There's No "I" in Leader | 2

Leadership is not a solo endeavor.

Community organizers from multiple neighborhoods in Los Angeles learned this after two incendiary rebellions in the city’s history: Watts in 1965 and the 1992 uprising. Activists, neighbors, and organizers across the city came together to take stock of the needs of the people. They’d go on to influence  community and civic leaders, setting  the basis for transformative leadership on the ground and at the city level.

Organizer Anthony Thigpenn, UCLA Project Director or Labor Kent Wong, and historian Robin D.G. Kelley join Angela, in There's No "I" in Leader, chapter 2 of Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life.

Title: There’s No ‘I’ In Leader

Episode Outline:
Act 1 | Angela’s story + History
Act 2 | Watts and Rodney King uprisings – turning points
Act 3 | Dreamworks campaign and the institutionalization of Collective Leadership

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Audio here

I arrived in Los Angeles in 1968, newly married, and fresh from organizing in New York – Harlem, specifically. In LA, my husband and I moved to the edge of South Central, then a mostly Black neighborhood. This area of the city had palm trees and lush, tropical foliage. The locals affectionately called it The Jungle.

Sadly, a few years after we moved away, the neighborhood became very low income, suffered deep disinvestment, and the Jungle label took on a more negative connotation.

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But back in '68, I was an activist in a new land, with roots in the Black power movement, anxious to be perceived as revolutionary. I wanted to continue the kind of organizing I had been doing in New York in LA.

I proudly wore my hair in a natural.

I had strong critiques of capitalism and those Black strivers who distanced themselves from the Black working class community. And I definitely looked with suspicion at the blonde afros some Black women wore in LA.

Blonde afros are common these days, and represent an expanded kind of freedom. But at the time, they ruffled my sense of a Black aesthetic: earthy but serious. And were too much of a nod towards white beauty standards. The blonde afro seemed frivolous, superficial. And that was my sense of the city itself.

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After four years, my feelings about LA didn’t change and so my husband and I eventually moved to Oakland, then a hotbed of racial activism and progressive organizing, a place I considered on the cutting edge of societal change.

Today, it's ironic that I view LA as occupying that cutting edge, both for multiracial organizing and for its leadership. So while I still make my home in Oakland, I'm fascinated by what LA can teach us.

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I’m Angela Glover Blackwell and this is Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life. Chapter 2: There’s No “I” in Leader. In this episode, we'll unpack how the Los Angeles rebellions in 1965 and then again in 1992 gave rise to a new kind of multiracial consciousness that inspired new leadership.

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People around the country often dismiss LA as, well La La Land. The Hollywood dream factory. Bastion of liberal elites. Not the “real” America.
Robin: Hollywood shapes our understanding of history. Anyone who came up in the 1980s knows that when you think of L.A. in the 1980s, you think of cops, you think of police, you think of gangsters. You think of South Central and you think of Beverly Hills.

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That was Robin D.G. Kelly, a longtime Angeleno. Robin is a historian at UCLA. I view him as a thought leader on Black social movements and the Black arts.
Robin: And I'm not saying that these things don't have some reality to them, but they're part of the kind of mythmaking which makes it difficult to understand the way in which these histories are connected.
This mythmaking has buried some stories, like LA being a major player in the early days of the oil industry, and elevated others – like everyone’s a star and you can be one too! But LA is really no different from the rest of the nation.

Like the American South or the industrial North and Midwest, the city was shaped by racism, brutality, policies and systems designed to hold people back on the basis of their skin color, their language, their ancestry.

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And yet, through all of that, people have continued to come to LA seeking better circumstances for themselves.
Kent: Los Angeles has been for generations, home to immigrants from all over the world. And from its very beginning, it was a multiracial settlement comprised of Native people — Indigenous people — of Blacks, of Spaniards, of mixed race people.
That’s Kent Wong.

He’s the former Director of the UCLA Labor Center, and is now the Project Director of Labor and Community Partnerships there.

And later in this episode, you’ll hear how he played an important role in bridging the divide between LA’s Asian and Black communities during the 1992 uprising.

Robin is African American and Kent is Chinese-American. Both communities have deep roots in LA. Communities of color have often been pitted against each other. Yet, Kent and Robin describe very similar experiences of growing up in Los Angeles. For example both Asian Americans and African Americans were prevented from living in certain parts of the city.

Kent: My own family, when we moved to Los Angeles back in the 1950s, there were racially restrictive covenants, which my father had to challenge in order to allow my family to move into the neighborhood.

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And even after that, there was a petition signed by many of our white neighbors to keep our family out of this neighborhood. I remember there were parts of Los Angeles County, which were sundown cities, where you knew you did not stay beyond sundown because you would get in trouble. That you may be harassed by the police or worse, beaten by White vigilantes. So this was growing up in Los Angeles. This was the reality that we faced and that we experienced.

Robin moved to the city at the age of 15.

Robin: I came to Los Angeles in 1977 and my memories of coming up and becoming politicized in L.A. in the late seventies, early eighties, was being harassed by the police. You know, that was our reality every single day.

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The levels of racism that we experienced throughout the eighties was extraordinary. And yet the one thing that was really striking about L.A. even then in the eighties, and as we move into the nineties, was how you have a very multiracial, working class community from Koreatown to Latinos who were both Central American as well as Mexican. The Black community spread all over. And for the Black community, much of what they experienced in the middle 20th century and later 20th century was housing segregation, vicious attacks on Black homeowners, racial restrictive covenants, and also job discrimination.

Many people of color in LA have told me similar stories.

Anthony: So I was born and raised in L.A., South Central LA, Watts particularly.

Anthony Thigpenn has been an organizer across Los Angeles for more than 30 years. He spent his earliest years in the Watts neighborhood in South Los Angeles.

Anthony: We moved from Watts, which was at the time, 95% Black, to Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley, which was a multiracial community. And that was at the time a shocking experience for me because I had never really seen White people except for on TV. San Fernando High School, which was predominantly Latino and Black. There were lots of conflicts between African Americans and Latinos –riots all the time.

Anthony attempted to redirect the energies of Black and Latiné students to find common ground.

As head of the Black Student Union he collaborated with leaders of MECHa, a Chicano student unity and empowerment organization. It would become his first experience of multiracial organizing.

Anthony: And we began talking about why are we fighting each other when all these problems we share in common?

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ACT II — Watts, Rodney King and the birth of multiracial consciousness.
Communities of color were facing similar economic and social limitations in LA and those circumstances would reach a boiling point, leading to the two most explosive events in LA in the past 60 years: the Watts rebellion in 1965, and the Rodney King uprising in 1992.
These events became national news where people — including myself — were riveted to the TV and radio for days. But inside LA I’ve come to learn that they became transformative moments.
We’ll start with what happened in 1965. LA police stopped a Black Watts resident driving home. Soon after, a scuffle began between the driver and the officer. A crowd gathered, sentiments swelled, and an outpouring of anger and frustration led to the Watts community demonstrating that they had had enough.

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Archival: It began with police and rioters clashing on a hot Wednesday night. Some believe it could have been stopped right then if law officers moved in in force and sealed off the area. Perhaps so, perhaps not. But within a matter of hours, it was completely out of hand.
Speaker: Geez. They really turned that thing over and now they're going to burn it. It's all the way. There it goes. [cheering]
The Watts rebellion was the manifestation of a community pushed to the edge.
And in 1965, Kent Wong was just a kid.
Kent: I was in elementary school during the Watts Rebellion, and I remember the profound impact that it had on the city and on the nation in exposing the vast economic disparities within Los Angeles. But how it represented the vast racial and economic disparities nationally. This whole notion that in this city of tremendous wealth, that there were large parts of the city that had never experienced those economic opportunities.

Anthony Thigpenn was 13 years old and living in Watts.

Anthony: The Watts riot happened right down in front of my house. The National Guard were situated in our backyard. So these were all experiences. As you know, Angela, and those times were very formative.

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The Watts Rebellion lasted six days. When all was said and done, 34 people were killed, over 1,000 people were injured, 4,000 were arrested, and approximately 400 million, in today’s dollars, in damage had occurred. But despite the destruction, or perhaps because of it, the Watts rebellion triggered a new movement in LA. For the first time, racial groups organized explicitly on a platform of racial pride, claiming ownership of what made them unique.

Robin D.G. Kelley observes that from the rubble, the arts emerged as a potent resource and platform for collective expression.

Robin: The rebellion sparked something that we don't always talk about, an amazing cultural renaissance. In some ways, the city put resources into trying to maintain peace through WattStax, which was, of course, the big celebratory concert, which became a series of concerts. And, you know, we remember that as a kind of moment of black nationalist pride.

Announcer: It is a day of black awareness. It is a day of black people taking care of black people's business.

Today on this program you will hear gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz.

And now one of the most popular groups in the nation, the Staples Singers.
Speaker: Yeah. Raise your fists together and engage in our national Black [unintelligible]. I am. I am. Somebody. I am. Somebody. I may be poor, but I am somebody…
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Robin: Out of the rebellion of 65 we get, the, you know, Watts Towers Arts Center, you get the Mafundi Institute, you get the inner city cultural center and you get movements on the ground to police the police, like the community alert patrol. So it's amazing how these rebellions can produce something quite, you know, positive.

Watts changed the way many in LA organized. It did not, however, lead to a shift in power. Ultimately, the underlying economic and social conditions did not change. So, for many in LA, things got even worse.

Robin: What followed ‘65 was, in fact, the beginnings of the loss of jobs and investment in South Los Angeles and a kind of organized abandonment.

Neoliberal policies that erased corporate regulations and shrank public investment, forces that wallopped communities across the nation, hit LA and its Black communities particularly hard.

Robin: At the very moment when the Black working class is starting to make some progress at places like Firestone, Bethlehem Steel, you know, General Motors, something actually happens in terms of the way in which — I’ll just name it — racial capitalism, then takes advantage of low wage migrant labor to displace Black workers and to deeply exploit migrant labor in the process through sweatshops. And so what ends up happening is you have these solid Black communities in South L.A. end up –people losing their homes, being dispersed, high unemployment, a solid industrial economy replaced by an informal economy, and increasing migration, which then creates a kind of segmented labor force and deepens the ability of capital to both divide this working class and to reduce wages all around. And so I think this is a really important part of the story of L.A.

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In the wake of 1965, discrimination endured as did economic exploitation, and job loss. Coupled with ongoing police violence in communities of color. Those elements acted as the tinder that fueled the fire of 1992.

Kent: So, if you look at some of the underlying causes that led to ‘65 and led to the 1992 civil unrest, they were not that different. The same issues of police brutality, the same issues of lack of job opportunities, lack of economic opportunities, housing discrimination.

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In the spring of 1991, Rodney King, a Black man, was severely beaten by a group of White Los Angeles police officers.

The beating was recorded by a bystander, and four of the officers were charged with assault and excessive force. The trial of the four officers was moved outside of LA. And in the spring of 1992, all four officers were acquitted. The acquittal sparked an uprising that became the most destructive civil disturbance in the 20th century.

Newscaster: There you go. They lit a flag on fire.

Newscaster: But tell me, what exactly, how do you feel about all of this?

Protestor: I feel that it’s a great travesty of justice. I feel that the jury in…

ARCHIVAL FADE UNDER

The devastating 1992 uprising lasted about three days. 63 people were killed. Over 2,000 people were injured, and there was about $1 billion in property damage. Over 12,000 people were arrested, 36% were African American, and 51% were Latiné.

I remember the first time I went back to LA after the uprising. An entire block of businesses in my old neighborhood, including Newberrys, the five and dime store where I got my first credit card, was nothing but flat ashes.

The uprisings fed a growing consciousness of the common struggle shared by oppressed communities in a city, a society, that places the lives of people of color on the lowest rungs of the ladder of human value.

This was clearly demonstrated when the LAPD failed to protect South LA. While police set-up barricades to protect other parts of the city — stores and businesses in South LA, many of them owned by people from the Korean community — were left unprotected. This disregard was a surprise to many Korean people. No one in South LA was deemed worthy of protection by the Los Angeles police.

Korean Store Owner: It was unreal. I mean, LAPD was gone. No -no one was protecting anybody.

Store Owner: We lost trust. Trust in America

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Kent: It was such a indictment of what the role of the police was for. That they set up barricades protecting wealthy communities of Los Angeles. So the role of the police was laid to bear that we are not here to protect you. If you folks want to kill each other, if you folks want to burn each other, that is fine with us. We are here to protect those with wealth and privilege in the city of Los Angeles. So, in many ways that was a wake up call to the Korean community. Who, before then, had a lot of illusions in that police are here to protect us. They're here to support us. No, they're not.

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Immediately, the uprising brought the need for cross-racial solidarity into sharp relief. Two days after the Rodney King verdict, Kent Wong and the other founding members of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance paused their inaugural convention in Washington D.C. to demand justice.

Kent: We were convening the first national convention of Asian-American workers throughout the country. 500 of us gathered in Washington, D.C. on May 1st, 1992, to launch the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. And here, my hometown, Los Angeles, was burning. And we were surrounded by cameras and newspaper people. And they said, ‘Well, why are you here? Why are you marching on the Justice Department?’ And we said, ‘We are marching for justice for Rodney King.’

Archival: chanting: When do we want it? Now. What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!

Newcaster: APALA demonstrated its commitment in Washington by marching to the justice department —

Kent: And we said we want a federal civil rights prosecution of the cops who were involved in the beating of Rodney King. We want the resignation of Police Chief Daryl Gates, and we want to call out the causes for what's happening in Los Angeles is due to racial and economic injustice that is being perpetrated by the U.S. government.

Daryl Gates was the police chief at the time. He was criticized both for his failure to condemn the beatings and for lack of leadership.

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Responding to community pressure, there was subsequently a civil rights prosecution, and two officers went to jail.

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Cross-racial solidarity was only the first step. Organizers realized the importance of building campaigns and coalitions across racial lines to make real change.

During this time, Anthony Thigpenn and other community members decided to form a grassroots organization called AGENDA.

Anthony: But very rapidly, we realized well, our neighbors are Latino and they're suffering the same conditions and so we cannot build the power we need to win to change our conditions unless it's everybody in this community, and beyond this community, and so very rapidly AGENDA became a multiracial, Black, Latino grassroots organization trying to build power to change conditions in Los Angeles.

Part of our analysis of the rebellion was there wasn't many vehicles for people to organize and have their voices be heard to make changes. And so in the absence of those vehicles, people just acted out and they were violent and they were angry.

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Out of 1992 emerged a number of different organizations that tried to build alliances across Black, Latine, and Asian communities. This set a precedent for ongoing political organizing in the city.
Act III
Anthony Thigpenn’s work as a leader and organizer has been key.
He has led successful field campaigns for former LA Mayor Antonio Villaragosa and current Mayor Karen Bass when she was running for a congressional seat. Anthony is president of California Calls, an alliance of 31 community-based organizations. They engage, educate and motivate new and infrequent voters from communities of color and working class neighborhoods.

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He has been intentional and successful at building relationships and organizing campaigns across racial lines to achieve big wins for LA’s diverse communities.
A great example is his first major campaign.
Anthony: So our first campaign was a DreamWorks campaign
Archival: [Dreamworks’ sonic ID]
Dreamworks Studios was co-founded by Hollywood heavyweights: Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. It’s given us well-known films like Cast Away and A Beautiful Mind.
Anthony: Well Dreamworks Studio, they wanted to build a new studio in a part of L.A. They wanted $90 million in subsidies from the city of LA to do that. And so we did a campaign based on analysis that says, well, if you're going to get public money for this, then you –there ought to be a public good. And a public good ought to be opening up an industry that’s a dynamic industry in Los Angeles to poor people, to people of color, to women who will not have access to that.
When the campaign started the film and TV business was seriously lacking in diversity, across race, gender, and pay equity, even more so than today.
Anthony: One of the thriving industries in L.A. was the entertainment industry. We did an analysis and well, they're very little Latinos and Black people in that entertainment industry. It’s very White. Your brother, your cousin, your son got the jobs, right?
At the time, Anthony was leading an effort called Metro Alliance, which included groups throughout LA such as the Filipino Workers Center, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, and the American Civil Liberties Union, to name a few.
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Hollywood was getting tax benefits at the expense of local communities. Metro Alliance was insisting that Dreamworks, and the whole Hollywood industry, provide what had not been realized before in LA’s history – community benefits in the form of jobs and other economic investments.
A win for Metro Alliance seemed unlikely. It was a David and Goliath battle.
Anthony: We won that campaign. Something called Workplace Hollywood was created, a new organization that trained African Americans and Latinos, and placed them in jobs in the entertainment industry.
Millions were allotted for the workforce development fund known as Workplace Hollywood.
Anthony: The Dreamworks campaign that we did, it was for jobs not just for those in South LA, but for East LA as well, and folks in the San Fernando Valley. So having a policy, a campaign that expanded the pie, so everyone is included. Because we could have just done it for south L.A.
I think Anthony has been such a force because of the way he approaches leadership. He’s not transactional or the kind of leader who focuses on self-interest or the needs of an exclusive group. He makes a conscious effort to build relationships and work for change and transformative benefits.

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Anthony: I guess the main thing was intentionality. You know, we recognize that this is something that needed to happen. It was going to take time, but it doesn't happen automatically. You can't just bring a bunch of folks into the room and think they're going to get along and ‘okay, yeah, you're my neighbor, so we should work together’. It took intentionally having people understand each other, building relationships to one another was key to that, um, to create an ongoing multiracial organization.
This style of leadership, this generosity, has become a template for organizing in L.A. And the Dreamworks win became a model for community benefits agreements: direct negotiations between the communities experiencing the impact of development and the corporations reaping the benefit.
We saw these agreements in the expansion of the LA International Airport and the development of the Staples Center, now Crypto.com Arena.
Workplace Hollywood ensured that the financial gains to developers and their investors actually benefited a wider segment of the community. The Dreamworks project is a concrete example of the collective benefits that can occur when leadership is supported by really great organizing.
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Just as the summer of 2020 marked a racial reckoning for the nation, the ‘65 and ‘92 uprisings in LA were a flashpoint for the development of multiracial consciousness.

A consciousness that embraced racial pride, and cultural expression, and translated these into cross-racial solidarity, multiracial coalitions, and organizing for real change.

A movement for transformative change emerged. This movement recognized the need to develop greater levels of engagement, analysis, and sophistication in support of demands.

And this process created leaders, like Anthony, who are intentional about power. Leaders who are using power for the public good, expanding the pie so that everyone benefits. I see this spirit of generosity in a growing cohort of multiracial leaders in LA, and it’s exciting.

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Of course, challenges remain. People of color rising to positions of power does not guarantee generous, principled leadership, nor a rejection of internal competition. This reality was painfully surfaced again and again in LA.

It is heartening, though, to see so many leaders in LA grappling with these dilemmas.

Despite challenges, I see the city’s movement expanding and gaining greater power, as leaders remain guided by a deep commitment to cross-racial solidarity and human flourishing.

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In our next chapter: THE “WE” IN POWER

Manuel: It was a really interesting place to grow up, because it was a place that was very working class. Had Latino folks, White folks, some Black folks. And it was a place of mixing, a place of hope, but fundamentally a place of working class dreams.

Denise: It turned into about a two and a half year battle. I was essentially muzzled and was told not to have the public hearing with the Public Works department.

Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life is a podcast created by PolicyLink in partnership with Pineapple Street Studios.
We are grateful for the PolicyLink funders whose support allows us to produce this show.
For a transcript of the episodes and for more resources visit PolicyLink dot org
The team at PolicyLink is Perfecta Oxholm, Fran Smith, Glenda Johnson, Josh Kirchenbaum, Ferchil Ramos, Vanice Dunn, Montana Rane, and Loren Madden. Dr. David Kyuman Kim. Special thanks to PolicyLink CEO Michael McAfee.
This episode was produced by Natalie Peart with support from Producers Yinka Rickford-Anguin [Anne-gwin] and Alexis Moore.
Kamilah [Ka -ME-la] Kashanie is our Managing Producer.
Our Editor is Darby Maloney.
Fact checking by Will Tavlin.
Our Senior Audio Engineer and Mixer is Pedro Alvira.
Our Assistant Audio Engineers are Sharon Bardales [bar-DALLAS] and Jade Brooks, who also provided scoring assistance.
Theme song by Donwill.
And our Music is from Epidemic Sound.
Special thanks to Leila Day, Grace Cohen-Chen and Gabe Kawugule [ka-WOO-ga-lay ].
Our Head of Sound & Engineering is Raj Makhija [MAK-e-jah].
Je-Anne Berry is our Executive Producer.
I'm your host, Angela Glover Blackwell.
I urge everyone will make sure they’re registered and have a plan to vote. In a multiracial democracy, everyone’s vote matters.