scurrying into their neighborhood from the trash site.

More than 200 people jammed the council chambers on several occasions. Lewis’ best friend and next-door neighbor, Lois Cooper, who understood the intricacies of environmental impact reports, warned of dangerous dioxins--and added a racial element to the debate.

“I hope it is not the fact that the city of Compton is predominantly minority and predominantly black that this waste-to-energy plant is proposed in the middle of a residential property,” Cooper said.

For more than a year they fought. In August 1984, the $160-million trash plan was scrapped. They won.

But the threats continued.

They came so often the neighborhood met almost every month at the park to plot yet another strategy.

A few battles they won, some they lost. Lewis harped on county officials to get rid of an illegal auto dismantler on Avalon Boulevard. She helped push out a nursery that was spraying pesticides in a utility easement. And she worked with Supervisor Burke’s office to eliminate a toxic waste transfer station operating without permits.

“She was our eyes and ears,” said Mike Bohlke, Burke’s assistant chief deputy.

Even her best friends sometimes laughed at Lewis’ tenacity. She talked too fast, her mind racing ahead of her lips.

But most agreed the threats were real. The industrial zone by her Roseview Gardens became one of the largest in the county. It’s creation was legal, indeed, needed for the county’s economy. Under county zoning, that’s where heavy industry was supposed to go.

It’s the kind of situation urban activist groups cite when they speak of environmental racism--the charge that, whether deliberate or not, zoning laws and societal problems forced industry and minorities to reside side by side.

Now, a hazardous waste trucking company sits across the fence from McKinley Elementary. Lewis had complained about it for years. Students and teachers complained of getting sick from acrid odors that wafted into the playground.

In December, a federal grand jury indicted the company, ChemTrans, for illegally dumping liquids “with a heavy chemical odor” into the storm drains.

“Why is our community a dumping ground for dangerous and unwelcome business?”

Lewis asked the Board of Supervisors that question last year. It was a month before the ChemTrans indictment and would be her last battle for the neighborhood. This time she was fighting a proposed concrete plant a quarter mile or so from her home.

She had found a flier from the company saying anyone who supported the plant could meet at Hometown Buffet for a meal and a bus ride to the planning meeting. Lewis was furious.

“I know the history of slavery,” she said. “A few hundred years ago, the master would give the blacks a little molasses so he could get them to tell him everything about the other slaves.”

She rounded up 75 to protest at a county hearing. But the supervisors, including Burke, said the project would be safe and approved it unanimously.

A few months later, Lewis learned she had rectal cancer. She thought it was due to picking polluted fruit from orange and avocado trees.

She grew tired, relegated to her den. She went through radiation therapy as the cancer quickly spread to her liver.

She wasn’t ready to call it quits, though. She started compiling a list of other neighbors who got cancer, including Cooper, who survived breast cancer.

But the decline came fast. Hooked up on oxygen, she soon never left her bed. When an old friend, Irma Smith, paid a visit, Lewis was worried about the meetings at Campanella Park.

“Irma,” she said, “keep the people together, keep fighting for the cause.”

Lewis died before she could finish her list.

Her song has not died, though.

The meetings at Campanella Park do continue, and a half dozen neighborhood “fighters” now look out for the area. Due in part to Lewis, Burke’s office began creating buffer zones so that certain hazardous companies could not move next to homes and schools.

But more than anything, the tears, hugs and close-knit affection seen Saturday show that the banyan tree is still growing.