A Community’s Cultural Heartbeat

The city simmered and seethed. Anger overflowed in neighborhood after neighborhood.

But those who flocked to Leimert Park Village during the riots of 1992 found healers: poets, painters, musicians, dancers--artists whose art spoke more truth about people’s lives than a burning building ever could.

“It wasn’t, ‘I hate [white people] poetry,’ ” said poet and writer Michael Datcher. “It was young black men, writing love poems.” And mothers writing about the difficulty of raising children. And others talking about everyday pain and joys.

Datcher is a writer-in-residence at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, exploring the continuing significance of Leimert Park for artists--and for the city as a whole.

Widely recognized as the cultural heartbeat of black Los Angeles, Leimert Park also is the center of an arts renaissance, Datcher said, that was galvanized by the civil unrest. The flourishing in this neighborhood, he said, in some ways parallels the Harlem Renaissance.

Like Harlem writers of the 1920s, Leimert Park artists have served to affirm black humanity at a moment when others seemed to deny it, Datcher said. And through the arts, Leimert Park stands poised to help transform thoughts and create new visions.

“We’re reaching for that in Leimert Park,” Datcher said.

Tonight at 7, Datcher and several Leimert Park-based poets will read their works and the works of Harlem Renaissance artists in the galleries that house the museum’s “Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance” exhibition.

Sponsored by Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center and Poets and Writers Inc., Datcher’s residency also includes teaching a private workshop at Beyond Baroque.

*

At the heart of his philosophy is the idea that artists are--and historically have been--the agents of societal change.

It is a view shared by others in Leimert Park, and one that keeps them devoted to their work--even as they struggle to pay bills.

“What the artist has the power to do is to change and influence people on a very, very intimate and personal level,” said Kamau Daaood, performance poet and co-founder of the World Stage in Leimert Park. “The role of the artist, many times, becomes that of educator and of healer.”

The Harlem Renaissance, Datcher said, “was propelled by the Red Summer of 1919.”

Many black servicemen returning from the battlefields of World War I were lynched and others brutalized by white mobs. Race riots broke out in cities such as Chicago and Knoxville, Tenn.

“The artists’ response to that was to document black humanity,” Datcher said. “Their feeling was, if white Americans can literally burn black bodies they really can’t appreciate us as fully and wholly human.”

After the verdicts in the 1992 Rodney King beating trial, Leimert Park offered what many in the African American community needed--a place to listen and to be heard.

“When things like that happen people feel the need to dialogue,” Daaood said. “People have questions and people have emotions that they need to express. Leimert Park and the environment that artists created there provided a forum.”

The tables and chairs in front of a coffeehouse, 5th Street Dick’s, were a perfect stage, Daaood said. It was a simple forum for young and old to listen and to talk.

For the poets, painters and dancers, it grew into a new audience. Others were inspired to join.

“It was amazing,” said Datcher, who is the literary programs director at the World Stage.

People trekked to Leimert Park from throughout the city, from Riverside and San Diego, to join a Wednesday night poetry workshop.

That influx was a spark that “energized Leimert Park and the artists who worked there,” said performance artist and playwright Keith Antar Mason.

The civil unrest had another effect.

“The backlash was there was no funding for the work,” said Mason, whose critically acclaimed performance art group, The Hittite Empire, got its start in Leimert Park. “The white liberal progressive folks in the arts became deathly afraid of Afrocentric artists.”

*

But the reputation of Leimert Park as a place where art was accepted--and appreciated--grew.

People from throughout the world now find their way to Leimert Park’s Degnan Boulevard, to hear jazz at the World Stage or visit the galleries, studios and coffeehouse.

“Basically there’s no place like that in L.A. where black and white can come and be comfortable,” said Senegalese-born artist Aziz Diagne, who began renting a studio in Leimert Park in 1994.

“It’s a refuge,” he said, “and it’s not just for African Americans or Africans.”

There also is sharing among the artists. Sitting outside the World Stage one night, listening to poets, Diagne was inspired to create two art pieces, “Oppressed Emotions” and “La Charmeuse.”

In Leimert Park he met Billy Higgins, co-founder of the World Stage and a legendary jazz drummer whom Diagne had admired since childhood. And he learned how to drum from the master.

Jenoyne Adams cherishes the role and the responsibility of artists. People listening to her poetry about abuse or love sometimes cry, or share their own experiences.

“I’m adding to people’s lives and people are adding to mine,” said Adams.

Adams worked as a customer service manager for a large corporation before discovering Leimert Park and her own creativity. Now she makes a living as a member of a West African dance ensemble and through her writing. This year she received the PEN USA West Emerging Voices Fellowship.

“I’m a part of a sister circle that is made up of artists from Leimert Park,” she said. “We support each other. We critique each other’s work. It’s become a family for me.”

Documenting the role of artists in fighting oppression, Datcher said, may help change the way artists are viewed, especially on the West Coast. “For the most part, artists aren’t really respected,” he said.

In African societies, artists are seen as the holders of culture, he said. They are healers, cultural workers.

“We’re just trying to reclaim that tradition,” he said.