South Side Childhood Taught Hahn Empathy

James K. Hahn had heard enough about how Antonio Villaraigosa was the candidate of street smarts and empathy for the common man. At a debate between the mayoral candidates last week, Hahn let his audience know: He was reared right in the multiethnic core of Los Angeles too. And the city attorney didn’t really have to say much more. Most people probably got the subtext--not many white boys grow up in South Los Angeles.

“I’m straight from the heart of L.A.,” Hahn told reporters, echoing Villaraigosa’s campaign slogan. “We were just on different streets growing up.”

While Villaraigosa was running the streets of Boyle Heights on the Eastside and going from scrap to scrap at a pair of high schools, Hahn was a scrawny white kid and model student, navigating the sidewalks and school hallways of an increasingly African American neighborhood near Inglewood.

As his family stood fast over the years in a neighborhood transformed by white flight, Hahn said he learned how to get along with people who didn’t look like him and how those without opportunities sometimes got into trouble.

He got into a few scrapes, was punched at least once just for being white, and felt the discomfort of sticking out at a school where the “South Bay surfer” look was not the norm.

But he said he is proud of other actions he and his family--particularly his father, the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn--took to help those who were less fortunate. He does not exactly claim to be Homeboy Hahn, but the four-term city attorney will say that he believes his youth in the mixed-race neighborhood taught him empathy and, if only in small measure, what it feels like to be in the minority.

When Hahn was born, his father was still a Los Angeles city councilman and the family lived in the heart of South-Central Los Angeles, near 89th and Figueroa streets. It was a working-class quarter of whites, blacks and Latinos, adjacent to a park where children could still play without fear.

There was sandlot baseball and basketball. “Kids from all different backgrounds, all different walks of life lived there and we would come together there in the park,” Hahn recalled.

But the mayoral candidate also remembers that the neighborhood got rougher toward the end of the 1950s, with the “beginnings of gangs.” When it was reported that a student brought a knife to Manchester Avenue Elementary School, all the kids had to line up to be searched, even the 8-year-old son of the councilman.

The Hahn family moved from the heart of South-Central to Morningside Park near Crenshaw Boulevard when Jim was 9 years old. They chose a classic Spanish-style California home--with three bedrooms, it was bigger than a bungalow, but hardly ostentatious for a rising politician like Kenny Hahn. The neighborhood is on a slight rise above the city’s flats, and residents, then and now, keep their lawns and hedges well tended.

The neighborhood was almost entirely white in 1959. A handful of black families lived there, and many of the residents were older and without children. But as more African Americans moved into the neighborhood, young Jim and his sister, Janice, mixed with everyone.

In the ensuing decade, the area went from 95% white to more than 71% black, census records show. Hahn remembers that some Realtors were actively promoting white flight. A biracial group of neighbors meeting at the Baptist church across the street from the Hahns tried to promote the benefits of an integrated community.

What those who fled would have seen, Hahn said, was that the new neighbors who moved in were just as nice as the ones who came before and that they cared as much for their homes. “In fact, there were more professionals, doctors and dentists, so it got a little more upscale,” Hahn said.

Neighborhood kids of all races quickly came to know the family patriarch as “Daddy Hahn,” the avuncular community leader who would do anyone a favor. He gave children a ride to school, stopped to chat with everyone, wrote letters of recommendation for college and jobs and helped some people land county jobs.

“I asked him one day why he still lived in the neighborhood,” recalled LeRoy Williams, a member of one of the many black families who moved in after the 1965 Watts riots. “He said, ‘Well, the ocean is close, the airport is close and it’s close to my work. So I’m happy with that.’ ”

City Park Before Violence

Some people who still live in Morningside Park remember the younger Hahn less vividly. He was just a boy, of course. “He was mainly into his books and school,” said Veronica Hale, whose mother still lives across the street from the old Hahn home. “He wasn’t out there running around fighting or raising trouble or anything. . . . He was just a straight-up white boy, a nice, straight teenager.”

Hahn spent a lot of time with his cousins. They’d drive down to what’s now known as Dockweiler State Beach to surf and hang out. Two movie theaters were within walking distance and Hahn and his friends would ride their bikes to Darby Park in Inglewood to play basketball.

It particularly hit home for the city attorney when a young boy was killed by stray automatic weapons fire in the same park in 1997. “I recalled immediately those old days and that really hit home for me, the death of Evan Foster in that same park,” Hahn said. “My mom didn’t have to worry. And his mom was there, doing everything right to protect him and he was still a victim.”

Although Hahn and neighbors recall that blacks and whites generally got along well in the neighborhood, he says that, as an undersized junior high-schooler, he suffered the sad reality of racial animosity. At Horace Mann Junior High School, white students were in a considerable minority.

“I remember the first time it happened and I got punched in the stomach, for no reason,” Hahn recalled. “And I cried. I cried a lot longer than I thought I should have. I guess it hurts your feelings when someone doesn’t like you, without even getting to know you, right off the bat, just because of your skin color.”

Even as he relates that experience, however, Hahn emphasizes that it does not compare to the systematic racism others have suffered.

Hahn would have gone on to the public Washington High School, but his parents instead sent him to a private neighborhood institution, Lutheran High. They hoped the private, sectarian school would shield their son from the “drugs and sex” rife in the late 1960s.

Indeed, the mayoral candidate said he saw none of either during his high school years. He and his sister--now a candidate for Los Angeles City Council--were so square that some other students called them “milk drinkers.”

The Hahns were well aware that some of their peers weren’t escaping the troubling influences in the neighborhood. One of those young men recalled that when he was in County Jail one Christmas Day for an armed robbery, Supervisor Hahn and his wife, Ramona, came to visit.

The neighbor recalled that later, when he was facing another felony charge, his lawyer told a judge Jim Hahn had written the defendant a character reference. Although his memory is hazy, the man said that letter might have appealed to the judge not to “max out” his prison sentence. The man’s mother recalls, in contrast, that it was Supervisor Hahn who had written the letter.

Jim Hahn, who now is running as a tough-on-crime city prosecutor, remembers that neighbor and his brushes with the law, but believes he only wrote an employment letter of reference to help him find a post-incarceration job.

“I believe in second chances for people who have demonstrated they really want to turn their lives around,” Hahn said.

“Daddy Hahn” died in 1997 and his two children have since moved on to their own political lives and homes at the south end of the city, in San Pedro. Ramona Hahn remained in Morningside Park until about a year ago, one of the last remaining white homeowners to leave.

Still Remembered by Former Neighbors

Now Hahn’s mother has also moved to San Pedro to be near her two children. But old neighbors in Morningside Park still remember the family fondly.

“Me knowing Jimmy and seeing him grow up here, I know he really is from the neighborhood,” Hale said. “He grew up with black people. He’s comfortable with them. He doesn’t consider himself to be better or anything.”

Such feelings run deep in Morningside Park, where a series of door-to-door interviews show that Hahn stands to win overwhelming support in Tuesday’s mayoral election.