Middle-Class Blacks Feel Sense of Betrayal

On Crenshaw Boulevard, just yards away from a row of burning stores, a handful of well-dressed black men and women stood guard outside their businesses, carrying signs begging angry crowds of looters to spare their stores.

“Burn Westwood. Burn West Los Angeles. Burn Simi Valley,” the shopkeepers shouted.

In the days since the stunning verdict in the Rodney G. King beating case, middle-class black Los Angeles has found itself in moral quicksand.

Like middle-class whites, middle-class blacks are appalled at last week’s images of torched buildings, savage beatings and brazen thievery.

But unlike the white middle class, most middle-class blacks understand why it happened. To them, it was inevitable, driven by an anguish that transcends class lines among blacks--an anguish so deep it cried out for something extraordinary to be done in response.

“Once the verdict came down, we knew something was going to happen,” said Chauncey Hughes, a city fire inspector who lives in West Adams, a mid-city neighborhood in the heart of the riot-torn area.

“This may be sad to say, but most people here who were thinking about what would occur were just hoping it would be taken outside the community . . . that just once, they’d make them pay.”

For middle-class blacks, many of whom used education and hard work to rise from impoverished beginnings, the not guilty verdicts in the trial of four white police officers were a slap in the face by white America.

“It makes the black middle class question all the sacrifices, all the hurdles that they had to jump through to get to the middle class,” said W. A. Jordan, a black college lecturer who lives in the racially mixed Palms section of West Los Angeles. “The system has betrayed us. Society sets rules and doesn’t really accept them.”

Beyond this gut-level reaction, response among the black middle class to the tumultuous events of the past week has been as broad and varied as the community itself.

For those living in affluent hillside neighborhoods overlooking the devastation, the concerns were immediate and practical: They faced gutted stores, long waits for gasoline, the loss of such necessities as mail service and electricity. They worried about falling property values. They struggled over how to explain to their frightened children why they deliberately chose to make their homes in a largely black community.

And beyond their personal worries is their concern for the future of their community. Although housing values make it the most affluent black community on the West Coast, the Baldwin Hills area has struggled to attract major retailers and only began an economic revitalization that residents hoped would turn their neighborhood around.

“The sad thing is that some stores may use this as an excuse to bail out of our community,” said Howard Manning Jr., a lawyer who lives in View Park. Like most of his neighbors, he is searching for some good to come from the past week’s tragedies.

“In the long run,” he said, “it could finally make us as a people do what we should have done a long time ago . . . build our own.”

Those who are scattered outside the area, in mostly white neighborhoods, face a different set of problems, many of them stemming from the isolation that comes with being the only black face on the block.

To get along with white neighbors, they bury their anger over the verdict. They endure stares and hostility from residents who act like they are to blame for the racial unrest. They tire of having to provide explanations for events that their neighbors cannot possibly understand. They feel isolated, at times, from both whites and the black community.

“In a way, we’re carrying a different kind of burden,” explained Pearl Henderson, a USC-educated lawyer who grew up in South Los Angeles but has lived with her husband and daughter in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of Pasadena for the past 20 years.

“I feel I ought to be able to do something, to say something that would make a difference. The helplessness I feel now . . . emotionally, it’s just very hard to accept.

“I used to say to these young kids, you’ve got to get an education, go on to college, then come back and contribute something to your community. Now I’m thinking, maybe I’m giving them false hope. . . . Maybe racism is just too deep-rooted for anything to make a difference.”

The televised scenes of the violence unfolding in South Los Angeles sickened her, but she will not condemn the rioters. “I don’t think it was necessary . . . but I think that somehow we have to have our voices heard.”

But Henderson, who works in an all-white insurance company office, is troubled by what kind of message the lawlessness will deliver.

She worries “that whites are going to shy away from us.” Yet she is irritated by the bumbling attempts of her white co-workers to give solace.

“I’ve had stupid comments from people at work . . . (white) people who don’t even know me who tell me how concerned they are about my safety because they think I must live in the (riot-torn) neighborhood,” she said. “There’s no way they can understand what I feel.”

Russell Gray is accustomed to feeling like a stranger in his own community. His is one of few black faces his white neighbors see, and at times it seems he might as well be invisible for all the courtesy they extend.

But on Thursday--as the mayhem was reaching full force in areas far removed from his Northridge neighborhood--he felt as if a spotlight was shining full force on his black face.

“We were in the grocery store when it was very crowded with people trying to stock up on food, and you could feel the racial tension,” Gray recalled. “A white person bumps into you and you can see the panic in their eyes. . . .

“When they have to come in contact with you, they go out of their way to be careful, to be nice. I can’t say what’s in their mind, but it’s like they’re suddenly paranoid about the presence of black people. What do they think, I’m going to burn the store down?”

His white neighbors “have never been what I would call friendly,” he said, his voice tinged with bitterness. Now, “they don’t even look me in the eye.”

Three years ago, when he finished his residency in anesthesiology at USC, Gray moved his family from their too-small house in the mostly black community of Ladera Heights to a spacious newer home in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley.

“I didn’t come here to be with white people,” he said. “If I could have afforded a bigger house in Ladera Heights, I would have stayed there.”

And while he is grateful that the move spared his family the horror of seeing their community destroyed, he feels a nagging sense of guilt over the peace that reigns in his suburban neighborhood.

“I’ve got friends in that part of town and I see how it’s affecting them,” he said. “They don’t have gas stations or stores, they’re waiting in line to get their Social Security checks. It’s not something we’re experiencing in Northridge . . . and in a way, we should.”

Clad in a colorful, flowing African dress, community college instructor Barbara Hodges waved a red, black and green flag symbolizing black liberation at passing motorists as she stood near the spot where, less than 24 hours earlier, a white truck driver had been dragged from his vehicle and kicked and beaten--a scene that shocked the nation.

Black drivers passing by honked their horns and waved clenched fists at Hodges and her twin sister, Bobbie Betts.

The women had rejected the idea of venting their frustration in church. “(Society has) closed every door to us,” Hodges said. “I refused to go to church to hear preachers preach about politics. The solution is going to come from the people, and last night the people spoke.”

School administrator Judith Mays spent most of Thursday walking the halls of the nearly empty Hamilton High School campus. She reassured worried parents who had rushed to retrieve their children. She chatted casually with her colleagues about upcoming school events.

But when the conversation turned to Rodney G. King and the violence that was escalating just blocks away from her Inglewood home, the stately black woman turned stony.

Blinking back tears, she struggled to put the dizzying swirl of events into perspective. One minute, it seemed, she was grieving with friends and co-workers over the verdict. A day later, she was being called upon by her white co-workers to explain the burning and looting that had disgusted them.

She shook her head and her voice was stern.

“I’ll talk about it with (white) people, but I won’t let them ‘tsk-tsk’ me” about the violence, she said resolutely. “Everybody’s saying ‘Isn’t it awful?’ I’ll tell you what’s awful . . . what that jury did in that courtroom.

“What’s happening now is what you get when you let problems fester in a community that has had all the pain that it can bear.”

From her window in an apartment complex at the foot of Baldwin Hills, schoolteacher Paula Stokes spent two days watching smoke rise from the ruins of what once had been a bustling commercial strip near her home.

The young, single mother saw carloads of young looters “throwing gang signs and laughing” as they hauled carload after carload of stolen goods away after ransacking stores.

And she felt her own sense of rising anger--ignited by the King verdict, but fueled by the lawlessness that engulfed her neighborhood.

“I wish the police and the National Guard had been here when the first rock was thrown . . . and I wish they had started tear-gassing the looters and shooting them,” she said, her voice trembling with anger.

“I understand their anger and frustration. I felt it myself. But there is no excuse for this. . . . I think what they did was much worse than what those four officers did to Rodney King.”

Until Saturday, she kept her two young sons inside the apartment, allowing them to believe that the graphic televised images of fire and vandalism were happening someplace else--not a few blocks from home.

“How do I tell them that the life they have known is over . . . that the (store) where they rented videos every Friday is gone, that the grocery store has been picked clean,” she wondered.

“Our community has been totally destroyed, and I don’t think psychologically people will ever be the same. Even if every single store came back and rebuilt--and I don’t think they will--we’ll never be the same.”