To Stay or Not to Stay in L.A.

In a Bible study class at his family’s Moreno Valley church, Timothy Morris, like any new kid in town, was desperately trying to show he belonged.

The teacher had asked the 30-odd youngsters to volunteer for parts in a play about the trial of a persecuted Christian. So Timothy, seated on a carpeted concrete floor with his brown body reclining against a glossy white wall, thrust his left hand high.

Timothy hoped to be selected for a role as one of several surly reporters, and was overlooked. Then he tried for a place among the jurors and, again, was not chosen. Finally he was cast with those who would portray an ugly mob, the play’s least desirable roles requiring the least talent.

But no one felt sorry for Timothy, the new black kid in a mostly white suburban city. It was the luck of the draw. He was treated like everyone else because he was like everyone else in the class--black.

As it turns out, Timothy already has a small part in a very important play--the migration by black families out of Los Angeles. The black exodus from the heart of the nation’s second-largest city has been drawing national attention from scholars trying to determine the reasons for it and its potential consequences. It is also dividing African Americans over where their common interests lie.

Some black city residents worry that the migration, with its middle class character, means that the city of Los Angeles’ black voting strength, volunteer base and purchasing power are being diminished.

“What’s important is that most of the people who move out there are better educated and productive citizens,” said Frank Denkins, the owner of Office Furniture Outlet in Los Angeles. “It does dilute a lot of our political strength.”

Others say the movement is saving some children who otherwise could fall under the influence of gangs or other urban ills. That observation, coming from the mouths of black people, might seem strange to some. But those who voiced it said they were being honest about one of the harsh realities of black-on-black crime. Although the majority of African American children are well-adjusted, there is a widely held perception in the black community that youths in gangs are responsible for most crimes.

If people fleeing the city expect to escape the gang menace entirely, however, they can be disappointed.

The migration “reduced gang activity in Los Angeles and it increased gang activity out there” in the suburbs, said Tim Lester, executive director of the Los Angeles-based African-American Chamber of Commerce.

Whatever the reasons, the shrinking of the city’s black core is causing African Americans outside Los Angeles to discount it as a black cultural hub. In fact, some scholars say, Los Angeles is becoming a place for black people to shun because fewer black people means fewer black neighbors, fewer black votes and less political representation.

“I think it’s a problem, the spread-out nature of the Los Angeles [area] community, particularly for the African American community,” said Jim Johnson, a former UCLA demographer who migrated himself to take a job as a distinguished professor of business, sociology and demography at the University of North Carolina.

Johnson said he moved for a better job with higher pay. But crime and a daily commute on congested streets from Ladera Heights to Westwood made the decision to leave Los Angeles easier, he said.

The migration is “going to hurt now that blacks are losing in absolute terms and relative terms,” he said, referring to political influence and quality of life.

“In many respects, [Los Angeles’] blacks are living off past laurels,” Johnson said, alluding to the election and long reign of the city’s first and only black mayor, Tom Bradley. “They’re saying, ‘We’ve always had power here and we’ll have it in the future,’ when in reality you won’t. It’s unraveling very slowly in Los Angeles.”

Black Population Spreads Outward

And it’s been unraveling slowly for a long time. From 1980 to 1990, the black population of South Los Angeles fell 20%, to 672,000. At the same time, the number of black residents in Riverside and San Bernardino counties doubled to about 170,000 people, according to the 1990 U.S. census.

Nearly 40,000 African American residents settled in those two counties from 1990 to 1996, according to the California Department of Finance, which based its numbers on birth and death records, and migratory projections using census data.

In Moreno Valley, black residents make up 15% of the population this year, triple the percentage of five years ago, according to that city’s 1998 Demographic and Labor Force Survey.

North of Los Angeles, the African American population grew by 2,000 in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties from 1990 to 1996, according to a state projection based on census data. Most of those people settled in cities such as Oxnard and Ventura, and towns such as Buellton near Santa Barbara.

Genethia Hayes, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, said she stopped in Buellton while traveling north one day and was astonished to see a large group of black people in a restaurant. It was a sight the lifelong Los Angeles resident never expected.

“I thought that maybe there was a convention or something,” Hayes said, but there was not. “African Americans are moving there. If you work in Santa Barbara, Buellton is a wonderful place for you to find a house and raise your children.”

When Carrie Allen left her job as principal of Compton High School to become principal of Claremont High School in 1997, the Claremont football coach asked his players to volunteer to help her move.

Several hands went up, none of them black, although the team has a fair share of black players, Allen said. The effort obliterated any doubts she had about leaving her multicultural neighborhood.

“I’m telling you, I’ve been warmly received,” she said. “I haven’t heard the word ‘black’ but twice, and that’s when the media came to interview me. I think you can blossom wherever you’re planted.”

That’s what Timothy Morris is trying to do. Raising his hand for the play at Friendship Fellowship Church of God in Christ was a start.

The 17-year-old was surrounded by black youngsters about his age. The church is pastored by a minister, Art Wooten, who also migrated to Moreno Valley from Los Angeles, vowing never to return after his brother was killed in a drive-by shooting.

Timothy’s teachers in the Bible study class were two black men, one of whom, Roosevelt Sargent, moved from Portland, Ore., to flee a culture of gangs that had seduced him. Now he raps for Jesus and ministers to youngsters, including those involved in gangs in Moreno Valley.

It’s preventive medicine, Sargent and others said, adding that Moreno Valley gangs aren’t nearly as threatening as those in Los Angeles.

“Most of the people in our church are from Los Angeles,” the Christian rap artist said. “A lot of people try to get out of that fast life. They didn’t want their kids to grow up in that cycle.”

One such person is Timothy’s mother, Naomi Bradley, who relocated to Moreno Valley from Inglewood two months ago. But the decision to move an hour east of where she grew up constantly gnaws at her heart.

Not long ago, Bradley shared the opinion of Muhammad Nassardeen, who cautioned black people against moving to places like Moreno Valley.

“They create a brain drain” from the community, said Nassardeen, president of Recycling Black Dollars, an organization dedicated to the support and expansion of black-owned businesses.

Ladera Heights is an example of a community where black residents “made a decision to stay and keep the neighborhood up, and keep the school system up. What we should consider doing is rebuilding where we are. I’m a strong proponent of improving, not moving,” he said.

But Bradley said she can improve the quality of black life in Moreno Valley. She kept her part-time job as an editor for the black-oriented Turning Point magazine by telecommuting, and she started another black publication called Family Times. Every Wednesday after school, she leaves her home office to work with children at her church’s community center.

Bradley said she feels obligated to serve black people. She was born at General Hospital, now County-USC Medical Center, and grew up in South-Central in the 1970s, before it had acquired that name. In her early teens, she said, she became one of the Avalon Criplettes, a group of girls with boyfriends in the Crips gang.

Only now will she admit to having robbed another girl at gunpoint for a leather coat because her boyfriend asked her to. She survived a frontyard gunfight at a party in her home, and said she smoked marijuana daily.

Like Sargent, Bradley said God found her and pulled the devil out--at age 17 in her case. She often visited a community center where activists helped her get into UC Davis, in spite of her grades, on an affirmative action plan.

The activists only asked for one thing in return. “ ‘Don’t do what those others are doing,’ ” Bradley recalled them saying. “ ‘Don’t leave the community.’ ”

It was a guilt trip that cast a spell on her for 17 years, she said. Bradley began to snap out of it when Timothy came home visibly shaken one day and said a kid with a menacing look stopped him on the street and asked, “What [gang] set you in?”

About two years later, Bradley was at home with a second son, then-13-year-old Matthew Sutton, when police and helicopters swarmed their street in Inglewood about 2 a.m. A man had been killed in the middle of the street, and the police were at a nearby house calling through bullhorns for the suspect to “Come out!” Matthew wouldn’t sleep alone for months.

Nearly the same thing happened a year later when Timothy was in the house. Son and mother looked at each other. That was it. She was getting out.

Within a few months, Bradley found an apartment that rented for less than $700 a month near Moreno Valley’s coveted Canyon Springs High School.

Changes in Moreno Valley

Timothy said he likes the school because “I don’t see a lot of fights,” as he did at the Inglewood and Long Beach campuses where he was a student.

“For years I criticized people who moved out,” Bradley said. “Now that I’m in their shoes it’s a different insight. I know in my heart what I’m doing is right.”

Besides, she said, “If we all stay in L.A., who’s going to help the ones in Moreno Valley?”

One thing African American residents helped do recently was elect Bill Batey, the first black mayor of Moreno Valley. “Ten years ago, when I moved here, I saw very few blacks,” he said. But with the black population at 15% and growing, that has clearly changed.

Batey won by appealing to whites, who make up 55% of Moreno Valley residents, and to Latinos, who are 20% of the city’s population.

Myrtle Faye Rumph wishes the best for those who have moved to the Inland Empire but says Los Angeles will always be home.

She has stayed in the city even though she has every reason to flee. Rumph’s son was the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting. Her other son is Friendship Fellowship pastor Wooten, the man who said he would never move back to Los Angeles because of the slaying of his brother.

Devastated by the murder of her son, Rumph decided that healing the anger that took his life was a better option than leaving. She founded the Al Wooten Jr. Heritage Center in Watts with every penny she had.

Her center seeks to steer children from the wrong path. She started an after-school program for different age groups, and it was her idea to stitch three memorial quilts for families of young murder victims. The quilts are adorned with 39 decorative panels in memory of the dead.

Speaking from her broken heart, Rumph said her goal is to embrace neglected youths and tell parents to “be dependable, be there for them, show them a lot of love and attention and keep them going, so they don’t have time to think about drugs and gangs.”

If someone had done what she is trying to do, Al Jr. might still be alive.

“Maybe if my son hadn’t been killed, I would have been one of the ones running,” Rumph said. “I have a different perspective now.”