Near the Flash Point, Peace and Pain

The intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues is where the cameras will come this week to document the 10th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. This is where the first rocks were thrown, the first injuries were recorded and the first loot was grabbed hours after four police officers accused of beating Rodney G. King were acquitted.

But the real legacy of Florence and Normandie lies in the lives of the people who live around the intersection, like the people of West 71st Street, a block to the north.

This working-class slice of South-Central Los Angeles never looked like a symbol of black rage, and it still doesn’t. It’s full of neat, wood-frame houses, flowers, green lawns and children playing baseball.

The despair lies under the surface. West 71st, like so much of South-Central, has always been a place where aspiration battled disappointment, increasingly losing more than it won. Today, you can find people who still agonize over how the riots tarnished the place they call home.

“Our dreams are here,” said Edward Riley, 75, a retired county government procurement officer who has lived on 71st Street with his wife, Jovann, since 1964. “We raised our family here, had backyard barbecues. I played baseball with my son. Thanksgivings here. All here from this house.”

Riley’s lawn is a plush carpet. His geraniums and bougainvillea are in spectacular bloom. To him and others, the block was always a notch up, full of expectations that its children would go to college, the way Riley’s went to UCLA and Cal State Long Beach. But it became a place where, too often, children got entangled in a world of drugs, gang warfare and jail.

White families were already moving out when Riley, an African American, arrived. He saw dozens more flee a year later after the Watts riots of 1965. There has been no mass exodus since the 1992 unrest, but Riley experienced one profound change: The church he attended for decades closed after membership dwindled to a handful. Blame demographics. The black population within a quarter-mile of Normandie and 71st dropped from 72% in 1990 to 50% in 2000.

“I don’t go to church anymore,” he said solemnly. “I pray in my bedroom.”

On the other side of Normandie, two houses from Riley, Roy Lee Walker has lived half his life on 71st. He’s a 51-year-old California Highway Patrol officer who has self-published a book about spiritual beliefs. He’s writing another one about living with the riots outside his door.

It was this neighborhood where the first arresting officers were forced into retreat, abandoning Florence and Normandie to an angry mob whose televised violence spread over large swaths of the city. And it was back to 71st Street that LAPD Chief Daryl Gates came two weeks later, personally participating in the predawn raid that arrested a 19-year-old resident of the block, gang member Damian Williams, in the near-fatal beating of white truck driver Reginald O. Denny.

Walker was at home that April 29 and saw the televised verdicts. He watched the LAPD officers back down from rock- and bottle-throwing crowds. He felt guilty that he didn’t go in on a day off, but his wife and 1-year-old daughter were not home and he wouldn’t leave without them.

For three nights, Roy and Laverne Walker watched fires, listened to the gunshots, did without lights or a phone and slept on the floor for safety. They decided they would move out of the neighborhood the moment things calmed down.

But somehow things seemed to return to normal, even improve. There was a gang truce. The crime rate fell. Gunfire and the drone of police helicopters did not plague the neighborhood as much.

Then last year, a few days before Christmas, the Walker house was hit 11 times by gunfire around dinner time.

“We heard the sounds and hit the floor,” said Walker, who pointed out the bullet holes in the house. “It was deliberate,”’ Laverne said. The motive remains unknown.

“The riots never disturbed the sanctity of our home,” Walker said. “This was different.”

Now Walker wants to move out. But housing prices are so much higher and retirement is near. “I may have stayed too long,” he says.

A Legacy of Rage

The wave of violence that would end in 54 deaths, more than 2,000 injuries and nearly $1 billion in damage began an hour after the verdicts were read. Five young black men walked into a Korean-owned liquor store three blocks west of Florence and Normandie. They grabbed several bottles of malt liquor and hit the store owner’s son over the head when he tried to block their path. They shattered a storefront window and one yelled: “This is for Rodney King!”

In truth, for many it was not that simple. To some, the King beating mattered less than the fact that the police had been acquitted by a largely white jury. To others, the beating mattered less than the fatal 1991 shooting of a black teenager by a Korean merchant during an altercation. Most African Americans saw the beating as the latest in a long string of injustices. Residents of 71st Street had no trouble recalling the families who lived in the Dalton Avenue apartments, a couple miles north on Normandie, whose homes were left uninhabitable by a police drug raid in 1988. That raid came at a time when Chief Gates was flooding South-Central streets with officers in Operation Hammer, which targeted gang members but swept up numerous innocent residents.

In that context, “We didn’t know Rodney King from a can of paint,” said one rioter, a 25-year-old man named Melvin, who still lives on the block and asked not to be identified by his full name. “We didn’t care anything about Rodney King.”

On that first afternoon of violence, 30 officers confronted 200 rioters at Normandie and 71st. The crowd had been made even more furious by the officers’ arrest of a combative young man named Mark Jackson. Intimidated, the police pulled back.

An hour later, Reginald Denny drove his truck through Florence and Normandie. He, like some other white and Asian motorists, was pulled from his vehicle and beaten. The young man who hit Denny in the head with a chunk of concrete was Jackson’s half brother, Damian Williams.

Williams, one of the kids who used to play baseball in the street on 71st, had been raised by his mother, Georgiana Williams. Known as “Grandma” to many who grew up on the block, Williams is a deeply religious woman, the daughter of a Mississippi sharecropper who grew up picking cotton. She became a nurse and moved to California, certain it offered more opportunities to a woman than Vicksburg.

She brought a Southern sense of hospitality to the street. “If someone couldn’t pay their light bill we’d chip in or if there wasn’t food to eat we’d share. That is the kind of neighborhood we had.” Even as her son and his friends in the 8-Tray Gangsters grew older, the home remained a place of refuge.

She also brought a deeply rooted sense of Southern respect and fear of authority. “When I first heard about Rodney King, I thought he must have done something terribly wrong to deserve such a beating,” she said, recalling her feelings that “police just don’t beat you like that for nothing.”

Even today, Georgiana Williams, 61, does not believe the man who crushed Denny’s skull on the videotape was her son. “Have you seen a picture of Damian? He doesn’t look like that. I say they don’t know who was at Florence and Normandie.”

Damian was eventually convicted of the beating and served four years in prison. Once he was released, his mother moved to a three-bedroom apartment in Compton to get Damian away from the criminal influences of the block, as well as away from the eye of the LAPD, which she maintains had targeted Damian because of his involvement in the riots.

It didn’t work. In 2000, Damian was arrested on charges of participating in the killing of a man in a drug house not far from 71st Street. He is in jail awaiting trial. His mother, who kept ownership of their home when she moved, has finally put up a “For Sale” sign.

“My only regret is that I couldn’t keep him out of the neighborhood,” said the mother, who has battled arthritis and survived colon cancer during the last 10 years and still works. “But he really doesn’t know any other neighborhood.”

“He has to work the hard head out of him,” said half brother Jackson, 39, who works as a floor foreman for a transmission repair shop on Crenshaw Boulevard.

Another young man who hung out at the Williams house, Henry Watson, was convicted of misdemeanor assault for placing his foot on Denny’s neck.

Later, he served more than three years on a narcotics conviction. (He maintains that police planted the evidence on him.) Five of his last 10 years have been behind bars.

“There is no good time in prison time,” said Watson, whose release came two months before his father’s death. “I made it home for him.”

Watson, 38, who grew up on 69th Street, sports a tattoo on his left arm: “4-29-92 Florence and Normandie.”

“I know I just got caught up in the emotions,” he said. “When I got home I remember my mother asking me, ‘Was that you on TV?’ I said yes.”

The Denny trial and publicity surrounding it made him feel like a celebrity.

“I felt like O.J., but on a smaller scale. I was ghetto fabulous. I’d walk into a club and they would shine the spotlight on me. I went to a store and an Asian storekeeper offered to buy me lunch. At another store I was told, ‘You too much trouble’ and kicked out.” He now operates a limousine service.

Coming Back to Run a Local Landmark

In 1992, two of the four lots at Florence and Normandie were occupied--by Tom’s Liquor and Deli and a gas station--and two were vacant. Shortly after the riots, an Auto Zone was built on one lot, and celebrated as part of the economic recovery. A second gas station filled in the intersection later. Flowers grow from planters at three of the corners, but not at the liquor store, which was sold after the riots and no longer says “Tom’s,” just “Liquor.”

The presence of more commerce drew Darnell Nelms back home.

In 1995, Nelms, 44, who lived on 71st in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, bought the closed Art’s Chilidog stand at Florence and Normandie, an institution in the community since 1939, when hot dogs sold for 10 cents.

Art’s closed shortly after the riots when the original owner died. “The area is coming back and I wanted to be a part of that,” said Nelms, a real estate agent who lives in the east San Fernando Valley.

He’s told his employees to continue Art’s tradition of giving free hot dogs to children with good grades, remembering getting one himself. “I’ll look at the report card and if I see like three A’s and no U’s, I’ll give them a free chili dog, a drink and bag of chips.”

As blacks have moved from the neighborhood, Latinos have moved in, their numbers increasing from 25% in 1990 to 47% in 2000.

Francisco Alvarez, 36, a Guatemalan immigrant who came to the U.S. more than a decade ago, purchased his home on 71st three years ago at $110,000 and recently was delighted to learn it is worth $160,000.

“The neighborhood is getting better and better,” said Alvarez, who lives in the five-bedroom house with his wife and three sons. “You can’t find a house like this on a quiet street like this for the money I paid.” Happy as he is, he still won’t permit his sons to play on the street. Too dangerous. “If they want to play I’ll take them to the park” for organized sports.

The kids who do play ball in the street every day know little of their block’s history.

“Damian started it,” said Brian Arguelles, 13, stepping up to the plate, a red paint spot, in the middle of the street.

“I was little,” said Rickey White, 15. “My mother told me about it.”

The street game pauses for cars. There is a timeout for the ice cream truck. Play resumes.

“I want to play but none of the boys are going to let me in the game,” said Marie Cole, an 11-year-old riding a scooter. “Why can’t I play?” she asks.

“Because you’re a girl!” one of the boys shouts back.

“That’s not funny,” she says.

A ball hit in the trees is an automatic home run. First base is a pole on Mr. Priebe’s fence. That’s David Priebe, 64, the former neighborhood milkman, who has lived on this block of 71st longer than anyone else. A year after the riots, Priebe was described by one local newspaper as the “white man in the ‘hood.”

“What an epitaph,” he jokes. He raised five children on the block after moving here in 1960. Today he has 10 grandchildren. His daughter purchased a home across the street and a son purchased another home a few doors down.

Back in 1992, he grabbed a hose and kept the flames from spreading to his daughter’s garage on the first night of the riots. He recalls Damian Williams as the tough kid on the block who always spoke politely, and was a favorite of Priebe’s wife, who died in 1997.

The riots left Priebe bewildered and frightened, but determined to stay. Ask him why he hasn’t left and he answers, “Neighborhoods need yards that have roses growing in them. This is my neighborhood.”

Priebe also publishes a monthly newsletter of poetry, Haiku Headlines, which he sends to subscribers across the nation. March’s eight-page newsletter had 72 entries. He offers a poem of his own to describe the place where he’s staked his claim:

the calla lilies

flattened by the winds and rain

have risen again