TEACHING IN SOUTH CENTRAL L.A.
By Donna C. Myrow
In the early 90s I was approached by Jefferson High School Assistant Principal Roslyn Weeks to train students at her school to publish a small bi-lingual newspaper, El Original, four times a year. The funds were part of a large community grant from the state that focused on educating children, teens and adults on the dangers of alcohol and tobacco. Quite a challenge for a community to confront these issues especially since there was a liquor store on every corner, billboards promoting the fun and escape from reality messages from a bottle of booze and few health clinics to treat the abusers.
Jefferson had been a predominantly black high school for several decades serving the community around Central Avenue and 41st Street in South Central L.A. It was once an attractive campus with two-story buildings wrapped around a corner and old trees lined the front grassy area. Just inside the front entrance visitors marvel at the photos of famous alum, Dr. Ralph Bunche, actress Dorothy Dandridge and choreographer Alvin Ailey. It’s been a long time since such extraordinary young people graduated from Jefferson.
It was an opportunity to work with a group of teens that were cut off from the mainstream life in Los Angeles. The students at Jefferson were incredibly difficult to train. Low skills, most of them functioning below grade school level and even their Spanish was strictly conversational, few could construct a sentence in their native language.
Deadlines. That word was not part of their vocabulary. Social promotion was the norm, no one was required to repeat the grade level even when they didn’t complete schoolwork or pass exams. It was hard to establish a relationship with them since the overcrowded school was on a year-round schedule with students attending school on a multi-track system. Graduating seniors found the idea of attending college an unattainable dream. Most were recent immigrants from El Salvador. The 20-year war destroyed that beautiful country so families with young children made their way across Central America to the City of Angels. What awaited them here were low-paying jobs, over-priced housing and loss of control over their children. Two or three families were forced to share a small apartment in a run down building where no one dared to complain to the slumlord. People without a country, undocumented, some illiterate even in Spanish. Survival was the primary concern for these frightened parents. There was little time nor interest in the over-crowded school. Turf wars divided the South Central community run by warring gangs who long ago exchanged fists and sticks for guns and knives.
The former all-black neighborhood is now 80 percent Latino. Frank Young was the only black student on the El Original staff. He filled notebooks with rambling tales of his journey from West Texas, going door-to-door selling books, moving from one place to another when his parents couldn’t pay the rent. He never criticized his roving, unschooled tribe and proudly carried snapshots of them in his wallet. I was intrigued with his family — brothers and sisters, step-brothers, half-sisters, Native Americans, black, Hispanic. I never figured out the complete family tree as it seemed to change every couple of years. I often wondered how old he really was, maybe he didn’t even know; it was obvious from his patchy education and rambling stories. It took two years before one article was ready for publication.
He was a sweet young man. Frank was intrigued with my family and would ask lots of questions about my children’s ethnicity. I have a white biological daughter and two adopted children, a Korean-Hispanic daughter and a Black-Asian son. Frank was writing a book about his family’s history; it was the most important thing in his life. I always carried a bag of fruit and crackers to Jefferson. It didn’t take long to figure out that all of these students were on the federal lunch program and had no money for after school snacks. He lived with his father and step-mother. When I asked him if he was hungry, he’d shrug his shoulders and tell me not to worry. Months later I pieced together the puzzle of his living arrangements. He slept on the floor of a room, no refrigerator or stove.
“Where’s your family?”
“Oh, they’re back in Texas. I want to stay here.”
It was a simple explanation but hard for me to comprehend that parents could up and move and leave their son behind with no food or money. I never knew whether he graduated high school but six months after El Original folded I got a postcard from him, he’d moved to Omaha, Nebraska and was enrolled in a college writing program.
Now, years later I still receive an occasional note from him, always upbeat and still writing his family memoir.
We met every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in a bungalow at the far end of the high school campus. The students and I created El Original, a bi-lingual newspaper that was distributed to students at Jefferson, the nearby middle schools and to community-based agencies. The newspaper focused on drug and alcohol prevention. Of course we wrote about teen pregnancy, violence, drop-out rates and everything else connected to substance abuse. This neighborhood has it all. Often I feared for my safety, not from the kids in the program but frequent outsiders walking in unannounced. The energetic principal, Phil Saldivar, struggled to provide a safe haven and nurturing environment for the thousands of students entrusted to him every day. With a handful of caring teachers he managed to inspire a few students but more than 50 percent dropped out by the end of the tenth grade.
Gunshots were common. The first time I heard a shot coming from across the street of Jefferson I dropped to my knees, ducked under the desk and screamed. I was the only one under the desk. The students laughed and went about their business and told me they were used to it. I was outraged, yelling at them to run to the office and call the police. They looked at me as if I was sending them on a Venus-probe rocket!
“The police won’t come unless someone is dead,” said Herbert.
“The sound was right outside the school, someone could be hurt,” I yelled. They ignored me.
“Do you want to buy a gun?” one of the other boys asked me.
“No, “ I angrily retorted. “I hate guns, no one should be allowed to have a gun except the police.” That was my knee-jerk reaction to a smart-ass teen.
“I can buy you a gun for fifty dollars,” he continued.
“I told you I don’t want a gun and besides I don’t have that much money with me.”
“I can buy you an Uzi for fifty dollars but if you have twenty dollars I can get something smaller. It’ll only take me a few minutes to go around the corner.”
“I told you I don’t like guns, leave me alone.”
I was there to teach journalism not to solve social problems. They live here, I leave at the end of the day. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening I would say a silent prayer, “Please let me find all four tires on my car. Steal the radio or junk in the back seat, but let me leave here.”
Herbert was my favorite. A mediocre student, no plans for college. Herbert and his mother fled El Salvador in 1988 and spent six months on foot making their way to L.A. They set up housekeeping in a rundown building near Central Avenue and 43rd Street. Clusters of adults and children took refuge in the dark, damp rooms they converted into homes, installing old stoves and rigging lights and water. I introduced Herbert to photography. He loved it and asked to borrow a camera to shoot pictures in his neighborhood. I trusted him and never worried about losing the camera. I knew little about photography but in my usual way of begging for help I managed to snare the talented Newsweek photojournalist Lester Sloan who brought his cameras to the class and introduced the kids to the wonders of viewing the world through a small lens. Herbert and others found a way to portray South Central L.A. — festivals, religious ceremonies, murals and much more.
Herbert was a good son. Once a month he stayed home from school to accompany his mother across town on a three-hour bus ride to County USC Hospital where indigent people wait all day to be seen by a doctor. I never knew what ailed his mother, certainly a lifetime of poverty would reduce anyone to a short life. He and his mother shared a tiny one-room apartment. The double bed was partitioned with a colorful cloth strung across a clothesline. A mother and son sleeping side by side in a cramped room with a stove next to the bed.
His mother wanted to thank me for taking an interest in Herbert. Guess who came to dinner? They set up a wobbly card table on the other side of the stove. The room was stifling but I didn’t dare insult them by asking to open the window. It was probably nailed shut out to keep out intruders. The meal was typical Salvadoran and the most memorable part was the large pot of red Cool-Aid. Childhood memories rushed back to me, hot summer nights sitting on the steps drinking flavored water, sweet punch, the kind that leaves a red moustache across your upper lip.
Enrique, a talented illustrator produced terrific illustrations if I hounded him. He sat in the room staring out the window, disengaged from the group. I often wondered why he attended the staff meetings. What did he get out of the program? Enrique spent every other weekend driving to Tijuana with his parents to get his teeth straightened, a cheaper way to get braces than in the states. There were days when he was in pain from the twisting of metal and new rubber bands stretched across his mouth. There was no one to complain to until the next trip across the border.
And then there was Linda Daitsman, the only white student at Jefferson. Linda arrived in South Central shortly after the 1992 riots as part of the Revolutionary Youth Brigade, responding to a call for volunteers to join the community in the fight against police oppression. I doubted her story about leaving her Chicago home and school with her parents permission, to recruit young people in South Central L.A. to join the Marxist political group Sendero Luminoso, a guerrilla organization in Peru led by the notorious Carlos. Linda looked older than 15 and was much more persuasive than any teenager I had worked with at Jefferson. Principal Saldivar was suspicious of her, too, and urged us not to publish her article, that it would stir up trouble on campus. He was worried about the graffiti that greeted him by the front gate every morning — Communist political slogans. He was used to whitewashing graffiti with a gang insignia, but the new graffitti carried political messages. He knew his students were not interested in large scale revolutions when they were faced with day-to-day survival. We decided that Linda was using our newspaper for her own purposes. We asked her to be more specific about her background and the plans of her organization, give the readers more details. She stopped coming to the meetings and we never heard from her again.
This was my introduction to “agents provocateurs.”
At the end of three years the grant for El Original was eliminated, one more failed attempt at social change. I had no intention of looking for other funds. The South Central neighborhood frightened me, especially after the riots in 1992.
Ten years later the situation at Jefferson was worse. The anger is raging every day. Fights on campus, hundreds of boys and girls jumping each other. The police are frequently called to the school to stop the fighting and the only way they can ensure safety is for a lock-down and seal off the campus from outsiders. Concerned parents hold nighttime prayer vigils and peace marches to end the violence. The school district rushed to build more schools in the neighborhood to ease the overcrowding. Small schools might solve some of the problems but it goes much deeper with rising unemployment and tension between racial groups and recent immigrants versus those who crossed the border a generation before. News reports blared stories from schools around the city:
Three lunchtime fights prompted a lockdown at Baldwin Park High School.
A lunchtime fight at Jefferson High School involved about 100 students,
three were hurt.
Fights at Santa Monica High School involved 10–12 students.
A fight between 50 students occurred at Fairfax High. No injuries but several students were sprayed with pepper spray.
After rumors of violence on Cinco de Mayo, the L.A.U.S.D. reported 51,000 students absent fro middle and high schools, an absentee rate of 18 percent.
We rarely received an essay or letter-to-the-editor from Jefferson students. Teens from that community never attended our weekly staff meeting or summer writing workshop. We received two letters critical of our coverage of the Jefferson fights, both pointed to the fact that we did not publish an opinion from a black student. It’s true, we only received comments from Latinos. We accuse mainstream media of not being more inclusive in their reporting of the ethnic community, but our writers are volunteers.
There’s another side to Jefferson, a small off-site campus for 150 students who might otherwise drop out of school. Every morning at 7am the students met at Jefferson and took a short bus ride to Los Angeles Trade Tech College to continue their education in a quiet, controlled setting. The tight group of teens were supportive of one another, the teachers know their names and 90% graduate high school. A dedicated teacher, Mike Dean, nurtured the students and imparted words of encouragement that helped them believe there is life beyond the confines of South Central L.A.
I left L.A. in 2013 to escape horrid traffic, potholes, a city without strong political leadership. A trip down memory lane is not enough, it’s time to visit South L.A., as it’s now called, to see for myself the remarkable changes I’ve heard about with new healthy food stores, small schools, community leaders and other opportunities for people in South L.A. I wish the ever-increasing violence would stop. A new writer’s workshop might be the answer.
Donna C. Myrow is founder and publisher of L.A. Youth, the newspaper written by and about teens (1988–2013). She also published El Original (1992–1995).
Teaching journalism to teens in South L.A.
