Inland Teachers Get a Pep Talk From a Pioneer in Civil Rights

Five months after a Corona high school student was killed in a racially motivated attack off campus, a civil rights legend came to Riverside County on Wednesday and told thousands of Corona and Norco educators that they had a pivotal role in teaching children about tolerance.

Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and a renowned civil rights attorney, told the teachers that the “keys to the gates of opportunity and justice” were in their hands.

“Your job as educators is to build a community in our schools that represents inclusion,” Dees said. “We’ve been able as a nation to overcome, because we’ve had dedicated educators such as yourselves [who] have dedicated their lives to helping others and educating young people in this country.”

Dees delivered his speech to well over 3,000 teachers, administrators and staff of the Corona-Norco Unified School District at the Crossroads Church in Corona. It comes after a series of racially charged incidents involving students in regional high schools in the last two years.

The most violent occurred in May, when 15-year-old Centennial High School student Dominic Redd, who was black, was killed while walking home from school, allegedly by three Latino gang members who yelled racial slurs as they stabbed him.

Since 2003, other incidents included the beating of two black students by four white students at Murrieta Valley High School; a fight among 200 students at Temescal Canyon High School in Lake Elsinore, which was triggered by racial slurs; and a racially motivated fight at Centennial High in March.

“It’s a good time [for the discussion] because everyone’s thinking about all of the things that have happened here” recently, said Kelly Linn, a seventh- and eighth-grade language arts teacher at Auburndale Intermediate School in Corona.

Dees, born in 1936 to an Alabama cotton farmer, became involved in the civil rights movement after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that killed four black girls in 1963.

He asked fellow members of his congregation to help raise money to rebuild the church and to offer prayers for the girls, but his plea fell on deaf ears. So the lawyer sold his profitable mail-order and book-publishing business in 1969 to Times Mirror, the former parent company of the Los Angeles Times, and decided to focus his legal work on civil rights cases.

He has tried dozens of well-known cases in the decades since, including the civil lawsuit in 2000 that bankrupted the Aryan Nations and closed its Idaho compound.

Dees came to Corona at the behest of local philanthropist Nan Eisley-Bennett and her husband, former Corona Councilman Jeff Bennett, longtime supporters of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“Every child should be exposed to tolerance and diversity,” Eisley-Bennett said. “Perhaps if it happened [more frequently], we wouldn’t have racial hatred and violence.”

Dees acknowledged that the changing racial dynamics of the Inland Empire may be triggering some of the incidents. Reported hate crimes grew nearly 20% in Riverside and San Bernardino counties in 2003, while declining statewide 10%, according to the California attorney general’s office.

“The demographic and racial makeup of this county ... are changing,” Dees said. “With that change brings fear, and many times hate crimes. You’re not alone. Hate crimes are happening all over the United States.”

Officials in the Corona-Norco Unified School District, where enrollment has tripled to 48,000 in 20 years, have addressed racial tensions with such steps as adoption of an anti-bullying curriculum and plans to install security cameras on high school campuses.

Tim Pike, assistant superintendent of student services, said the district planned to incorporate elements of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Tolerance” school program.

“Tensions occur on every high school campus in this country,” he said. “Our goal in the district is to make sure we do the types of things we need to do so we don’t develop real serious issues.”