Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America by Jeffrey Stout

Author:Jeffrey Stout [Stout, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Blood and Harmony

A FEW BLOCKS AWAY from St. Rose is a section of the City of Los Angeles that has become so emblematic of gang violence and ethnic strife that officials have formally changed its name: what used to be called “South Central,” and thus shared its name with a 1992 movie about the Crips, is now officially known as “South Los Angeles.” Locals still refer to the area by the old name, and I will follow their lead here. South Central has approximately 1 million residents. The population density is half that of Maywood, but almost 6 times that of Los Angeles as a whole. As a result of immigration, Latinos now make up more than half of South Central’s population. In the period since 1980, the African-American population has shrunk from 64 percent to less than 40 percent. Tension between Latinos and blacks is high.

During the week before Anna Eng took me to visit Harmony Elementary School in South Central, six murders had been committed in the immediate neighborhood of the school. Three of them were allegedly the work of two men, probably gang members armed with assault rifles, who got out of their car and fired more than thirty rounds into a Latino man, Larry Marcial, twenty-two; his nephew, ten; and their neighbor, seventeen. The twelve-year-old brother of the ten-year-old was also hit. Gangs had become a dominant form of organizational life for the young in the 1970s. When crack cocaine became the local drug of choice, beginning in 1982, gangs found the drug trade so lucrative that they were able to acquire massive arsenals of weaponry of the sort used in the Marcial murder.

As a teenager in Trenton, New Jersey, I belonged to a civil rights organization. Membership was open only to pairs who were committed to attending meetings and organizing as a team. But there was an important restriction on what the pairs had to look like: each pair had to include two races. To join, I needed to find someone of a different race who was willing to join with me. In other words, the rite of initiation involved befriending someone unlike myself. This requirement threw me and my partner, Alonzo Younger, into one another’s lives. It meant that his friends and family would need to come to terms with me and that my friends and family would need to come to terms with him. Each of us discovered a great deal about what life was like for the other. In a racially tense community during a time that included the King assassination and a riot in Trenton, we found ourselves in circumstances where it took courage to be seen together. For me, that meant getting a taste of the racism being directed against my partner. It also meant learning much about divisions and traditions in the black community that I had known nothing about. The friendship that developed with my partner mattered enormously to me, as did the sense of belonging to a larger group committed to bridging the racial divide.

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