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Redevelopment Action
Can you talk a little bit about your involvement in the Fillmore community?
Yeah, because redevelopment, see, predates the preaching. I came to a meeting one night so I could vote on board members to try and get some community control of WAPAC with that. I was just there to vote and leave and never come back again but I got involved in WAPAC. This is after I had gone to WACO meetings and everything and that had kind of slowed down. And I got back, I was in school and working and doing other things and then when I went to that WAPAC meeting, I just didn't like some of the way things were going. So we voted and somehow, and I don't really remember, I ended up running for the board and got elected.
Then when I got elected to the board, the board elected me the chair of personnel. The personnel committee, which was over the hiring and firing. And our concern, the reason myself and some friends got involved was that we didn't think that the people who were in that office were being effective. Right or wrongly, I still think we were right. And so, we had to interview people and decide whether people were going to be kept on the job or not. And some people were let go. Some knew they were going to be let go and never even bothered with getting interviewed. A couple of others just resigned. Then we had to hire new people. We hired some really good people and some not so good people.
Describe the differences between WACO and WAPAC.
They were different. They were different in a lot of ways, but there are a couple of very significant ways. First, significant way they were different: WACO was really a grassroots created effort. People came together in WACO to try and improve and protect their community. And what they did was they got community organizations from every area of life. They had church groups. They even had the willing workers youth out of one of the churches was a part of it. The Japanese Community Youth Council as well as other Japanese organizations were represented. So, the people there in WACO were representing the members of all the organizations that existed in the Fillmore at that time. And there were hundreds. All kinds. Some of them had a lot of members; some of them might have had two. Churches were represented. Fraternal organizations. Business and civic improvement groups. Businessmen and businesswomen's associations. Everybody had representatives there. And so, that is how WACO got started. They were there to deal with the issues that confronted their community. They dealt with everything from taking up collections when people had funerals and didn't have enough money to bury somebody to fighting city hall.
WAPAC: Now, when WACO got started-—and this is just a little history which will make sense out of some of the personal—when WACO first got started, you see, they started resisting the redevelopment process. And they fought so hard, that's when they laid down in front of bulldozers to stop them from demolishing homes, because the people had no rights. They were moved out, you got fifty dollars, and no right to come back to whatever they built.
So anyway, they created that, so WACO was there. Well they raised so much hell when the law finally said they went to court and won. And the law says, "You got to create an organization to represent the interests of the people." And the law allowed redevelopment to designate an existing organization as that group or to create a new one. Well, Justin Herman, the head of the redevelopment agency was so angry at WACO. They were too radical. He wouldn't designate them. So they created a new organization called WAPAC: Western Addition Project Area Committee. And so it was obviously designed to be the puppet of the redevelopment agency. That's why we moved to try and take it over.
The problem was, by the time the lawsuit started, it was too late. The only real hope for this community would have been if, at the time the lawsuit started, if they could have just stopped it, the community could have been saved. But the fact that they found a way to let it continue, that they thought would make it continue right, it was already too late. When we took it over, we didn't realize at the time that it was too late.
So what is it then that the organization did?
We resisted. And I think one of the mistakes that we made, in retrospect, is that we tried to work with the redevelopment agency to make redevelopment responsive to the needs of the people. And it didn't work. You know, when I look back had it not been for us, it would have been worse. But as far as I am concerned, a lot of what I did wasn't enough. It wasn't good enough. Because it didn't work. The community is gone, so no matter how hard I worked, no matter how many good things—and I worked very hard, and still am—and no matter how many good things that I think I did, and I think I did, and when I say me, me and the people I worked with, I think we did a lot, but it wasn't enough. Because it was really too late, and when you are involved in a situation like that, trying to make something wrong better, just doesn't work. Wrong is just wrong. You might try to make the bullets softer, but they are still hard enough to kill when they come out of a gun.
And that was the problem that I believe we had with redevelopment. And it's a tragedy. It's a real, real tragedy. In retrospect, it probably would have been better to just stand up and say no. And just let the fight go down like that. Because what we didn't realize, what we lost, what I lost personally, is the dynamic, healthy African-American community—I didn't say perfect, I said healthy—that has never existed. And I think nowadays probably exists nowhere but in the South. Some places in the South, not everywhere.
We had, I mean, it was just so hip. Everybody in the world deserves to grow up in the kind of community I grew up in. It was in LA, but it's the same thing here. One, it was still here when I got here. And then when I talk to my partners who grew up here, it's the same thing. Just the life. There were children on the street. I told you, I grew up in an integrated community but the black community was all around us. And our life even though—and see, this one thing that you have to keep in mind—even though we had moved to an integrated community, we went to church, we went back to the black community. When we wanted something to put on our hair that would work, we had to go back. When my mommy wanted to go to the beauty shop, when me and my daddy wanted to go to the barber shop, see, white barbers didn't have to learn how to cut black people's hair in those days. Black barbers had to learn how to cut white people's hair to graduate the barber school, but white barbers didn't have to learn how to cut our hair. So you had to go. They'd mess your head up, even if they would cut it. So you had to go back to the hood. The kind of food we liked to eat, Black restaurants, for everything we needed and then for the feeling of life.
When we were young, in junior high and elementary, me and my partners we used to like to go on the street and just watch black men. Then later on we would imitate them. And we were really laughing at them, because they thought they were hip, and we didn't. You know, I'd be with my dad, and he'd see one of his buddies and he says, "Hey, Cat Daddy." And to them that was hip and to us that was so lame. It was so lame. But we were learning how to be men, and we didn't know it
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