February 6 is the anniversary of the California Coastal Commission’s 8-2 vote to save the sacred Acjachemen site of Panhe and San Onofre State Beach and stop the toll road there.  Coastal Commission member Mary Shallenberger explicitly concluded that the impact on the Native American people alone was reason enough to vote against the toll road, citing the work of United Coalition to Protect Panhe and The City Project.  The United States Department of Commerce went on to uphold the Coastal Commission’s decision and ruled against the toll road in December 2008.

Acjachemen tribal members have produced a video of testimonials about the value of Panhe in their lives.  Singer Jodi Levine has produced a beautiful “Song for Panhe.”

Media attention has focused on the values at stake for the Acjachemen people.  David Reyes wrote about Panhe in the Los Angeles Times on August 20, 2007.  Dana Parsons interviewed Acjachemen grass roots leader Rebecca Robles in a poignant column in the Times on February 9, 2008.  Surfing Magazine covered Panhe and the Acjachemen people in October 2008, and Surfshot Magazine in June 2008.  The National Trust for Historic Preservation wrote about Panhe in February 2008.

The media coverage culminated with the Los Angeles Times Editorial about “The Acjachemen’s Victory” on December 27, 2009.

c Ricardo Duffy.

Thank you to everyone who has helped make this happen — you know who you are!

Learn more at www.savepanhe.org and www.savesanonofre.org.

In Sugar Hill, a Street Nurtured Black Talent When the World Wouldn’t

New York is a city of blocks, each with its own history, customs and characters. Yet from these small stages spring large talents. Anyone who doubts that need look no further than a stretch of Edgecombe Avenue perched on a bluff near 155th Street.

It was part of Sugar Hill, the neighborhood of choice for elegant black musicians, dapper actors, successful professionals — and those who aspired to be like them.

A red-brick tower at 409 Edgecombe was home to Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. DuBois and Aaron Douglas, who has been called “the father of black American art.”

A few blocks farther north, the building at 555 Edgecombe burst with musical talent: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne and others. Right before and after World War II, when discrimination and segregation were commonplace, young people in Sugar Hill saw success stride by on the streets where they played tag and stickball.

The son of a taxi mechanic, Roy Eaton was a childhood piano prodigy who became a trailblazer in advertising. His friends on the block included the artist and writer Faith Ringgold; Cecelia Hodges, a Princeton professor and actress; and Sonny Rollins, the “saxophone Colossus,” who is still touring.

Many of them came from Depression-era families who were short on cash but long on dreams, managing to scrimp for music lessons or art supplies. And they lived in a community where neighbors and churches offered encouragement amid rampant racial discrimination.

“It was like our place to dream the impossible dream,” Mr. Eaton said. “It gave me a sense of, you might call it entitlement or unlimited possibilities — that nothing could stop me from doing what I felt I could do.”

Read the rest of this article in the New York Times . . .

The Baldwin Hills Community

Professor Josh Sides describes the unique role of the Baldwin Hills in the history of African Americans in Los Angeles and across the nation:

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, blacks had pushed west and south of West Adams into Leimert Park and the exclusive area of Baldwin Hills, which quickly became the heart of affluent black Los Angeles, a position it still holds today.

A five-square-mile area of unincorporated hillside west of Leimert Park/ Crenshaw and south of West Adams, Baldwin Hills boasted large homes and expansive views. Largely undeveloped until the 1940s, hundreds of houses and apartment complexes were built there in the 1950s. As they had in Compton, blacks moved into new and large homes, with an average of four to six bedrooms per household. African Americans in Baldwin Hills were generally much better educated than their South Central counterparts, a fact that translated into greater job opportunities in the post-boom economy. Accordingly, just over 71 percent of all employed African Americans in Baldwin Hills were white-collar workers. Many Baldwin Hills residents were typical of those who fled South Central after the Watts riot; according to the 1970 census, 57 percent of blacks in Baldwin Hills had lived in the central city in 1965.

In addition to superior housing, residents of Baldwin Hills and the nearby Leimert Park and Crenshaw areas also enjoyed many more conveniences as consumers. While many Watts and Willowbrook residents were forced to buy groceries at overpriced liquor stores, Baldwin Hills residents had other options. The Crenshaw Shopping Center — opened in 1947, as one of the first planned suburban malls in the United States — was the most popular shopping area for local residents. And, during the 1960s, the Baldwin Hills Center and the Ladera Center also opened, offering residents even greater selection and convenience. Central to this improved consumer selection, and middle-class life in general, was the greater mobility of Baldwin Hills residents relative to blacks in the central city. Whereas 57 percent of Baldwin Hills households had one car, and 37 percent had two or more cars, a survey of Watts residents found that 57 percent did not own a car.

Perhaps the greatest advantage to residing in Baldwin Hills was the superior quality of the area’s public schools. In 1971, the Los Angeles Department of City Planning described Baldwin Hills public schools as the “the best schools of any city area inhabited primarily by black people” and “on par with those in West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley.” In addition to boasting low dropout rates and small class sizes relative to public schools in Watts and South Central, public schools in Baldwin Hills were also more racially integrated.

Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present 101 (2003).

The Baldwin Hills Park

In poor black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the economic ladder is often perched against the Baldwin Hills.

There, on that lonely hump in the urban plain, lies hope. There, doctors and lawyers and politicians make up one of the wealthiest black communities in the nation. And there, in the heart of the hills, conservationists are hoping to create the crown jewel: a 1,200-acre state park.

That partly explains the outrage aroused when [PXP] proposed building a 53- megawatt power plant in the middle of that envisioned green space, on what is now a working oil field. Neighbors managed to come together with environmentalists and civil rights activists in such a strong coalition that they may have rung the project’s death knell.
. . .

To many, the power plant proposal was another slight in a long history of discrimination, from the days of racist real estate covenants to white flight to zoning decisions that seem to put the unwanted–the power plants and chrome plating facilities–in minority neighborhoods.

Joe Mozingo, A Fight for Their Goal, Their Gains; Baldwin Hills: Residents of the upscale black neighborhood rejoice over a victory in battle to block power plant. L.A. Times, June 23, 2001.

Learn more about keeping the Baldwin Hills community and park clean and green for generations to come at www.greaterbaldwinhillsalliance.org.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, in response to a community campaign, has adopted a plan to enforce physical education requirements requiring an average of 20 minutes of physical education in elementary schools every day and 40 minutes in middle and high schools. The school district, the second largest in the nation, is enforcing education and civil rights laws to help promote academic performance and youth development and reduce obesity and diabetes. The plan will ensure that schools provide properly credentialed physical education teachers, meet the physical education minute requirements, maintain reasonable class size averages, and provide quality facilities for physical education.

Obesity rates in the school district are above the national average. Evidence suggests that physical education of sufficient quantity and quality helps prevent childhood obesity. In addition, physical education and civil rights laws require equal access to physical education in California’s public schools to alleviate unfair disparities based on race, color or national origin.

The implementation plan is the result of a strategic campaign by The City Project, a policy and legal non-profit organization in California whose mission is to achieve equal justice, democracy and livability for all, working with teachers, parents, health and community activists, and school officials, including Superintendent Ramon Cortines and Physical Education Advisor Chad Fenwick.

The campaign includes five major elements. First, the teachers’ union United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) organized a public campaign to support physical education. Second, The City Project filed administrative complaints under education and civil rights laws to require the school district to enforce physical education requirements. Third, the school board unanimously adopted a resolution to enforce physical education and civil rights laws. Fourth, the district staff, under the leadership of Superintendent Cortines and Mr. Fenwick, adopted the implementation plan. Fifth, the campaign relied on social science research published by the California Endowment and others highlighting the relationship between physical education, obesity, and health disparities based on race, ethnicity, and income.

The school district serves over 600,000 K-12 students in over 770 schools. 92% are students of color, and 74% are low income (qualify for free or reduced meals).

Active Living Research, a national program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is funding a study to assess the impact of the physical education campaign on student’s health. The principal investigators are Robert García, Executive Director and Counsel of The City Project, and Sarah E. Samuels, Dr.P.H., M.Ed., of Samuels & Associates. Dr. Elva Arredondo of San Diego State University and UCLA’s Dr. Brian Cole will serve as expert consultants on the evaluation.

“The physical education plan is the result of successful teamwork, including coalition building, multidisciplinary research, media, policy and legal advocacy. This is likely to be a replicable model in other states or countries,” according to Chad Fenwick, the Physical Education Advisor in the school district.

“Enforcing physical education and civil rights laws in Los Angeles is a best practice example to help students move more, eat well, stay healthy, and do their best in school and in life. We will take this campaign to other school districts that do not enforce physical education laws,” according to Louis García, a Staff Attorney with The City Project.

James Sallis, of Active Living Research at San Diego State University, noted, “Studying the implementation plan and campaign is a great opportunity to evaluate a multi-component campaign to improve physical education, which is an essential strategy for getting children active.”

The article by Robert García and Chad Fenwick entitled Social Science, Equal Justice, and Public Health Policy: Lessons from Los Angeles, is published in the Journal of Public Health Policy (2009) 30, S26-32, and is available here.

The public school campaign is a “tipping point in the physical education revolution,” according to the online journal Peaceful Playgrounds, available on the web here.

The administrative complaints were filed by parents Ike and Irene Kaludi; physical education teacher Cathy Figel; youth groups Anahuak Youth Sports Association, Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, and Antes Columbus Football Club; and health advocates California Pan Ethnic Health Network (CPEHN) and Prevention Institute, working with The City Project.

The school district’s plan will improve education for all students:

[R]esearch indicates that physical education quantity and quality are particularly deficient for less affluent students, and those in racial and ethnic groups who are at high risk for being overweight and/or obese. According to the California Endowment . . . youth with the fewest resources are at the highest risk for health problems. Many students are not passing the state- required fitness test, and there are large disparities by race and ethnicity. Compared to non-Hispanic white and Asian girls, national data shows Black and Hispanic girls were less physically active. Less than 30% of students met all six standards in Grades 5, 7, and 9. Racial and ethnic differences are consistent with the pattern of lower quantity and quality of physical education in low resource schools serving mainly students of color. In Grade 5, for example, 34% of non-Hispanic whites passed all six standards, compared to 23% of Blacks and 20% of Latinos.

The complete plan applying physical education laws, as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, California Government Code Section 11135, and applicable regulations, is available by clicking here.

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GREENSBORO, N.C. — The sign still says “F. W. Woolworth Co.” in bright gold letters running across the building on South Elm Street, just as it did 50 years ago. And within that two-story structure, the same stainless steel dumbwaiters and commercial appliances line the mirrored walls. The lunch counter, which includes a bowling-alley-long tabletop that must dwarf any currently in use, is largely intact; the original chrome and vinyl chairs are still mounted in the floor. This site is an authentic, half-century-old relic, a remnant of the mundane, the insignificant, the quaint.

But one of the achievements of the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, which is opening Monday in that former Woolworth building, is that you begin to understand how such a place became a pivot in the greatest political movement of the 20th century.

In the museum’s 30,000 square feet of exhibition space, the mundane luncheonette reminds us that a cataclysmic social transformation took place over the right to be ordinary. For that was what was at stake — not subtle and arcane matters of law or obscure practices that challenged eccentric codes of behavior, but the basic acts of daily life: eating, drinking, sleeping, working, playing. It was here, at this luncheonette counter, that four 17-year-old freshmen at the all-black Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina — Joseph A. McNeil, Franklin E. McCain, David L. Richmond and Ezell A. Blair Jr. — arrived on Feb. 1, 1960, sat down and ordered some food.

And when they were refused — refused because they were black, because much of Greensboro was racially segregated, and because Woolworth headquarters had decreed that the company policy was “to abide by local custom” — the four students continued to sit in mute protest.

They returned the next day and the next. Within a week 1,000 protesters and counterprotesters packed the store. By the end of March “sit-ins” had spread to 55 cities in 13 states. By mid-April the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been established to expand student involvement. And by the end of July, when the Greensboro Woolworth’s counter was finally desegregated, this form of nonviolent protest had become one of the central strategies of the American civil rights movement. . . .

Read the rest of this story in the New York Times . . .

The International Civil Rights Center and Museum is at 132 South Elm Street, Greensboro, N.C.; (336) 274-9199, sitinmovement.org.

IMAGE GALLERY & VIDEOS

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Public Service Announcements

Op-Ed Contributor
The Counter Revolution
By HOWELL RAINES

. . . On the morning of Feb. 1, 50 years ago today, four black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University seated themselves at the all-white lunch counter in a Woolworth’s dime store in Greensboro. Within hours, news of this bold act by the Greensboro Four, as they would come to be called, had grapevined its way from A&T to the campuses of historically black colleges in Atlanta and Nashville.

All Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond and Joe McNeil did was ask for coffee and doughnuts and politely decline to move until they were served — and try to engage a flustered white waitress and a bumbling store manager in a Socratic dialogue about the meanings of “serve.” Then, just like that, the black preachers who had challenged segregation in citadel cities like Montgomery, Ala., and Atlanta had found their natural allies: thousands of students who would become, before the end of the month, the shock troops of the civil rights movement.

It was always a fractious alliance. Not surprisingly, imposing black elders like the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. did not like being booed during church rallies for moving too slowly by militant students, many of whom cast themselves as radical Christian activists. But together, the team of preachers and students would show, within the space of three years, that the edifice of segregation was a lot like Georgia’s Stone Mountain, that imposing Confederate monument whose soft, exfoliating rock turns to dust under the hammer. . . .

Lyndon Johnson . . . predicted as he signed the Voting Rights Act that he was handing the South over to the Republicans. That legislative instrument turned out to be another retrogressive force in the South, albeit a more benign one than segregation was. In the past 30 years, the law has been distorted to gerrymander the region into safe Congressional districts for a great number of white Republicans and a handful of black Democrats. Who would have predicted that the death of de jure segregation would usher in a new era of political segregation in elective politics?

Read the rest of the article in the New York Times here.

Dotson House, Livery and Blacksmith Shop

View the Administrative Complaint to Keep State Parks Open for All!

There has been an increasing realization of the need for environmental interventions to increase physical activity levels in the population. Although promising, the impact of these strategies in reducing obesity-related disparities will be limited by the presence of inequities in the distribution of activity-related resources in the community. Advocacy efforts are critically needed to ensure that all communities benefit from environmental strategies being implemented.

The article “Pushing physical activity, and justice” in the journal Preventive Medicine by Robert García of The City Project, America Bracho of Latino Health Access, and Patricia Cantero and Beth Glenn of UCLA, describes two activist community-based organizations in Southern California, The City Project and Latino Health Access, and their successful efforts to mandate equitable access to public resources critical for reducing obesity-related disparities, relying on diverse strategies including compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other federal and state laws.

Principles for equitable development of public land are also presented, as well as lessons learned that can inform future advocacy efforts.

The article concludes:

“Realization of the severity of the obesity and chronic disease epidemics and failure of individually focused interventions has led to heightened interest in implementing environmental interventions to increase physical activity. Although promising, the impact of these strategies in ultimately reducing the obesity epidemic will be limited by the presence of continued inequities in the distribution of physical activity-related resources in the community. Advocacy efforts are critically needed to ensure that all communities benefit equally from infrastructure projects designed to build healthy communities, effective public schools and safe and reliable transportation. Without continued advocacy efforts, the environmental strategies being implemented to increase physical activity levels in the population will lead to a widening versus narrowing of the gap between the health status of the wealthy and poor in this country.”

Click here to download the complete article, Garcia et al “Pushing physical activity and justice,” 49 Preventive Medicine 330-33 (2009).

Visit mapjustice.org to learn more about equal access to healthy parks, schools and communities.

View of the west side of the Los Angeles City Market

Learn more about Monuments, Diversity and Democracy.

Visit the Heritage Parkscape online and on flickr.

See more about National Parks, the PBS documentary America’s Best Idea, and Transit to Trails.

Soda Lake is a glistening bed of white salt, set within a vast open grassland, rimmed by mountains. The Lake, a normally dry playa, covers an area of about 3,000 acres, and is one of the dominant geographic features of the Carrizo Plain. A crust of sodium sulfates and carbonates are the result of evaporating mineral-laden surface water.

The Carrizo Plain is traversed by the San Andreas fault, which has carved valleys, created and moved mountains, and yet close up, is seen in a subtle alignment of ridges, ravines and normally dry ponds.

The Carrizo Plain is 100 airline miles (160 km) north of Los Angeles, California.

The Nature Conservancy led a field trip by urban park advocates including The City Project to Carrizo Plain and Chimineas Ranch in May 2009.

See more about National Parks, the PBS documentary America’s Best Idea, and Transit to Trails.