It was just a little like old times this week at MCHS with Mr. Kennedy, our old assistant principal back as acting principal while current principal Moats was out on family leave. Kennedy left MCHS in 2002 to become an AP at Narbonne, then principal at Gardena High School. Now he works at the local district office. He was one of the founding faculty of our school, the only one still there three years later when I was hired. He was pretty laid back this week. I guess after a few years in charge of Gardena, there isn’t much that happens at our little school that is going to stress him out too much. The funny thing is that after all his big school administrative experiences, he still gets really excited talking about the nuts and bolts of effective teaching. It’s still his passion.
Kind of like the original teachers at LA Southwest College when they opened up in 1967—crusaders from other LA community colleges who had voluntarily transferred to the new school; visionaries determined to bring enlightenment to this neglected part of the city.
Thirteen “bungalows” were been anchored to the soft earth while asphalt was spread above water pipes and electric lines—and on September 10th of 1967 Los Angeles Southwest College had its first day of classes. It looked more like a trailer park than a school. The bookstore resembled a small town railroad station, the library an army barracks. At night, the grim lamp posts and high surrounding fences suggested an internment camp. Five hundred students attended 49 classes – from Intro Accounting to General Zoology. Early rains made mud of the still untarred ground through which students had to wade. But spirits were neither dampened nor muddied.
“It was very exciting. Exciting and a little bit crazy,” recalls Pat Lewis, one of the original students at Southwest (now one of the professors there). “We were the first ASO [Associated Student Organization]; we put on the first play production, the first everything. We were helping create that school and that made us feel like we could reinvent the rest of the world!”
She remembers how her teachers encouraged everyone to do great things. “We read and performed Shakespeare inside those bungalows. We learned about Socrates and Plato and about our own history. The black professors were the only African Americans I’d ever met with post graduate degrees. I didn’t even know a black person could get a Ph.D.”
By the spring of 1968 the college had 20 cement and plywood “bungalows” to go along with the 13 wooden trailers. Enrollment had swelled to 1200, and the class offerings increased to more than 160, but the overall condition of the place did not change, and by the fall of 1968 many students were disenchanted.
They took offense to the dirt and mud trails that connected classrooms, and to the bleak functionality of the place. There was no grass anywhere; no plants, no trees, no benches or statues. The student lounge had been crammed with wobbly wooden chairs, the “cafeteria” trailer offered a pitiful assortment of non-nutritious food. Campus police, some students believed, were racist and abusive. Student activists wanted them gone. They wanted a voice in the hiring of teachers and other staff to ensure “sensitivity to the needs of Black students” and a say in the selection of classes in the schedule as well as the books in the library.
They wanted their education to be about more than job training. They demanded a Black Studies program and wanted the college named after an African American. The college president, John Grasham, a bespectacled white man with slick hair and tight features, was non-responsive. Students walked out of classes. Others expressed their frustration in class, sometimes causing teachers to walk out. The activists vandalized classrooms; they threw library books on the floor, broke the windows of an administration trailer, hanged an administrator in effigy, and made bomb threats.
The student revolts divided the faculty and administration. The president of the college resigned. His replacement, John Nicklin, closed the school for several days. Faculty members transferred. So did students, some of the brightest among them.
A year later, in the fall of 1969, LASC added eight more concrete temporaries and its first African American college president, Leadie M. Clark. She lasted for two years. The turnover for other administrative positions was equally high. Office space was cramped or non-existent. With nearly 120 faculty members – 64 of them fulltime – many professors worked out of their cars.
By 1973 the enrollment reached 4000 with 400 sections of mostly university transferable classes. By then there were 48 trailers and a football field encircled by a track. LA Southwest not only fielded football and track & field teams, but also competed at baseball and basketball—even though they had to use high school and park facilities for those sports. Plans for permanent buildings included a library and a theater, lecture halls and science labs.
Green lawns colored the campus along with the increasingly eclectic mix of students. The Chosen Few, an African American biker gang in fresh leather jackets and shiny chrome Harley Davidsons would sometimes roll up en mass—even if just one member was on his way to a speech class or football practice. Or the glinting metallic-detailed low-riders of the Compton Camaro club would fill the parking lots. Card games and domino tournaments crowded picnic tables while Black separatists and other radicals, with no official sanction, recruited and organized students in protest of the LAPD and the Vietnam War. Many veterans of that war enrolled in classes—some for the sole purpose of collecting GI Bill cash, others sincerely trying to restart their lives.
“You could get about six-hundred a month,” recalls Moses Robinson, who attended Southwest just after arriving home from the jungles of Vietnam. “I was trying to get my degree, do something, but that place was crawling with vets who never went to class. They’d go the first day and maybe the last. They must have been bribing those professors. You weren’t supposed to get your money unless you attended class and got a grade.”
Moses had applied for the
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