South-Central Is Still Waiting for Promise to Be Kept

Because this is a story about Danny Bakewell and his power in South-Central Los Angeles, it begins with a big promise and a long, long wait. It is 1994, the corner of 53rd Street and Vermont Avenue. We are standing amid the ruins of a century-old Presbyterian church.

A groundbreaking is in progress. A high school band belts out “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” As reporters scribble, Bakewell’s Brotherhood Crusade and its offshoot, the African American Unity Center, announce that the venerable church, rocked by riots and earthquakes, will be resurrected as a community linchpin.

The founder of Motown, the city of Los Angeles and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are said to have pledged a total of $4.5 million to help Bakewell turn the church into a state-of-the-art performing arts theater. This is big. The area is so beset by gangs that engineers surveying the site have had to pay protection. The block is rundown. The church is a longtime hazard. The Brotherhood Crusade, its owner since 1990, has been using it as a food bank, but workers have had to distribute outside because it hasn’t met seismic code in 15 years.

Behind the scenes, a who’s who of Democratic politicians has gone to bat for Bakewell, even as the records show inspectors questioning damage claims. Some are quake-related, some seem less so--stained-glass windows that could as easily have been shot out as seismically shattered, etc. Still, most of the application passes muster and a $3.5-million FEMA grant is speedily OKd.

And for a time, hope runs high. Who wouldn’t hang on such a promise? But slowly, the years pass. And pass. And the church stays boarded up. And rotting. And vermin-infested. And because this is about Danny Bakewell and his power in South-Central, if anyone wonders what happened, they don’t ask.

All big cities have their Bakewells, their charismatic go-to guys. The guys who galvanize the marchers and threaten the boycotts and scare the politicians. The guys with whom the business folks negotiate because, you never know, it might get noisy otherwise.

Still, in this city where ethnic politics are as intricate and multihued as the politics of the United Nations, I’ve always found it strange that Bakewell’s formulaic use of a single race card could get him so much mileage. Behind his back, African American civil rights leaders call him a problem, a divisive element, a self-promoter. But on the record, not a peep.

So imagine what it took for Lynda Newton--whose father, the late Rev. Bennie Newton, was a hero in the 1992 riots for rescuing a Latino from a mob’s blood lust--to speak out recently. A student in the adult school at the African American Unity Center, adjacent to that church that Bakewell has left to fester, she called to complain about the building: “People,” she told me, “shouldn’t sit back and let this happen to them.”

Newton lives in the South Bay, where she used to own a secondhand store. She wanted to change careers and needed computer training; she chose the adult center at 53rd and Vermont, she said, because the teacher there was a friend of a friend of her dad. But she was shocked at the classroom, which shares a wall with the shuttered church. Rats from the church overran it, leaving droppings on the keyboards and chewing the mouse pads of the computers, which, even on a good day, were mostly obsolete.

School officials confirmed that an aide had rushed out in hysterics not long ago after a rat skittered across her foot. Fellow students reported that a bus pulled up to the center a couple of months ago and they were told that if they didn’t get on it and go to a Brotherhood Crusade demonstration downtown, they wouldn’t get credit for attendance that day. “They just told us to wear T-shirts and hold a banner and march back and forth, and don’t say too much,” one student said.

The head of the Brotherhood’s Unity Center, Curtis Owens, boasted to me five years ago of telling FEMA “that they were looking at another damn riot” if the church claim didn’t get expedited. This week he said he didn’t know about the coerced bus trip, and directed questions about the church to the Brotherhood Crusade. “I’m just the lessee,” he said.

Bakewell was out of the country and couldn’t be reached directly for comment. But his chief of staff, Joe Rouzan, who relayed Bakewell’s remarks, brought matters up to date. Seems the church has gone untouched because the FEMA money can only be used to reimburse repairs that already have been completed and paid for by applicants. FEMA says the job could have begun at any time in the past five years, but Rouzan says it has stayed in the planning stage while more FEMA money was negotiated, eligibility issues were settled and a more experienced project manager was hired (the manager started just this week). There’s a $5.2-million reimbursement account now, and in “two to three years, we’re going to bring something state-of-the-art to this community,” Rouzan promised. “You just wait.”

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Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.