A New Message From Watts: Hope But Verify

On the No. 53 southbound bus, a young black man asks an old one: "You already vote?"
"Yep. It show?"
It does. He's been smiling for five minutes straight, and saying "beautiful day" to everyone he sees.

"Need a change"; "we ready for change"; "he's going to make a change": they all sound like they stepped out of an Obama commercial. No anger, not even when I ask what might happen if lightning strikes and their candidate doesn't win. "If he loses," the first person in line says, "well, that's how it goes. We gave it a good fight. We know how to take losses pretty good." Violence? "Naw," a woman shakes her head. "That's the past," a man chimes in. A second woman: "Education, health care. That's what's on people's minds. Our future—that's what's on people's minds." Not too much glibness, either, about mystically magical transformations. "Next year I hope that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will be leading the country where it really needs to go, that we'll be on our way to bringing the troops home from Iraq." She pauses thoughtfully, as if indicating her awareness of just how slow, or uncertain, ventures to change the world can be: "We'll be rebuilding," she says. Hope, but verify.

If any place knows the intractable challenges of change, it's this neighborhood. After the riots, a state commission led by a conservative Republican former head of the CIA recommended a hospital as the first step in rebuilding Watts. As it was, the nearest one was 10 miles away, with wards designed for eight patients crowded with as many as 16. The county board paved the way, placing a $12.3 million bond issue on the June 1966 primary ballot. A month before the voting, a policeman named Jerold Bova, 23, pulled over a speeder and ended up shooting the driver, 25-year-old Leonard Deadwyler. Accounts differed as to precisely how it happened (the discharge was eventually ruled accidental), but all agreed as to Deadwyler's last words, gesturing to his pregnant wife beside him: "But she's having a baby." One month later, overwhelmingly white Los Angeles County nonetheless voted against a Watts hospital.

Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital wasn't built until 1972, though thanks to a combination of mismanagement and official indifference the showplace soon began falling to ruin. Via a computer search of L.A.'s venerable black weekly the Sentinel,I found the first reference to the hospital's infamous nickname—"Killer King"—in 1980. But in the decades that followed, the defiant pride of local black activists force-fed the community denial: "It gives you hope for the whole race that we're achieving and doing something," one commented on the hospital in 2002—though the facility's surgery, neonatology and radiology training programs had already lost their accreditations by then. In 2005, a Los Angeles Timesexposé about the hospital's "long history of harming, or even killing those it meant to serve" won the Pulitzer Prize. Now the facility exists only as a single outpatient clinic. "If Deadwyler was shot again," says veteran Los Angeles journalist and historian Bill Boyarsky, "the same thing could happen again. Because there's no hospital there. It's a disgrace."

The city-council member for much of Watts is Janice Hahn, who was 13 in 1965 ("I remember this glow of orange around the entire Watts community"). Getting that hospital built was the crowning achievement of her father, the legendary county board member Kenneth Hahn. The Hahns are white. Kenneth was first elected to the city council when Watts was still an all-white neighborhood. Their family's work—Janice Hahn remembers visiting a grandmother in her district with pictures on the wall of Jesus, Martin Luther King and her father—is a testament to the sort of cross-racial solidarity Barack Obama hopes to represent. But that didn't stop Kenneth Hahn from getting a huge brick through his car window that frightening, hot August day. Janice Hahn insists it wouldn't have happened if the culprit had known who was inside the car. But she also has to admit that she remembers people warning the family to keep the doors locked because militants might be coming after them.

America's racial ordeal has a way of pushing back against fantasies of false comity. And Hahn would be the last to deny the bitterness that still is fresh. "I've seen firsthand the feelings, still, of disenfranchisement, feelings that, still, a community needs better jobs, needs better schools." And why shouldn't it be fresh? The last Census showed the average annual household income in her district was $28,305, less than half that for Los Angeles as a whole. Thirty-seven percent of its adults 25 years or older don't possess a high-school diploma, and a stunning 60 percent of its children live in poverty. The unemployment rate is 23 percent—comparable to the rate of 30 percent in 1965.