had settled there that the city was
known as Iowa by the Sea.
Larry Burnight’s father came to
Southern California from Sioux
City, Iowa. When Burnight, who
is white, attended Wilson High
in the mid-1950s, Long Beach was
97 percent white. California was
entering a golden era of public
education, peaking with a 1960
‘‘master plan’’ that promised state
residents access to tuition-free col-
leges and universities, an era that
would last until the taxpayer revolt
of the 1970s. By the time Burnight
became principal of Wilson High in
1989, Black students made up some
15 percent of the student body, and
large numbers of Latino and South-
east Asian families were starting to
move into the area.
The newcomers arrived to a
place that was also being trans-
formed by deindustrialization. The
aerospace industry, a Long Beach
economic mainstay, was shrink-
ing, and the Long Beach Naval
Shipyard would soon close. At the
same time, the crack epidemic, the
‘‘war on drugs,’’ mass incarceration
and gang warfare took a toll on the
largely segregated communities.
The tension between Cambodian
and Mexican American youths in
the poorer communities west of
Wilson High often spilled over
onto campus. A large underclass
of undocumented immigrants was
forming. In Compton, northwest of
Long Beach, Black and Latino res-
idents lived side by side; through-
out South Los Angeles, a new,
‘‘Blaxican’’ culture was emerging.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Long Beach
voters and offi cials in the school
district made several decisions
that helped guide the city through
these changes. The district adopt-
ed voluntary school desegregation
programs in 1972, fi ve years before
the state mandated such measures.
Offi cials created magnet schools
and drew more white kids to the dis-
trict’s traditionally Black and Latino32 5.1.22
Héctor Tobar’s article on
the March 6, 1991, front page
of The Los Angeles Times.
Latasha Harlins’s killing at Empire
Liquor Market (March 16, 1991, 10 a.m.):
The grocery-store owner Soon Ja Du
accused 15-year-old Latasha Harlins of
theft, and after a scuffle, she shot the
teenager in the back of the head. The
Los Angeles Police Department and
security footage confirmed that Harlins
had not attempted any theft. Later that
year, despite a jury’s finding Du guilty
of manslaughter, Judge Joyce Karlin
sentenced Du to five years of probation.Christopher Commission (July 9, 1991):
In April 1991, Mayor Tom Bradley
appointed former Deputy Secretary of
State Warren Christopher to head an
independent commission inquiring into
the L.A.P.D.’s culture and practices.
The commission’s report concluded that
‘‘there is a significant number of officers
in the L.A.P.D. who repetitively use
excessive force against the public’’ and
that ‘‘the problem of excessive force
is aggravated by racism and bias.’’Verdict at Ventura County Superior
Court (April 29, 1992, 3:15 p.m.): The
trial of Koon, Briseño, Powell and Wind
for assault took place in Simi Valley,
an affluent suburb in Ventura County.
A majority-white jury acquitted every
officer of assault and every officer
except Powell of using excessive force.
The verdict immediately triggered angry
protests among the people who had
gathered outside the courthouse. This page, counterclockwise fromtop left:Los Angeles Times; Reed Saxon/Associated Press;JulieMarkes/Associated Press.Opposite page, clockwise fromtop right: KirkMcKoy/Los Angeles Times,via Getty Images; Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times,via Getty Images; KJLH Radio; Guy Crowder/California State University,Northridgecampuses with special academic
programs. In 1986, Long Beach
voters approved an initiative to
elect school-board representatives
by district, ensuring representation
from Black and Latino neighbor-
hoods for the fi rst time. And the
school district avoided the manda-
tory busing programs that deeply
divided other Southern California
communities, like Pasadena, where
busing triggered a sharp decline in
white enrollment.
Some white families left Wilson,
but more stayed. Even as nearby
neighborhoods were becoming
more Latino, the old, sprawling
campus had not lost its cachet
with those white families. Wilson
alumni included an astronaut and
athletes who competed at the sum-
mer Olympic Games for every U.S.
team going back to Helsinki in 1952.
And for the students of color, who
longed for something better than
the prejudice and inequality that
life had handed them, the sprawl-
ing Wilson campus and its old
buildings were an island of order
and possibility.By 1992, Woodrow Wilson High
presented a vision of what Southern
California aspired to be. The year-
book was called a Kaleidoscope of
Changes. In its pages, Black, white
and Latino students run together on
the cross-country team and line up
for a portrait of the varsity football
squad. The children of Southeast
Asian immigrants swing rackets
on the badminton team. The Black
and white members of the cho-
ral club sang the Paul McCartney
and Stevie Wonder hit ‘‘Ebony and
Ivory’’: ‘‘We all know that people
are the same wherever you go.... /
Ebony and ivory/live together in per-
fect harmony.’’
The now-middle-aged alumni
describe a large campus where,
on most days, there was a relative-
ly calm relationship among racial
groups, with few overt tensions.
The Black students hung out at the
media center and the white stu-
dents at the rally stage, though it
wasn’t unheard-of for a kid from
one group to wander over and talk
to a kid in another. Wilson High
‘‘wasn’t Orange County white bread
with the crust cut off ,’’ remembers
Greg Darling, who is white and