History Part TWO: Visionaries and Lunatics

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 10^th 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 LAPD Academy, taking classes at Southwest while he awaited acceptance. Then, suddenly, he became the single parent of six children and deferred his career plans, taking a job with the city parks department.

Two Riots and a Revolution: An Institutional Genealogy of Our School (PART ONE)

Of course it all began on a hot August 11 evening in 1965 when a seemingly “routine” traffic stop at 116^th Street and Avalon escalated into a confrontation between police officers and African American residents made angry by years of harassment, brutality, segregation, unemployment, isolation, and poverty. The ensuing violence came to be known as the Watts Riot.

By the third day of looting and burning, nearly fourteen-thousand National Guardsmen occupied the south central sector of the city. They rolled up and down the long flat boulevards, set up checkpoints and enforced a strict curfew. Police Chief William Parker blamed “outside agitators” and later, when the size of the insurrection disproved that claim, said:

“They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

Central Avenue, once a cultural center of jazz clubs, dance halls and theaters, was reduced to ashes. Thirty-four people died and more than 800 were injured. Arrests, depending on who you ask, ranged from three to four thousand. Property damage estimates were between twenty-seven and thirty-five million dollars.

In the political aftermath, an angry community was promised jobs and other opportunities for economic and geographic mobility, a more reasonable police force, and better schools. One promise made good on was a community college in South Central Los Angeles. It was an idea that had been around since 1950, promoted by community residents led by Odessa Cox, activist, lifelong learner (through the city’s community college system), and owner of the Utopia Dry Cleaners -- which was thirteen miles south of the nearest city college.

For years, Cox and other residents of Watts had to ride the Red Car trolley downtown, and then catch a bus west to Vermont Avenue (a two hour trip one way) in order to attend Los Angeles City College. The city government and school district had never cared about any of that, but now, after the conflagrations of August, the LA Unified School District (which then oversaw the community colleges, referring to them as grades 13 and 14) found a piece of land in the Athens Park section of South Central. The land was just a few blocks from where, during the third day of the 1965 insurrection, young men who had looted gun stores brandished their new arsenals and threatened to “invade white neighborhoods.”

On July 11^th of 1967, in the pre-dawn hours, a convoy of trucks hitched a pair of gray wooden trailers, (cast-offs from LA’s oldest city college campus), and towed them down Vermont Avenue, then dumped them onto a depleted oil field that had been sucked dry by Union Oil. 14.2 acres of the field had been sold to LAUSD for a few hundred thousand dollars. The property bordered South Western Avenue to the west and Frances X. Cabrini Church to the east. To the north was Imperial Highway—named for the Imperial Wooly Mammoths to which the neighborhood had once belonged—and to the south were the tracks of a Union Pacific freight line. The land itself, with its dusty slopes, had been known as Devil’s Dip, where boys tried to defy gravity on makeshift dirt bikes and homemade motorcycles, and where, quite possibly, gang bangers had buried the murdered corpses of enemies.

Nearby residents who were awakened by the loud rumble of trucks and the groaning of their wheels could witness a college crawling into the ghetto. It was going to be their college. It would belong to Odessa Cox and everyone who had stood with her. Cox was among the twenty-five people standing in the darkness of this unfolding dream as those first buildings arrived at what would be called South Central College, then, later, Los Angeles Southwest College.

Laying the Foundation

I want to be clear about this—

The college president who tried to kick our school off the LA Southwest Campus is no longer the president of Southwest College and the current college president, Dr. Jack E. Daniels, had nothing to do with that policy. Daniels, in fact, is part of the reason we are getting a new building—for which, as you can see from this photo, the tractors are laying the foundation .

Let me also make clear that the manager of plant facilities, the man responsible for the awful conditions of our classrooms in the fall of 2004, is also, thank God, no longer an employee of LA Southwest. The current facilities manager, Randy Craig, is not only extremely competent and professional but a really decent guy.

Institutions and their problems may be larger than individuals—but sometimes people can make a world of difference.

The LAUSD superintendent who was willing to let our school close—either out of indifference or ignorance—retired from that post not long after and his replacement has since resigned. The current superintendent, Ramon Cortinez, has much larger problems to confront right now than the fate of a school with 350 students. Still, when I see those tractors and bulldozers out there every day making way for our new building, I’m glad he’s our superintendent.

I did not imagine any of this would be possible back in September of 2004 when we were like the citizens of an abandoned city.

By the end of that first week, on a sweltering Friday afternoon, my classroom was been overrun by ants.

I emptied a can of Raid in there, closed the door, and met students outside, escorting them to the nearby covered eating area. Plastic cutlery and Styrofoam plates still littered the blue plastic bird-shitted picnic tables where our students were served their federally funded lunch each day.

This was my journalism class. I handed out a questionnaire for them to answer about where they got their news and why newspapers are so important to us. Students complained about having to “do work” on the first day of class and having to do work on Friday afternoon and having to do anything outside, but eventually they were all writing something in their notebooks—or pretending to. Their answers were predictable—and so, probably, were my responses to them. I told everyone how fortunate they were to be in this class and how it made them reporters on our school’s weekly newspaper. There was mild enthusiasm, then the usual questions about how they would be graded. Some students said they didn’t want to be reporters. They hadn’t chosen to be in this class, had no interest in journalism, and demanded to be told the minimum requirements to earn a B or C.

I used to get tired of this argument and think it would be better to reserve the school paper for those with an interest and aptitude. I’d imagine what this publication could become in the hands of our school’s best writers and most active citizens. But in our school, (and perhaps in most, if not all, urban high schools), elective classes do not exist so that students can explore their interests. They exist as a safety net in the schedule, the place where students without a class that period can be deposited.

As usual, my new class told me that last year’s newspaper was boring, what the school needed was a gossip paper—after all, rumors are way more interesting than well-investigated news. I tried to convince them otherwise. Some girls were taking making corn-rows on the head of a boy named Will. I normally don’t allow hair treatments during my classroom rules were a bit difficult to fully enforce without a classroom.

I told the class how democracy requires informed citizens, then told them to brainstorm some ideas for school newspaper reporting.

I’d always wanted the school paper to be written by students for students – and to that end I had always allowed them to devote a certain amount to the perpetuation of their materialistic mythologies, their self-imposed poverty of endless desires – but I always insisted that they devote some time to writing about the kind of issues I found important.

The first year we had a school paper one student got an exclusive interview with her godfather, Dameon Williams, the man accused of the videotaped beating of truck driver Reginald Denny during the initial moments of the 1992 LA Riot. On another occasion, student reporters uncovered fraud committed by a former principal. I told these kids about all that but they all seemed quite unimpressed.

Behind us, a flock of sea gulls and one courageous pigeon were fighting over one of the bright red boxes the college bookstore gave away, one per customer. There didn’t seem to be anything eatable inside of it but they still were going at it, tearing at a bar of soap, ripping open a tube of toothpaste. Two gulls had a condom and stretched it until it snapped. Then they all flew away.

Class was nearly over. I was ready to walk straight to my car, which sat patiently in the parking lot just yards away, and escape into a pleasant family afternoon: a bicycle ride to the beach, a barbecue in the backyard.

The corn-rows were finished. They shined in the afternoon sun. Those two girls had done a really magnificent job, a great accomplishment – much greater, I was afraid, than anything I had taught these kids today. The boy with the rows sat up straight and seemed to be checking them on his pavement shadow. “Hey,” he said, “I got something to put up in your newspaper, Strauss….”

My mind was on the beachfront bicycle path and I almost didn’t hear him say:

“Man, according to a unnamed source named… [and he dropped the names of two of my colleagues] … they say the college bout to close up our school and blow up these buildings.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. Class was over but without a bell announcing it, I was trapped. They all watched me and then someone asked if it was true. I supposed that a denial was my professional obligation. I supposed I ought to have done it for the sake of the kids. Protect them from the truth. But I couldn’t do it. Not after everything I’d just told them about the perils of ignorance. So I said it:

“Yes, it’s true – I mean, it’s a possibility, a strong one – that this will be our last year.” A lump formed in my throat and I couldn’t look at the students now. I glanced, instead, at the mangled storm gutters hanging off the cracked awning just above us. I remembered when those awning cracks were hairline and when those storm gutters could still hold water. Lately, during a heavy rain, the perimeter of this place was like a car wash. What a piece of shit this place was, pretty much everything about it, but it was our piece of shit. We’d made it ours in so many ways, my colleagues and I and our students, over the years, had made this a decent school.

“We’re getting punked,” I told my students. “Punked out of our school, your school. And what did you do to deserve that? Did you join a gang? Did you start a race riot? Did you smoke crack?” To that question, some kids pointed at each other, but mostly they just listened. “No,” I said. “You came to school, you went to class, you did your homework—most of you, most of the time— maybe with a kick in the ass first, but you did it. There are a hundred other schools that should be closed before this one, a thousand.” I was out of control and might have kept going but the boy with the fresh corn-rows raised his hand and asked:

“Do I get extra credit for telling everybody?”

“Yeah, sure, maybe.”

“Write it down, Strauss. Write my extra credit in your roll book.”

“I’ll write it down when you write it down—an article about it. Maybe we’ll have our first edition of the paper by next week. Who are you going to interview for this story?”

Someone said he would interview our principal, Ms. Jackson. Someone else offered to talk to our U.S. history teacher because he knew everything about everything. Someone even said she would try to get a statement from the mean old college president. I was proud of them. They had suddenly made such progress!

“Ain’t gonna do nothing anyway,” someone said. “Writing about it’s not gonna keep us open. It ain’t like the mayor or the governor or the school district people read our newspaper. So can we just do a newspaper about gossip? I mean, if they gonna close the school anyway, what difference does it make?”

An incredible stench wafted towards us. It was no mystery; we were directly downwind from the Hyperion Water Treatment plant, to which every toilet in LA County flushed. A few of the boys accused each other of being the source of the odor but no one thought that was very funny.

“I sure ain’t gonna miss that smell,” a girl said, and suddenly the boy next to her—who must have not been paying attention for the past ten minutes— picked his head up and said, with dismay:

“Are they closing our school?”

One of his friends leaned over and punched him and told him he was stupid.

“Hey!” I said, stepping between them. But the boy hadn’t even seemed to notice his friend’s punch. He just sat there, stunned and said:

“Where I’m gonna go?”

And then everyone sat there, trying to figure out their futures.

The other classes had all ended and students disgorged, successively, from all the rooms—the ones with AC or windows – but my students still sat where they were, watching, a little dumbfounded, as all their peers scattered toward the streets of the city.