An SOS to state leaders

Levi Kingston grew up in L.A.’s old Central Avenue district during its glory days.

His father was a bellman at the historic, black-run Dunbar Hotel when W.E.B. DuBois and Duke Ellington stayed there.

Over the years, Kingston’s been a jazz musician, a merchant marine, an activist in the civil rights and peace movements, and a tireless advocate for the working parents of South L.A.

Now Kingston, 71, is a child care provider hit hard by California’s state budget impasse.

Seventy preschoolers and their parents, most of them single moms, depend on him. But on Thursday, he was forced to close his center, Hoover Intergenerational Care, for the first time since its founding more than 30 years ago.

“Child care is fundamental, it’s a no-brainer, a non-debatable thing,” he said. “But in our case, we’re facing the music in terms of funding.”

The predicament reminds Kingston of another time in his life, when he was a young man circling the globe on a ship.

It was 1963 and he was the lone black man in the crew of a Norwegian merchant vessel crossing the Atlantic from Liverpool to Panama. “We had a whole series of engine fires,” Kingston told me. The captain pushed on even though it was clear they would never make it to Panama.

“He was the only one who had a gun,” Kingston said. “And he had the only lifeboat that worked too.”

Now Kingston is in the same sort of situation, metaphorically speaking. He’s aboard a troubled vessel, adrift in a dangerous sea. Except this time he’s at the mercy of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature.

On that Norwegian freighter, Kingston and the other sailors joined together in a near mutiny and pressured the captain to head for the nearest port, in Spain. “I learned then that sometimes you have to do things that other people might not consider appropriate.”

Like many other child care centers up and down California, Kingston’s is no longer receiving critical state funding because of the budget stalemate.

Last week, to try to draw attention to their plight, Kingston did something he hasn’t done in ages. He organized a protest. Marching with him outside Schwarzenegger’s downtown L.A. office were teachers, parents and children from his center and from two others in South L.A.

“It was important to them to see that we could do it, and that we could all come together,” Kingston said.

It’s the kind of thing you come to believe if you spend time in Kingston’s world.

“Everyone who works there has the same values,” said Kelly Arthurs, a 28-year-old clerical worker at LAX and a single mom with two children who’ve attended the center. “You don’t just drop off your kids there. You stay and talk to people. It’s a community.”

Arthurs’ 4-year-old goes to the center. As a child, Arthurs went there too. “Uncle Levi” often shows up at her kids’ birthdays.

Kingston and other South L.A. activists founded the center in 1979 to provide working parents with affordable, quality child care, which was in short supply in the area.

These days, several single moms in vocational training programs send their kids to the center. Programs like his are an integral part of L.A.’s social safety net.

We have government-funded child care because Watts, Newark and other cities burned in the 1960s, forcing a new focus on the root causes of urban poverty. And because Kingston and a lot of other unsung heroes gave their all to try to improve their own backyards.

Kingston was raised in South L.A.’s then brand-new Pueblo del Rio housing projects in the 1940s. After graduating from Los Angeles High, he went to New York to try his luck as a jazz bassist. Eventually, he headed out to sea and saw the world.

Once that rickety freighter finally had docked in Spain, he hitchhiked to Rotterdam and got on another ship, headed to New Orleans. He’d been at sea for so many years, he said, he’d forgotten what it was like to be a black man in the U.S.

New Orleans reminded him.

“I’m embarrassed for you, I’m embarrassed for me,” a white friend told him after they’d accidentally entered a “whites only” seaman’s union hall together. “They should have put a sign up.”

Kingston soon took a bus back home to L.A.

He’s been working for social justice here ever since.

“While other people honed rhetoric, Levi was hooking people up, building a network of friendships between activists all over the city,” said UC Riverside professor Mike Davis, who first met Kingston during the Vietnam War, when both were working in South L.A. on draft resistance.

After the war, Davis watched Kingston pressure USC officials and others to invest in South L.A.

“Levi is a constant gardener, patiently but passionately trying to bring about social change at the neighborhood level,” Davis said.

“For sheer moral endurance, after 45 years of working in the greater USC area, he has few equals.”

One South L.A. neighborhood owes a lot to Levi Kingston. But in his commitment and passion to that place, and in his willingness to fight for it over and over again, there’s a lesson for all of us.

Now Kingston’s working to get L.A.’s child care centers to join together and force state officials to see how much they matter.

“You have to push the program of unity and collaboration,” Kingston said. “Unity goes back a long way with me.”

hector.tobar@latimes.com