who got to shape how it lived on in
our historical memory.
In the years that followed, Wilson
would continue to be a place where
students experienced both progress
and violence. In 1993, a 16-year-old
boy who arrived at Wilson to enroll
there was shot near the school
entrance — just two hours before
Dan Lungren, the attorney general of
California, was scheduled to appear
at a campus forum on the dangers of
guns at schools. A 16-year-old Wilson
student was shot and killed after she
attended the school’s homecoming
football game in 2009. These news
stories often hinted at the paradox of
shootings happening at a place oth-
erwise deemed ‘‘the safest school in
Long Beach.’’
How many schools are there
in America, I wonder, with both
champion golf teams (Wilson’s
team has racked up 176 consecutive
league wins dating back to 2004)
and students shot on campus in
their recent history?
The 1992 riots were in many
ways a product of segregation. The
sense of disorder they caused only
accelerated white fl ight. Wilson,
however, has retained a substantial
number of white students: Today
it is 58 percent Latino, 18 percent
white, 12 percent Black and 7 per-
cent Asian.
‘‘That’s where the Mexican
gang members used to hang out,
by those trees,’’ Beatriz Nieves
said as we stood on the old quad,
underneath the clock tower; she
attended Wilson in the late 1980s
and early 1990s and now works at
the school as a mentor and activi-
ties coordinator. She tells students
today how, back in her day, a day
in the years right before the riots,
white, Black and Latino kids kept
separate groups on the quad. ‘‘They
can’t even fathom that this invisible
line was here.’’
Several other Wilson alumni also
returned to the school — as par-
ents. Timica Godbolt has a 17-year-
old son at the school, and Terry
Moseby has two daughters and a
son who have studied there. ‘‘I love
that school so much,’’ Moseby says.
Nguyen visited Wilson recently
with a teenage nephew who is now
a sophomore. Nguyen says that his
years at Wilson were ‘‘the happi-
est time of my life.’’ Greg Darling This page: From Walter Thompson-Hernández. Opposite page, from top: Dave Gatley/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images; Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press.
38 5.1.22
My aunt Elisa — a ectionately
known in our family as Tía Licha
— got o work at Nimitz Middle
School in Huntington Park an
hour before she picked me up from
school in the same neighborhood.
It was Wednesday, April 29, 1992,
her 34th birthday. By the time she
locked the textbook room behind
her and walked to the employee
parking lot that afternoon, there
were dark clouds forming to
our west. ‘‘No rain,’’ Tía Licha
overheard someone shout before
opening their car door. ‘‘No rain.
Probably just a re or something.’’
When we arrived home, Bear,
a retired World War II veteran and
the last white man on our block,
sat on his front porch. A battery-
powered radio played faintly
while he watched us walk from
across the street. After making
brief eye contact with him,
I quickly lowered my head. It had
been a little over a week since
two neighborhood friends and I
threw grapefruits in the direction
of his home. When more Mexican
families began moving into
the City of Perfect Balance, as
Huntington Park was called,
Bear chose hostility. He yelled at
my friends and me for running
in front of his house or for building
our lowrider model cars on the
sidewalk. The adults in the
neighborhood engaged in shouting
matches with him. We kids threw
fruit from our parents’ trees —
lemons, oranges, grapefruit —
at his home, clogging his storm
drains and shattering his windows.
Bear was a vestige of Huntington
Park’s past. Like other cities
in Southeast Los Angeles County,
Huntington Park was created
for white working-class families
in the early 20th century. The
short distance to Downtown LosAngeles, close access to a once
thriving Paci c Electric Railway
system and a ve-block stretch
of shops on Paci c Boulevard made
the area attractive.
The 1965 Watts Riots — also
called the Rebellion, or Uprising,
by some historians in order to
emphasize the riot’s political
dimensions — changed that. When
L.A.P.D. o cers stopped 21-year
old Marquette Frye near his
mother’s house in the Watts
neighborhood on suspicion of
drunken driving on Aug. 11,
the neighborhood was already
a tinderbox. Intense racial
segregation in housing, schooling
and employment kept Black
citizens con ned to neighborhoods
to the west of Alameda Street,
known in those days as the cotton
curtain. Alameda was a de facto
line in the sand that demarcated
the eastern border between Black
Los Angeles and more lucrative
jobs and better schools in cities
like Huntington Park. Wanton
police violence, meanwhile, was
a persistent menace. Rumors that
the police had attacked Frye’s
mother was one insult too many,
and the resulting riots lasted six
days. More than 600 buildings
were damaged; more than 30
people died; the city su ered
roughly $200 million in property
damage. The destruction spurred
white families in Southeast
L.A. County to leave for places
like Orange County and the San
Fernando Valley. When property
values began to decline, newly
arrived Mexican families like
my own pooled their money
together and purchased homes,
forming beachheads for others.
On Aug. 12, my grandfather
Walter Thompson — one of the few
Black sta writers at The OaklandSMOKE IN
THE DISTANCE
—
By Walter
Thompson-Hernández