1. Transcript
1.1. Session 1 (January 22, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- I'm interviewing Dr. Sid Thompson on January 22--
-
Thompson
- Mr. Sid Thompson.
-
Stevenson
- Mr. Sid Thompson, on January 22 [2009]. First I'd like to know when and
where you were born, something about your parents and grandparents.
-
Thompson
- Born here in Los Angeles in 1931, and born at the, like many folks, the
L.A. County General Hospital. I later on asked my mom how she could do
that to me after I saw it as an adult. She said in those days it was
there or maybe the street or home. You didn't have a lot of options.
Anyway, I was born there and went through babyhood and all that, infancy
here, but at the age of about four I was taken--my parents are from the
West Indies. They're from the Grenadines, way down near Grenada, and I
was born here but taken back there, and my older brother [George Irwin],
who's two years older than I, we went back to the West Indies in
approximately 1935, and the only way you went in those days was by ship,
no planes. We went by ship from Los Angeles, down through the [Panama]
Canal all the way to Trinidad and then by sailboat, because that's how
you did it down there. There were no engines in those boats--sail,
period, and we sailed to my mom and dad's little island.I lived there for about two or three years. I went to school there, began
kindergarten there. It was the British system, and the British system
was very, very strict. They believed in spare the rod and spoil the
child, so in kindergarten my introduction to kindergarten was missing
two problems out of five on a math exam, which I thought was pretty
good. They had carrying and all--like I said, the British system. And
the headmaster, who was my uncle [Jack]--we went to school underneath
the main school, in the sand--beach is about fifty yards away, and I got
one cane for every one I missed. So I got two lashings, but after the
first I decided that that was not for me, that I really didn't
appreciate that. So there were pillars that went up to the upper level,
and I shinnied up like a koala bear up the pole, and they called you
Master Thompson, so it was, "Master Thompson, come down." "No, Uncle
Jack, I'm not." But no, you couldn't call him Uncle Jack, that was
later. He was Schoolmaster Jack. "No, sir, I have tasted that and I
don't want the next one."So I'm hanging up there, but unfortunately my aunt [Irma], who we lived
with, and my grandmother [Cleopatra], she was in charge of the secondary
school. So they brought my good Aunt Irma down, and I remember very
distinctly, "Sidney, come down." Now, I'd been on the island for two
days, so I really didn't know anybody, neither my brother or I, but I
knew enough about my Aunt Irma that I thought I'd better go down. So I
went down and got the second one, went home, and on this little island,
which is six miles long and about a mile and a half wide, every evening
the Anglican priest would go door-to-door and say goodnight to all the
families. You had kerosene lamps, no electricity, and he did that, the
Anglican priest, with the schoolmaster, and that night it was
Schoolmaster Jack, my uncle, who was going with him.And my mother--they came up to the door. They'd walked the whole island
almost, and my mother informed me that I had to kiss him goodnight. And
I don't know why I picked that particular time to revolt, but I said,
"No." I felt I'd been through enough. Long story short, I kissed him
goodnight, I got some more whacks, and it was my brother, older brother,
who that night said to me, "Look, idiot. You want to live, or do you
want to die?" [laughs] I'll never forget the lesson. "So listen, you'd
better bend or you aren't going to make it." And I decided that he was
definitely correct, and so from there on I was a model student, and when
I was told to kiss somebody goodnight, I kissed them goodnight, because
the wrath of Mom was not pleasant.We stayed there for about three years, and then we went from there to
British Guiana. What is now Guyana was British Guiana, and the reason
for that is that we, my and my brother being born here, were U.S.
citizens. My father was naturalized, but my mother was a British
subject. By this point, Dad thought he could open up a radio business
down there, but then found out there were only two radios in all of the
Caribbean and maybe South America for that matter, so he realized that
he was not going to make a living doing that. So he had to get back to
the States, but they had the quota system and my mother was a British
subject, and we were being put off, put off, put off because of that.
And it was an aunt who was here who was one tough lady who I'm sure
bugged immigration so much that they just figured it's easier to let
them back in.So after I went to school for another two years [it was actually only one
year] in British Guiana, then we came back here, and I finished
elementary school here, and just as a memory and as something as an
educator I would never do, because I went to school in that system I
read easily. I picked up reading. They thought I was a genius, which I
was not, but they kept skipping me, so I skipped two years between there
and junior high, and I was a little guy. I loved sports but I couldn't
play because of size, and skipping me just socially put me--I graduated
from high school when I was sixteen and a month, from Belmont High
School here in the city, and by this point I wanted to go to sea in the
worst way, but Dad said I had to get a degree to do it. It was a real
problem to go to Annapolis. They weren't taking folks that looked like
us, and I finally found the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point,
a small academy that licensed you in the U.S. Merchant Marine, which are
the tankers, passenger ships, freighters, as an officer, and then I was
also commissioned in the Navy, which created a lot of problems.But I'm jumping ahead, because I went with that bent. I came back here, I
finished elementary at Dayton Heights here in the city. I went to Virgil
then Junior High [School] and then to Belmont High School, which was a
real interesting period for me, because the school was racially mixed
and, in fact, had a number of Jewish immigrants, kids who had escaped
Nazi Germany, and got to know a lot of them, also a small African
American population. We weren't large, but it was pretty close, because
you know how that worked in those days, especially around adolescence.
So I went to school there and learned an awful lot about different parts
of the world, different cultures. I used some Yiddish with that part,
and then with the African American kids I learned a lot about--because
my folks were not from this country, similar experiences, but not from
this country. I met kids from New Orleans and from other parts of where
black population tended to be in the South as well as some from Chicago
and Detroit, so it was kind of a broad brush that I learned in those
days about how the country was.Let me give you an experience. I had been raised, for all intents and
purposes after being a baby, I was raised down in the West Indies at the
early part of my life. The British, with their colonial system it was
very strict. The white Brits, Englishmen, controlled, but they did allow
through education for civil servants and so on to come up in the
civil-service system, so it was to the advantage of many of African
descent people to gain as much education as they could. And, in fact, my
dad, who went to school down there completely, ultimately ended up as a
school principal very young, and by the way they were paid on the basis
of how well the kids did in achievement. And you could be paid in
chickens, or you could be paid in the British pound, so it was a lot of
pressure to have the kids achieve, which I think meant that that
corporal-punishment thing went on, because that was the quickest way to
get the kids' attention, sadly, but it was.But he had done that, and then when I came back to this country in school
I had learned, "I pledge allegiance to the flag [hand outstretched],"
and, of course, they got rid of that, because that looked too much like
that, so we were doing it like this. And silly me, I took that to heart.
Man, this is great, I pledge allegiance--because under the Brits I had
learned "God Save the King" and I had learned "Britannia Rules the
Waves" and all these things. Then coming back as a young, young kid, I
was a little torn between all these things I pledged allegiance to, but
I accepted I was a U.S. citizen of the United States, and I pledged
allegiance, remembering that this is the period before World War II.
[Adolf] Hitler is just coming along now, and Dad insisted on us reading
the newspaper and being up on all of that stuff, so I was reading about
these things and appreciating, "with liberty and justice" and all that.In about 1942 or '43, probably '42, my brother, who at this point is,
let's see, about fourteen, and I'm about twelve, and at that time I was
in middle school at Virgil, my aunt--I had an aunt, the aunt that got us
back here, ended up with her job going to New York, and we had a lot of
relatives there. A lot of West Indians had come up out of those islands
and ended up on the East Coast. Dad came here because he couldn't stand
the cold. But we took a trip, my brother and I, on a Greyhound Bus
across the country, and we saw an awful lot of this country in the week.
It was about a week by the time you got off the bus. There was no air
conditioning, by the way. You burned up. But I remember we left in the
early evening and we went to Bakersfield. No, not Bakersfield, San
Bernardino. We went through San Bernardino. I saw signs that said, "No
dogs, no Mexicans, no blacks." And I remember thinking, wow, what's that
all about? And I really didn't quite get it, although we sure talked
about it in the house and so on, but it just was not an experience I had
had, as some of my friends, African American friends, had had in the
South, of course, and even parts of the Midwest.
-
Stevenson
- Exactly. Right.
-
Thompson
- Well, we landed in Las Vegas at five o'clock in the morning, and my
brother and I went to get breakfast and went into this little
quick-serve place. We were sitting at the counter, and the girl said, "I
can't serve you." Dumb us, we thought that meant that we were sitting in
the wrong place, that they weren't feeding anybody sitting at the
counter, although there were people sitting there. And we said, "Okay.
So where do you want us to sit?" And she said, "I said, I cannot serve
you." About that time a deputy sheriff, who to me looked like six-eight,
but a big man, definitely, with the gun, a baton, the whole nine yards,
the uniform, the size, and he came down and said, "Look. Get your oom
out of here, or I'm going to be pleased to do it for you." And he did
this to a kid who had always respected the law. We had a close friend
who was a police officer in Los Angeles, and I respected police
officers. But I looked at this monster, and my brother said, "We're out
of here," said, "Let's go." And by the way, he was the one with the real
temper, but he was the eldest, so I think he figured he had to keep
everything under control. So he got us out of there.
-
Thompson
- We couldn't find a place to eat until we ran into an African American guy
who was cleaning the front of a store, and we said, "Hey, where can we
go get something to eat?" He said, "Oh, no problem." He said, "Go around
the corner and there's a little shop halfway down the block on the left.
Go in there. You can get bacon and eggs or whatever you want." I said,
"Good." And he said, "By the way, don't worry about what she looks like.
She's an older white woman from Alabama, but she's real cool." So we
went down and went in, and sure enough she said, "Where are you boys
from?" We told her and she said, "So who got you here?" So we told her
our story, what happened, and she said--I'll never forget this old lady
saying, "You know, guys, that's the way it is in this world. We've got
some people that thrive on that sort of thing, because they themselves
don't know how to deal with themselves, so they take it out on you and
everybody else. Always remember that." She says, "There still are some
good people." It was a lesson I've always kept in the back of my mind,
white woman, Alabama, and she fed us.But that did not change what developed in me a strong dislike for the
country, and the reason was as we went across the country I could never
be sure that that wasn't going to happen again, and indeed it did in
Indiana. A little more subtle, but the same thing, so that by the time I
got to New York I was kind of a bitter kid, but I kept a lot of stuff
in. I didn't talk about it, although I'm sure my aunt would have dealt
with it, too. But whenever people, like they made that thing about
Michelle [LaVaughn Robinson] Obama and what she said about the country,
and they made this big deal about it, and I had some of my acquaintances
here at UCLA, and I said, "Hey, guys, let me do you like an old teacher.
Put your pencils down and listen to me." And I told them this story, and
I said, "You know something? If I could have led a Russian Air Force
attack group to bomb Las Vegas, I would have done it." I said, "Young,
foolish, dumb, but disillusioned." I said, "And you folks don't
understand that. That hurts. And you can say, 'I understand.' It's like
the death of a mother. You can say you understand, but till you
experience it, it's not the same." And I said, "That's something that
stayed with me clear until I went to the Academy and did all those
things," which I'll talk about in a bit.But when I went overseas in the Navy, the Korean War, they told me to
activate my commission in the Navy or I'd be a private in the Army, so,
okay, I think I'd better take the commission. So I did, and so we were
in Japan. We were in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Philippines, went all
over. I'll never forget being refused service in a teahouse in Tokyo,
being pushed out the door. "No, not you." And I begin to understand that
this is--and I had been raised in a Japanese community here, which was a
small community up in the L.A. area, in the central area, what they
called East Hollywood near L.A. City College, okay? Vermont [Avenue],
Melrose [Avenue], Virgil [Avenue], right in there was a Japanese
enclave. They're people I know still to this day, their kids. And I
remember that when we went to school, the darker Japanese had a problem,
and they had terms for them. And I remember thinking, "That's not right.
Not when I look at me. He's lighter than I am." But I realized that this
stuff is shot through society.And when I came back and I realized finally, being now twenty, twenty-one
years old, you've got to understand something, that this is people we're
dealing with, not a country, a mission, and a dream and all. These are
people, and they're going to do some hateful things, and they're going
to do some beautiful things. And it changed my attitude towards the
country. I began to understand how people are. And I told them, I said,
"But never before that or since that have I felt more American than when
this happened with Barack [Hussein Obama]." I said, "But you've got to
understand, and you have to have been through it. And I went through
nothing compared to my little buddies that came out of New Orleans,
Shreveport [Louisiana], Biloxi [Mississippi], and telling you stories
about going to school down there and walking on the sidewalk and having
to get off the sidewalk and all that stuff we know happened." And I
said, "So it took a little doing to get my bearings. But don't ever
forget that, because you didn't live it." They were quiet. And they're
good guys, they really are, and you know, they're victims of their skin,
too. I said, "None of us selected this."
-
Stevenson
- Right. Okay, I have some follow ups.
-
Thompson
- I'll pause.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Could you tell me something about your mother and her occupation?
-
Thompson
- That's good, too. My mom was the product of a Scot--down in those
islands, as in the South also, but down in those islands there was a
complete mixture of people and their attitudes towards families. Many of
the men way back--the British got rid of slavery way back in 1820, '15,
way back there, well before us, of course. A slave ship on its way to
Barbados crashed in a storm on--there's Bequia [Island], my little
island I call it, and six miles away is St. Vincent, bigger, the size of
Catalina. My dad was born there actually. Well, when the ship crashed,
the slaves said, "Hey, we're out of here," and they ran ashore, and they
ran into the Carib Indians. The Carib Indians weren't indigenous,
because they had displaced the Arawak Indians, but it was an Indian
population that came from South America, because South America is
just--there's forty miles between Trinidad and South America, that's how
close. So they went by canoe. The Caribs were very warlike. These
African slaves never ended up on the plantation or anything in Barbados,
which is where they were going; ended up intermarrying, intermixing with
these Carib Indians.So I have relatives who are part Carib Indian and African American. But
also the whites who came over there, as we know, lived some rather
interesting lives. And this gets to my mother. But her father was a
Scot, from Scotland. He was over there. They were all entrepreneurs,
looking for a quick buck and all that. I don't know if he ever married
my grandmother, but they were a pair. My mother is a product of that,
but she came out very fair, with straight hair and all that. Daddy, he
read a lot. He knew he was Ibo from his Daddy. His mom was Carib Indian
and African American, so he had a mix, but if you looked at Dad, he was
obviously more black than Mom, both in appearance and features and
everything. So they were married, but Mom never--I mean, they didn't
know what to put. When I was born, on my birth certificate for her it
says Ethiopian. Now, don't ask me why, but it does, it says Ethiopian.
It's on my birth certificate. I can bring it in and show it to you,
Ethiopian. Why? The nurse didn't know what to call her, so she said,
"Oh, well, she must be Ethiopian." That sounded exotic, I think, that's
the reason, because they want to believe, oh, she's different.Anyway, long story short, Mom was very fair, Dad was dark. We came out
all kinds of mix in between. I have a brother, younger brother, happens
to be a doctor. He's the one two down from me, and he looks Middle East.
He really does. He could be a Middle Easterner, both hair, features,
everything. The brother right behind me, older than he, is my brother
Cecil [Thompson]. He's an economist, and Cecil is dark. I learned an
awful lot again about people, because--and the brother ahead of me,
Irwin [Thompson], who was regular Navy and retired, knew Jim, he is
dark, African American hair, African American features. So we look like
all kinds of stuff just by accident. But we played cricket, the British
game, because Dad came up from the islands and he played cricket, so
from the age of five down there, up here until I was about thirty-five,
we played cricket here in Los Angeles, with Basil Rathbone, C. Aubry
Smith, Errol [Leslie Thomson] Flynn and all these Brits.It was real interesting the way they dealt with my mother and my father,
but they never separated them, because they refused to be--they were
husband and wife, and that was period. But you could see the wonderment
in--what is--but a lot of them, being Brits, knew a lot about the
colonies and a lot about the mixtures and what went on down there. She
finished school here. That aunt that got us back brought her here when
she was still young, prevailed on her mother, and she finished high
school in Chicago. She went on briefly, but married my father, who had
come up and was a West Indian and knew my aunt and got to know Mom, and
Mom was a pretty lady, so I guess he figured, well, what the heck. So he
did, and he married her, and she had four boys, and during the whole
time--she's worked when she was younger. But typically in those days you
worked in service and that kind of stuff. That's what she did, until she
got really fed up with it, and I remember the day she came home and
said, "I just can't do this anymore. I'm not going to take that off of
some of these people. I don't care if they're white, black, blue, or
pink, or if they have a million dollars. I don't care."Dad--can I lump them together?
-
Stevenson
- Sure.
-
Thompson
- Dad, I mentioned, was a principal, teacher-principal in the West Indies.
He came here and he taught school in Chicago on the South Side. He
contracted pneumonia and realized--he was told by the doctor, "Listen.
You'd better get out of this climate or you're going to die. You're just
not ready for this." So that's why he came out here. He came out here
and he couldn't do a thing. This was the thirties, and the best he could
do was the WPA [Works Progress Administration]. He had a degree from the
University of Cambridge, West Indies, and he had all that to back him
up, wrote poetry, wrote stories, but none of that mattered in those
days. He worked in the WPA. He was a slightly built man, not big at all,
and he was just killing himself working. However, clear from 1929 he had
an abiding interest in radio, which had just begun. It had just been
invented and he was in on the ground floor.On his own, he'd get an old radio and worked on it, and he had a real
knack for it, and when we came back from the West Indies they hired him
up in Hollywood at one of the radio stores. They had these radio-repair
places, a lot of them. You don't see them anymore, you buy a new one.
But he did that, and Alva, my mother [Cecily] had by this point gotten
fed up with working in service. She was a mother, a housewife, and she
concentrated on us and keeping Dad going, because he managed to get on
teaching adult school, electronics. He met [James] Jim Taylor at
Jefferson High School, teaching adult school, and I remember he always
mentioned Jim.Because of this radio ability, when the war started, [The] Lockheed
[Corporation] began hiring people who had knowledge of radio repair. He
realized that since he'd been on the ground floor--and this was an
exceptional guy. I mean, he was a literature major and yet he ended up
in engineering. And I said, "You never had a course in engineering in
your life." I said, "As far as I know, you had algebra and geometry,
period." "Yeah." "Well, how do you do it?" He says, "I don't know." I
could see him thinking, and he said, "Well, I develop what I need." And
he did, so that he went from teaching adult school and during the day
five days a week working at Lockheed, radio installation and repair in
the planes, and then along comes radar, and he took to that like a duck
to water, no training, and they made him a radar engineer.I remember coming home from school one day and he was there grinning all
over himself. "What's going on, Dad?" "You're looking at an A engineer."
"What?" And so the fortunes of the family changed radically. And Mom, in
other words, was a housewife. It was Mom who we met. He would come home
from Lockheed. Sometimes--imagine, we live in Hollywood. He would drive
to Palmdale every day to flight test the equipment in planes. They'd
flight test the plane, and he was in the plane doing all of this radio
stuff and radar then. Then he'd come home on the fly. He would have his
dinner, jump in his car and go down to Jeff [Jefferson High School], and
he would teach adult school till ten at night, five nights a week.He told us once, because we talked to him sometimes when he was home on
holiday or something, and we'd talk with him, or when we were playing
cricket it was good, because we could talk to him. He said, "I've been
so dirt poor that I'm never going to be poor again, if I have to work
myself to death." And we realized the commitment he had made, and he was
teaching adult school every night and going to Lockheed, flying
sometimes every day. It just amazed me. And Mom--he told my mother,
"Okay. You don't like doing that, and you don't want to do anything.
Right now you want to be a mother-housewife, and we need you with the
boys." There were four boys. By the way, she adopted a baby sister,
because I don't want to leave that out, because she didn't want to have
any more boys. And she wrote me a letter--I'm at the academy now, and
she wrote me a letter and said, "I'm adopting a baby girl." That's my
sister, Lynn Thompson, who is the head of human relations [Director of
Employee Relations] here at UCLA. That's my baby sister. She was an
attorney and she applied for the job and got the job and so on.But the background then was Mom, housewife, Dad, gone, to make it, to try
to make it, and clear through the war and even after the war through the
Korean War he was still--he worked for Lockheed up until he was seventy.
The last time he flew to Hawaii from here in a plane flight testing
radar against submarines, he was about seventy-two. But he was a strong
smoker, Camels, all those island people and the Brits. The British--we'd
go out to cricket, everybody was smoking. I never did, my brother never
did. We were in athletics at one place or another, and we just didn't do
that. But it eventually killed him, because he contracted emphysema
seriously in the seventies, early seventies, and he passed in the early
seventies. Mom lived to ninety-three, but he went--Camels did him in.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I have a couple of follow ups. One, going back to the time that you
were going to school in the Caribbean, what were your interactions like
with your classmates if you can remember, you being a transplant from
the U.S.?
-
Thompson
- They all knew--I had a couple of ins. And we were all little, by the way,
so at school it was not an issue. Kindergarten, what do they know? At
that age you look around, oh, well, do whatever they tell you to do,
especially there--shut up. But I had relatives all over those islands.
My granny, who I should mention, Grandma Clee, Cleopatra, a little thing
at four-foot-ten, but about that wide, too, she was the island nurse for
probably--she died at 102 or something. And I remember, of course, from
when we were down there, and she came up here a couple of times, up to a
few years ago, everybody over fifty had been delivered by her. She was
the midwife on all births on Bequia Island. They knew her, their
grandparents knew her, their mother and daddy knew her, she was just
known. So the minute--I had not been back to that island for about
forty-five years, between school and working, and finally I said, "I'm
going back." And when I went back and I landed there--we were four boys
now, although they only knew two of us, my older brother and me, because
the other two were here, born here and raised here, but they would all
say--the minute I got off the boat--I had friends with me who traveled
with us. We flew down and took a ferry over to Bequia. When I got off
that boat in Bequia it was twelve midnight, because it was Carnival in
St. Vincent, and the boat wasn't leaving till it was time to go home.
They danced there, they danced on the boat with no lights. I'll never
forget. And when they got off at Bequia, I hadn't talked to anybody
particularly, just casual, but when I got off we went to the hotel where
we were supposed to be, and it was all locked up.We didn't know what we were going to do. I had my wife, a friend, a close
friend and his wife, so there were the two of us, the close friend and
his wife and their sister, his sister-in-law, no, his sister, his sister
Amy. She worked here. We were going to sleep on the park-bench tables in
the patio of the Hotel Frangipani. It was locked up, and there were dogs
all over the darn place, and we didn't know any of them and they didn't
know us, and I said, "We're going to get bitten if we go fooling
around." So we just got back--and then this older lady came walking by,
and she spoke with that soft West Indian, and she said, "Excuse me?
Y'all here for something?" "Yes, ma'am, we're here because--." "Oh." She
goes like this, "Oh, Sid Thompson." And I went, "Yeah, guilty." She
says, "Please, Grandson--." "Yes." She says, "We knew you were coming."
She said, "Don't worry. It's an Englishwoman." She says, "I'll wake her
up." So she went, and now they have phones. We went over and she called
her, and she came and opened up the hotel and brought us in.But I'm saying that to illustrate, I could never go anywhere that they
didn't know who I was, simply because of my Grandma Clee, who gave birth
to all of them, and they talk about her like a legend. She finally
passed away at the bigger island, St. Vincent, because she had to go
over there for medical--my Aunt Irma, the one that told me, "Come down,"
in the school, my mother's sister, half-sister, she had her come up and
stay at the bigger island, because there was better medical
availability, but she passed away--age. But she was known by both
islands. So my mom, they knew all about her, where she'd been in the
States and all that, and they still remembered my dad.I was in a little port town in Barbados when I was in the Merchant Marine
Academy. They sent us to sea for a year as officer trainees, and darn if
the boat didn't land in Barbados. Bequia is just a hundred miles from
there, but I couldn't get there, ship was moving. So I went over on the
dock and I talked to everybody, and I went down and I was talking. Some
of them said, "There's a couple of boats from Bequia." I said, "Where?"
"Over there." So I said, "Okay." So I went over. Well, it was Conrad
Mitchell was the captain. Conrad Mitchell was a Mitchell, and the
Mitchells were famous. My mother was very close to the Mitchells and my
aunt and my grandmother. I mention that because, very frankly, they had
been drinking rum, they were feeling no strain, but they were happy
people. They weren't prone to fighting and carrying on when they got too
much to drink, but they did imbibe. I wasn't drinking, so I was sober,
sitting there listening while they recounted tales of the islands and
all that. In fact, I went back to the ship, which was anchored out in
the main harbor, and I wrote a letter to my grandmother, and I took it
back and gave it to one of them to give to her.Conrad Mitchell is talking. It's now midnight, one in the morning, and
he's still talking about the islands and this and that, and he had a
huge family, so he could talk about his family forever. But halfway
through he says, "Sid." I said, "Yes, Conrad." He says, [imitates
accent] "Schoolmaster Thompson." I said, "My father." "The man whipped
me every day for a week until I decided to study, and he told me he
would kill me first, that I was going to be somebody or else." But he
said, "But he tore me up." He said, "Man, he didn't brook no nonsense."
I said, "Conrad, that's my father now, remember that. That's not me,
that's him." He says, "Oh, no, no. When you go back to the States, tell
him Conrad sends his love and respect." He says, "I wouldn't have read,
I wouldn't have done anything, because my older brothers didn't, and I
was going the same way." But he said, "He told me he'd kill me first."
[laughs]Well, it's that kind of close connection on those islands that even
exists today, and although the populations have gone up, there's an
influx of a lot of Europeans, Germans going down there and buying up
property, so you see these housing developments on this little, tiny
island in some of the nicest spots where we used to go just to see
coconut trees and a couple of sheep and a cow wandering around. That was
it. Now it's houses, so there's a lot of stuff happening. But all of
that to tell you that they kept tabs. They knew people from way, way
back, great-this-and-that and grand-this-and-that, and they just knew
it. And they would tell you stories, and you never knew if you were
getting all the facts, because this is by oral, so you never know how
much is written and how much is not. It's a fascinating part of the
world.My father, he told us, "I like oceans and sea." By the way, none of the
other ones liked it, because they all got seasick. I didn't. For some
reason I never got seasick in my life, so the ocean was always something
that I've done. I have a boat now that I keep, a little sailboat up
north up in Oxnard. But, what was I saying? I lost it. Darn it, it was
something I wanted to--it'll come back to me. But the fact is that all
of this is recorded. Oh, I know what I was going to tell you. There's an
island historian, graduate, master's degree in literature and history
and all that, from Cambridge in England. They didn't allow you in the
early days, my dad's day, to go to Oxford or any of those, although
there were certainly African-descent folks who would have qualified. But
they did decide to open what they called a bona fide adjunct, auxiliary
to Cambridge in Jamaica. Jamaica now has its own university, but it was
British originally, and that's where Dad went, and he got his degree
from there, and a lot of the people that have made it in civil service,
which as I said, the Brits allowed you to do, were from there. And you
had to get--I mean, they pushed an education. I've always said, "Well,
the Brits did one thing right." Where this country was whipping the
slaves not to read, they were whipping them if they didn't read, so this
whole switch, a different environment.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I have a question. In terms of your father and his experiences in
being able to get these different positions with Lockheed, do you think
his experience was different, that he maybe got these opportunities
because of the different trajectory of his education or being a
naturalized citizen from the Caribbean? Do you think there was any
effect?
-
Thompson
- Excellent question, because sometimes that does play into it. Let me
digress this one second, then I'm coming back, and I'll remember to come
back to this one. But Barack Obama. The fact that his father directly
African makes a difference to these people. Had he been a black from the
South, speaking like a black from the South, I'm convinced many of these
people would have had a problem. So he--I want to say it kind of
romanticizes it a little, because Daddy was an African, a real African.
Mom, of course, is white. Well, there is a tendency for that here. Also,
it's a tendency to use it for an excuse, this way. I've had people say
to me, "But you're different." "Why?" "Well, first of all, you're from
the islands." I said, "So?" I said, "My ancestors, the bigger part of
them anyway, got there by way of slave ship, same ones that deposited
people here." I said, "There's no difference. It's only where." I said,
"The difference is that one was British and one was U.S." I said, "And
the Brits did do away with slavery a heck of a lot earlier than the U.S.
did." They got the message much sooner, thank God.But at the same time, everything was set up on a colonial basis, so their
king and queen had absolute control of all of these colonies, even now
that they're independent, and they are. And they need independence like
a hole in the head, some of them, because they don't have a thing to go
on. But they wanted independence because they were tired of being under
the Brits. And those colonies, they were offered membership in the U.K.
[United Kingdom], and most of them take it because my mother to her
dying day, even though she had now been naturalized, still talked about
the queen, and I realize how deeply that was in her, and you have to
read English history to understand what the monarchy means, even though
they say it's a lot of baloney. The British are funny. They'll say this
and mean that. But they have never given up on the monarchy, and even as
a British subject and in a colonial state, which wasn't always the best,
she still talked about the queen. So there are things engrained in us to
make us different.But I found that my dad, his education surely made a difference, and the
man spoke the king's English with a slight British accent, because
that's the way they taught them at the university. So he was different,
and he played cricket, and these folks here like to believe if you made
it and you blow the stereotype, well, obviously it's because you're
different. Well, yes, how you're raised or who you are, those things are
all determined by your background. But a lot of it is used as an excuse
for why I can keep this group subjugated and acknowledge it, but this
group is different. I've never bought into that. I fight that, "Cut that
out. We're the same people, different circumstances, different
cultures." And it's hurt me sometimes, because I have people that say,
"Well, you're not really black." I've been through that many, many
times, and I say, "Well, I was principal of Markham [Junior High
School], and when I left, they walked out and had petitions to keep me,"
I said, "so I did something right, even though you think I'm not black
enough. I don't know what that means anymore," I said, "because there
are gradations of everything."We can hold the way people look against them, because they had nothing to
do with it, and they are, and then you're going to hold that against
them means there's no hope. What are they going to do, bleach themselves
or what? Get darker? What do you want them to do? Anyway, I've been
through all of those things, and we can talk a little more about that
later, but Dad got where he was because of education and a burning
interest in something, and it was radio, which then becomes a question
of when it happened, and it was a perfect fit, because at the time that
he was coming along, he wasn't making dime one in these repair stores.
He was just making subsistence, and then, [snaps fingers] boom comes the
war, and Lockheed has to build a million planes and they've got to have
radios in them. And he knew more about radios at that point than a whole
lot of people in this city. There were very few people that knew what he
knew. They would summon him from all over the place at Lockheed. He
said, "They were always sending a little truck to pick me up and take me
over to plane number whatever, because they were having trouble and
didn't know how to fix it." But he did.So education, drive, very important, drive, and that's familial, that's
cultural. They drove on education, literally beat it into you. And then
that little thing you mentioned that I just mentioned, that with a
slight British accent he didn't make sense to them. They didn't
understand it. Well, god, he came from another country. You understand
that? They spoke a different way, just like they speak in the South a
different way. So that's really--it's a combination of things, but no
question that they looked on him differently. He was the first black
engineer at Lockheed. Another one came later, as a matter of fact lived
behind me where I was living after I started teaching, with my wife and
kids. He lived behind me, Mr. Rice, and he talked about Dad all the
time. He was an engineer, and he said, "He was the first, and we went in
behind him."Years later I met a retired CEO of Lockheed who referenced Dad and even
had a Lockheed paper with Dad on the front of it, after he had retired.
So he was known, but considered a little differently, and that's because
of problems this country has dealing with race, big time.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I'd like to move forward and talk about--you're back in Los Angeles
now, and you're in elementary school. Like to talk about, first, talk
about the neighborhood you lived in here in Los Angeles during that
time.
-
Thompson
- Interesting. The neighborhood was, as I said, primarily Japanese, small
but Japanese. Then this is during the war, and, of course, a lot of this
was from working in the war industry, planes, building ships, all that.
So primarily Japanese but then some Mexican Americans moved in,
typically low-income. And then across the street and down on the street
just west of us, Westmoreland [Avenue], Madison, there were African
American families that lived down there, a doctor, Dr. Harris, a police
officer, Officer Stanley, but that's to say that there weren't a lot of
African Americans. Then across the street moved in the Winston family,
and the Winstons, I went to school with them. I'm still in contact with
them, and they were in the building trades. [Their] daddy was a
plasterer from New Orleans. There were two other families on maybe
three-block-long Virgil, where Virgil goes about three blocks to
Melrose, there were maybe four or five during the war, four or five or
six African American families or people, and down on the next block a
few more, but they were not the predominant group. In those days, the
predominant group lived around Jefferson High School or lived around
generally east of Vermont, and a lot of the building restrictions and
stuff was west of Vermont.
-
Stevenson
- The housing covenants?
-
Thompson
- Yes. And that stuff didn't break until after the war, and after the war
as you recall maybe, you're still a young one, but it moved west, and
most of the African Americans were living around Jefferson. A lot lived
in Watts around Jordan [High School]. Fremont [High School] had none. I
remember when Fremont was integrated, and they hung an effigy of the
girl, African American girl that first enrolled at Fremont High School.
Can you believe that?
-
Stevenson
- Really. What year was that?
-
Thompson
- That was way back in the early fifties, and they hung her in effigy, a
caricature, and put it up the flagpole and all. Manual Arts [High
School]. It began to change. I saw the population move, heading west.
And you know, Alva, for example, people tell me about experiences.
Another one I used on those folks here at UCLA who were talking about
why Michelle Obama referenced not loving the country, just, here, and
I'm an American, yes, but I've got some problems. And I said, "You know,
there was another one." And I asked them, "How many of you were here
living in Los Angeles in the forties and fifties?" Well, most of them
were much younger than I and they didn't, they came later.I said, "Okay. Do you know that when I was a kid we went to a certain
part of that beach at Santa Monica or we didn't go?" I said, "Do you
understand that?" "What are you talking about?" I said, "Get the
picture. There's no sign that says 'coloreds only' or 'colored.' There
wasn't anything like that. It was just a given understanding that that's
where you went, because most of the blacks came from the South, and they
understood the little ins and outs of the population. Didn't have to say
it. You knew it when the cop said, 'What are you doing here?'" And they
went, "What?" I said, "Yes. All the African Americans went on the beach
below the Miramar Hotel, where it is now," I said, "down there." And I
said, "And that's where we were. And when that broke is when I came back
here from the academy in the fifties and it had broken." I said, "And
even then," I said, "I'm lying on the beach with my buddies from high
school who I ran into or met up with, and I remember this girl walking
by saying, 'My, what a beautiful tan he has.'" [laughs] And her husband
or boyfriend, he's going, "Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh. That ain't a tan."Well, I said, "That's the way this place was." I said, "We couldn't drive
through Beverly Hills. Do you understand that?" "What?" I said, "Yeah.
You drive a car and you're black through Beverly Hills, you get pulled
over." I said, "You know what they told you? 'You don't belong here, and
I don't want to see you back.' Take down your license number. 'If I
catch this again, I'm going to run you in.'" I said, "Beverly Hills. Los
Angeles." They just didn't know. They couldn't really understand it
either, still, but at least they knew something, that it must have been
wrong and that, god, I must have been a little difficult to live with. I
said, "Especially, like the kids from the South, the Winstons from New
Orleans, they would say to me, 'We understood--in the South it was clear
what the rules were.'" They said, "Up here we never knew what the rules
were." I said, "Yeah. I visited a friend in high school, I went over to
his house, junior high. I went over to his house just the other side of
Vermont Avenue, just west, and we were playing ball in the backyard, and
this white woman, her three little girls were playing out there and we
were out there, and we just sort of kidded around with them, but it was
more--they were younger. She came out and read my buddy the riot act.
'You live here and I live here, and I want you to know I never lived
around Negroes, and I don't intend to, and I don't appreciate him being
over here with my daughters.'"And my partner is white, Jewish, and he's going, "Uh--," because he's
never had this. And he's looking at me like what--I said, "Stan, don't
worry about it. I'm out of here." I said, "It's okay. You're fine," and
I left. But I repeated that to them. I said, "How the heck would you
feel?" "I wouldn't like it." "You wouldn't like it?" I said, "No, it
goes a lot deeper than that." I said, "What it goes to is I can't do a
darn thing about it, but it's there, it exists. And it's about me, and
it's about this. I can't do a thing about this. I can do a little bit
about this." They weren't interested. I was trying to get them to get a
feel for it, and they got some of it, but not much. Anyway, all that to
say that when I was a kid in school, the neighborhood was generally
slightly mixed, but more where I was was more Japanese American than it
was anything else in the early years.And then when they were relocated, Dad, because he was in radio--it was
so sad. These Japanese would come to the door. "Mr. Thompson, can you
take this short-range radio component out of my radio?" Because the FBI
was going around looking for those. But a lot of the radios were built
that way. So Dad said, "Yeah, bring it over." "How much?" Dad refused to
take any money. He'd take it out, get rid of it, but that didn't save
them, because the next step was the relocation, and our neighbors, the
guys I went to school with all ended up in a camp. We were taking care
of their fish, took in the dog, a cat, I mean, you know. And there was
another manifestation of this race thing, in this case against them.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at German Americans all over the Midwest and
everywhere else, they're walking free as a bird.
-
Stevenson
- Which camp did some of your neighbors go to?
-
Thompson
- Manzanar. Some went further. Some ended up in Arkansas, they ended up in
the mid-Southwest area, weather totally foreign to anything they had
known here and living under extreme conditions. They were living in
temporary housing. They went to school in that poorly heated--food
nothing like they were used to, and I've talked to many Japanese who
said the same thing, how they felt. They had their own racial feelings.
That's another story. But as it applied to them for relocation, as
Americans how deeply it hurt, and you always hear that. Many of us say,
"Oh, gosh, it must have been terrible." "No, it wasn't terrible. It was
god-awful. It wasn't terrible." Nothing they could do about it, and they
get slammed, and they lost very good businesses. A lot of the Japanese
in my neighborhood owned like the corner gas station, the Endo brothers,
Dad had known them for years, and when they had to leave they were given
a moment's notice to go, and they had to put that thing up for lease to
an American white, and they took a real beating, because there were
people berating them because of, "You're Japanese. They're Japs," that
business. So it was another lesson.
-
Stevenson
- Yes, and you were how old when this happened?
-
Thompson
- That all happened when I was about ten, eleven.
-
Stevenson
- Okay, so thinking back to your thoughts then as a ten-year-old, what were
your reactions to this?
-
Thompson
- It really began with, how can this happen? They're American. I went to
school with them. Now, in truth some of them had Japanese flags. Well,
what did they know? Their history is Japanese. Their granddaddies and
daddies in many cases were Japanese, from Japan, so I just knew the
inequity of it, and we talked about that many a night. Dan and my mom
would talk about, "Well, it takes a lot of forms, but that inequity
exists, and it exists because of who you are, what you look like." It's
not about, like Martin Luther King used to say, about your heart, what's
in your heart. Well, this wasn't about that, but their heart or not in
their heart.
-
Stevenson
- Right. So you definitely when you talked about it in your family circle,
you relayed that to inequities against African Americans and other--
-
Thompson
- It's another expression of racial inequity, of racial intolerance, of
racial abuse, and Dad says, "Of course." As he put it, "Of course." He
says, "And a lot of people are wondering how come the Germans that are
of German descent aren't being put in a camp." He said, "Well, first of
all, hard to identify them, and the race thing is always easy," as he
explained it. And he said, "Under the racial thing--," and you know, I'm
just remembering this, Alva, I hadn't thought of it. But this whole
business during when the war started, we were gearing up to a
first-class war, obviously. We had been, in fairness, been bombed. But
we went whole hog in building almost a hatred for the Japanese. We
called them Japs, "The Japs," typically buck-toothed, wearing glasses,
and little.During the early part of the war, but it was after Pearl Harbor, but just
after Pearl Harbor my brother and I and some of the neighborhood guys,
the Winstons, we used to go up to City College. They played football up
there. We didn't have any money, so we'd climb the fence and go in and
watch the game, and they didn't bother us. We went into a game and it
was City College playing the Camp Lejeune [North Carolina] Marines, and
there were a lot of Marines in the audience. Sadly, the quarterback of
the City College team was Japanese. These guys were yelling obscenities,
"Kill that so-and-so Jap," and a lot of us sitting in the stands were
from the neighborhood and we knew him. I was too little to get into
anything, but certainly with no damn, pardon my French, Marine. And all
of a sudden the fights started to erupt, and the Marines whipped off
their leather belts and they left the buckles clear. They were swinging
those things and people got hurt. And, of course, these are trained
fighters in peak condition. And then in fairness to them, and I remember
later thinking of it from a more mature viewpoint, that they had been
hyped to this, "Kill the Japs!", and you've got to hate if you're going
to charge ashore in the face of machine guns. You've got to hate and
just go and don't question. That's what they were.And those sort of things during the war--and that was early on. I was,
like I said, ten, eleven years old, and I remember it vividly, I guess
because of the expressions of hate that just to me, how do you hate like
that? I'd read about Hitler, and I said, "Well, I guess like that."
Gradations between him and where some of these people are. But it was a
memory I still carry about that. The Japanese being moved to internment,
my friends, the stuff that happened as a consequence of World War II and
the fact that we were fighting the Japs, and, of course, an inability to
distinguish between Japanese nationals from Japan and Japanese
Americans, that these Japanese Americans are suspect because they're
Japanese. And a lot of them were better citizens than half the whites
left. Bad.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Before we move forward, I want to talk a little bit about Central
Avenue and its significance during this time as a business district,
entertainment center, and maybe some of your personal experiences, even
though I know you were young at that time.
-
Thompson
- I was very young, of course. We had friends, the Drake family. The Drakes
used to live down on Westmoreland a block west of Virgil Avenue, so they
were in that same community I've been describing. They were from the
South, and interestingly, Daddy Drake could truly have passed for white.
He had long hair, he was white in complexion, but a little ruddiness
here and there, but he was Southern black and proud of it, and that was
it. Celeste, his wife, a beautiful lady--I always loved her smile--she
was African American, dark, beautiful smile, and just a lovely, lovely
lady. My mom got all of us boys and we went to see her before she
passed. She was ninety-eight or something, but just a--when we went to
the West Indies, they came down and picked us up when we came back and
were always talking about how--they used to embarrass me--"Sid had this
accent," because I was little and I had assumed the Brit. I was talking
about the "cos" meaning cows, and the Drake girls, who were older than
I, were saying, "What's he talking about? What's he saying?" And the
mother, Celeste, was trying to explain, "He's been in another country
and they speak that way."But I'm thinking of the Drakes. They lived about three blocks west of
Central Avenue, so Dad and Mom and us, and we went over to them over the
years, we'd go down there. In fact, all my brothers went, depending on
when they were born. There's eight years between me and the last one.
But we'd go down there and it was like another world, because where we
lived it was a tweener, and they were African Americans, and I never
understood this, but the Winstons, who were party people, they loved to
party--New Orleans, and when it was in the [Los Angeles] Sentinel it
would be "a party at the East Hollywood home of the Winstons." Now, the
East Hollywood home of the Winstons was just a house like everything
else, but that was the kind of attitude people had. And we understood
that the primary black population was in around Central Avenue, down
around Hooper [Avenue].And I remember that when my dad and some of their friends, most of whom,
almost all but one were American, African American blacks, that when
they went to a nightclub in their younger years, they went to the Club
Alabam or one of those places on Central Avenue. It was always Central
Avenue. And when I was asked about it more than once, I would say,
"Because they couldn't go on the Miracle Mile, folks." I said, "They
didn't let you in the door." "What? Did they have a sign?" I said, "Oh,
heck no, no sign, just a big bouncer who said, 'No,' unless you're ready
to fight him and the police who'd back him up," I said, "you didn't go."
So it was Central Avenue, and that's where I was down at the Dunbar
[Hotel] back a couple of years ago, and that was a lot of memories,
because I remember as a little kid we drove by the Dunbar and that when
a lot of the stars--I'm thinking of the Lena Hornes and that era,
"Satchmo," Duke Ellington when he was alive, all of those guys and
women, men and women would have to stay in the Dunbar, or like that was
the best that they had at that time for African Americans. Same thing,
of course, true in Vegas. Remember they used to have to stay in the
hotels on the other side of the tracks in the black community.
-
Stevenson
- Right. Exactly.
-
Thompson
- They couldn't stay in those nice hotels. Lena Horne, for god's sake. I
said, "If she can't stay there, good-looking African American woman with
a talent won't quit, and she couldn't stay in the hotel," but it was
true, and the same thing was true here, not quite as direct but just as
effective. It was years before African Americans could stay in what
became the Beverly Hilton when they built it and those kind of hotels.
You just didn't stay there.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I'd like for you to talk a little bit about your elementary school
experience--
-
Thompson
- Here?
-
Stevenson
- Yes, here, interactions with classmates, teachers that were memorable,
either good or bad, and just like I said, your impressions of your
experience.
-
Thompson
- It was a good experience. It was only two blocks from me, down the street
to Clinton, down one more to Westmoreland, so it was two blocks to go to
school, and we didn't have dime one as a family, so everything was
brown-bagged. My experience of the kids--I have folks I've known with
the district, and I've known these people for probably fifty, sixty
years or more, and they used to talk about--there was a Mexican American
guy, Arnold Rodriguez, who lived in the community and ended up working
for L.A. Unified when I was doing my thing. He said that--there was
another guy by the name of Oscar Bauman. Oscar was of German descent and
a wonderful young guy. He was my age. They were typically two years
older than I. They had skipped me, and that's the memorable thing about
elementary school. They skipped me a year and skipped me another year,
and I never--like I would go into classes and they were talking about
fractions. I didn't even know what it was. They had skipped me through
that, and that's why I hate that kind of thing. Whenever parents start
that stuff I say, "Don't let your ego lead you astray. The kids needs to
know sequentially certain things, and I never did catch--I had to catch
up on my own in junior high, I said, and it was a killer.Now, Oscar Bauman and Arnold--Arnold told me years later, he said, "I
remember saying to Oscar, 'Hey, Oscar.'" They lived about, oh, ten
blocks from me, east. "I've got this guy I know down at Dayton Heights,
and he speaks with a British accent and he wears short pants, and his
name is Sid." So he brought him over, and Oscar and I became good
friends through junior high. He moved north after that. But I got along
fine. They just kind of found me to be an oddity because of the accent,
and they all knew I could read and do things pretty well, so that was
all right. The teachers were obviously impressed, and I think what
happened to them, they got carried away with race, too. Here is this
African American kid who can read at a young age texts that would be
good for high school. I just was a good reader. But they assumed that
that meant I was some kind of genius, and the fact that I was black also
meant I must be a genius, because black folks just can't do that. You
know? It was just incredible, and it hurt, because it just tore me up
socially and every other kind of way, I was so young.I didn't catch up till I went to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy,
because you had to be seventeen to get in there, and I killed a year at
UCLA because I was only sixteen. So I did a year there before I went to
that academy, and I say that because all the way from this, not in the
West Indies so much but when we came back, from about there all the way
through high school, I was a misfit. I was a little kid running around,
ten years old when I was in junior high. I graduated, as I say, at
sixteen. I was thirteen when I went into Belmont High School. Well,
you're in high school. I didn't even qualify, Alva, and I loved
athletics. I was reasonably coordinated, but I was a little, skinny
little kid. I wrestled at UCLA. The year before I went to the academy
they wanted me to wrestle at 121 pounds. Can you imagine, 121 pounds? I
boxed at the academy at 148 pounds, three months later after I left
here.I say that because it just creates all kinds of stress on you in a social
environment that's already stressed, meaning white, black, brown, and
all the separations that occur at adolescence, and being knee-high to a
duck didn't help. Plus all that education I had to make up, because they
skipped me. I mean, they threw me into algebra when I got to junior
high, and I'm sitting there saying--they were going into fractions and
all that, decimal fractions, and I'm looking at them like, "What's
that?" because they had skipped me. So it was not--I don't want to say
it was unpleasant. Socially, I like people and I get along fine with
them, and I don't have any problem. Even the worst dope I can deal with
if I just know what he is and where he's coming from. But elementary,
junior, and senior, especially--I started to catch to catch up a little
in high school, but I just never fit, and everybody would talk to me
like they were talking to an elementary kid, because they really were.
So it was hard for me.But I had a lot of interests, and another thing about me that was
pervasive was this business about going to sea. It really was, it was
pervasive in the sense that I was going to do it no matter what. I kept
telling my dad, "I'm going to sea, I'm going to sea," and Dad knew all
the time what he would do and what he wouldn't do. And during the war,
the first merchant marine--that's private now, ships that carry freight,
tankers, even cruise ships are private, not military, unless the
military takes them in time of war. I had an uncle, a distant
uncle--now, I don't know if he really was an uncle or not, because I
found out that a lot of these times they'd talk about, "Play this, and
play--," just like the South, kind of everybody from an African
background, they have their, "It takes a village to raise a child."
Well, they really mean that, and everybody's a cousin or an aunt or an
uncle when they really may not be, but who cares?
-
Stevenson
- Right, exactly.
-
Thompson
- Okay? So this guy, [Captain] Hugh Mulzac, I have a picture of him right
now. He was from Union Island [Grenadines, W.I.] in the West Indies,
which is south of Bequia, my little island. And by the way, Bequia is
B-e-q-u-i-a. It's a really odd spelling. My dad used to say it's
probably "beckwa," but he said they'd change it. He [Hush Mulzac] was a
naturalized citizen. He had been going to sea since he was, I think,
twelve in the West Indies, on sailing ships, and he's an incredible
story in his own right. He comes to the United States, he goes onboard
ships as an able-bodied seaman and different things, merchant marine,
not Navy, Navy wasn't taking any blacks in that, stewards but not that.
He, in spite of going to sea and not getting the job commensurate with
what he could do--they had him as a steward, as a chief cook, all kinds
of things. Nevertheless, he managed to work his way up and sat for his
master's papers as captain, master's papers in the merchant marine in
Baltimore.And he told the story of going in. He's very light, but obviously of
African background. He goes in and they're looking at him, "Yeah, what
do you want?" "I'm sitting for the exam." He said, "I told them, no, I'm
sitting for the exam." In other words, this isn't debatable. And they
said, "Okay." So they threw the test at him. That examination for that
position is about an eight-hour exam and it's about everything, storms,
balance of ships, all the stuff you have to do if you're going to load a
ship to go to sea. He had none wrong, unheard of. He said the person
giving the exam kept looking at him like, "Who are you really?" [laughs]When the war started, they were building all these ships and Hitler was
sinking them about as fast as they built them, but FDR [Franklin Delano
Roosevelt], Roosevelt, ordered a ship to be named for an African
American. So they built a ship down in Todd Shipyard down here in San
Pedro called the S.S. Booker T. Washington, and it was a liberty ship.
That was the kind of ship it was, class of ship. And then, of course,
FDR said, "Well, we've got to get a crew for it, and it ought to be
black." And they were able to scrounge up--the captain was Hugh Mulzac,
and they had these other guys as crew. They all stayed at the property
next door to where we lived on Virgil Avenue, because my aunt owned it,
and she was in the Auxiliary Women's Corps down on Central Avenue,
because again, during the war our troops, sailors, whatever they were,
could not go to the USO, so they had their own on Central Avenue.
-
Stevenson
- Never heard of that.
-
Thompson
- Yes. She headed it. Auxiliary Women's Corps, AWC, something like that,
and she was approached about this guy going to be named captain. And
then when she found out he's a West Indian, and she knew the Mulzacs on
Union Island--they all know each other. So he stayed at our house. So
here is this little kid running around, all taken with the sea and going
to sea, and here is this man walking around with four stripes, a
captain. They took me down to the ship, to see the ship, and man, I'm
just like, [whispers] oh, my god. So he goes through the canal, and they
had put him on the Murmansk [Russia] run through the North Atlantic, and
it was the worst. Hitler was torpedoing them faster than they could go
out to sea. I mean, it was--and there were times when he was in convoys.
They had a radio program about him. My Spanish teacher at Virgil Junior
High, she said, "Sid," because I didn't hear it. She said, "Your Uncle
Mulzac, they had him on the news." They broke up the convoy because the
Germans sank so many ships, and they said, "You're on your own. Get to
Murmansk on your own." And he took off and it took him three weeks, but
he got there. Well, he did that three or four times. He's quite a guy.He retired. I went back to see him as a high school student and told him
I wanted to go to sea, and, of course, he tells me, "You've got to go to
sail first. You've got to do sail before you can do steamships." I'm
still back East. That was that bus trip we took. That's where I met him,
wonderful old guy, but really torn up from the war, ulcers and all kinds
of things, wondering whether he's going to be alive or dead, I guess. I
wrote my dad and told him that I had met Hugh Mulzac, and Captain Mulzac
told me that I had to go to sea through the sail. And I'll never forget
the letter he wrote back to me in New York. We were going to be coming
back in another couple of weeks anyway, but he wrote it to me and he was
telling me all about his experiences, because he'd been to sea, too,
before he got into radio and all that, before he was a principal, as a
young kid he had gone to sea in summers on sailboats. He says, "Sid,
listen to me very carefully. You are going to sea, IF you can get a
bachelor's degree doing it." And I remember going, why is that
important? I want to go--a kid, right? And I was only, shoot, thirteen
maybe.Anyway, Hugh Mulzac was an inspiration for me in the going-to-sea piece.
He came along at that opportune moment when he was the only black sea
captain in the U.S. Merchant Marine, of all the thousands of ships, one.
That was another lesson. One. Now, it changed, and when we get to the
academy I have a lot of things to tell you about that, about American
culture and mores and southern cadet officers who had special feelings
about Sid.
-
Stevenson
- All right. Well, this would be a good place--[End of interview]
1.2. Session 2 (February 11, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- I'm continuing an interview with Mr. Sid Thompson on Wednesday, February
11, 2009. I'd first like to ask you, what was the role of religion in
your upbringing?
-
Thompson
- God, I haven't thought about that for a long time. The earliest religion
that I recall is in the West Indies, because I was little when we went
back, and my folks had been raised Anglican, basically Episcopalian, and
as a result they went to an Episcopal church here in Los Angeles which
was basically black, with Father H. Randolph Moore. And Randy Moore, the
son, was once an attorney and then head of the Juvenile Court as a
judge, and he headed the Juvenile Courts in L.A. I mention that because
Randy was a pretty close friend when we were real little and then later
when we came back. But basically, my family was Anglican. In the West
Indies the church was an Episcopalian church, although they speak of it
as Anglican, which is probably more accurate because it followed the
British lines very closely. So that was my earliest recall of religion.
We went to church every Sunday, and there was a lot of praying and hymn
singing whenever there was a gale or a storm and the boats were out at
sea and stuck out there and whether they were going to survive, and some
didn't. But that was kind of the background of that little island and
all of those islands; St. Vincent's, same thing.We came back, and I mentioned the aunt that was instrumental in getting
us back into the United States. She went through a bout of cancer when
she was relatively young and from that she gravitated towards Christian
Science, Mary Baker Eddy, Massachusetts and all that. So when we come
back, we come back to an aunt who is heavy into the Christian Science
movement. This was in the late thirties, and we ended up, because she
was such a formidable person, I mean, she was incredible. I get the
feeling that my dad didn't feel like fighting, and he went along. We
would read the passages for Mary Baker Eddy that she wrote, and there's
a lot of faith healing and all of that involved with it. I never felt
that we did things strictly according to the book, because when we were
sick my mom had no problem with medication and taking care of that. But
I was raised that way clear up to the Merchant Marine Academy, till I
was about twenty. So my early upbringing is Anglican, Episcopalian, and
Christian Science. I went to Third Church of Christ Scientist downtown
in L.A., a big church, and even at one time we were thinking of trying
to get into the Christian Science School, which was in Beverly Hills. I
don't think we would have had any chance of that, but we didn't try, so
I don't want to blame anybody for anything. But that's how I was raised
up to the age of twenty.After that, because it said no wine, no this, no that--nah, I don't want
to be in something like this. So I drifted away from it, although I have
to confess I had this nose smashed when I was at the academy. A kid, big
kid, center on the football team, threw a bat by accident, and it caught
me across the bridge of the nose, and they were pronouncing me dead, I
think. I had a skull fracture and all kinds of stuff. I ended up in the
base hospital, and I remember using some of it to say, "I'm not going to
use any bedpan. I'm getting up." So I got up and I went to the bathroom
and I did everything. "How did you go to the bathroom?" I said, "I got
up." "You what?" But all this to say that I drifted away, and I am not
currently a member of any organized church. I happen to be a believer in
a supreme being, but I am not a member of any organized church.My wife, second wife, was Catholic. My first wife was Catholic. Both of
them were Catholics, and I attended Catholic Church with them, just to
keep it all in the family. And I didn't have any problem with it. I was
Christian, basically raised Christian, but the background during my
formative years was Christian Science, which was also very interesting.
There weren't too many blacks in there, but there were a few downtown
where we went to church, and I remember the kids all saying, "So what is
it?" That was my background in religion.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Can you tell me about your secondary school and high school
experiences, memorable teachers, and with regard to high school was
there any college preparation per se in those days?
-
Thompson
- Junior high, Virgil Junior High School on Vermont Avenue, when I went
there in 1941 I was ten and two months, or about three months. I was
this big. I was a fish completely out of water. I think I mentioned to
you the real tragedy perpetrated on me was skipping me, because it just
was too much. Two years was just way too much. And Dad was all proud of
it, of course, West Indian and all this stuff about education, that, "My
kid is doing--." So I went into junior high and it was a blur. I was so
little and running around, but I was a decent student. But in doing the
two-year skip it had a profound influence on me for about through junior
high and into the beginnings of high school before I could catch up with
the fractions I missed, percentage. Especially in a sequential study
like mathematics I had a real problem, because I'd missed so much. They
put me in algebra and I was like, what is this percent business? I
couldn't even define it.So junior high was not unpleasant. I played in the school orchestra,
which was city-renowned. They had a 101-piece orchestra in junior high,
mixed, white, brown, some black and Asian, had everything that was
around at that time. I played in the orchestra and I loved it. They had
service organizations during World War II, they had patrols for after
school to get the kids home safe, made up of students, which was very
fascinating. You wouldn't dare do that in this day and age, but you did
back then. And junior high I recall as a bit of a blur. I didn't have
any problem with the humanities. I could go through that. But the
mathematics in particular and science were a major problem, because
sequentially I had missed so much, and I still recall it as being--and
then junior high and even worse in high school, particularly junior
high, I just didn't fit. These kids were already into puberty and
beyond, heading out, still adolescence but later, and here comes Mighty
Mouse walking around. I didn't know up from down. They were all asking
me, "How come you're so young?" I said, "I don't know." I couldn't
explain it. I didn't know why myself. They kept skipping me, telling me,
"We're going to put you in the fifth grade." Now I was in the third
grade. I said, "Why? What did I do?" "You didn't do anything. It's
great," and they were all applauding me, but it hurt. And to this day
when somebody talks to me about skipping I tell them, "Don't brag to me
about that, please." I said, "Just be careful with it."I went into high school sixteen and three months, I mean graduated, I
don't mean went in. I went in at thirteen in Belmont High School. Now,
let me explain a little bit about those two periods of time, and I don't
know if I mentioned it the last time. At Virgil I still had a lot of the
West Indies in me, the experience, and down there you weren't conscious
of color, because you were really on those islands all one. There were
white folks, but there were very few of them, and typically it was the
governor and his wife or something. There was no governor on Bequia
[Island] anyway, so we didn't see too much of them. They were mixed
people, some of whom looked white, and there was a caste system related
to that on that island and all of those islands, and still is. It's
referred to in Malcolm Gladwell, "The Outliers." If you haven't gotten
that book, take a look at it. It talks about he's white, a West Indian
mother and a British white father, and he writes a lot about the racial
thing in Jamaica and those places, very interesting, nothing that far
off of what happened in the South.And you know the history. I mentioned New Orleans, all of that stuff, and
the fact that we happened to sadly pick up the mores of the white
society in terms of color, and we did our own color, as you know, and we
did at parties. I can remember parties that were Creole at which some
blacks would show up, noticeably black, and we would come in and it was
a different group. The Creoles married in the Creoles and so on, and
some of that still goes on, as you know.
-
Stevenson
- Yes. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that. This was actually
referred to in my interview with Dr. Owen Knox, where he indicated he'd
taken his wife to a party, I believe in New Orleans, and it was, as you
say, a Creole party where everyone there--could you talk a little bit
more about the role of skin color in our community particularly and your
experience with that?
-
Thompson
- Yes. One of the more memorable things I recall is across the street was
some African American kid that we went to school with. Daddy was a
plasterer. They were from New Orleans. They were darker, more African.
One daughter was light but obviously of African descent. I remember once
I was in that group. My brother--I had a brother two years older, and he
was not skipped and all that, but he was a good student. I mean, he went
on as an officer in the Navy and all the rest of that stuff. I remember
two of the brothers of this other family across the street saying that
in our family, mine, were four boys, my brother who was more African in
appearance than I, I was light but still obviously of African descent, a
brother behind me who was dark, darker than he, not black but really
dark brown, and then another brother, that's my youngest brother. He's a
doctor right now and if you met him coming through the door, you'd think
he was Middle East, just the way it all worked out genetically. And they
were talking about it, these two brothers across the street and my
brother, and they were saying, "Well, the best-looking of your family
is--," pointing at me, and I was busy trying to look like I didn't hear
him, and the younger brother, who was at that point a little guy. He was
only two, I think.In other words, something that stayed with me from that, this structure
even within families, in which one looks more white than the other, and
that's a badge of honor of some kind, like they had something to do with
it. It's always stayed with me. It always worried me, because I had the
brother behind me who was dark. I told you we all played cricket, the
British game, and we would go out to cricket. Every Sunday we played
cricket religiously till I went to the academy and my brother went in
the Navy and all that happened. When I came back, I started playing
again, till I got fed up and said, "Oh, the heck with this."
Interestingly, at that cricket match were some Americans whose father
was South African. Now, between you, me, and the fencepost, if you and I
saw the father you'd say, "Hey, man, you've got something in your genes
you ain't owning up to, because you've got some funny-looking hair
here." His hair was curly but tight, and he was swarthy, a little guy
and an egomaniac from the gate.Well, these sons of his, and he had five of them, were very British. They
spoke with a British accent don't you know and got parts in the movies.
They were in movies in the forties, the Severn Brothers. They were even
on the cover of "Life" magazine, Billy Severn and Raymond Severn, and
they actually were in the movies. But they would make racial comments to
my younger brother, the brother behind me, for which he's never forgiven
them, and I was young I didn't quite understand. I didn't even realize
that that was going on. He told me this much later, about some of these
comments they made, so that the racial thing, the ethnic thing was
different for different members of the family, depending on how they
looked, which you know well. And a part of it--the brother that is the
youngest one would have had no problem in a Creole party. Another
brother would have had all kinds of problems, not obvious but not to be
mistaken.In junior high school--I wanted to bring something in there to show you
the kind of culture that existed then. Los Angeles had, as we mentioned
before, the beaches that weren't marked colored, but everybody knew
that's where you'd better be. In the schools--I'm from the West Indies
now, I'm back a few years, and I'm a seventh grader at Virgil Junior
High. The guys across the street were good friends of mine. They were
black, because we were all in the same block. We were the only primary
black families on that particular block. There were a couple more down
below, but on that block. So we were in with Mexican families, a lot of
Asian, more Asian than anything, Japanese. We were in gym, and I
remember this like it was yesterday. And I loved gym. I'd go running
around. One thing I could do was run and act the fool, so I was running
around, and they had coed dancing like on a Wednesday, and they had it
every other week, coed dancing.So I'm sitting there wondering--now, at that age I could care less about
dancing. I wanted to get a ball and go out and play kickball or
football. And all of a sudden I found myself outside. They told me to go
outside, and we were playing softball, and I remember saying to my buddy
Larry, who lived across the street, "Larry, what are we doing out here?"
And we were all obviously like this. And he said, "Oh, we don't go to
coed dancing." And it didn't really from a social standpoint sink into
me, because I really didn't care I wasn't dancing, but what it was was
they would not allow the black kids in coed dancing, because they might
end up dancing with a Mexican or a white, and by the way it was both.
The gradations of what's white were stretched. In those days they
classified Mexicans as white. That changed later. I remember in homeroom
when a Mexican kid says, "I ain't no paddy. What do you mean white?"
Because that's what they called white, paddys. "I ain't no paddy boy.
I'm Mexican." And the teacher going, "You're white." "Uh-uh." [laughs]
It was just so funny.But in that coed dancing, I went home and told my dad. "What?" He says,
"You tell that coach you're going to coed dancing." "Aw, Dad, I don't
want to." "Do it." And West Indian dad, "Yes, sir." So I went back with
the coach and I said, "I've got a problem." And the coach--they all
liked Sid. Sid was a good old kid. I didn't mess up too much, and I
liked to play and do dumb things, but I was basically not a pain for
them. And the coach says, "So what's this about?" I said, "Well, my dad
wants me to be in coed dancing." "Really?" I said, "Yeah." And he said,
"You are in coed dancing." I said then, "Coach, I can't tell Daddy no."
So I said, "I need help." So coach said, "You come on up to coed
dancing." The next time they had coed dancing they invited me up. They
told me to go up with them. So I told Larry, "Guess what?" "What?" "I'm
going up with the coed dancing." "Why?" I said, "Look. I think he just
found out my dad was ticked because they didn't let me in." I went up
there, they lined up the kids to dance, and Sid wasn't in the line. And
the coach looks over and he says, "Hey, Sid." So I come over, "Yeah,
coach?" "Listen, man. I need help." "Yeah, coach?" You know, this was
the coach. "What do you need?" "I've got forty kids that I've got to get
down here to check on why they're not dressing for gym, and I want you
to take the summonses to all the classrooms." "Okay, coach." I'd been
conned. Alva, I'm out there running and I'm going, wait a minute. But I
was smart enough not to tell Pop. I just left it alone. I said, okay,
you're running messages, and that's what they did.Now, four or five parents of kids, African American kids, raised
continental cane. Dad was working two jobs and didn't have time to
breathe. But some of these other parents, four or five of them went in.
They all knew each other, lived in another community called The Flats
over off Temple Street. Flats was an area of black, still is somewhat,
Bonnie Brae, that area right off of Temple, and between Temple and
Beverly, in that general area.
-
Stevenson
- Now, is this the area the call The Island? Because as I understand it--
-
Thompson
- We called it The Flats. Now, it may have evolved, because the composition
also changed over there. It went from very heavily black--as blacks went
more west, more Hispanics moved in and so on, so The Island I haven't
heard.
-
Stevenson
- Yes. My understanding, because I went on a black history tour, was that
the reason why it was called The Island was because it was a small
number of blacks surrounded in this residential area by whites.
-
Thompson
- That's right, that's what it was, so it makes sense. I think what I
referred to as Flats was more a black term, an African American term.
-
Stevenson
- Ah, okay.
-
Thompson
- We referred to it--whenever we went over there by streetcar, we always
said, "Well, we're going over to The Flats." Island, that's interesting.
The whites probably called it that. And in the schools, if they had
dancing, for example, not in gym but if they had a social dancing--my
brother when he was at Belmont, I think a tenth grader, he danced with a
Hispanic girl, and the teacher called him over and she chewed him out.
"What do you think you're doing?" "About what?" He hadn't the foggiest
what she was talking about, and she climbed his frame for having the
audacity to dance with a Mexican girl, Mexican American girl instead of
a black girl. And he was dancing with everybody, but the stuff was
subtle and not so subtle.So to go on from there, in junior high there were some vestiges. I began
to understand there were differences between the way I looked and other
people looked, and, of course, when you reached the eighth and ninth
grade and the whites started dating among whites, there was no black
dating among whites or vice versa, none of that. It was strictly
segregated socially, and that lasted. That was true for a number of
years, I mean, into the fifties and so on, but gradually then began
breaking down, as we all know from the colleges and so on. But going
into senior high from junior high, now we're into the late forties near
the end of the war. I've been through that trip I made across the U.S.
where my sensitivities for the country were dashed, and now I'm in high
school, and I don't recall the racial thing too much, except to say that
we pretty much hung out in our own groups.There were a lot of gangs, Echo Park, Custer Street, Alpine Street.
Alpine Street gang went to Belmont, and those guys were the ones that
were involved in the zoot-suit riots, when the Navy got involved and
sailors were coming up jumping browns and browns. It was mainly brown
and white. The blacks were kind of out of it.
-
Stevenson
- Tell me more about that.
-
Thompson
- I'm doing it by what I was told. I learned from way back, having to
travel on Temple Street past Echo Park, that you stayed on good terms
with those gangs, and I was friends with all the Mexican gangs, and
whenever something occurred with a black kid, we would get the word.
Larry would run into me in a class and he'd say, "Sid, after school
we're all going to follow Jasper." Jasper Ross was the sprint king for
Belmont High School track. He was a wonderful track man, and he took the
city, but he was kind of loquacious. He liked to talk and he would--,
"I'm Jasper Tissue Mingo Cool Papa Ross." I'll never forget that. That's
what he called himself. But sometimes he'd open his mouth and the
Mexicans wouldn't like it, so Pino Ortega one day was going to beat the
slop out of him, and he did, and then he was going to get him again
after school.The way it worked, the blacks would tell each other, "Okay, we've got a
problem after school." We weren't many, but everyone of us was down
there on the street corner when Jasper came out of school, and the
Mexicans were all lined up, but they had a smaller group because they
didn't organize it that way. There were more of them than there were of
us, in terms of school, but in the gangs we were basically dealing with
a gang. They looked at us and we looked at them, and fortunately for all
of us they decided not to get into it, because we had a few too many
more people than they thought would be there. But that's to say that it
was a weird kind of thing. We would do that, and yet in those Mexican
gangs there were black kids--
-
Stevenson
- Oh, interesting.
-
Thompson
- --but typically mixed-looking. But they weren't pure Mexican, and you
knew that. Jackie Lee, I won't forget that kid's name. I know he died in
prison or they executed him. He was a thug. I mean, Jackie was pure
thug. His face had been burned in a gasoline explosion. He was something
else, but he was one bad kid. But he was a member of I think Custer
Street gang. He was a member of a Mexican gang, so there were those
kinds of crazy alliances, sub-alliances, and he didn't even speak
Spanish. But he ran with them clear from elementary school, and he was
such a thug that all the other thugs liked him.It's funny because now that I think about it, the blacks didn't really
look on him as an outlier, as somebody outside the group. It was just
Jackie. "That's the way Jackie is," and they tended to accept that.
Everybody hated the guy. Any number of people would like to kill him.
But there were some crazy mixtures, and sometimes in my own
neighborhood, across the street from me was the Cardenas family. Raymond
was a little older than I and a very powerfully built kid, mature for
his age and very disillusioned, father was a child abuser, a drunk, ran
around on mom and everything else, and the kid just turned to gangs, so
he formed his own gang over there by where I lived. And one night he was
going to beat the daylights out of me and my brother coming home from
Boy Scouts in our little uniforms, little guys. He had five guys with
him, and he came over and he said, "I heard you called my mama--," the
usual. And I said, "Who's your mama?" because we didn't know. And the
guy that saved us was a fellow by the name of Hector de Aragon, who I
will love forever, who was in the group, the gang, but I knew Hector a
little bit and he said, "These guys don't even know your mother." And
there was a midget in the group, a sick little character, and he's the
one that told Raymond we had said this. I might not be here today,
because Raymond was that bad, but Hector saved us. And he said, "Nah,
nah, nah. Leave them alone." He lived down the street from us.Raymond lived across the street, and we were on tenterhooks. Alva, there
were days when we would walk around two blocks to get away from wherever
Raymond was. One day an old friend of our family--I think I mentioned
the Drakes, who helped pick us up at that ship--
-
Stevenson
- Right.
-
Thompson
- Bob Drake, who was all of six-two, big man, boxed professionally for a
while, but he was married to a Mexican, and he ran with--he was black,
but he ran with a bunch of Mexican guys. And one day we were over at
Celeste Drake's, the Drake's house. Bob was there, and he said, "How are
you guys doing?" He was talking to us. Now, he's a young man. And we
said, "Well, pretty good." He says, "What's the matter?" "Well, we've
got a problem," and we told him about Raymond. He says, "Ray Cardenas?"
I said, "Yeah." "Francis is his older brother. Francis is my boon
buddy." So he came over one day and Raymond was walking down the street,
and Bob called him. "Raymond." "Bob." So he came over and he's a little
bit, because he's looking at us, and Bob said, "Man, these are my two
buddies. I've known them since they were that big, man." He says,
"They're cool. Don't bother them, okay?" He says, "Bob, sure. Hey, guys,
we're friends." And I was, ever since then. He straightened out a little
bit, but it was so funny, because these cross-alliances sometimes really
helped out, because he happened to know his brother Francis, who was his
older brother, much older, and he revered Francis. And if Francis' buddy
Bob said don't do it, he wasn't going to do it. So after that we could
walk anywhere, and I know if I needed help I could have called on
Raymond, but it wasn't starting out that way.These are experiences, and I mention them only because sometimes it's
hard to get into people's head how at the time these things happen,
they're emotionally very frightening for you, for a little kid running
around two years ahead of himself anyway, and there were guys that you
went to school with that just had tendencies already for ending up in
San Quentin. There were some bad people, not many, just a few. Belmont
the same way. Now, at Belmont I never was counseled--you mentioned
Belmont. Belmont I was never counseled specifically about college. Anglo
kids, white kids were, and I had many former German Jewish kids who were
friends of mine, I was friends of theirs, who had escaped Nazi
Germany--I think I mentioned that--and they were there. Jack Reasonfeld,
the guy I will always remember. They were brilliant, flat out, because
they came from a background of daddy was a doctor, mama was a doctor,
this kind of background, and they got a lot of attention, as they
should.But we didn't get much attention, as we should, and I had to kind of do
my own thing. I mentioned about running into Mulzac in New York. My aunt
took me over there. And I told Daddy I was going to sea, and he said,
"Yeah, if you get a degree," remember? And so I happened to find a book
about the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. I knew I couldn't get into
Annapolis, not likely, but the Merchant Marine Academy already--not on
his ship. I see the cadet in the picture, and I think he's white. He is
white, but because most of the kids were that went to the academy, and
still are, but there were African Americans already there. There was
one. But there was a history of having one, and I figured I could get in
on that basis, so I counseled my own way in. I did my own writing. I
called. I did all the things I had to do to find out. None of them did
it, and that was just a sign of those times.And a number of the African American kids in that school--the Hines
brothers, they were from The Flats, Alfred Hines, Joe Hines. Alfred
Hines ended up--what do you call the head of the post office in Los
Angeles? Postmaster General--in San Francisco. I mean, some of these
kids went on and just did some incredible things with very humble
beginnings, and I always tipped my hat because I always felt like, in
later years, I had the fortune of a father who was educated. A lot of
them came from working fathers, plasterers and cement workers and steel
workers, and yet they were a family, and that for me is what has
been--in those days you knew Daddy and Mommy. And what's more, if you
messed up down the street, somebody down there was going to tell them,
and you were about to get pounded, so there was more community. But
there were families.And later on, just to digress for a sec, as I got into Crenshaw [High
School] and Markham [Junior High School] and I just was stunned at the
lack of fathers, which you know they're addressing coming up pretty
soon. I think Al Roker is doing something, Sunday I think. Anyway, and
it's what Barack [Hussein] Obama referenced, too, about the missing of
black fathers, because you had families then and now you don't. And
those things saved us, because those people did have a discipline and
their kids had a discipline. I remember old man Winston saying, "Don't
bring no D's in this house. I will murder you. Don't come in here with
no D's." [laughs] And they knew better to do it, so they worked. They
didn't work as hard as they might have, but they worked a heck of a lot
harder than they would, I think, today, as I look at it.Anyway, the experience in high school was better, because I graduated at
sixteen. I was a little bit older, but I was still knee high to a duck.
But I caught up in mathematics, that was the big change. It took me all
of junior high to catch up on the stuff I'd missed by them skipping me
back in elementary school, and it was a real burden, but I ended up in
Trig getting an A, trigonometry and geometry. I finally started catching
on I noticed in geometry, and then from there on mathematics was much
easier, never a cinch, but it was certainly easier. And going through
high school I graduated with some honors and things, did fine. I got
into UCLA because I had to kill a year, couldn't go to the academy at
sixteen, so I had to make up a year, so I went out to UCLA where my
brother already was and basically just went through a year, because I
had no interest in what UCLA had to offer me. I was going to sea and
that's it, until I got into the academy, which was a pure joy except for
dealing with southern white midshipmen, which was a problem, but other
than that.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Well, before we move to speaking about the academy and your
application and everything, a couple of other things. One, reflecting
back on those gangs that you mentioned, Alpine Street gang, Custer
Street gang, how did they compare with the gangs today?
-
Thompson
- Good question. Good question. Very different. A lot of fists. Fists don't
kill, typically, but once in a while somebody would grab a ball bat.
Now, if somebody had a knife, oh, my god. In those days that was just--a
gun was--I remember being at a party in Watts and my brother coming
over, older brother, he came over and he said, "We're out of here." And
I said, "Why?" And we had to take a streetcar to get out of Watts back,
so we're talking serious business here. "Why are we leaving?" "Out." So
when he said that I figured something's up, so I went out the door.
Usually it was him and some girl, and he was going to have to fight some
guy. I mean, he'd get himself in it. But he came out and he said,
"There's a guy in there with a gun. I saw it." I said, "What? What?" So
nowadays it would not be that big shock. I've been around kids that talk
about guns all the time.When I got to Crenshaw and Markham, looking at that, and that was the
sixties and seventies, late sixties, early seventies, it had changed.
The Hoover Street [gang], not to mention Bloods, Crips, I mean all that
stuff, it was far different. The gangs were more about man-to-man sort
of stuff, although three or four might jump in, which they did with
regularity, but not to the extent of killing you, which the difference I
would say is that as I noticed the progression of gangs and I've dealt
with them most of my life, Pacoima, Watts, Crenshaw, because Crenshaw
was a different school. I'll mention that when we get to it. But I
noticed that these gangs were not as bad as [meant worse than] Custer
and Alpine were, and they were--you didn't want to cross them, because
you would get your backside beaten, so you didn't. But it wasn't with
the finality that is sort of detached. I mean, people now, I mean, they
can shoot and kill you and never touch you. This distance thing, it's a
dissociation thing, and the gun allows it. It's far different.
-
Stevenson
- Another question. Could you tell me something about what you did for
recreation or your social life as a teenager, and what sorts of
activities would African American young people--
-
Thompson
- We were very heavily into sports, so that we went to all the track meets,
and we ran track and played ball and all the rest of it, so athletics
was a big part of the African American background in school, even if
they weren't going on with it. There were no pro football players. In
fact, pro football wasn't even near was it is today, even if it was all
white. It was kind of get together, you made a few bucks and that was it
for a career. But we still participated, heavy participations in
athletics, so that we would go to the all-city track meets, and I say
we. The black guys, we'd get together and we'd just go. We'd all go,
either together or we'd meet down there. So that was one major part of
the social structure, and it's a cultural thing. We were allowed that.
We were allowed to run. We were allowed to play football. Joe Hines of
the Hines brothers, he was a good football player. He was at Belmont. He
was student body president by the way. I forgot to mention that, African
American. I think he was the first one.As I look back, in junior high I was so so young that it's a cloud for
me. I wasn't into any social anything. I was beginning to notice girls
about the time I was in the ninth grade, which put me at thirteen, just
beginning to go into puberty and all that. The partying between junior
high and senior high was very restricted. It was black. So the parties
we went to--The Flats was not a large area as you indicated. I like that
Island term, because it really was. So at Belmont and Virgil there was
not a large African American population for you to interact with. So we
would go find it. We would go to parties where there were kids from
Jeff[erson High School], and Jeff was the big black school at that time.
We were kind of an anomaly, because there weren't that many blacks that
had gotten over on that side of town, west like that, and even if it was
a hokey, hokey house, it was a big deal because it was in Hollywood, you
know, this kind of stuff. You'd see it in the [Los Angeles] Sentinel,
Hollywood home, which was a three-bedroom old home that folks were
making it in, you know?But the parties were definitely segregated. They were basically all
black. There were no Mexicans. Creole, yes, but an offshoot, obviously,
of the black, but mainly black and mainly not in our area, so we'd go
out of our area. I mentioned Watts. We'd go clear to Watts for some
parties. Folks didn't always know it. I don't think Dad would have
thought too much of that, because it was so far. We'd go down there, and
sometimes the trains didn't run after twelve-thirty in the morning, so
you'd better make it or you've got a long walk through some rather
interesting territory. We'd been run out of Watts a couple of times. But
in the main, the social thing was black by whatever means, and you
traveled in order to experience black. Sometimes that was kind of
interesting, because they'd start jumping on each other about one school
or another, "You people over here in the ghetto." That's a sure sign of
starting something, and we got pretty sophisticated at picking that up.
When that stuff started, we're out of there, because it's not going
anywhere but downhill from that point.But it was all segregated socially, so any girl as I got to high school
and started to date, would be black, and you would go to parties
jointly. In other words, you'd figure out where you wanted to go, and a
lot of it was on safety things. I mean, where could we go and not get
into trouble? Because you're using public transportation. We didn't have
cars. That was a big difference to what I see today or way back even in
the seventies. Kids have cars and had cars. Back then we didn't have
cars. Cars ran on tracks, and you were very vulnerable getting on a
streetcar. So in other words, you had to be sophisticated and cool about
what you did, and we were, but it was definitely very segregated, and we
never talked about the other persons.There was one thing Belmont did which was interesting. They worked up
some kind of an arrangement with the Downtown Y[MCA], the old YMCA, and
on Friday nights we were given access to the pool, and they would have
dancing and stuff, and that was the most integrated. Now, most white
kids, except the tough ones, stayed away from those, because that's
where the minorities went, because we didn't have anything else. We
didn't have clubs and all that stuff. Jewish kids had a lot of Jewish
organizations, because we talked. The kids I knew would tell me, "I'm
going to the Jewish this and that." Sometimes we went. They would invite
us, but it wasn't social-social as in girls. It was more fun. They'd
play softball and stuff, and my brother and I, we'd get invited many
times to some of these Jewish events, so we had a kind of cross-cultural
thing. But that Downtown Y had swimming and dancing and table tennis and
all that stuff, and it was a welcome relief for a lot of kids that had
no other access to anything, and we could take a streetcar down Temple
very easily right into downtown to go there.One of my memorable instances of crossing, again, with the police was
down there, when a cop asked us what we were doing, my brother and I, on
the street, coming from the Y going to the bus, the streetcar, and he
asked us what we were doing, obviously looking for some problem. Huge
guy, put us both on a wall, one hand on each of us, and he could have
killed us with either hand, and I remember that vividly because we
weren't doing a thing wrong. My brother told him, "We're coming from the
YMCA. We belong to High Y." "Don't give any of that crap. I don't want
to hear it. Just shut up." "Yes, sir." And whenever somebody talks about
police brutality I tell them, "You know, I don't think a lot of people
that haven't been through it--you don't understand the power of a
particularly big man, typically white, gun, nightstick, badge, full
weight of the law, and he's decided to come down on you." I said, "I
don't care how anybody writes about that. Until you've lived that, you
don't understand the terror of it, because you have nowhere to go. You
can't beat him physically, and you can't resist him, and he's decided to
hassle you."And that's just an aside, that one instance, because we really thought we
were going to get worked over, because they'd done some of that. The
police department back then was--so that's a memorable thing about being
at Belmont and that YMCA thing we did, but it was still basically a good
thing for kids, and it shows that we really needed those kinds of
things, because we had no other options. It's like our parents--we
talked about that. They can't go to the Miracle Mile, so they went to
the Club Alabam on Central. The only option, no other option. You say
that to people today. "What? What do you mean you couldn't?" "We
couldn't. Wouldn't let you in. Wouldn't let you approach it."Anyway, the social thing was black, totally black in terms of boy-girl.
In other arenas, the athletes, for example, had a lot of things they
would do and get into that involved white, black, and brown, and if
there was any integration at all, it was there, through athletics, and
some of those kids were fast friends for a long time that were mixed
races, so in other words, the athletic-team thing overcame some of the
racial stuff. But the minute you introduce a girl, talking about boys
now, different ballgame, and all that integration stuff went out the
tooth. You'd better not show up at that party at somebody's house.
They'd throw you out.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting. Okay, so you spent a year at UCLA because you were at that
point, at sixteen, too young to apply to the academy. Can you tell me
about your one year at UCLA? What do you recall about that year, and
what year is this by the way?
-
Thompson
- I'm laughing because I came out here, I was sixteen years old, Alva. I
was about five-foot-three or -four, five-foot-three maybe. I weighed all
of 120 pounds. I was one little dude. And I came out here--this is 1947.
I did UCLA between '47 and '48. In 1947 guess who came home? All those
vets. These are men, battle-hardened typically. I mean, some of these
guys have been through Normandy, been through some things, and they're
back. But they're men. They are not kids. We're not talking about some
eighteen-year-old, nineteen-year-old starry-eyed little guy. Here I was
sixteen, this big, a little bigger, and this place was like--it was
obviously not anywhere near this size, but it was a big institution. It
was certainly many times bigger than my high school.I looked around at UCLA and I kind of did my own thing. I decided that I
was going to get through the classes, and I didn't care how I did it but
I got through, because I was just doing this year to get to seventeen. I
was a pretty good little jock in some ways. I couldn't play football, I
couldn't play basketball, but I could wrestle and they had wrestling.
They had boxing. My brother was captain of the boxing team here. That
was before they went into real interscholastic men's and women's and
they had to get rid of some of those because they needed the money to
form the women's athletics, which makes a lot of sense, so wrestling
went and boxing went.But my crowning glory, there was a great wrestling coach here by the name
of Briggs Hunt, and Briggs Hunt retired years later, but he was a legend
here. And my crowning achievement was in May of 1947 he said,
"Thompson." "Yes, sir." He was from Oklahoma. "Yes, sir?" "I want you to
come on the wrestling team this fall." "Yes, sir." I didn't tell him I
was trying out for the academy. Well, I subsequently made it and I was
appointed, so I never did that. But I always liked the idea that Briggs
Hunt asked me to be on his team. So it wasn't all sad. I had a nice
time, but I was in awe of the place. I mean, being quite candid, you can
imagine the conversations of some of these men, of women and everything
else, and Sid, here I am down here, will go, "What is this?" At sixteen
I was beginning to understand all that, and I was dating and so on, but
it was still different. These were men. And sometimes I'd be sitting
there and they'd start talking, and they'd compare notes about this
battle and that battle and stuff they'd been through was in many cases
awesome. A whole lot didn't, but the ones that did didn't forget it, so
I learned a lot from that.So the year at UCLA was kind of--I look on it as a placeholder. I just
marked time to get out of here, to be seventeen. That worked. Although I
went through some things to get into the academy, I made it. Want to
talk about that?
-
Stevenson
- Yes, let's talk about your application and what you went through applying
to the academy.
-
Thompson
- I applied, and you had to send a picture, and I was worried about that,
but I put the picture in, and I knew they had had one or two or three
blacks before, so I figured, this isn't breaking ground, so maybe. This
would be in March I applied, and then around May they sent back and said
that--I got a letter saying that I had to take a written exam, and I did
that, and I had to get letters of recommendation, and I got those from
Belmont, and I got one not from Briggs Hunt but from somebody out here,
because I didn't want Briggs to know I was looking at this. I just
didn't want to disappoint him. But when they told me that, "You have
passed the written," I remember doing a hallelujah, wonderful, great.
And then I had to go for a physical, and Alva, I've played, I've run
track, I've wrestled. I'm little but I'm starting to grow a little bit
and fill out a bit, and I wasn't worried at all about the physical, the
least of my worries. "You passed the written." Shoot. I can get the
letters of recommendation, and I did, so the physical was nothing.So I went down for the physical at Naval Officer Procurement, which was
an office in Downtown Los Angeles like a recruiting office, but it was
specifically for officer recruitment, so it had that aura about it. I
walk in the door and here's a young doctor. He says, "So what's your
name?" And I said, "Oh, my god, a southerner." And he was. I had learned
enough to know it might be a problem. He put me through this physical--I
was there for about two hours, blood pressure and the usual. Well, okay,
I expected that. But, "Walk here. I want to see you walk towards me."
You know how I began to get funny feelings? And then he--now, to my
knowledge he's an M.D., okay? And he [unclear], I've been there now most
of the afternoon, and he looks at me and he says, "I want you to close
your teeth." "Like that?" "Yeah." And then he goes, "Uh-oh." And he
says, "You have an occlusion problem. The teeth weren't quite meeting in
the back." Now, how in the heck could he see in the back? And it was
beginning to occur to this dummy, you're being had, son. You've got this
southerner, and he doesn't want to see you in this.And he ran out immediately and got the guy running the place, who was a
lieutenant commander. This guy is a Navy doctor lieutenant. The other
guy comes in and I could see him a little puzzled, but he went along
with him. He said, "Well, you know--." And I said, "Well, do I have any
right to a review or anything?" I'm by myself. My brother drove me down
and left me. "Well, yeah. You can go to the chief dental officer at Long
Beach Naval Station." "I want to do that." I just, you know how you're
older now and you're mature and you're deciding, uh-uh, you ain't doing
this to me without a fight, not for where I've got to go or where I want
to go, and I've gone through the written and all this stuff. And he
said, "Well, I can call him and set an appointment." I said, "Please
do," and he did.And now I didn't sleep. The appointment was the next week. I didn't sleep
for four or five days. I just was a nervous wreck, my mom and dad
talking to me, "Oh, come on, now. This is only one thing. There are a
lot of other things." "No, Dad, I want this." "All right, then go after
it, just cinch it up and go in and do it. You go down and see that guy
and tell him you want to be a naval officer," [unclear]. I remember
that. And he said, "No, don't tell him that." He said, "Just go in and
do it." I said, "Okay, gotcha, Dad." So I went down there, again my
brother, the older brother was still at UCLA. He drove me down, dropped
me off in this mammoth building. I'm looking around, "Oh, God." I go in
there and they send me in to meet this chief dentist, and all I can
remember doing is saying, "Please, God, don't make this a southerner.
Give me a chance."The guy comes in. First of all, he's a commander. He's fairly senior for
a dentist. He comes in and he says, "So Mr. Thompson, what's the
problem?" So I told him, "Well, I was told that I have an occlusion
problem in the back." And I'll never forget that look on his face of,
"What? How in the heck would you know that?" He said, "So what did they
do? Did they use the wax things to get imprints?" I said, "No. He just
had me put my teeth together." And I remember this guy in the back of
his mind saying, what kind of check is that of anything? He said, "Oh,
really?" I said, "Yeah." I said, "Do you want me to show you?" He said,
"No. No. I'm clearing you." He said, "You're signed, sealed, and
delivered, Mr. Thompson. Get yourself to the academy." I said, "All
right!" Ran out of there, ran into my brother, I said, "Man, he signed
it off. He said, 'What did he do?' I said, 'Nothing.'" He said, "Because
he knew." I said, "I think so. He had that look of, oh, man, they're
playing a game on this kid."So anyway, long story short I go back home and I get a letter from the
academy and it tells me to show up, but that's the other funny part,
Alva. The Merchant Marine Academy is located at Kings Point, New York,
which is a beautiful, beautiful grounds, the old Chrysler estate, big
estate. They built a whole academy there just for about a thousand men
and women, men then and then men and women, as opposed to Annapolis and
West Point that are three thousand. But, remember I had to put that
picture?
-
Stevenson
- Right.
-
Thompson
- They had--the first year of that academy was typically you went to one of
two schools. You went a year to San Mateo in California, Alva, or you
went to Pass Christian, Mississippi. The year that I applied they closed
San Mateo, so now there's only one first-year school and it's in Pass
Christian, Mississippi. And my orders were to come to Kings Point
directly, and I didn't understand about Pass Christian. I knew it
existed, but I didn't know what the significance, and when I got back to
the academy as a fourth-classman--now, they had some people from New
York. They didn't send them down there. They had them right there on
Long Island. But then every kid from Puerto Rico, every kid from Panama
that had a little funny skin color issue, they were in Kings Point,
because at Pass Christian there was a welcoming dance the first night
you were there. They didn't want no black kids lining up to dance with
these white southern belles.So I went back and again, young kid, what do I know? I don't know why I'm
there, I'm just there. You have to stand watches all night, they have
military crap. So we're meeting and I'm sitting there. I'm a
fourth-classman, so you don't open your mouth. There's seniors and
first-classmen there, and they were in charge of the watch, two of them,
and both of them it turned out were from California. They were talking
between them and they said, "I've been trying to figure out--there's a
California kid here, but I don't know why. Everybody else is at Pass
Christian." I went and put my little hand up. I said, "Sir, I'm from
California." He goes, "Oh." [laughs] "Oh. Got it." They didn't bring it
up again, though. It was so funny, because it was kind of an awakening,
"Oh. Oh! We know how you got here." So that was kind of an introduction
to the place.Thoroughly loved it. Went to sea, not all of it pleasant. I still had
some problems. I was on a merchant ship, Moore-McCormack Lines as a
midshipman. There was one deck, one engine midshipmen assigned to. They
had to do that, because the government paid for a lot of those ships and
as a part of that payment they had to agree to allow midshipmen to come
onboard for training for a year, so we spent a year at sea and then had
to make it up by going to school the eleven months of the year, the
remaining time. The problem in the Merchant Marine was the same. I was
on a merchant ship, a young kid. I'm eighteen years old. There's one of
me and one deck cadet, engine cadet who was a real nice guy, friends,
we've known each other for years, a white kid. I went up on the bridge
for watch, to go on watch the first time, and it was no problem. The
second officer, who did the navigating, was up there, and he was a nice
enough guy. I even took star sights with a sextant and all that. In the
early days we used to do it, and got to map, chart my positions and all
that stuff. The captain was Norwegian, Ingvald Molrlog. Funny how the
names stick.But the third officer was a fellow by the name of Gresham, Texan, all of
six-three, big man and just one of the nastiest--nice-looking guy, but
just a terrible disposition, and when I came up on watch and they asked
me to stand watch with him, and he looked at me and this was not going
to be happening. I lasted two watches with him, in which he told me,
"You stand out on the wing of the bridge," which is off the bridge and
outside. We were in southern waters so I didn't mind, but obviously he
wasn't going to do a darn thing to help or train or anything else, and
the next thing I knew I was put on a different watch. Then the first
officer also--a number of the guys on that ship were Norwegian. Gresham
I don't think, unless it's way back, but he wasn't. They weren't all,
but the senior officers on there were Norwegian descent, American
Norwegians.The first officer was Anderson, Chief Mate they call them, first officer.
He called me in one day and he said, "Okay, you've been standing some
watches. I want you--we're going to have a special assignment for you. I
want you to shine the fire extinguishers on the upper levels of the
decks of this ship." I remember looking at him like, what? And I was
talking to the cadet who was in the engine room, and he's from New
Hampshire. This kid hadn't the foggiest about race nothing. And he said,
"Why would they do that?" I said, "Well, I think it has to do with the
way I look." "You mean because you're African American?" or at that time
black. I said, "Yeah." "Oh, my god. He wants you to shine--?" And that's
what I did till we got--and that trip was four months, all the way down
to Rio de Janeiro. Now, I didn't mind, because I was going to some
fascinating places, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires. I got to the West
Indies from Barbados. I was just a hundred miles from my home and I
really wanted to go. I told you a little bit about that, I think,
before.
-
Stevenson
- Right.
-
Thompson
- As soon as we got back to port we were ordered to come down to the U.S.
Merchant Marine Academy assignment office in San Francisco, and they
reassigned me, and I knew it was all about color. And I thought to
myself, "Gresham, may you roast in hell." Pardon me, but I just thought
of that guy and what a nasty--if there's such a thing as a typical white
Texan, he was it, just thin-lipped and beady-eyed, the way I saw it. But
the funny part was, Alva, they put me on a ship, a Grace Line ship to go
to the other side of South America--I'd gone down the East Coast, this
is the West Coast. The captain was a German, A.E. Naumann, tough, came
up in sailing ships, and the stories on him are kind of legend. He
wasn't a big man, but he's powerful. But he had a reputation for taking
on bouncers in those bars down on San Francisco's Embarcadero. I mean, I
think of that, I think, oh, my god, that's some crazy human beings down
there in those days.But you know what? He was the fairest man I had ever met up to that point
in a position of authority. He was all over me. "Cadet! Blank, blank,
blank, blank. You've got to do this and this," and, "Yes, sir, captain."
And you know, I was running all over the place. But I would handle the
phones when he was trying to dock and undock the ship, which was tricky
stuff, and I handled that pretty well. I mean, he could understand me
and I'd, "Captain," to tell him. He'd [unclear]. And one day I was in
the room having coffee down in the ward room, officers quarters having
coffee, and he came in and he said, "Now, look." He said, "You know, I'm
counting on you for a lot of stuff, Thompson." "Yes, sir." "I want you
to check those chronometers," the expensive clocks that they use for
navigation. He says, "I want to make sure those are always wound and up
to speed, okay? And you check them for accuracy." "Yes, sir." I had the
fairest, most pleasurable trip, although we had some problems with other
officers, not with me so much. They were pretty good. I didn't have
anybody that absolutely didn't want me around. But it just shows
you--it's like I told you about Las Vegas, where we ended up eating with
the woman from Alabama, white woman, old white woman.
-
Stevenson
- Right, right.
-
Thompson
- So you can't make judgments. Some people fit the mold and some don't.
Thank God there are people that don't always fit it. He didn't and it
was a memorable year, and I did it at the end, which was fortunate.
Anyway, it was not as bad an experience as it had started out, because I
was very bitter. But I didn't even write home about it. I just left it
alone, and then I came back to the academy and I did my two years there.
I went on to the Navy from there. Why? Well, when I got out of the
academy I stupidly got married at a very young age. We were both
twenty-one years old. I always tell kids that tell me, "I'm not married
yet and I'm twenty-five," not to worry, because I was way too young. But
we raised four kids for about twenty years and got through some
horrendous times, but still it was an experience, but that's another
story.I got home here in L.A. from back East. We both--I'm married, my wife
came out. I was going to go on a ship, a merchant ship, and the ships
were tied up on strike. They'd picked to go on strike just as I
graduated. So I'm at home for about a month, and I get this telegram
from the Navy Department that says, "You will activate your Navy
commission," Korean War. "You will activate your Navy commission or be a
private in the Army." No question there. So I activated the commission.
This time I had to go down for another qualifying exam, and I had no
trouble with the officer doing it. Times have changed, you know? It just
changes. But the interesting part there is that when I reported to the
ship at San Pedro Harbor, Long Beach Harbor, it was huge. It was a big,
heavy cruiser, 800-foot warship, and I know nothing about the Navy,
because I was trained on merchant ships. But I went onboard, and I
remember going down to get my orders stamped in one of the ship's
offices, and there were several of them. These things are like a city. I
went down to it and the yeoman, clerical staff down there. They stamped
it. "Okay, Mr. Thompson, you're onboard and you'll see Mr. So-and-so,
who'll give you your assignment."Well, I did that and they put me, Navy ship stuff, but in gun turrets,
which gave me ear problems from the gate. But the interesting part was
later on I took an interest in training, and I remember helping some
kids that were white and black. They were kids that never got their high
school diploma, and somebody asked me to help them, so I did, with their
mathematics in particular. And I did. That's where I loved teaching.
-
Stevenson
- I was going to ask you, was this--
-
Thompson
- That's where it started. I didn't realize it, but it really did, because
I was still thinking, sea, sea, sea. So then when the training officer's
position opened up because the guy there left, they asked me to be the
training officer, take care of these guys getting their diplomas,
training to become whatever, radar men or whatever the position might
be, and I said, "That sounds interesting," so I did. Well, I got in
pretty tight with the yeomen, the clerical staff, four guys that were
right in that office, and we were friends even after I got out of the
Navy. They told me one day when we were in there, "Mr. Thompson, you
know something?" I said, "What?" "You were something we talked about at
chow." I said, "What, when I came onboard?" "No, no, no, before you came
onboard. Your orders were on here two years before you graduated." I
went, "What?" He said, "Yeah. Your orders were here in 1950, because one
of us was onboard at that time," one of the guys told them. It's weird.
They didn't see a picture or anything. All they saw was the orders.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting.
-
Thompson
- What it was was the Navy was covering its bets, and every place there was
a black who was about to become an officer, they figured out ahead of
time where they wanted to put them, and they never put them on small
ships. They never went on destroyers or tight-quarters ships, submarines
and things. They always were on big ships. My brother, that older
brother who graduated from here, he went to Officers Candidate School
and ended up in the Navy. I'm in Korea and he writes me and he's
finished Officer Candidate School. We're the only two black officers on
the Pacific Coast, honest to God. Same family. He ended up on an
aircraft carrier, big ship, so they had us--wherever there was a black
it was lined up that they'd be on big ships where there would be a lot
of officers and their chances of friendships and so on would work out,
rather than something small where you might run into five guys who don't
like blacks.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting, interesting.
-
Thompson
- So it was a calculated move on their part, but I had nothing but a good
experience in the Navy other than the war nonsense, shooting at people
and things. But in the main--because we showed the flag all over the
Pacific. We went down to Singapore and Bangkok and Hong Kong. I saw more
of Asia than most people would ever see, the Philippines. That ship went
everywhere to show the flag.
-
Stevenson
- Follow up on the Merchant Marine Academy. Your major while you were
there?
-
Thompson
- My major? No, they didn't have like math or this. You all took heavy
mathematics, heavy science because of the naval training. The degree was
a degree in nautical science, because we did a lot of ocean stuff and
all this. It was all about ships. I always said it was a fancy name for
a trade school. It was to go to sea.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting.
-
Thompson
- They did a lot more--for example, Annapolis would do a heck of a lot more
with gunnery and all that. They practiced having the guns fired off on
ships. I never did that. I went on that ship and the first time they
shot those guns off I'd about died. My god, blew out light bulbs and
things. But, no, it was not that. Now, there was a marine engineering.
You were either what we call deck or engine. In fact, on our epaulets we
wore in one case an anchor if you were deck, to run a ship, or if you
were an engineer to run the engine room you had a propeller. The guy I
was at sea with had a propeller because he was an engineer, and
everything he did was training to run engines, ships' engines.
Everything I did was preparing to run a ship, so they were just two
different things.
-
Stevenson
- I see. And at the academy there were other African Americans there at the
time you--
-
Thompson
- There was one ahead of me and there was one in my class, and he was a
kind of quiet guy. He went all the way through, and he did some things
in the marine-something department in New York, so he went on in marine
whatever. But in the main, there were two and one ahead who graduated, a
terrific guy. He was kind of light-skinned and they could put up with
him a little bit easier, the southerners, than they could with some of
us. And the other kid was kind of dark, and he had a little bit of a
rough time.There was a very dark kid from Haiti, Nelson, or as he called himself
[pronounces with French accent] "Nelson." And Nelson was one
obstreperous cat. He was something. He would go down South and he would
come back and he'd say, "Those southerners." He said, "Mon, I don't
understand them." He said, "What kind of people are they? Idiots!" And
he'd rant. He wasn't a big guy, bright, really bright. But he reacted to
America's racial policies in a very negative way, but not enough that
they threw him out or anything. He graduated. But he was a real thorn in
their side, because he was very dark and very obvious, and he didn't
give a blessed hoot about whether they liked it or not. I always loved
the guy. We would go out together and stuff, and I'd tell him, "Nelson,
you've just got to be cool. Don't let them get you, man, because they'd
probably beat you." He says, "I know. I know it." He says, "But I'll
never do anything stupid." I said, "I know."But there were a few blacks, and they made a point sometimes of letting
you know there were a few folks that didn't want you there. But in the
main, I could never argue about the academy in terms of its total--the
way it handled us totally was fair, and certainly the other academies
weren't doing that, so I was very happy with it, and later on I went
back, by the way, as an advisor there, not professionally, I wasn't
paid. I was at UCLA. About ten years ago they put me on the advisory
committee, and I worked with the admiral who runs the place, and he had
a burning desire for the inclusion of minorities, and I saw more Mexican
Americans, more African Americans. And one of these African Americans,
I'm proud to say, the last time I was there was the regimental
commander. In other words, he was still a midshipman, but he was in
charge of all midshipmen under line officers, but the regular Navy,
regular Merchant Marine. But he was the lead cadet, lead midshipmen
officer of the academy, very, very bright kid. I loved talking with him.
So a lot of good things have happened.You know, you always have to think in terms of progression. Things
happen, things change. I look back at the beginnings and first time in
there in '47. I remember what '47 was and the war and all that stuff,
and some of the things some of us went through, and you always think
that those are things that lead to other things, acceptance, whether
they like it or not, they're going to have to deal with blacks and
browns and other people. There was a kid from Hawaii, I remember that, a
Polynesian-looking kid. He and I, because we couldn't go home at
Christmas, it was too far, so he couldn't go to Hawaii, so we hung out
together at the academy. I think they were maybe fifty guys there from
different parts of the world that couldn't go home. His experiences were
different. They could more put up with a Hawaiian than they could with
an African American, for the same reasons that a Creole was--it's
different. But he had his moments, too, when he said he ran afoul of
this officer or that officer because of skin color and who he was. He
was kind of a swarthy Hawaiian.The academy was a good experience for me. I never regretted a day of
doing it. It allowed me to go to sea, and I had to get that out of my
system, and I did. Not entirely, I got my own boat, but other than that
I decided I couldn't go to sea and raise a family, and that changed a
few things.
-
Stevenson
- I did have a follow up. During World War II, in those years were you
aware of, say, the Tuskegee Airmen--those are probably the most
famous--and other blacks in the military?
-
Thompson
- We had relatives who were in the military. Matter of fact, some of them
stayed with us. They would come out from New York. A lot of them were
from New York. We had the Phillips brothers, wonderful, wonderful guys,
and they were in the Navy. They were enlisted men, and they were
assigned to Port Hueneme, where they trained Seabees, the construction
battalion, and so they would come down to stay at my aunt's place. She
was right next door, the one that ran the Women's Auxiliary. They would
stay at her place, right next door to where we were living, and, of
course, we would get stories from them. These were New York kids and
they had not been raised in the South or any of that, and they had a
whole different attitude, and they had problems with some of the Army
decrees on segregated this, that, and the other.I'll never forget when we went out to Victorville. We went out there. Dad
got a chance and we rented a cabin out there, with the desert and the
horses and the whole nine yards. Well, it was owned by blacks. A black
family owned this dude ranch, not a big place.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting. Remember the name?
-
Thompson
- No, darn it, I'm blanking. It was in Victorville, I know that, and if I
heard the name I'd probably know it. But there was an Army base nearby,
and they were shipping the black--there was a huge black component
there, engineers and guys that had to build roads and stuff, and they
were getting ready to ship them overseas. The war in Germany was
progressing. They had a big going-away bash at the ranch, and I remember
the best barbecue I had in my life, except it was Texas barbecue. It was
hot. Man, I mean, I was a little kid, because it would have been the
early part of the war. It wasn't near the end. I take it back, it was
the early part. It was about '44, '43, '44, and they were shipping out,
and I remember listening to those guys talk, and the topic of
conversation was access to what they knew they could do and what they
weren't allowed to do. It was very big to them. And no, I never, did not
hear of the Tuskegee Airmen, because in those days they didn't advertise
it. It wasn't important. Even Mulzac, even this big deal was not a big,
big deal. In the black press, The Sentinel, yes. In the white press, no.So I didn't really learn about those guys until after the war, and I know
some of them now. One lives in my complex where I live, and he's now
ninety-something. But you realize the things they went through, and we
talked a little bit about some of that, and yet they weren't--even to us
as role models. I mean, as a kid I would have said, heck, I might have
decided I'll go down there and fly planes. I don't know. But you never
had access to that. They just didn't tell you, unless you happened to be
there or meet some of them or whatever. It was not advertised. A lot of
things happened then that were vestiges of a really racist society. It
just didn't want to acknowledge what it did to people, one, and number
two, it's almost like you didn't want to acknowledge that these people
have brains enough to go fly a plane and guts enough to fly a plane, and
it was very prevalent in the thinking. That's my take, because I never
heard of it, and that's criminal. What did we have on the role models?
All you had was John Wayne and these clowns playing at it and nothing
that was real that we could have put our teeth into as kids.
-
Stevenson
- Okay, so after you left the Navy, what trajectory did your education take
at that point?
-
Thompson
- Came back here. I started doing some post-grad in math and science and
then realized I really don't want to go into math and science. I wasn't
interested in theoretical this, that, and the other, or burying myself.
I liked people and I wanted to be around people. I got a chance to sell
trucks for International Harvester in 1958, '57, '58, around in there,
hated it and I hate sales, because ostensibly I was hired to sell trucks
to blacks.
-
Stevenson
- I was going to ask you, would it have been unusual for them to hire a
black salesman?
-
Thompson
- Yes. But I was specifically hired to go after the black trade.
-
Stevenson
- Right. And these were trucks?
-
Thompson
- International trucks. They built pickups to heavy-duty eighteen-wheelers,
so it was big stuff and little stuff. But the problem was, as one of the
salesmen told me, an Italian American who said, "Sid," Valenti, never
forget him, he said, "Sid, you're here to sell trucks to blacks." He
said, "Black folks, they don't have any money." He said, "They can't buy
these trucks," and he was absolutely right. I found myself scurrying
around selling where I could to whites. There wasn't any money, and I
had to live. I had two kids at the time, three. And one day, to be real
candid, we had had lunch, me and another salesman, Ross Sony. He was
from [U]SC. He was selling trucks between jobs, and we were sitting
there sipping a glass of wine we had after dinner, and he said, "Sid,"
because I told him I wasn't happy. I said, [unclear] "--sell trucks to
blacks. These poor folks don't have any money. They don't want me
selling to white," I said, "and I don't want to sell, period." He said,
"Yeah." He was the same way, a very bright guy, and he said, "You know,
I worked in teacher procurement for USC." I said, "Really?" He said,
"Yeah." He said, "You'd be a heck of a teacher. Did anybody ever tell
you that?" I said, "Well, Dad taught."And to tell you the truth, then the Navy thing kicked in, and I said,
"Tell you the truth, some of my more pleasant things were as training
officer on that ship, because I got to see a lot of young guys, white
and black and brown, who never would have made it except they earned
their own little diploma finally, GED, and made it," and some of them
were getting ready to go on to community colleges and so forth and
correspondence courses and all that. He said, "You ought to consider
teaching. I'm serious. You've had a lot of math." He said, "God, they're
hiring math people like crazy." So I thought about it for a day, and the
thing with this truck thing was going nowhere quick, so I went down to
the board, 450 North Grand, and told them that I was interested in
teaching.And the guy was the principal of Venice [High School], can't remember his
name, wonderful guy, because I did meet some--there were some folks I
met down there that weren't good, not nice anyway. But he was a real
nice guy, principal, and he's talking to me, he says, "You were an
officer in the Navy?" He says, "How many black officers?" I said, "There
were two when I was in there, me and my brother." And he said, "Where'd
you go?" I told him Belmont and Virgil and he said, "And you had all
this math?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Man, I think you'd be a good math
teacher." So he said, "Here's what you're going to do. You're going to
take a course at UCLA." No, he said, "Cheap--go to Cal State L.A.," he
said, "and take a course in child psychology." He said, "You've got to
have something, so why don't you go take a course in that, and then
we're going to have you talk to some people." So I said okay.So I went and took the course. Alva, to this day I've got to confess I
never student taught in my life. I never took the whole teacher-ed
thing. I took courses to get the credential. But what he did, when I
took the child psychology thing I took it in the spring, got through
that final and he said, "How'd you do?" I told him, "I did good." He
says, "I want you to take a course this summer, not with the university
but with us." He said, "Dale Carpenter is an old name in mathematics,
and he is going to be doing some teacher workshops this summer at Cal
State L.A., and I want you to take his course and then we'll make an
assignment in the fall." I did that. I went back down and the head of
personnel, I'll never forget, looks at me with this disdainful,
sneering--it's been a long time, but I wanted to just knock his lights
out. I was so angry with this human being. I said, "God, what a pig. Who
hired--?" I said, "Let's not go there." True story. I said, "Let's not
go there. The man I talked to is the principal at Venice. You don't like
it, you talk to him. But he told me," and I told him, and I said, "and
I'm here expecting to be assigned." "Well, okay," he says, "I'll see
what I can do." I said, "You do that," and I went home.Well, Alva, it was about two months later and I get a phone call from
Dale Carpenter. I had a good time in his class. He liked me and we got
along fine, and he called me and he said, "We want you to go to Pacoima.
We want you to be a math teacher up there. You report to Dr. Dave
Schwartz." He said, "He's putting the school together," because it had
its problems. It had a couple of riots and one thing or another, so I
thought, well, that'll be interesting. [laughs] So I went out there, and
Dave was a big ex-USC baseball player, a pretty good one. He was
all-something or the other, a big guy, Jewish and deceptive, a big,
rough, [imitates gruff voice] "Here's what I want to have happen," and a
Phi Beta Kappa, so bright as the devil. Shook my hand and told me years
later, "I liked your handshake. It was firm." He had his own way of
testing people.Anyway, so I started teaching at Pacoima Junior High, never student
taught, never--I didn't even observe. I went to Dale's class and he
talked about the sequential teaching of arithmetic and mathematics and
algebra, which was fine. But never--I'm going in this classroom on a
Monday morning and don't know the first thing about what I'm going to do
next. I had some help from a wonderful guy who was the math department
chair, Jerry Adler, and Jerry later on became an adult-school principal.
But he gave me some pointers and I listened, and I went in the class and
it worked out really great. I loved it. They seemed to like it. It was a
day when there was corporal punishment. They got rid of that--actually,
later on when I was a deputy they got rid of corporal punishment, but in
those days they'd swat the boys if they acted up, and that was just part
of the--I was swatted when I was in school. It just shows you how that
corporal punishment thing was engrained.And by the way, there were kids that worked on. They swatted me twice and
it was over. They're not swatting me again, and I behaved. Now, there
were other kids though that that didn't work, one. Number two, there
were kids that actually, I think, enjoyed being battered, and that's the
sad part. These kids were probably getting battered at home, and we
carried out the abuse at school. So when they got rid of it, although I
reacted to it at first, I said, "Well, wait a minute. We've always--."
But after I thought about it I said, no, wait a minute, we can't
continue what's been happening at home. I say that because when they
went into the school, that's how they nailed it. They got a bunch of
men, a few tough women, and Principal Schwartz asked me, and I'll never
forget his first question, "Are you afraid of kids?" I said, "God, no."
"You ever been in athletics?" I said, "Well, I've done some boxing," and
I was at the academy. I said, "I've boxed, I've wrestled." "Really?" I
said, "Yeah." He said, "Okay." I said, "That's how I'm going to teach
math?"First day in class a kid by the name of John Guinsburg that was Mexican
Jewish, looked like Fonz, the Fonz with the hair, pure thug. He had a
lead pipe up his coat, leather coat, leather coat, the whole nine yards.
It fell out, boom, all over the floor. So I went back and I said--second
day I'm teaching. I go back, "Is that yours?" "Yeah, so what?" I said,
"Hey, say that one more time." I said, "You're not talking to some
dope." I said, "I'm not going to put up with your mouth, so knock it
off." "All right, man. Well, don't--you're getting angry." I said,
"Yeah, I am angry, because I didn't come on you." "All right, all
right." I said, "That's your pipe, right?" He said, "Yeah." I said,
"Pick it up." He looks at me, and I'm looking at him like, pick it up.
So he picked it up. I said, "Give it to me." And I was thinking, you'd
better put it in my hand. So he laid it in my hand. And I remember going
home that night and my wife, that wife saying, "So how did it go?" I
said, "It wasn't really about teaching. It was about surviving." I said,
"These guys, they've got some kids in there that are really bad." I
said, "But it worked out, and I didn't have to really go on him, and I
think I've got him so he'll listen a little bit." Well, it worked out
with him. He actually graduated from the junior high. I don't know what
he did in high school, didn't want to get into it, because he was a
really interesting kid.But all that to say that I began to find an affinity with kids. I just
liked kids, and it hurt when they didn't make it, and it felt wonderful
when they made it. And I was good enough in math, they made me math
chairman a year later. I said, "Do you guys know what you're doing? I
never was trained." Said, "Oh, shut up, just do it." "Okay." So I was
math chair, and I went on to teach classes in arithmetic, algebra. We
had some geometry classes, and we had a group of kids, extremely bright.
It was a borderline area. It had a Jewish population that came from all
the Jewish culture. You had an African American population that came out
of San Fernando, the Joe Louis Tract, some places that were heavily
African American, and then a strong Mexican influence from San
Fernando-Pacoima that had been there since the 1800s, so it's an
incredible area. Some Asian kids that came from the big nurseries up on
Foothill, a mixture.And I had a group of kids that went through algebra and geometry [snaps
fingers] like that, and the question was, what were we going to do--I
take it back. They went through algebra, but they were getting ready to
take geometry, but they didn't want to do that, because they were going
to get geometry at the high school, so they had to have a filler, and I
didn't know what in the world. They asked me to teach it, and they said,
"Well, you're doing stuff with--." I was working with the Air Pollution
Control District at the time, part-time computer thing, and I decided--I
had come back here and taken some analytic geometry and one thing or
another, so I went into analytic geometry with them. I'm saying that
because I was trying to do something that would not have them marking
time and withering on the vine, but not taking away from what they were
going to do in high school and the kids saying, "I already had that." I
didn't want to get into that kind of a fight with San Fernando High
School, for which we were the primary feeder.So I went into some analytic geometry, and I did something totally
different. I was scared, because I didn't know how it was going to go
over, not with the adults, they didn't know what I was doing, but the
kids. These were very bright kids, and I'm digressing for a reason,
because I've got to add this. They had a reunion a year ago. These kids
are grandparents now, you believe? And to see kids with a doctorate in
computer science. One is the lead meteorologist for the United States in
the Western states, a wonderful, wonderful, bright, bright kid. We had
lunch at Jerry's in Westwood, and there were twenty of them there,
twenty-five, with wives, husbands, because there were girls. One girl
had become a district superintendent up north, Solano. It was just a
wonderful experience. It's something you don't get as an administrator.
You have to have been a teacher to have the relationship.But these kids have gone on and done some just--one kid that I thought
would end up in prison. He was a bright, bright kid, but he was messing
with narcotics, and when he gave me his card at the luncheon and he was
a Ph.D. in naval architecture at [UC] Berkeley, I said, "I think you
made it." He laughed. He said, "I'll bet you figured I would be behind
bars somewhere." I said, "You probably were." He said, "I was once,
until I wised up." And he said, "But now I'm doing these things." In
fact, he even worked with the guy that designed the sailboat I own. He
mentioned, "Do you have a boat?" I said, "Yeah, I've still got my boat."
"What is it?" I said, "A Rawson sailboat thirty." He goes, "Oh, my god,
I know Rawson." He says, "I was up in Seattle, Washington." That's where
they are. This is to say I was thinking to myself, you know, as you look
back over the years, you think you know people. You don't know anything.
You don't know.One girl, attractive, older woman obviously, a grandmother now, but then
in those days she was an attractive girl, but she had a real race thing
about Mexicans, and I don't think that ever left, because we were
talking about the old days and she said, "Yeah, but some of those kids
that were there, those kids," and the way she was talking I said, "Boy,
you didn't mellow with age." So sometimes it doesn't work out real well,
but a lot of times it did, and it was just memorable. So the time at
Pacoima--I taught there for nine years, and I always have said teaching
time was absolutely critical for somebody to be an administrator. You've
got to know teaching. You just have to. You have to know kids, and you
can't do that in two or three years like we're doing now. We're putting
people in charge of schools that haven't taught really in depth
anything, and to understand teachers and to understand what it's like to
be in a classroom day after day after day, and I always tell them,
"Answering the bell," it's different. I said, "I'm not saying that being
a principal was easier. No question. Being a high school principal, good
God. Five, six days a week you're out, and it's every kind of activity
in the book." I said, "But there are just differences in the kinds of
things that you're working on, what you're doing as a teacher, as an
administrator." But you can't denigrate either job. They're just
necessary, and being a teacher begins with it. That's where most of the
administrators come from. They were teachers.And I always think back, when I start to say, "They ought to be--," I
would think, okay, when you were in the classroom, I said, and I hadn't
forgotten it, I could remember. Anyway, the time at Pacoima, we had the
plane crash. Did I tell you about that?
-
Stevenson
- No. I think you alluded to it, but--
-
Thompson
- Oh, my gosh, first year. Yes, the first year of teaching at Pacoima
started in September. The next year in February, and this would be '56,
'57, we were graduating two graduations, one in the winter, one in the
summer, before they went to all year. They were rehearsing with all the
kids in the auditorium, in the ninth grade. The school was a big school,
2300 at the time, and graduating classes were large, so there was a full
house in the auditorium practicing. I was teaching math in the bungalows
down by the athletic field, and I'm a beginning teacher. I still don't
know which end is up. I hear this screaming sound. I had come out of the
Korean thing and I was thinking, that sounds like a bomb. I ran
outside--I told the kids, "Stay," and I ran outside the door, and I see
pieces--it was aluminum foil coming off this plane, and what they didn't
realize, a lot of folks, that plane was a transcontinental,
four-propellered transport plane, a big propeller-driven plane. It got
hit by a military jet over La Crescenta/La Canada, came on a wide arc
out of control, had a big hole in it. My dad, who was a radar engineer,
remember? He told me later the guy was running a blind radar run on the
plane, in which they blackout the cockpit and they go on radar, very
dangerous, and he did it to a plane--fortunately did not have
passengers. It was only three crew.Plane came in over the athletic field. I didn't see it, I could hear it,
just horrible screaming of the wind going through it, and then this
horrendous explosion, wham, and flame and smoke all over the gym, gym
field. It blew up about fifty feet in the air, blew up over the gym
field, and I thought, oh, my god. I told the kids to stay. I had a
teacher across from me by the name of Mrs. Williams who was a disaster.
She couldn't control a thirsty horse. And I remember yelling to her,
"Mrs. Williams, watch my class. Keep them under control. Don't let any
kids out. Hold them here." Because we were way down in the south
bungalow. And I remember her yelling at the kids, "Shut up and sit
down!" What got into her, you know?But I ran out there and I didn't even get to the field. There were kids
coming towards me that I knew. They had peeled off burning clothes from
airplane fuel, and white kids who were yellow from burns. Hispanic and
some African American kids were injured, but not seriously. But what
happened was, Alva, he came over the field. There had been 350 girls out
there. They had just taken them in for showers. He didn't hit the gym.
He blew up over the athletic field. The pilot was obviously trying all
he could to control to an open space; didn't do him any good. They were
blown to pieces, and he blew up over the field. One of my kids for the
next period was killed, and three others were killed, and a whole bunch
of others lost a leg, terrible burn injuries, and that was in my first
year, and I thought, it can't get any worse, and it really never did.
That was absolutely--you know who was a student here, did I tell you?
Ritchie Valens [Richard Steven Valenzuela].
-
Stevenson
- Oh, really?
-
Thompson
- Yes, I had Ritchie. Ritchie was a student at Pacoima, and he had
graduated--no, he hadn't graduated, he hadn't graduated. He ditched that
day. He was doing all this music stuff. And in his movie he thinks of it
as a crash of a little Piper Cub, and people who saw the movie thought
that's what happened. And I says, "No, no, no, no. That was a huge
plane, four engines." The engines--the explosion was so violent it drove
them into the asphalt. Those engines were below ground level, if you can
believe, I mean, just a tremendous explosion. Anyway, that was one that
took a while to get over for all of us. All of us were really
traumatized, kids, parents. Parents--I remember a woman jumping a
sixteen-foot fence around the athletic field, and this mother I remember
in her nightgown and a robe jumping, and it was months later when she
asked me, "You know, Sid, I never knew how I got into the school." I
said, "You jumped." "What?" I said, "You jumped from the top of that
fence." She says, "What? I couldn't have done that." She says, "I'd have
broken my neck." I said, "Well, you almost did. But you jumped and I saw
you moving, so I figured you were okay." But I said, "No measure of a
mother--you saw--you weren't sure if your kid was hurt, so you were
going to find out." And I said, "You went up that fence like a Ranger
going over an obstacle course." I said, "It was amazing. And you
jumped." I said, "And you weren't the only one."Anyway, all of that was there, and I remember it vividly, because it was
just something I always related to people about the lessons we learn,
and I won't go into them, but it's all about those people you can count
on in emergencies and those you can't, and I learned a big lesson. There
was a war vet there who used to talk about his exploits as a pilot and
all this stuff. He was catatonic, absolutely frozen. His kids took the
flag and marched out and left him. [unclear] So anybody that was
counting on this war experience, this and that, it wouldn't have worked.
He was frozen. Then I always talk about the little old lady that was the
teacher who was a disaster, who told the kids to, "Shut up and sit
down," and they did. You just don't know how people react in
emergencies. Anyway, a little lesson.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Well, that's a good place--[End of interview]
1.3. Session 3 (March 23, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- I'm continuing an interview with Dr. Sid Thompson on Monday, March 23,
2009. I'd like to start our session today talking about the vice
principal and principal test, and I want to look at this in the larger
context of a time when there were very few if any black vice principals
and principals, if you could talk a little bit about that.
-
Thompson
- Well, it's true. There was Lou Mazique and folks like them that were kind
of the spearheads of all of this and began it early on and went on. Jim
[Taylor] was a tweener, because when I started teaching, Jim Taylor was
an assistant principal at Poly High School. I used to call Jim the gem,
because my dad knew him well. They taught together at the Jefferson
Adult School. Father was much older, of course, and Jim was a young
fellow, but they were the beginning. There was one here, one there, same
with the elementary level. When all of it began was the tail end
of--late in the forties, I don't know exactly what date, but it was
early fifties.There were two sides to look at. One was the history of the district was
not inclusionary. It did not have black representation as such, or any
representation for that matter, Asian, Hispanic--I mean, white,
basically. And we knew that that was representing a huge change in what
the district was about. We also knew, though, that they had a major
problem with South Central, and then they had these what we called
pocket ghettos and barrios like San Fernando, Wilmington, Canoga Park.
They're places where there were minority populations, and they were
having to look at that because we're having a problem controlling that.
And sadly, a lot of it was looked upon as a matter of how do we control
these populations who are poor and really aren't going anywhere that
they could see, the general population, so there was a mixed bag.But we did figure that there were enough problems related to minority
areas that they needed minority representation, and we saw it as an
opportunity for things to change. I went to work in '56 as a teacher.
Jim Taylor was right next door at Poly High, and we used to send kids
from Pacoima [Junior High], our school, middle school, to Poly, so that
was a visible change, and that we happened to know him helped, too,
because I knew him from here when I came out for a year before I went to
that academy. My brother knew him well back then. So we saw all of that
as the very beginning of change. But Jim was an easy role model for them
to pick, just excellent English, excellent in everything, great
personality, good person with people, so he was an easy choice for them,
for the district, the institution.But a lot of us were being actively trained. When I went to Pacoima and
after about a year of teaching, the principal, Dave Schwartz, white,
Jewish, liberal, big old guy--and he told me one day, said, "You've got
to be an administrator, so I want you to go into my training program."
He set up a training program. He had eight people in it. He had Jewish,
he had non-Jews, he had white, just white Protestants. I was a black.
I'm trying to remember if there were any--no, we didn't have Hispanic.
It's funny. The Hispanic piece followed, because most of what they were
looking at was--in Pacoima, for example, a pocket ghetto-barrio, because
it was also heavily Hispanic, but they didn't even begin to think about
Hispanic representation. They just thought about, ""We've got to get the
blacks in here. We've got problems with the black kids." So much so that
those of us--oh, there was another one, Roger Dash. Roger Dash was an
African American. He was older than I, a little older, little older and
a little more experienced. He started sooner. He was also in the
program.The reason I remember that so well is that he and I were asked, along
with a couple of African American teachers who weren't going into
administration but were respected on campus, and we were asked to meet
with the African American kids to talk with them about the kinds of
things they could do to help themselves. Well, it sounded innocent
enough, but it turned into, "You folks can't be so loud. You folks,
you've got to tone it down. Let's not forget about our cleanliness."
Well, they were appropriate for some kids, but individually. I thought
about it later and I was not proud of that moment, to be included and we
were doing this. It just bothered me a while later, after I got a little
bit more experience. I was just a young guy on a block and I was going
along, "Okay, we'll meet with them. Heck, talking with kids is no
problem." And the kids all knew us, and I don't think any of them took
it necessarily badly, but it just was not the right way to do it, and I
recall it as a lesson, and from then on I always said, "If you have a
problem, deal with it the way it is a problem, individually, and don't
do collective this and that, because that's not the way it is. And if I
were one of those kids that showered every day and did what Mama told me
and carried my books to school and did my homework, I'd be insulted. Why
are you telling me this? What about all those white kids that don't do
this, living up in the canyons there."So as I thought back on it, it was a time when I reflected, and it wasn't
that long. Within a year I was reflecting on that, and we cut that stuff
out. But as far as the administrative part--and that was a growing thing
is that administrator. I said to myself, listen, if you ever move on in
this, don't ever get caught doing that, because it's not right for our
kids and not fair to any human being. But in terms of the exam process,
I studied, and it was very rigorous then, because they required you to
know an awful lot of minutiae. There was a book this thick called "The
Administrative Guide," and I swear to God, it looked like the Bible, I
mean, and it was in its own way, but it was thick this, but covered with
codes and the distance apart of chairs when they're set up in
classrooms, and the minimum width of aisles for fire reasons, and all of
that stuff, how many times you hold a fire drill. And it was done, I'm
convinced, as a good way to weed out the hundreds and hundreds of people
who applied. That's the classic way to do it. You just throw enough junk
at them and if they don't know it, they're out. That gets rid of some of
them.And then you had to write essays and all that sort of stuff, and then you
had oral interviews and so on. So the first time I took it, I didn't
make it, which was not at all uncommon. I took it, as I recall, twice,
and the second time I placed pretty well with it. What began then was a
process of not from a racial standpoint, really from an experience
standpoint. They would take you downtown for different programs. I was
taken downtown--no, no, not true. I was first taken, before I was made a
vice principal the list had not come out, but the principal at Maclay
Middle School [Junior High School], which was an integrated school next
door to Pacoima that had opened, and the principal was what turned out
to be an old friend of mine, a big old white guy named Fred Frazier.
I'll never forget Big Fred. And Fred was one of these individuals out of
the Midwest, right out of the corn belt, but he loved people, and his
African American kids in the school he'd fight for with some of the
parents, because it was a mixed school, and there were whites who didn't
like being in there with blacks and browns and so on.So he had an assistant principal who was promoted, and he had been
talking to my principal, who was now a different person. Dave had moved
on to other things. And he called that principal, the then-principal of
Pacoima, a guy named Bill Layne. He gave me a real push. He said, "I
want you to do this, Sid. We want you to be an administrator. We want
you to be a principal. So I went over, I took the job as an acting
assistant principal. Then when the list came out and I had made it, then
it was a regular assignment. So I went over there in '62 or '63, '63 I
think, and then--'65, because I taught nine years at the other school. I
went over there, I became an assistant principal, and that's when I
began to meet other African Americans, because this district was so
huge. What did you know about the harbor, the East Side? And we had
blacks from the East Side all the way west.And by this point we had managed to integrate finally Dorsey [High
School] and places that I remember as a kid, blacks were not in there.
They did anything, just like they did with Odetta with this situation at
Marshall [High School]. Marshall was a protected school, and, "No, you
can go to Belmont [High School]. We're going to let you go to Belmont,"
with all the other black kids we're trying to put in there, and there
weren't that many. There weren't that many blacks over there. Belmont's
black population was a tiny percentage of the total--mostly white and
Hispanic. So these kinds of changes were the very beginning in the
fifties and then into the sixties. Now, it really picks up when the
Watts riots hit, and folks began looking at this saying, "Now, how are
we going to run these schools?" And quite honestly, a lot of white folks
are saying, "I don't want to go down there." So they were having trouble
filling those positions.I don't want to forget this, because it was such--I remember once being
asked by some white principals when I was at a senior level, so I don't
forget it, "What is this white-black? We serve as principals, and we--,"
and they were going on and on, and I knew them, and they're good guys,
but they were in the system. So when I stopped them I said, "Okay. I'm
going to give you a scenario. I have an opening at Jordan High School,
and I get twenty Porsches down here, fast cars, and I say, 'Okay guys,
ladies, jump in, have a car. You're going to drive it. I need the first
car to Jordan to be the principal.'" I said, "Do you think there are any
cars out in front of Jordan?" I said, "No, be honest now." "Well, no." I
said, "That's my point. That's why we have to think about those things,
because how do we serve those kids, and we don't even talk about it,
when you've got our own people afraid or whatever their reason is they
don't go there?"Now, I say that because after the riots, that's when all of that stuff
began in earnest, and Fremont and Jordan and Washington [High School]
and all of those South Central high schools were very difficult to
staff. And, of course, if that was true of the administrators, think of
the teachers. And the reason all of that is very appropriate and apropos
for what I'm talking about is because in '65 I was over at--'65 to '68,
then from '68 to '69 they had me downtown as a little more seasoning in
charge of what they called the recreation directors. These were people
that aren't teachers. They're not credentialed, and they're hired to
help with ground supervision, and that was all over the city. There was
a budget, big budget for them, and this is after the riots now, so all
this is very, "We've got to protect these kids," and all this stuff. So
I ran that for a year, and I didn't know what they were doing. I was
down--I didn't know what I was going to do next.And then they called me in the office one day and said that the
principal, who happened to be white, was being transferred from Markham
[Junior High School] in Watts to another school that he was going to
open, Curtis, down in Carson, and that Markham was open and they would
like me to be the principal, and would I accept it? And I said, "Of
course, happy to do it. Thank you." I trotted on down to Markham, and I
ran into some problems because the culture I was raised in, this West
Indian thing, was always a bit of a problem, to be real candid, with
some of the African Americans here. They didn't understand that I was in
the Philharmonic Club, me and my brother, because Daddy insisted that we
learn classical music and understand it. Now, that didn't mean no other
blacks did it, because there were certainly many I met who had done the
same thing and were probably castigated the same way we were. But we had
problems because of that. In other words, it became a question, "Are you
black enough?" And that's a very common thing, and we go through it as
an African American society, we go through it as a society at large.And when I went down there, they put out a lot of things about, "Well, he
had West Indian affiliation," and all kinds of things. And I say this
because I went to that school, I loved it. It was 104th [Street] and
Compton, and the staff was primarily African American, out of Texas
Southern, Xavier, the black institutions.
-
Stevenson
- Historically black colleges.
-
Thompson
- Exactly. And they were some of them, and this sounds like trite or
something, but I really mean this--they were such a neat group. They had
identity, which I never had being raised in Hollywood with a mixed
population in schools, and we were the smallest population. I never
learned anything about "Lift Every [Voice and Sing]." You don't know
that stuff. You never heard it, because it wasn't important to the main
population. And so down there, to be real candid, I got an education,
and I would ask the folks from Texas Southern and Xavier, "Look guys.
Tell me about this and this and this." "Well, man, don't you--?" I said,
"No, and please don't beat me up because I've been beaten enough. Just
tell me."But the one thing I think I made my point on was that they knew I was for
those kids, and I would fight for those kids hammer and tong. I got into
it with the police department, because when I went as a beginning
principal, and there weren't a lot of black principals, I was the second
one, because the Jordan principal at this point was now black, so change
was beginning, and we were all a part of it, and that was good.We had a bad episode on the campus at Markham. It was right by the
Southern Pacific right-of-way, and the darn train used to come through,
and they'd take rocks and throw them at the trains, and they hit the
engineer one day and put him in the hospital, and I'd just had enough of
it. I understood this was part of the tradition. There was no fence. It
was poverty, right? So who cared? Let them get across the tracks the
best way they can. So what I used to do, one day I just got mad, and I
had a little temper, and I went across the tracks with them. The kids
were going home, and I went across the tracks. I picked up a piece of
two-by-four, "First one that hits a rock on that engine, you've got to
answer to me." "You crazy, Mr. T?" I said, "Yeah, because I'm sick of
people getting hurt, and one of you is going to get hurt, because
somebody's going to send the police and now I don't know what's going to
happen." Well, they would respond to that. "Okay, man, we'll be cool." I
said, "You're cool, I'm cool." I put the thing down and said, "Okay, now
no more of this stuff, all right?" "Okay, man." I don't mean it stopped
completely, but it wasn't the tradition anymore.Well, one day they were going home. They went across the tracks. There
was no train, so that wasn't an issue, but it was a Jordan
Downs-Nickerson [Gardens] thing, gangs. And I see where they want to
tear down Jordan Downs now, and I don't know if there's an answer to
getting rid of--those gangs are so entrenched in there that it's really
difficult to move it.
-
Stevenson
- It is, it is.
-
Thompson
- They got into it on the tracks and right way Southwest Division
interpreted it as a potential riot. Now, we're only two years, three
years after the Watts thing, so they came in force, and, of course, the
stations had not been integrated, so these are white officers. I'll
never forget this. Funny how you say things and it causes my memory
to--I had gone across the tracks to follow my kids, and I was yelling at
them, "Get home." "Mr. Thompson, they're fighting over--." "Okay, you go
home." The police came in there in squad cars, obviously emptied the
station, because they had three or four officers in every car.
Motorcycles, the whole nine yards. And these young white officers were
grabbing the kids and instead of lowering their heads to put them in the
back of the car if they were taking them in, they'd just jam them in,
and to the extent that I was yelling, "Hey, easy, man." "Who the hell
are you?" I said, "I'm the principal." I said, "And I don't appreciate
it--if they deserve to go to jail, okay."And you know what reflected back in my mind, I think I told you, as a
kid, a six-foot officer, gun, billy, the badge, the law and abusing it.
At the same time that was happening, as a beginning principal, brand-new
principal, it was the lesson I also learned about people--never
generalize. Down the sidewalk--this motorcycle's as big as all that, you
know, police motorcycle, got all that junk, and he's coming down the
sidewalk. He's a big guy, and in front of him are a bunch of my kids. I
couldn't get to them. They were coming down the sidewalk, but they were
yelling and screaming. You know how they get. They got all wrapped up in
this stuff. He took that bike right into the middle of them. He stopped
the bike and he said, "Young man, young lady, I want you to go home
now." And he said, "Well, man, you just--." "No, I'm not threatening
you. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about you going
home. You know, I just want you to do the right thing."I sat there and I said, "Holy cow. Now, he is doing what we would expect
a law officer, a peace officer to do." No more, no less, but that he's
doing it, and some of these other idiots are doing what they're doing
teaches you again, do not generalize. Human beings are human beings.
Some will be gentle but with authority, which he was, and others will
not, will abuse power and abuse it under circumstances where it's
totally unnecessary. You didn't have people burning buildings. You
didn't have folks shooting at people. You didn't have any of that. They
were just raising cane, and that it sets off some to this reaction, some
of which is just mucho testosterone, I think, "I'm going to be the man
here, and I'm tough and I'm this and that," and in others--that
motorcycle officer represented to me--he had power, he was a huge man,
carried every bit of armament you could carry on a motorcycle, but had
the dignity to respect.And I remember at a meeting that was held a month later regarding the
incident at the police station. I didn't do it in an open meeting. I
waited until it was clear and I got with the captain afterwards, who I'd
met a few times, and I told him the story. And I said, "You know what,
Captain?" I said, "I just wanted to say it to you and give it to you,
because it would be a great lesson in your roster, in your meetings when
you muster the troops before they go on the street to just tell them one
educator appreciated the dignity, the respect that was shown to my kids
by their officers out of here and then to observe the ones that have
lost it." I said, "You put it in your own words." He said, "You know
what? I will." I said, "Okay," and I believed him. So there were lessons
learned at Markham, but I always like to say that I learned more about
being black there than I learned anywhere, because it was a black
society basically, and the people I was learning it from were steeped in
the traditions and all the things that black folks had to do in the
South to survive, and I learned an awful lot from that lesson.And my proudest moment as an administrator, including superintendent and
all that stuff, was that one day they called me up on the phone. I'd
been there two years, had a lot of things going, wonderful staff, and
they called me up and told me they were moving me to Locke [High
School], and it was kind of devastating, because I really wanted to do
another couple of years there, but they had trouble. They lost a white
principal, a close friend of mine, Sid Brickman, who moved on and was
being promoted, and they had an opening and they wanted me to take it,
and it made the news. The next week I went into Markham, I was going to
school. I got in there early every day, so I got in there early in the
morning, and I was met at the gate by one of the teachers, and she said,
"Mr. T?" I said, "Yeah?" "Listen. We would like you to go down to the
shops, to the print shop, to Mr. --," oh, gosh, I want to say Alverson
[Iverson]. That's not it.Anyway, the print shop teacher became a friend, a wonderful guy. In fact,
his wife worked with me for a while. I went down to the print shop. How
could I forget his name? Something like Alverson [Iverson]; anyway. I
went down there and said, "What's going on? You have trouble?" "No, no,
Mr. T. Sit down. Have some coffee. Have a donut." I said, "What?" He
said, "Trust me." I said, "Oh, I trust you." And he says, "You sit here,
you have this jelly donut and you have this cup of coffee and relax." So
I did. What they'd done, they had a walkout about my transfer. I mean,
it made the front page of the Times. They had a little dog with a sign
"Don't move our principal." [laughs] He had on shades; it's a little
poodle. They had this big old sign on him, and they had walked out, and
you know, that moment was for me, because it meant, I think, that they
recognized that I had tried to do some things for those kids. No matter
whether I truly fit the culture or didn't fit the culture or whatever
they thought, the fact is that they felt that I was knocking myself out
for the kids.And I have people that I still consider friends--this was '68, no, '69.
They had the walkouts, the teacher walkouts occurred when I was
principal at Markham, and those were not pleasant days. They were very
ugly. My assistant principal was a wonderful white lady, Gloria
Marchini, and we went out together to serve donuts and coffee to the
people outside, because they were my teachers. And they had some
confrontations with the teachers inside, because when they came back in
there was a lot of--and I tried to say to them, "Folks, we've all got
the kids here though, and no matter what we think of each other and what
we think we should have done and all those things--." It helped, and we
were able to pull it together, and the transfer occurred later and the
walkout occurred later and the signs and the dog and all that.Well, we'd been through some things, but I never forgot that place,
because of what it taught me, and I was raised in this city, but it just
shows you how where you are raised determines in fine detail what
happens to you, because what I encountered at Markham was like nothing I
had ever encountered at Belmont or at Virgil or at Dayton Heights
Elementary, because they weren't black schools. Black kids were
recognized for, "How are we going to deal with them?" but not for, "What
is it that makes them tick? Where do they come from? What are the things
that they as a group associate with, respect? We know about gospel, we
know about all these things, some of it, but we don't really know these
folks, and so we don't teach them."I went from there to--actually, they sent me to Locke and then moved me
again because they had a major movement at--they had a kind of riot at
Crenshaw [High School], and the principal left, who was Anglo, and they
moved me into Crenshaw and the same thing. But now I had been around.
This was a mixed faculty, not like Markham, a new school. It was only
built in the sixties, so it was different, and it was built in, as you
know, View Park and that area, and while the kids initially went there
as trouble--and there were a lot of problems back in the early
seventies, sixties and seventies with the African American gangs, the
Hoovers, Hoover Crips. All those gangs were east of Crenshaw, and as
those problems developed in those schools, those parents were looking
for alternatives, so they would falsify addresses and so on, and that's
part of the African American westward movement. It was always, "Let's go
west, it's better. Head towards the ocean. It's better," till we ran
into the ocean, then oh, well. I mean, you can't go out there, so back
that way. So they had moved by false addresses. That school had at one
point 3800 students on traditional calendar in that school.
-
Stevenson
- It's huge.
-
Thompson
- And many of them when they went home at night, they'd go out the gate,
went east, because the ones living west in the hills, I would see them
getting up in the morning, going out in the street with their [Pacific]
Palisades [High School] letterman sweaters, getting on the buses and
being bused to Pali as voluntary integration kids. So the upper-level
socioeconomics went west, because they had resources to do it, mother to
drive them if they had to, and all of my kids, in the main, not all
total but a lot of them were from the east, and they brought in all the
gang--I had a terrible time.It was also a time when you care about your kids and you're knocking
yourself out, and I would talk to them like a Dutch uncle. But, you
know, the gang thing was so serious that I found myself--there was a
shooting at one point there every week for six weeks. It was so bad I
had four school police officers, armed officers on campus, and I
remember Jim Taylor, because the superintendent was Bill Johnston, and
he'd gone down to Mexico for vacation, and Jim called me up because he
was the deputy superintendent, and Jim said, "Sid, we need you to tell
the board of supervisors what it's like in these schools right now." And
I said, "I'll have to tell them the truth, Jim." He says, "Okay." So I
said, "All right." Now, of course, I told more of the truth than maybe
he wanted either, because I got down there and I'd just finished the
night before--a kid shot right in front of me. Went out front
supervising, car pulls by, bam, luckily hit the kid in the upper leg,
not anywhere, and he was okay. But I mean it was scary stuff. Here we
are down on the ground in our suits hoping we don't get hit, too.And an incident had happened, and they had trouble at Jefferson [High
School]. Jefferson High had a homecoming, and I remember four or five of
these cheerleaders were hit by gunshots. Luckily again nobody serious,
but they were all wounded. It's incredible. Cheerleaders? What are you
doing? And I remember I was telling this to the [L.A.] County Board of
Supervisors. "What is it like?" I said, "Well, I'm running a school with
police officers inside school, our school police officers." And I said,
"But outside when my kids go home, they're on their own." I said, "And
it's some pretty scary stuff." I said, "I'll tell you how bad it is. The
principal of Jefferson High School will call me, the principal of
Crenshaw, and he would say, "Fort Crenshaw, this is Fort Jefferson. How
are you doing?" And that made the front page of the Times, and ever
since then people--some people were very angry with me. "You call our
school a fort." And I said, "Well, tell me what it looks like when you
go to the gate. I've got police officers all over the place," and now
when I did that, even though it was heavy, the local division, I forget
which one it was, came up to the school, the captain, the head of it,
and he said, "What's going on?" I said, "Look at the stats. Six
shootings, six weeks." I said, "This isn't a school." And he says,
"We're going to shut it down." I said, "You mean--?" He said, "The
street. That's our jurisdiction and we're not helping you." I went,
"Hmm?"By god, they shut it down and it made such a difference. You didn't see
these kids going out the gate running home. They were going out the gate
walking to the bus stop. Police had patrols. I mean, it just called for
heavy action to prevent this from happening, and we were working so hard
on the AP [Advanced Placement] courses and all these kinds of things,
and every time one of these incidents happened, Alva, what would occur
is that the kids would go to another--they'd go west. They'd go to Pali,
they'd go to Hami [Hamilton], they'd go anywhere they could get in, and
I just thought I'm losing the kids that I would like to have as
examples, and that can't happen. If the parent really cares, they're not
going to send them here. And there was a little battle. I worked on an
awful lot with the community and a lot of parents, and we got them in
and we talked with them and tried to get them to understand what we were
trying to do, and I said, "But I need your help in that you need to put
pressures on the powers-that-be that these kids need to be safe. A kid
should not be terrified going to a bus stop," or going to his house.
There's got to be a better life than that.And every parent agreed. They were stuck. They weren't sure how the heck
to deal with this either, because this gang thing was just mushrooming
out. Eventually I think we got it more or less under control. I was
there five years. I got some time there, and I thought I made a--I don't
know if I told you this or I said it someone else, but one day I was
standing in the quad, the middle of the school, at lunchtime. I always
was out there, lunch, nutrition and so on with the kids. This young man
was standing next to me, and I said to him, "What's your name, son?" So
we introduced ourselves, because with all that number of kids I didn't
as many as I'd like to. I said, "How's it going?" He said, "You're the
principal, aren't you?" I said, "Yeah." "Well," he says, "it's like
this. I think that the sheriff said, 'I need me a good prison,' and
somebody said, 'Let's build a school here.'" Stopped me in my tracks,
because now we had put the lid on the place, in class, everybody. "I
don't want anybody roaming the halls." Standard stuff, but what was
coming over, across was control, and I knew, consciously knew that we
were in a control mode. The street's patrolled, the school patrol, and
this young guy was just saying, "This makes a great prison."And that's when I went back to my office and I was sitting in there
thinking, "He's right." So then you start to think about what can I do
to change this culture? Again, now, first year as a senior high
principal, I mean my second, third year, and I talked to some of the
teachers, and there was a group of young teachers, kind of avant garde,
and some of the old guard didn't care for them, some of whom were very
traditional teachers out of the South. I had a wonderful math teacher,
math major, was in his sixties, just a wonderful gentleman, and he
didn't like these avant garde folks, because he thought they were too
liberal. "All you've got to do with these kids is tell them what you've
got to do and do it."But we sat and had meetings and we decided to come up with a school
within a school and to take 600 kids out of the main school population
and have them, like we do now, with small learning communities. In other
words, a school within a school. I was the principal, yes, but they ran
the programs for their kids. They counseled their kids. They called home
on the kids, and I thought it was really successful. But you had to work
at it and it didn't last, because when I left, after I left folks didn't
want to work at it and it just went into nonexistence, which happens.
That's how institutions survive. They outlast you. You want to do this
and this and this. Fine, how long can you last? And the day you're gone,
unless there's somebody with the same burning this and that to do it,
gone, right back to the old traditional.So I've learned over the years that if you're going to make a change that
the institution has to be reformulated. It's hard to do it within a
school, because the other traditional school controls--it's the bigger
one, and it controls. That's why I loved so much when we built the King
Drew High School, because right from the start it had a process for
beginning with the parents involved, the parents signing the kid in, and
the parent required to be involved with the child. And I could go on a
soapbox, I get so mad with the mayor and everybody else. They're all
ranting and raving about taking over schools. You don't need to take
over anything. What you need to do is you have the bully pulpit. Get up
there and tell these parents and these kids what they need to do. And I
don't care, ma'am, if you have a third-grade education. When this kid
does his homework, you know junk when you see it, and if he's doing
junk, put his behind back in that bedroom and tell him, "Get to work,
and shut that stupid television off, and don't you touch your cell
phone, and get to work. And I'm going to look at it." And you know junk,
make no mistake.And they could do that. They have the bully pulpit. The mayor, he's got
the bully pulpit. He could tell us all one evening, "And I'm going to be
talking to you every month about education." But if we're going to
educate these kids, it's good teachers, good schools, good
administrators and all that stuff, but it's parents involved, and if
you're not involved you can forget it. The kid knows, "Shoot, I'll go on
home and they don't care about all that." But we're not doing that. I've
seen now two major editorials in educational pubs nationwide, they go
nationwide, saying this, that that's what's wrong with the No Child Left
Behind. The No Child Left Behind talks about the school's got to--and if
they don't, we're going to fire them, we're going to take away their
money, all these threats. But not once does it really talk about the
fact that a kid's education begins with the attitudes at home, and you
don't have to be rich to have an attitude. My parents were poor. I'd
better not walk in that door with some stupid report card. "And don't
tell me about Miss So-and-so. That's not my interest," my dad. "Oh, no.
Listen. You're in there to get an education. Don't tell me what prevents
it. What prevents it is you. I don't want to hear about the teacher."
And that was it, and we learned quick, that isn't what Dad's looking
for, or Mom.And there are a lot of parents like that, and thank God there are poor
parents. I had poor folks, black, living across the street from us in
East Hollywood, and he was a plasterer, and that old man, he'd be on
those kids' backs, and all of them were successful, and he was poor as a
church mouse, right out New Orleans, plastering. So I had a lot of
feelings about it, and at Crenshaw and points afterwards--but I really,
in my beginning years as an administrator, as I look back on it, Markham
formed me as an African American. I learned more about being an African
American than I had ever learned in my life, because my parents weren't
from here, and what you learned as a kid in a school that was
integrated, which we all say should be the way it is, well, that's true.
Maclay was integrated, and we fought for that integration.But you also have to know a lot about yourself, what it means to be a
this or a that, because that's part of you, and when Hispanic kids talk
about quinceaneras and things like that, that's as it should be. That's
part of their culture, and isn't it a good thing? Yes. So why aren't we
encouraging that? Well, because that's the way you can get into the
parent's mind that, okay, in addition to all of this, here's the other
thing that's huge in this culture. It's called education. And you've got
to put aside whatever happened to you for what you think ought to happen
with your kids, and Crenshaw taught me more of that at an older level. I
think back and I think, boy, if I were back there now, I would do this
and this and this. Human beings are kind of victims of our own time and
culture, and at that time it was survival, which is so sad. But the
school within a school I thought was a darn good idea, just couldn't
hold. We got it in, it lasted while I was there, but then it just
disappeared.So the beginning administration was the start of a recognition by a
school district that if you're going to serve kids of many colors, they
need representation. Sometimes you do it for survival again, because you
want somebody that can control, and, "Blacks will control blacks." Well,
that's a lot of nonsense, I learned that over the years, too. A good
white administrator can control and handle just like anybody else. But
it helps to have it so that you can take a young man around the corner
and talk to him sometimes in our own language, in a way that he can
really understand it, and he's hearing it from you, who you didn't have
any advantages either, just like him. So sometimes there are lessons
that kids can learn that way.So the representation part, from an integration standpoint it became
absolutely critical. I found it to go over the other side to the extent
that sometimes I've noticed over the years, especially lately, lately
being any time from my time on up--we were so taken with the idea of an
African American that sometimes we'd bend over backwards for an African
American to run a school, and sometimes we put people in that were
really not qualified or were not the best for kids. I don't care if
they're African American or what they were, they just weren't good for
kids, or teachers, teachers, because they had an attitude about
principal. Done better with a qualified white. We can't have it both
ways. What you want is the most qualified for what you've got.Now, is it wrong to want representation in your school population? No. Is
it right to say that on a staff for a school in Watts that there has to
be African American and Hispanic representation? No, that's good.
Doesn't have to be the principal. Could be, and if qualified, yes, but
that doesn't mean you do it at all costs. Don't hurt the school just for
a racial purpose, but racial representation is always something to be
achieved and to be acquired. So I learned all of that over all those
years, and I've come out here and I'm looking now at the schools, and I
think we are so much better at representation. I see Hispanic, I see
African American, but I'm worried because I don't see the African
American population--it's diffused. It's all over the place, and that's
problem number on. They can't point at an African American.On the other hand, I'm noticing as I look at the makeup of people east,
Orange County and so on, that there is more representation in African
Americans out that way, because that's where a lot of the population
went, so that's good, too. Again, you can't have it both ways. And in
the city I'm seeing a lot of Hispanic representation. I observed about
four years ago again where we--for example, a reading program and all of
the people not in the classroom who are reading specialists who are
going to present this to the schools, everyone of the people in this
particular organization were black. I'm saying, but wait a minute. At
this point Fremont High School was 80 percent Hispanic. You've got to
have representation for that, too, because you have a whole bunch of
kids there who are English-language learners, and who understands why
and who and what--that can be done by an Anglo or white person. That can
be done by a black person, yes, but where's the representation for their
kids, for their people, who understand the culture and so on? And I
didn't see that. So like I said, we go to extremes both ways.I think the lesson is representation, that true representation. There has
to be, so I'm glad to see that they've gotten Hispanics in there for a
lot of those schools that are Hispanic, the same way they did with a lot
of the schools that were African American, that they had African
American representation. Didn't have to be the principal, but there's
hopefully one, two people on the staff who were, and sometimes if little
Charlie needs somebody to talk to him, Sid could take him around the
corner and talk to him. That's what you want, or Mary or whoever the
person is.So lessons were learned. It was a beginning. I've seen this come full
circle. Back when I was in middle school, I never saw an African
American administrator. When I went to Belmont, went to Virgil, went to
[unclear], never would I see an African American, because they didn't
think it was important and necessary and all those kind of things, and
they had an attitude about us, too. We belonged on Central Avenue. After
the war, after the fifties, into the sixties big changes, and while it
was ugly, that Watts disturbance caused a whole lot of changes. It
caused changes because they realized they had to do something. They
weren't quite sure what, but they had to do something, and one of the
things they thought they'd better do is get some more of us in there,
and that was good.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. One follow-up question. You came into the district you said in '56.
In your opinion, what effect did events on the national scene--I'm
talking particularly about Brown v. Board in '54, but you had the Civil
Rights Movement going on in the South and other places--what effect do
you think those national events had on the changes, including more black
administrators?
-
Thompson
- Excellent. And I didn't reference that, and that's a great lead in to
that effect, huge effect, there is no question in my mind. The Brown
situation, in fact both of them--there are certain segments of this
population that are frightened by that, and that's the same way it is
right now, the same fear Obama strikes in some of these people, because
he's black and we don't know what he's doing to do. He might want to do
a Mau-Mau thing, who knows? All this foolishness. But the Civil Rights
Movement to me, as is said, all is not unique to anybody, anybody that
observed it and observed what Martin Luther King [Jr.] did, and I say
that because it is so critical. Nobody could say there was fear involved
on their part. What were you afraid of? They were going to riot and blow
up people and burn? No. The very thing he talked about was not, so the
fear came the other way, and the dogs and jailing and the bombings and
all the stuff that went on came from the other side.I knew white folks that had a lot of embarrassment, didn't want to really
enunciate on the thing or make it clear or trumpet it or anything, but
they were bothered, and I think it got to people's consciousness. And I
think that a lot of what happened in the sixties, while it was
reactionary to the riots and all that stuff, was the Civil Rights
Movement, huge. The Brown thing--the reason I separate them a little is
because I noticed from the very beginning there was fear, and that fear
was you know what, forced integration, and they were scared to death.
Just like I served downtown during the time that some of those board
members that were on there were scared to death of forced integration,
[Bobbi] Fiedler, oh, the redhead--
-
Stevenson
- Goldberg?
-
Thompson
- Not Jackie. No, Jackie's liberal over here, and she was very much into
the whole movement. Roberta Weintraub, and remember they had all these
anti-busing this-es and that's, and then Tom Bartman came in and some
others, but there was a lot of fear related to that. Now, why, I don't
know, because the fact is only ever got integrated was us going the
other way. And as a matter of fact as an observation, to show you how
things worked, there are many ways to skin a cat, as we know. When the
integration situation federally, Office for Civil Rights, they came with
an edict about integrating faculties. We lost so much in that it's
incredible. We lost because the only integration that occurred was our
people going to the valley. But they never came here.I had a teacher interview while I was Markham, late sixties, in Watts,
white teacher, young, and she came down and she said, "I was told to
come down and interview you, Mr. Thompson." I took her around and I
talked with her, and she says, "I really like your attitude about
teachers and collaboration and our involvement, and the school, gosh, it
looks great, and the kids are in class. But I just can't come down
here." So I said, "Well, that's your decision." She says, "I know they
assigned me here," but she says, "You know, Mr. Thompson, I have some
strong feelings about this." I said, "I gathered." And she said, "So if
I have to, I'm going to get pregnant." I said, "Well, that's one way."
But I'm sitting there going, holy cow. She did. Ran into her years later
in the valley. What she did, she got pregnant, went on child leave,
maternity leave, childcare, came back, but she came back as a sub
teacher, and then she subbed in the valley for two years until all this
stuff--again, this big system--just waited, and you guys turn your back
and she's hired at Monroe in the valley. And she said, "I'm not proud of
it, Mr. Thompson. That was a time when I just wasn't proud of myself,
but I had to do what I had to do." I said, "I understand. There's no
hard feeling. Good God, a whole lot of that happened." But she says,
"But the thing that's really amazing is here I am at Monroe." I said, "I
know." And she said, "So I learned that if you wait long enough, things
happen."What that says is the system will correct to get its culture back, almost
like a deliberate act. But we lost so much. I know so many good black
teachers who ended up out there, and in return we got white subs, or
subs, any sub, because we had unfilled classrooms by teachers who didn't
come. So all of the best-laid plans don't work that way, and people who
are in control by voting or by whatever, money, whatever, they will find
ways. But the one thing they couldn't quite get around was Martin Luther
King and the whole Civil Rights Movement. They just couldn't quite--it
was national, it was nonviolent, it was everything, and it had the
support of thinking white people, and it had a huge effect, I believe,
on a lot--first of all, they were afraid of the Office for Civil Rights
in the big hierarchy downtown. I would hear that all the time. The
minute we were talking about doing something, even when I was an
associate superintendent, they would get a lawyer in right away and say,
"If we do this and this, what is that going to mean for civil rights?"
They didn't want to be in violation of civil rights.Everything that was done about the whole integration movement, forced and
voluntary, was a legal-lawyer battle in which they would come up with
rulings from the judge that said, "You don't have to do this, you don't
have to do that." And the anti-forced integration people won, because we
never did it.
-
Stevenson
- Right.
-
Thompson
- Tells you where the power is. That part--nevertheless, by not doing that
I also noticed that they had to do other things to counter their image
related to that, because these were liberal people. If you were to ask
them what they considered themselves, all of them considered themselves
very liberal, but not in that case. That was their kids. It's funny, we
can say liberal up to this point--not my money and not my kids, and you
learned that in the sixties and the seventies. So I want to say I would
give the Civil Rights Movement almost a primary responsibility for a lot
of those changes, no question, because they happened on such a scale and
nationally that people--I mean, when you saw federal troops going into
Arkansas with [Orval] Faubus and all that stuff he was pulling, I think
it had an impact on people that this was serious business. It caused an
awareness that they just didn't have. "It's not right to do these bad
things to blacks and browns and all that," but it wasn't sticking. "It
wasn't really too bad. It was okay, because we didn't want to integrate
with them anyway."But yes, that was a very, very important movement, and another regret I
had was that I wasn't down there with it. I just didn't understand--"So
what's going on down there?" And the South was a place I avoided like
the plague after what I went through in Las Vegas, so I just said, "I
don't want to go South." It was years, until years later that I finally
did it, because I had friends and they would tell me, "What are you
doing? Yeah, we don't recommend you traveling the back roads of
Mississippi at night, but--." I said, "Yeah, but I wouldn't do that in
parts of L.A. either." So they said, "That's right, you've got to be
smart."Anyway, it's been an interesting time in the school system. Some things
change, some things never change. You know, it goes in circles, Alva,
but the circles are moving. It never comes back to the same place. So
when you asked me is it better now than it was fifty, forty years ago,
sixty years ago when I went to school? Yes, no question. Are some things
worse? Yes. One of them beginning for me, the big one that has not
changed one iota is poverty, what has happened in poor communities,
especially among minority kids, that that has done this. The other night
I tuned in "48 Hours" on A&E, and situation after situation was
black shooting black, very rarely black shooting white, but mostly black
shooting black. And you look at this and look at it and you think, good
God. Have we gone so far that we've forgotten these poor people have
been in that role for generations? Street kids, folks that have never
progressed educationally and been able to move out. That's where they
are. And with all that they've learned and the narcotics hooked into all
of that, when I look I get so depressed that I just don't look anymore.
But it's about black kids and black kids going to jail.And that's why I say the circle moves, and yes, we're more cognizant, and
I believe that what's going to happen to the schools, public schools,
there's no doubt in my mind that we're going to have more and more of
the private, and why? Well, because the kids in private schools, whether
they're black private schools or not, the parent goes to the door and
signs for the kid, and the parent is involved with the kid, and this
means that that kid's behavior is going to be a little different to
little street Charlie who comes in and wants to fight everybody, and
there's nobody to control him at home, and it's a question of can we
control him in school. And most parents will want their kids to go with
other parents' kids who care enough to be responsible for them.The scary part is, after we filter that and filter it and filter it,
what's left? And it's still black street kids. That's what bothers the
heck out of me, and I just don't have an answer, because it's bigger
than schools. It's economics, it's all kinds of things, and it takes a
will to want to cause change. But what change? And how do you do it if
you don't educate? And how are you going to educate at that nit-grit end
where folks really don't know and don't care, where folks have been
beaten down so much they just don't know what's better, and that's the
part that worries me. I think though that increasingly folks are going
to go towards signing and taking responsibility and putting their kids
in schools that do that.
-
Stevenson
- Right. Another follow-up question. You talked about the effect of the
nationwide happenings on what was happening in schools. What was
happening locally in terms of movements dealing with things like
housing, economic empowerment, employment, full employment, things like
that that may have had an effect on the schools and education of our
children?
-
Thompson
- Yes, that's a good question. A lot of things happened. I heard the other
day that somebody said, "You know, this whole business of whites and
blacks and browns, but particularly whites and blacks," because we're
always at the bottom of that pole, I don't care how you construct it.
It's our people that end up here, some of them. And that the white
population and that Obama in a sense represents some of this--the old
fears about the black population have shifted, faded. For educated
blacks it's different. People know them. They go to whatever together,
plays, and do things together, and they have learned that there is not
this huge disparity between blacks and whites. There's a question of are
there good blacks and bad? Oh, yes. Whites? Oh, definitely. But in the
normal population there's far more, I think, acceptance now of the
status and all the mores. Everything that goes with being black, people
are able to differentiate. Now wait a minute, he can hold his own with
us on a job?I can remember Maclay had to suspend a little white kid who was badder
than the devil, fighting every time he gets a chance, prided himself on
being Irish, therefore tough, and he and some black kid got into it and
I suspended both of them. The father I talked to on the phone to have
him come in, and he came in and he started off with--no, on the phone he
said, "I know you guys have got this integrated crap down there, and I
don't go with that stuff. We're white and we like it, and [unclear]." He
doesn't know what I am, so he's going on and on, "And the nerve of you
people to be suspending my kid just because he whipped some black kid."
I wanted to interrupt and say, "Wait. That whipping, now, I don't know
what he told you, but he got his behind whacked." Both of them did.But he came in and he did a double take, and you know what he did? It's a
true story. He said, "Oh, god." In other words, I opened my mouth and
I'm coming and here's this black dude sitting behind the desk. I got up,
I shook his hand. He sat down and we started talking, and we talked and
talked, and I remember at one point saying to him, "Mr.--" whatever his
name was, I said, "You know, kids are kids. I used to get in fights, not
deliberately and not that many of them, but I wasn't going to take being
whipped around by anybody either. That's just the way we were raised
over in the streets I was raised on." I said, "But when you're out there
looking for it, it's a problem." And so he said, "I know, because
nowadays people shoot you." I said, "Yeah, all the above." When it
finished he said, "You know, you're somebody I can talk to." He said,
"And I didn't expect that." He said, "So I'm going to take that little
bugger home and give him a little talking to, too." And he said, "I
think we can work on this." I said, "I know we can." And he said, "Yeah,
because you know, we're talking the same thing." And it hit me that he
finally--wait a minute, this guy's black but he's talking like I would
talk about my kid, like he would talk about his own kid.And I think as a society we've kind of come there, and we are
understanding that just because your roots are from Africa doesn't mean
you don't have a brain, and number two, and doesn't mean therefore that
you can't assimilate all kinds of knowledge and everything else and be
able to operate at a level that's consistent with what or better than
you can, and I think the country has come to understand that. That's why
I believe, and it's not unique, we all say it--that's why Obama--how is
it that that could work? Well, people are beginning to understand, well,
why not? And the more he talks, the more they're convinced why not. They
know he's got a tiger by the tail. But I saw him the other night and I
thought, what a beautiful representation of the race--
-
Stevenson
- It is.
-
Thompson
- --I mean, to express himself so thoroughly and so well and saying things
that any fool can understand and I think appreciate it. Not the ones in
Washington, that's another breed of cat, but Joe Blow, the average
citizen. That's what I think we've come full circle on. I heard a kid
interviewed, a white kid, went to school in the valley, and I forget
which school but it was integrated by busing, voluntary. They asked him
about multiplicity of people in the school of different origins, and he
said, "I've learned so much here." And he said it in such an eloquent
manner. He said, essentially, "I learned more about other people than I
ever would have learned in my life, because the way I was living and
where I lived, I never would have known them." And he said, "I won't say
that some of my best friends, because--," and he laughed. The kid was
really mature. He says, "Because that's what we hear all the time." He
says, "But I'm talking about friends, real friends, real people that I
respect, and I've learned that here that I never would have learned
anywhere else." And I thought, maybe the books and all other things may
not be the same. I don't know, the parents have different views, but
that alone talks about the national culture and what it means in schools
and why it's essential to continue trying to get this, because we don't
live like that.I always worry about the Korean community, all the tight little area,
this tight little area, and the Armenians. We're the only thing that
does any integrating of any note. In housing patterns, even though
blacks have--the blacks have actually diffused into the east of L.A. I
know my own daughter and her family, they live in Glendora, and they're
the only blacks on--I drive in there, and they're the only blacks for
two, three blocks, and they are so accepted, and she's African American.
She looks like me. Her husband is African American from Georgia. The
kids are African American kids. But I notice that her neighbors, they're
always over there, and they're always over at their house helping them
with this, that, and the other, both ways, and they don't feel any
problem. That would not have been true twenty, thirty years ago, thirty
years ago, wouldn't have been true, Alva.Like I think I mentioned going to that house in the forties, late
forties, and that woman from Oklahoma telling me I don't belong there
and, "Get out." Nowadays that just wouldn't happen, I don't think. Folks
don't do that.
-
Stevenson
- Right. Okay, another follow up. At the time when you were taking the
principal test, principal's and vice principal's test, and there were no
doubt other African American teachers also taking the test, trying to
get on these lists, were there any formal or informal meetings of black
teachers to discuss ways to get into these positions?
-
Thompson
- It would be dependent really on the group's origin. In the group that
came out of my school at Pacoima, the principal's exam you got together
with principals you knew, and that was more about just friendships,
people you respected, because you had to respect their opinions when you
asked a question. In the initial, for the vice principal or assistant
principal exam, it was a product more of the school. We were a mixed
group in the training group. There were eight of us, and we were two
blacks and an Asian and white, some Jewish but white. That group, we
stayed pretty much together that way and studied that way, kind of you
against the book and you against the culture of the organization and
that sort of thing.On the principal's exam when I say we picked the people that we would
respect and would want to study with, and I remember in that group we
had again there were two or three blacks who just were good people. I
mean, like you have the opportunity to talk to Jim Taylor, shoot. I'm
meeting with him all day and all night. Yes, but it wasn't a conscious,
"I'd better sit down and we study together." We were all urged--the
blacks I knew would talk about--because usually you're in different
places. I was in Pacoima at the north end of the valley. A lot of those
guys were down in Watts and other places, so it was hard, fifteen miles
apart. In talking with them, they didn't see it as a gain if we simply
met as a group. We would urge each other and sometimes there were
meetings the district held to help get more information, and we would
tell each other, and I can remember some of the African American guys
and women, we would talk and we would go to these meetings because one
would say, "By the way, did you hear?" We didn't have e-mail then, but
we'd call and leave a message.A lot of it, though, was more local, and now that I think about it, it
really wasn't so racially organized as it was organized by location and
by the ability of the people available to the group, because you didn't
want to study with a bunch of dummies, so you studied with people who
had some sense and knew what they were doing. The principal's exam was,
as I said, a little more--it wasn't about a group of teachers, for
example. Now you're talking about a group of administrators who are
assistant principals getting together to be principals. Again, I don't
believe that it was so ethnically organized as it was location and where
the people were you respected. They could be at other schools.I had a Japanese, Tak Nakahara, bless her soul, she passed away young,
too, but a great principal, and Tak was older than I, but when I was at
Markham she was at Bret Harte [Junior High School], and we used to talk
a lot. And she's a good example. When I started studying for the exam,
when I went from A.P. to principal I knew her, and I would call her and
get her opinion on things, and sometimes she would run a mock oral for
us, for example. But we would be a mixed group, because there weren't
that many of us either. They weren't that many assistant principals in
the sixties, early sixties. That increased in the seventies and eighties
to where now, I mean, you had people available that could be gotten
together.Also another difference, important difference. The rise of the African
American organizations, the Council of Black Administrators [COBA]
really comes about in the sixties, and that is an important tool for
bringing African Americans together, and yes, there were study groups
that came from that. They would run, again, mock orals and things as a
group for African Americans, and a lot of people took advantage of that
offering and studied. Especially I found it to be more appropriate for
the beginning level, where they didn't know a whole lot about the exam,
because once you do it, for principal it's more of the same. Competition
is different. These are all assistant principals. At the beginning it's
teachers, and you're learning about the exam and so on, and COBA, I
think, provided a very responsible base for helping those beginning
people with taking that exam, the initial exam, of what it's like, what
do you look for in terms of people that you would have recommend you,
this sort of thing, all the politics of doing it, what you don't do and
what you do do when you go to an oral interview, what you look like, how
you talk, how you respond, how do you handle questions, those kinds of
things. They did a lot of that.And there were other organizations, Asian, Hispanic. White folks used to
say, "We don't have any." I said, "You don't need it. You own it." So we
used to laugh about that, but they would come to the same organizations
sometimes and say they'd like to sit in, and sure. I mean, they didn't
say it had to be black and therefore whites can't come. That wasn't the
case, but it was just that it was aimed to give African Americans, for
example COBA, to give them a chance to have information shared with
them. So that was a big piece of what did assist a group, African
American group, whether they took advantage or didn't.
-
Stevenson
- What would you say the mission and goals of COBA were if you were to put
that in a nutshell?
-
Thompson
- Well, it was the Council of Black Administrators, and that means that
they were there to, one, assist black administrators. For example, if
something happened on campus and you got in trouble, you took an action
that somebody didn't deem appropriate, they would counsel you on that,
and they would give you counsel as to what recourse you had. In other
words, they represented you. They didn't do it in so much as a group
going into meetings because Sid Thompson did this and that in school and
he's being disciplined. They would counsel more from the side, telling
you how to handle the situation you're in, because a lot of these were
administrators. They were themselves administrators, and people that are
already administrators are hesitant to get in the middle, because they
don't know the facts. You never do. Somebody tells you this, this, and
this, and then you find, oh, no, it wasn't, this is what really
happened.So a lot of those organizations--the only one that will do that is an
association, the AALA, Association of Administrators, Administrative
Association of Los Angeles. Now, they represent everybody, but they are
like a union, and so when you have a problem they go in, legally and
every other way, and they negotiate. COBA doesn't really do that. It's
more informal, but it deals with black issues. For example, at x school
they're having trouble at the school, and nobody seems to be answering
for the needs of that school, and the school is primarily African
American. Well, COBA will take a stand and go down and they'll talk to
the board in open board meeting, or go down and talk privately with the
superintendents and say, "We think this and this and this." So it serves
a good function in terms of, one, recruiting African Americans for
administration. That's a big one, because they don't want to see it go
back to what it was, and right now they need to be very careful of that,
because there aren't that many African Americans around that you can get
in the pocket to say this is necessary, so it's a little hard to get
their attention, they, the district.Number two, they have, it's part of their charter, they are concerned
about the schools for African American youngsters and what's happening
at them. They will take stands, for example, on the hiring of teachers
and what's been happening at a school in terms of its faculty. You see
what I'm saying? That kind of thing and aimed more at African American
kids, aimed more at African American teachers and administrators.
They're very concerned, I'm quite sure, I haven't been to a meeting
lately, but they're concerned about African American teachers. We're not
getting a lot of them, and that's where the administrators come from, in
the main, not entirely but in the main, and that's a real concern for
everybody. So their issues are not so much legal as pertains to
evaluations or improper treatment of, imagined or real, of black
administrators. They're more concerned about keeping a representative
group of them and also making sure that our schools, the schools that
are dealing mostly with our kids, are properly formulated and organized
in order to deal with the problems they have. They're a watchdog, a
necessary watchdog.
-
Stevenson
- I wonder if we could talk about the Watts rebellion of '65 and maybe you
could tell me personally where you were when that happened and what was
the district response to that event.
-
Thompson
- First of all, some general observations. To my knowledge there was little
or no burning of schools. Businesses because they saw businesses as not
theirs, and we all know that, and some of it was not even rational. Some
of it was irrational in the sense that people were just letting off
frustrations from way back. A lot of us who knew anything about Watts
from way back knew there was trouble sitting there fomenting. I had a
friend of our family's, and it was really weird because they were from
the West Indies. They happened to live in Watts. We were playing this
British game, cricket, which I played from the age of eight on because
of the West Indies and the Brits and all that. Mrs. Lacey I believe, an
older woman in the late forties while I was still in high school, we
were at cricket and she was talking to my dad who she knew taught, and
she was saying to him, "Tommy," little accent, she says, "Tommy, I have
a friend at Jordan High School, and they have no geometry classes." And
she says, "How--I just didn't know if you knew, can a kid go to
university without geometry?" And he said, "No, not likely." And she
said, "Well, why wouldn't they have that?" Well, it was an innocent
question. My dad said, "Because somebody's allowing it to happen." He
gave her one of those, because he was teaching adult school at Jeff, so
he kind of knew the system.Well, she went back down there and she just didn't accept it, and she
went after them. And she was such a quiet, reserved lady they couldn't
deal with her. She didn't come in cussing and carrying on. She just kept
saying, "Why?" And it was two years later when she mentioned at cricket,
"Remember the issue?" And she was telling my dad, and I was, of course,
listening, and she said, "We're having geometry in October." And he
said, "How did you do it?" She says, "I don't know. Persistence." But
she said--this is the forties. She said, "It's symptomatic of that whole
area." And she says, "You know, they're building these massive projects
all around it." What is it, five of them now? And she says, "So that's
all poor people being forced to live here, here, here, here, here, with
all the frustrations and everything else." And she said, "And the
schools will probably reflect it." And even the businesses that were
allowed to flourish, she said, "For example, these kids and these
parents and these people are living in a community that in probably four
blocks has five liquor stores." And she says, "And we know what that
means. And the police," and she said, "and how the police react."This was the forties and fifties, and in those days the police were
crooked, abusive, the whole nine yards. They did have a few black cops.
I remember a pair of twin brothers, huge guys who were just as bad as
the whites. Black kid got out of line, they'd just physically whip him.
So a lot of us who didn't live there--I used to go to parties in Watts;
my dad didn't know it. We'd get on a streetcar, my brother and I, my
older brother, and go down there, and we had to make sure we got out of
Watts in time for the streetcar, the last one coming back to L.A.
Otherwise, those kids in Watts caught you down there, you were in
trouble. Well, there were a lot of frustrations down there, and those of
us outside could see it, and in talking to friends we knew there, so it
was like a kettle boiling, waiting to release steam, and it would not
make sense when the releasing occurred.I look back on it and I remember people saying, "Well, why, why, why?" I
said, "Because you have every frustration in the book, and nobody's
doing a blessed thing about it, and you just get tired. And you're
living like an animal almost, because nobody wants to take care of you
or give you a chance for anything. Housing is terrible." I take people
to Watts now. "What? How in the heck--man, green lawns?" You know,
people from back East whose view of a ghetto is tenement. Eight, ten,
fifteen, thirty stories of elevators you'd better not ride and no lawns,
all sidewalks, all cement. They think it's beautiful. It's all different
by geography, but I said, "Frustrations are the same, just takes
different avenues." The problems down there now are not quite the same
as they used to be, but there was definitely, Alva, a capping all the
way from way back when the blacks, that was one of the few places when
they initially came in they could live there and around the Jefferson
area, Central Avenue, up a little further. It was just an accident
waiting to happen, not so accidental as it was the expression of pure
frustration.The schools weathered that storm somewhat surprisingly, because a lot of
us thought--I was at that time at Maclay Middle School, and that's a
pocket barrio, pocket ghetto, and it was an integrated school, so it had
black and white, and we had some real moments in terms of that
population and the kinds of things that would happen. For example, when
Martin Luther King was assassinated, the black street kids in the San
Fernando-Pacoima area, they started roaming the streets, and you had
eighteen-, nineteen-year-olds--I think I may have mentioned it--come
into school, and they're going to get the white kids. And there's old
Sid standing there all by himself, because the principal took off,
another principal, new one. He left and left me standing there, and I'm
talking to these kids, pleading, "Look, man, I don't want to fight, but
you can't come in." "What are you going to do about it?" I said, "I
don't know, but you can't come in here." "You gonna to fight all of us?"
I said, "I don't know. I keep telling you," and I was talking back and
forth. There's a gate, it's not locked. We couldn't lock it for fire
reasons, and they're outside and I'm in, and I don't know if they're
carrying weapons. Finally one kid way at the back--this was a moment
when you go, "Thank God! Lord, you're with me." He says, "Hey. Aren't
you Sid Thompson?" I said, "Yeah." He says, "I knew you at Pacoima, man.
I had you in mathematics, remember?" I said, "Yeah, Charlie," whatever
his name was. And he said, "Man, leave him alone. He's a good guy."
"Okay, let's go." And you know, it's one of those moments where it's
just--what could have happened could have been real ugly.
-
Stevenson
- Yes.
-
Thompson
- And on the other hand, something up there is--I said, "Lord, I don't know
if you're there for me, but this moment I think you were," and whatever
it was got me out of this mess, because I was sitting there saying my
prayers. It was one of those days. That's the kind of thing that
happened at that time. And as you know, when that rebellion happened, it
happened in other places that didn't get the notoriety. They had trouble
in places like Wilmington where they had blacks, and they had trouble in
Pacoima-San Fernando with the black population, not like Watts, because
it was a much larger group and a larger area, more pronounced and known,
but it was a definite moment. And it caused a lot of change, because
remember now, I went into Markham after that, and they wanted an African
American in there. I know they did. That's the reason I was sent.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. If you could talk a little bit about interactions, if you had any,
with more left-wing groups. A couple of my interviewees, one in
particular had mentioned a very interesting story about left-wing
groups. In fact, they were actually young, white college students who
were trying to recruit on this particular high school campus. But I'm
just talking in general about any groups, whatever the interactions that
you may have had with them.
-
Thompson
- Because I was more--Pacoima was integrated, but it was integrated with
lower-blue-collar-white socioeconomic, definitely lower-socioeconomic
black, and definitely lower-socioeconomic Hispanic, and the populations
I've always had except at Maclay, and Maclay was middle-class white
still in the school, because we fought to hold onto them, and the black
tended to be middle class but mostly lower-blue-collar socioeconomic,
because the schools I was in tended, though certainly Markham and
Crenshaw were African American schools, so I didn't get too much--the
whites didn't come in there too much. Kids weren't real receptive to
others telling them what they ought to do.However, I am aware of what happened at Manual Arts [High School] and
University High School, and they had groups, liberal groups who were,
I'm not going to say fomenting trouble, I don't know that. They had
definite feelings of the plight of minority poor in particular, and
there were people that were definitely heavy left-wing, maybe
communists, could have been. They had some papers being published at
both schools that kind of reflected that, and those two institutions,
only because the principals were griping at every principals' meeting
about facing up with these groups, because they tended to be more
middle-class Republican or even Democrat, more conservative, so there
were a lot of complaints about them. I'm aware of them, and in their
school they had significant populations, non-black, I mean black and
Hispanic, but they were significant numbers of them, typically teachers
and staff and college kids who came on campus, and they printed papers
and a lot of things to try to win over the minority kids to be with
them. And Alva, I don't know how successful--there was certainly a lot
of ammunition with those poor kids, but I never saw it--the institution
never accepted them. That's just a given, because the institution tends
to be conservative, especially back then, and I didn't see that of any
note. But it was there, because I heard about it from other schools.And sometimes a kid would transfer. I remember a kid came in from Manual.
He says, "Man, over there--." You know how kids are, especially our
kids. This kid, he was telling me how there was going to be a problem
and that the folks who were on the Left side, he said, "They told the
school, 'Look. You've got an ROTC, and they've got rifles, and we've got
our weapons, so let's have a war.'" I said, "Oh, come on." He said, "No,
Mr. T., I'm telling you man, it happened." Well, do I know that? I mean,
it doesn't make any sense, one. First of all, your ROTC and those rifles
aren't shooting rifles and all kinds of crazy stuff. But if nothing
else, it indicated that there was a depth or a degree of some fomenting
going on both ways, and I know darn well the district side of it didn't
accept it, so they had a problem probably with the administration and so
they had frustrations, because they didn't see any way to let it out. So
they would go and recruit and look for us to recruit, and they were
starting to get some browns in, they were after them, too. But that's
the extent of it. I didn't see much more than that, especially in the
schools that were heavily black. They pretty much didn't bother us. I
didn't see them. Once in a while one individual might come by, but no
more than that.
-
Stevenson
- All right. This is a good place to--[End of interview]
1.4. Session 4 (April 1, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- Good morning. I'm continuing an interview with Dr. Sid Thompson on April
1, 2009. First is a follow up to last week. Could you tell me about your
perceptions of cultural differences, tensions historically between West
Indians and African Americans? You alluded to this in one of our
sessions last week.
-
Thompson
- Well, it depends on which ones you talk to, because if you talk to the
West Indians, we were told to get the best education you can get and to
move forward, and they didn't all do that by the way, because I met a
lot of them that didn't, which you would expect as it's true here. On
the other hand, when you talk about moving forward and ambition and all
of that--I'm speaking now kind of from back here looking down on it--I
always felt that a lot of students, African American students where I
went to school, while their parents were pushing them, they didn't have
an interest in a lot of things I had an interest in. I think I mentioned
the classical music piece and all of that, not that I didn't like my
other stuff, because I really did. I had a nephew bring us a whole bunch
of 78s in World War II to properly introduce us to all the music that
was coming out of New York and Brooklyn and that area, as well as L.A.
East. It's right here.The differences, first of all, I mentioned before and to me, for me, this
is a critical one. The British had some fascinating views and attitudes
about the slavery, and we know eventually they got rid of it, and they
got rid of it before we did, but nevertheless they did have them, and
they ran major plantations down in the West Indies, Barbados, Jamaica,
Martinique. They were run all over and not just by the Brits but by
others as well. But in all of that, the one thing the British did was to
emphasize the world of education, and they offered it as about the only
alternative a slave had, or a former slave eventually, to move up,
because even when slavery ended, the control of those colonies was
white-controlled from England.I recall the big white warship coming into the harbor on our little
island, picking up the tests to be taken someplace to be scored and then
brought back, and from that they ranked the islands, pretty brutal
stuff, and it caused a lot of brutality, because those headmasters' pay
depended on how well those kids did, and whether you got paid by getting
to ride a donkey or you got a substantial salary was determined by how
well those kids did, and there was an attitude that said spare the rod
and spoil the child kind of an attitude. But it did--at the same time,
when you compare to what happened to American slaves here in America
regarding reading, education, in many cases we read that they were
beaten, probably killed some of them if they persisted, and it was not
to be desired, putting it mildly, and that to me was a fundamental
difference.On the one hand, down here with the same people, same stock, you're
telling them, "Okay, you'll never own this place, but you can be a top
civil servant in this place, an assistant to a governor," and that sort
of thing, "and you'll do that by education." As opposed to the battle
that the African American slave had just to be able to read and having
to sneak that and knowing the consequences if he was caught, or she
caught doing it. That to me was a huge difference. It is probably one of
the most fundamental differences to me, and it also means that while the
Brits were controlling the colonies, because they opened it up
educationally for young African Americans, men and women, although it
was weighted towards the men to be real honest with you, and later it
changes and it's more equally balanced between the sexes, the whole way
that they--when you educate someone and when you allow them to take
positions, even if it's not at the top-top, you're now getting a view of
an educated person, and I'm sure that that had an effect on the white
controllers, I'll call them, because they're looking at these Africans,
people of African descent, who are running substantial civil-service
operations and doing it very intelligently.They had to have had a feeling about, well, wait a minute, maybe we made
some assumptions about these people and the bush and the wildness and
noble savages kind of an attitude thing. They would have had to
acknowledged, well, guess what? They have a brain, and what it needed
was just a chance to be seen, heard, taught, etc. That's far different
to what had occurred here. It's taken this country generations--I'm
going to oversimplify this, but I'm going to say what others have said
because it's so important. It's taken generations for this country to
understand the same thing, and I think the acceptance of [President
Barack Hussein] Obama, as some people have mentioned in the news, in a
way is an acceptance by the American people that I've got African
Americans working next to me and guess what? They're pretty bright, and
they can do this job. And those jobs will vary from here to here in
terms of complexity. But it took us much longer to recognize that, and,
of course, more of them than there were in the West Indies, because the
West Indies there's basically a lot of them but in smaller areas.So those are some of what I find to be key differences, and I had an
African American who told me once, talking about the West Indian thing,
"Well, you people come up here and I have to admit that you strive and
you do this and this and this." And I said, "It's not genetic, though."
I said, "There are reasons for that." I told them something and I really
meant it. I said, "You know, I think back to when I went to Markham
[Junior High School] as principal, and we had a faculty that was
heavily," I mentioned it's Southern, Xavier, those places. And I saw
these people performing, and I remember thinking, they had to overcome
in their generations that have been here all of that mess to do this.
And so me, I tip my hat. I say, "You know what? Weren't born with too
many pluses going for you, and still you did, and that means that before
you generationally there were people that in spite of this country's
attitude never accepted it," and the colleges and universities that were
founded that were black, the Tuskegees and Wilbur Force, all of these,
that's what they were, in spite of.So in me I look back and I say it's a common heritage with the same mixes
and everything else that everybody else has, maybe not quite the same,
but the mixes being it could have been from there or there, Scotland,
god knows where. All of that is pretty similar in these groups, and for
whatever reason some of them have done this, some have done that. Some
of it is by accident of birth and being born in a culture that said,
"Okay, we're going to let you be educated." Another one says, "Good luck
on getting educated," but they did it anyway. So I see it all as
indicative that man, no matter what, given a chance say, we all have
that same brain, pretty much the same brain. I haven't seen anything
bigger or whatever. It talks about opportunity, and I've seen it done by
people that didn't have much in terms of their history and yet have done
a lot, and not that the Africans in the West Indies had that much going
for them. What they had was a sop given by the Brits, but at least they
gave them an educational sop, which was a big thing.
-
Stevenson
- All right. I'd like to spend a bit of time at this session talking about
the integration, segregation of the district. If you could tell me about
the background of the movement to integrate, to segregate L.A. Unified,
and I'm interested in what groups within and without the district were
advocating both for and against segregation, if you could start with
that.
-
Thompson
- When you look at integration or lack of in L.A. Unified specifically, you
go back to what I talked about earlier and I won't dwell on it because I
talked about it, but the housing patterns and the fact that the African
Americans are located in a certain place, and the browns were, too, and
that's also an accident of socioeconomics. We know that because as the
blacks grew socioeconomically they pushed west, and there was always a
white that was willing to deal with that, as in giving up Baldwin Hills
and all of that, and then the real estate people gave it up for money.
They made a pile of money off of that, and the poor whites--and I don't
mean economically, I mean silly, it was silly. They gave it up because
they saw this black horde moving in, and as we both know so well know,
here come the whites saying, "Wait a minute. We gave that up and that
was stupid," and it isn't such a burning thing to live next door to a
black anymore, so they moved back, and I know a number of white families
that have moved back and are really happy, because they can buzz
downtown and so on. And to be real candid, they don't have to face the
gang problems and all of that that goes with the lower socioeconomic
problems of Watts and other places. So all of that's in the mix.L.A. Unified at the time was pretty much socially segregated. The black
population was pretty much located in the early years--I'm talking now
of the forties and fifties when the black population came out during
World War II to work in the shipyards and the plane yards and all that
stuff. When they came out they were living pretty much as I recall it
from Central Avenue, some east of that and always has been. They still
talk about the Eastside Boys and all that stuff. But it moved--it was
pretty much located between there and as I said before around Hoover,
but pretty much concentrated in a belt that went along Central Avenue
and went down to Watts, and Watts itself was an enclave of black with
some brown.Browns were always kind of mixed in this a little bit, but not to the
degree that when they had the in-migration, which changed a whole lot of
things. But at that time it was a very defined black population in a
very defined housing area, and I'm speaking of the forties, because
under no circumstance would the whites--who also by the way came out of
Oklahoma and places like that and were not exactly prone to education.
You mentioned New Mexico, and I found out from my wife, who was raised
there and who's Hispanic, she told me that she remembers and never
thought about it that in the movie theaters when she was a little one
the blacks were in the balconies, and she remembers that they went to
school in Vado, V-a-d-o down south of Las Cruces, they went to school
there. In other words, they had segregated schooling. So I say that to
mention that during the war a lot of the whites that came here came with
that kind of baggage hanging on them. That's what they were used to.
They weren't ready to deal with mixing and all that stuff, and the
schools reflected it. There is no question in mind but that there was
gerrymandering of school districts to serve populations.And by the way, it went as far--I can recall at Belmont [High School],
because we had a fairly, not large, but a substantial number of Jewish
Americans, and many of them were European Jews, former, who had been
through Adolph Hitler, or they were young and their parents got them out
rather than face Adolph and his insanity. They came here and they had
problems, but of a lesser degree, which is always the case. There are
social clubs and things here in this city and this country that first
began with a Jew being accepted and sometimes an Asian, sometimes a
Hispanic, but generally speaking the blacks and Hispanics come along at
the tail end of all this, and they're finally accepted in is the
gradation of these things. Housing was the same way, and the schools
reflected it in their districts.I mention again--a lot of people I know heard it and went, "Gosh," and
that was the extent of their--both African American and white American
by the way as I think about it, here at UCLA, when they heard about
Odetta [Holmes] and how Odetta could not go to [John] Marshall High
School, but had to go to Belmont where I went, because she was told, "We
have a school for you." Yet she lived in that district, the Marshall
district, saying that that was the extent--that was, to me, de jure
segregation. You're deliberately manipulating what exists even in terms
of where people live to call it--you took a positive step for
integration, you didn't even take a step for what was legally supposed
to happen and didn't.And there are many instances of that if you probe deeply into L.A.
Unified's history, [John James] Audubon [Junior High School], [Susan
Miller] Dorsey [High School]. Those were areas--I remember during the
forties Jewish kids talking among themselves, and I kind of ran in that
group and a black. I was in probably three or four different groups,
including Japanese. But they talked about, "Are any Jewish kids getting
into Dorsey?" And someone saying, "Blank blank, no. They don't get into
Dorsey. They're being told to go somewhere else." Forties, and then
that, of course, doubly applied to any African American, although there
weren't many living in the forties out that way at all.That break occurred during the fifties, and when that happened there were
now African Americans living within reaching distance of Dorsey, and it
didn't take that long before that broke down. I remember the changing of
the population at [George] Washington [High School], [John C.] Fremont
[High School]. I remember them hanging in effigy an image of an African
American girl who was the first black to move into Fremont High School.
-
Stevenson
- And what year was that?
-
Thompson
- That would have been in, gosh, it's a blue, late forties, early fifties,
around in there. I'm trying to think if it occurred--it was in the late
forties, I believe, while I was still at Belmont or here, because I
hadn't gone to the academy yet, and I was still pretty young, so it was
around that period of time, and it was a real unrest, kids walking out,
white kids. The same thing with all of--Manual [Arts High School], not
quite as bad, but Fremont and Washington were very, very noticeably
involved in a lot of upset and so on related to African Americans coming
in, because the blacks were pushing now to move into that housing.That is, therefore, a kind of indicator of the kind--we had a school
system that was in no way dedicated to integration, far from it. It
reflected the way people thought in those days, and white folks didn't
want black folks around them, didn't want them around their kids, in
particular at a high school. Might take of that at this level, but
beyond that uh-uh. So I noticed--that would be the first thing
noticeable to me and folks in my generation, my brothers, my sister, was
that there was a definite anti-integration feeling that came out during
and after World War II. When the valley opened up, they didn't want any
part of African Americans, except the ones that existed already in
government housing or restricted housing built to take care of poor
people in the San Fernando-Pacoima area.There was even a unit, I believe, that was called the Joe Louis Tract,
and that would be interesting. It just occurred to me, the Joe Louis
Tract. I think that existed in the San Fernando-Pacoima area, and there
were a lot of African Americans that lived in there, in that tract. But,
of course, that was a place where a lot of Mexican Americans lived, too,
because the Mexicans go back to the 1800s in that area, northeast
valley. But the rest of the valley, Canoga Park, Northridge, didn't want
any part of them, and I'll give you a personal example. When I started
teaching I was hired to teach at Pacoima, obviously because it had black
and brown students and they'd had trouble. They wanted to get minorities
in there to be more representative, remember? And I think I mentioned
the last time about how we were asked to deal with the black problem,
where the black kids are loud and don't bathe enough and all. And here
we've got these kids out of the hills of Kentucky living up in Kagal
Canyon with stills and stuff, and they were just as bad. Nobody talked
to them.Nevertheless, those kinds of things existed in the valley, and I use as
an example I had been teaching at Pacoima in 1956, living in what I
referred to kind of euphemistically as East Hollywood, whatever that is,
but in the Hollywood area. And a number of us carpooled out there, two
Japanese, two blacks, a white and an Asian. No, two Japanese, a white
and a Jewish white, and we all carpooled out to teach at Pacoima. I had
two kids and I decided that I really wanted to move out there, because
it was just too much. I was staying late and sometimes I couldn't even
carpool, because I was way later than they were getting back home.So I decided that I would move to the valley. My wife was fair and some a
quick look might have thought white. She wasn't white, but she was fair.
We had two kids at first; we ended up with four. We decided that we
wanted to live out there, but we didn't want to live in Pacoima or where
they said I had to live. That just burnt the daylights out of me, and I
wasn't going to do it. So I went to a black real estate agent, whose
daddy was from Jamaica by the way. He started talking and we got all
into that. But he was basically American, and he was a real estate
agent, and he was older, I'd guess about fifty, and I remember him
sitting us down and saying, "Now, you two know you're going into some
dangerous territory here." And we said, "Yeah." We didn't really; we're
young, what did we know? I said, "How dangerous?" And I remember he
thought about it and scratched his chin--true story, Alva. He opened his
briefcase and there was a gun. He said, "I have a license for this." He
says, "Is that serious enough?" I said, "Yeah." So I said, "Should we do
this?" you know, squeaky voice, "Do we really do this?" He said, "Yeah,
because it has to happen."We were talking about Northridge. We had been out there, and the real
estate agents, who typically were in the show house in the garage with
tables--you would think we were totally invisible. We would walk up to a
table and they would not even look up. Somebody else would come in, "Can
we help you?" I mean, it was blatant stuff. We moved in, and I'm sorry,
but it just brings up so many memories that--we moved in in a house in
Northridge that had been built three years prior, leveled an orange
grove and built these houses up near, to give you a feel, San Fernando
Mission runs across the north end of the valley. San Fernando Mission
and Reseda, that area, which is now old Northridge and full of all kinds
of people, but we were the first. They threw eggs on my car. They called
my kids names, and they were little, which really bothered me because
they were too young to have to face human bestiality, as far as I was
concerned.But the really interesting thing--a Jewish couple. She was an Armenian
Jew, he was an American Jew, a doctor, sweet people. Invited us to the
Hollywood Bowl, then invited us over for dinner and told us, "You're
going through a lot of hell as we know it on Earth," and he says, "so we
wanted you to know there's at least a couple of people that don't buy
this. And we want you to know that we're here for you." Well, that was
beautiful. Only two of you, but there were two. There was an engineer
living up the street, a young engineer who used to drive a sports car
down in front of my house, and he would deliberately, when he got in
front of my house, kick it out of gear and rev it, you know [imitates
sound], then go off, anything to bother you.I told you about my father and that this guy had gone all the way from
fixing radios at Lockheed to being a radar engineer, with no training.
He never was trained in engineering, and I told you I never knew how he
did it, but he did it. But I had to chalk it up to English education,
because they really pushed it and he took advantage, and he had a knack
for that. Well, he is now, as I move into Northridge he is an engineer
at Lockheed. He's out at Palmdale doing flight tests. He calls me one
evening and he says, "Sid?" "Dad," I said, "Yeah, Dad?" He said, "Boy,
something happened today I've got to tell you." I said, "What happened?"
He said, "Well, we were in Palmdale and we had been up on a flight and
we came back down, and a group of the engineers," there were three or
four engineers, "talking about the flight and what we could do." He
said, "And this one engineer said, 'I want to talk to you, Tommy.' Okay.
He said, 'What do you think of mixed marriages?'" So my dad said, "Well,
between dogs and people I don't approve." He says, "I just don't." "Come
on, Tommy, I'm serious." And he said, "Well, I am, too. Between people
it's their business. Why?" "Well, I've got this situation, man, and it
bothers me. I know you and," [whispers] it's the engineer up the street.
He's describing this family that has just moved in. My dad pats him on
the arm and says, "I think you're talking about my son and my
daughter-in-law," and he said, "Not that it's any of your business, but
she isn't even white, totally. She is mixed." He said, "But you even got
that wrong." He goes, "What?" He says, "That's the kids that went on to
the academy and was a naval officer?" He says, "Yeah." He says, "And
I've got another one like him." He says, "Why?" He says, "Well, my God,
he's a neighbor! He lives down--."Next day I'm out front watering my little--it was a big lawn, and I
didn't have a sprinkler system, couldn't afford it then, so I'm
hand-watering this lawn in Northridge dry air. He comes down the street
and almost wrecks the car, because he takes his hands off the wheel,
he's waving at me, "Hi! Hi!" And I'm looking at him like what is this
guy, crazy? So I give him a little wave like this. That was the guy, and
things changed that much because there were some educated people out
there. I had a next-door neighbor from Texas who wouldn't talk to me,
wouldn't let his wife or his kids talk to me. I was there three years.
I'm painting my house on the weekends. I'm up there painting and he
goes, "Mr. Thompson?" Alva, I almost fell off the ladder, because I knew
who it was. I saw him out there working, and right next door. I looked
down and I said, "Yes?" And he says, "How are you?" I said, "I'm fine.
How are you?" "Oh, I'm fine. It's nice talking with you." I said,
"Yeah." In other words, it had finally broken with him. He couldn't live
with it anymore. It was like you took a weight off of him.Now, every one of these people had kids going to school, and I mention
all that because that spilled over into some of the attitudes at the
schools. The white schools were for white kids. By the way, about two
weeks later he came over, knocked on the door and invited us to come
over for cocktails in a couple of days. And we went over and, Alva,
there were only the two of us and the two of them. "What would you like
to drink?" "I'll have a martini or a--?" [unclear] He didn't want to
make a mistake. [laughs] He brought them back with a piece of paper on
them, "martinis, scotch and water." [laughs] I was just stunned, and I
said, well, this is a sign. But these were educated people, and if you
wait long enough some of these things, because they know it's wrong.
There's no basis in fact for a lot of this mess, and he just had to
change his attitude.But there were, when we in the fifties--now, here we go to the sixties,
and now the stuff is really starting, because the pressure under civil
rights is really coming. There's been Watts riots and after that
insurrection a lot of changes occurred from '66 on. They were already
starting, but they gained a lot of impetus. Then there was the whole
Martin Luther King [Jr.] thing, which in the schools was--traumatic
isn't even the word, and I think I mentioned how emotional that whole
thing was, especially in the school I was in, which happened to have
been a racially integrated school, naturally, not by bus or anything, by
communities. It isn't now. It all went private or whatever for people to
escape. But the integration efforts became, if you called for a choice
with the white community, the choice would have been blacks to them. "We
can deal with that, but not us to them, because we don't want to go in
that community."And how do you argue? You've got crime and everything else happening, and
it's all blown up, of course, and used to make a point. Not necessarily
any truth to all of that. I used to see headlines that would just make
me think if that had happened in Northridge in that white area, you
wouldn't have seen this. There would have been a mention and that would
have been the end of it. With this, because the integration thing was
all in the stir now, and it was being used--there were board members
coming onboard with a policy of anti-mandatory busing, as you may
recall. I'm speaking of Bobbie Fiedler and Roberta Weintraub and, oh,
gosh, the man, a young Jewish guy, multimillionaire. But they all came
in with the attitude of no mandatory busing, and, in fact, there never
was.There was a ton of voluntary busing, but that really wasn't that
accepted, Alva. A lot of that happened because at the same time, late
sixties, seventies, the populations now are beginning to explode with
Hispanic, with the African Americans already living there, and many
schools, schools, for example, in the small cities, Huntington Park,
Bell, South Gate, Cudahy. Those schools were swelling beyond their
capacity, and so they had to be alleviated by either double sessions or
going multi-track. Double sessions were a complete disaster. The kids
didn't come to the second session. Kids said, "Okay, you set it up that
way. We ain't playing. We're not going to be there." And they didn't
show up, and the dropout rate was enormous, so that was quickly gotten
rid of, and then they came up with the idea of multi-track schools,
using them year round.Now, why did that work for voluntary integration? Well, because at the
same time those populations were swelling, the white population was now
beginning to do this. After the Baby Boom and all of that, things
quieted down and the schools were losing enrollment, and they started
talking about closing schools. And, "Gosh, oh, gee, we don't want our
dainty little school here closed," and I'm being a little pushy about
it, but that's the way it kind of was. "We don't want our school closed.
We'll even take blacks," is what they didn't say, but that's what they
meant. So as a result, instead of mandatory busing for integration we
now had a way to do voluntary integration under the guise of
overcrowding, so in the central city you were overcrowded. They couldn't
handle the enrollments, so we were busing these babies all the way from
central city to Canoga Park, to Northridge, to Chatsworth. Wherever they
had room we were putting these kids, and obviously [Pacific] Palisades
and places like that. The harbor pretty much had a population already
and didn't have a lot of room. Most of the room was valley and west side
here, Uni[versity High School] and that area, but not of the size and
magnitude of the valley. A lot of schools out there, and those schools
all were getting busing, had busing through integration.Now, that doesn't mean, because it was happening that the schools were
overcrowded and needed relief that that was a huge impetus, and there
were schools that were going to close unless they got kids, all of that
big, but I don't want to paint that as a picture that there was no
one--there were people that were concerned about integration, and they
were white people, and they were black people. The black people, my
experience during the sixties and seventies in particular, and eighties
for that matter--the black people had an attitude when you went to
meetings and they were talking straight up to you, and they would say,
"Listen. There is nothing in our history that says this is going to be
good for us," [laughs] and I had to nod. I'm saying, "You're so right.
We know that. The question is, can we make it this much better?" And I
said, "I'm not sure we can, because these kids are going--."The kids were going out to the valley, and the reports back were that
they were out there, and as we found out, kids still ate separately,
white kids, black kids, brown kids, and that in and of itself, unless
you can actively change that, and it's not easy to do but you've got to
work at it and not too many were willing, because I think a lot of them
agreed with it, the black experience out there was not--they weren't in
any AP classes. There weren't people concerned that they weren't in the
AP classes. These teachers are teachers who are used to giving the
material and a middle-class kid [snaps fingers] get it, and they didn't
have to cajole or do anything to get him to do it, and they weren't
going to do back flips to get black kids involved in that process.Not true about what happened with black schools in central city. There
were a lot of teachers, not just African American, because I can recall
at Markham some incredibly talented white teachers who just knocked
themselves out for these kids, felt it personally about what had
happened to them, so I'm trying to say that in spite of all this
ugliness, there's a lot of people that are not mean-spirited, that want
it to work. Just as there were when Obama was elected, there were people
that really wanted this to work, really want it to work because they
appreciate the magnitude of what this is addressing. Same thing was true
in those days in the schools, and the integration processes that the
district was going through were, to a large extent, federally controlled
through OCR and other things, and as we know with the federal
government, it doesn't always work in the most expeditious way, that
sometimes it's heavy handed or it's no handed. We have a policy, but
we're not sure how it's to be implemented kind of thing. Not to lay any
blame there, but there were a lot of folks in bureaucratic roles who
were saying things that didn't necessarily make it work.But just like everything else, good and bad, there was a good side, and
the good side was that the integration processes, the ways we funded,
what happened to those kids was an interest to the courts. Under the
voluntary integration process there was oversight. To me that was
necessary, essential, because the attitude of some folks, "We didn't
want to see them, but now that we've got them we don't have to deal with
them really, they don't want to work that's their problem," that kind of
thing, we saw an awful lot of that. And we had other teachers who were
committed say that to many of us. "This is what's happening."And then don't forget the other part that I mentioned earlier, which ties
to this. There was a move at the same time to integrate the staff.
Remember that? And I mentioned that we lost the good black teachers that
way, and the white ones, they never came, of any substantial number.
Some did, some really dedicated good people, thank God. But for what we
lost, we never quite gained, because we're filled behind some
experienced black teachers who were told to go to the valley, what
filled behind them were white substitutes who needed a job, but not
experienced and not well trained. So when you ask me what was the net
effect of all of this, the best I can say for that period of time, it
was an experience, and minimally I want to believe that a lot of white
kids who may have been looking for this kind of experience learned some
things about black youngsters and vice versa.I remember once when I was still at Markham in the late sixties, one of
the community activists, Dorothy Rochelle, and Dorothy Rochelle is one
tough lady who backs up to nobody. She heard some things about me not
being really black and all that, and she checked me out five ways but
up, and I applauded it, and I think we had a good understanding when I
left. She knew I was for those kids. And she had a meeting of school
staffs in which she questioned the meeting of the principals from the
whole area, elementary, middle, senior, and I went, and I remember at
the meeting she said, "Now, let's get down to the--," in those days
you'd say, "the old nitty gritty about what this is." She said, "This is
about integration." She said, "I've been talking to some white folks in
the valley, and we want some of our kids to go out there this summer for
summer classes who aren't currently attending out there, they're
attending here. And they want to send some of their white kids here."
There was a bit of an intake of breath. We're mostly black now, the
administrators, and they're looking and going, "They want to send white
kids down here?" "Well, yeah, but you want to send your black kids out
there, so, I mean, it's a quid pro quo."And Alva, I remember sitting there saying, this woman is doing something
that's incredible, that I just never could imagine would happen two-way,
so I raised my hand. I said, "Oh, Markham, we'll take them." I said,
"Why don't you get some middle-school kids? We'll take them for the
summer, if you have places for them to stay." She says, "I do." And she
really appreciated it. She says, "Okay, we appreciate you're willing." I
said, "Let's give it a shot." So we had these white girls, and man, the
first time they came on campus those kids were looking like, "Who they?"
"Mr. T., who are they?" I said, "They're students. They're going to go
here this summer." "Where are they from?" I said, "The valley." I said,
"But they wanted to come down." "And see how we live?" I said, "No, it
wasn't like that." I said, "They really wanted to understand you better,
for their sake. They need it." Because we met with the kids, and, of
course, the ones coming were farsighted kids. These weren't your
average.But you know, they were, Alva, I would guess thirteen, fourteen, very
impressionable age. Parents were worried. They'd heard about Watts. But
after the first--and they went home for the weekends. We got through the
summer I think with some really positive results with those kids. And it
wasn't that, though, it was the effort that I felt needed support. It
was a start of something. I didn't think it was going to go too far, but
who knew? Nobody knows. You never know how things--and you don't know
what those kids are doing now, so there's always that that comes out of
this sort of a process. And there were many instances kind of like that,
and I knew that not only were we dealing with the parents, our own
staff. These were white middle-class folks in the main who were
teaching, and what did they think? They had some interesting views, some
of them who were open about expressing it.Others, and I really believe this, others really wanted to see change and
wanted it to work, they just weren't sure how. And they knew the federal
guidelines and the threat of mandatory busing would be enormously
upsetting, and they weren't sure what the reactions of communities would
be and all of that, and the reaction by the African American brown
community, particularly African American, about we are always the ones
that have to accept them. Why isn't it a matter of them accepting us?
They don't accept us, they take us. One guy I remember memorably in a
meeting stood up and he said, "Look. Our African American kids are out
there to keep their schools open." I couldn't refute that. I said,
"That's part of it. You're right." You never want to lie to these
people, because they're too smart. Dorothy Rochelle, boy, Dorothy, I was
just thinking of her. She was such an incredibly tough, tough lady.
-
Stevenson
- Tell me more about her. Was she connected with a particular community
group?
-
Thompson
- She was. But to tell you the truth I can't--there were so many, and they
tended to be localized. Dorothy was from Watts. As I recall, she lived
on Century [Boulevard], somewhere, 103rd [Street], which is, of course,
the main street of Watts. She lived, as I recall, it wasn't Century. She
was just south of there in a little quiet house with a pretty lawn and
everything. She kept it just so. She loved flowers. And she not only had
an interest in Watts schools, though. She was down at the board, and she
was looking at this thing globally, and a lot of people feared her
because she was black, she knew the street, but she would give you
this--she and Margaret Wright was another one. Maybe you remember
Margaret?
-
Stevenson
- Yes, yes, I do.
-
Thompson
- She was famous at Manual Arts, got arrested over there. And Margaret
would roll up to the microphone, used to work in the shipyards in the
forties and always talked about it, and Margaret would say, "Now, folks,
I don't know what I'm talking about, because I'm totally uneducated, so
what I'm saying to you won't be in good English, and again, just
remember please I'm uneducated." And I remember being at the microphone
and saying, "Margaret, I'm holding onto my wallet, Margaret." I said,
"And my eye teeth, with you and your you don't know what you're doing."
And she cracked up, she just cracked up. But that was another one. She
had more of a sense of humor, because when Dorothy was on a mission
there was no humor in it, boy. It was all nuts and bolts and tough
stuff. But they both worked within--they tended to be more obviously
localized with their communities. They knew them there. She was around
the Manual Arts area, Margaret, Dorothy more in the Watts area, but both
of them had a vision that went way beyond that for the whole district,
and they would remind the board that, "You represent all kids in this
district, white, black, brown, Asian, every kid," and they never let
them take their feet from the fire. They always held them accountable
for that.And when they made a move that they visualized as somewhat racially
motivated, not nakedly so, not open prejudices, not that, just the
subtleties, and they were quick to hit them with the subtleties, and
sometimes the staff would be sitting there going, "Um-hmm, they're
right." And there were several smart board members there, and they knew,
"She's right. They're right, and they're going to hammer us." Sometimes
they'd get together and that was scary, because you had double trouble,
and boy, they would really come at it, and they hammered--they wanted to
see mandatory integration, okay? They figured that unless their kids
managed to get out of Watts or Watts was changed, then nothing was going
to happen. Sadly, the lesson we all learned was that unless you can
change--in other words, you have a de facto situation of how housing has
occurred in this city, and the blacks were living here, and the whites
are living there, and never the twain shall meet. They never met.And under that kind of generational thing that's been going on, people
just didn't know how to deal with black going from a white perspective,
and vice versa, with all of the suspicions that African Americans had
about the way they were going to be treated, and they always said, "If
somebody's going to lose in this, it's us," and they were right.
-
Stevenson
- Can you tell me now, Margaret Wright, Dorothy Rochelle in terms of
organizations, NAACP were pro desegregation, pro integration. Was there
opposition in the African American community groups or individuals you
can think of that were opposed to desegregation-integration?
-
Thompson
- It was more individual than it was a collected group, and the reason, the
power of these folks, especially these women, they were so powerful that
nobody wanted to take them on, and if you had an organization bending
that way, they would not want to be with Dorothy or Margaret or any of
their minions, because they knew they were in trouble. But you had
individuals who would come in and say things like--and I've had them,
yes, I can recall publicly, individuals who would say, "Look. We're not
going to win in this, and as far as I'm concerned you can keep your
integration, and we ought to just educate our black kids where they are.
We don't need this mess, because that's the way it's going to be
anyway." And Dorothy in a quiet moment would say, "I understood that,
because that's the way it's been. We've had to do that anyway. That is
what it is, but we have another dream." That's the way she would
describe it, and I'm paraphrasing the words, but in a sense, "We have
another dream. We see this having to happen."They were kind of looking ahead to what we see in the nineties, eighties
and nineties, more acceptable than it was way back in the fifties and
forties, because housing is more acceptable that way. I am constantly
amazed at, just as an aside, my daughter--one of my daughters, I have
three daughters--one daughter, then her husband and her kids lived in
Glendora. When I went out there to watch my granddaughters playing
soccer or whatever, and they did well in school, both of them and went
on, but I was really surprised at the numbers of black folks living in
different places out there, east all the way to Riverside, Colton. And
as I mentioned earlier, the one that just blew my mind was what happened
in, oh, gosh, the hotbed of rednecks--it'll come to me--where African
Americans and browns now live, and it was a place where you didn't drive
through there. In other words, the change in housing patterns where
blacks are now scattered, and in some ways it hurts them, because you
don't have an identifiable group that you can address. They're
individual. But one would have to say, "But that's what we dreamed about
in the first place, that you'd be able to live here, here, or wherever
the heck you wanted to live, without fear." So how do you argue that?You're arguing that because they're no longer in a group you don't get
the things that could be good for the group when it's identifiable is
true, and I think that's far different to what--the Hispanic population
in central city is very identifiable. It's huge. It is South Central for
the most part, just not that far west but more down the corridors. The
black population has just distributed itself out everywhere, and that
couldn't have happened in the late forties, early fifties, even the
early sixties. They couldn't have bought into those places without a
whole lot of trouble, even if they could have bought in, so it's
different now.And in talking to my granddaughters, who are--and I now have
great-grandkids who one of them, she's had three, so I talked to her.
[unclear] The African American population at the school--she went to
Charter Oaks or someplace like that. I'm not sure about that. I'd have
to check it, but it's east.
-
Stevenson
- Okay, I'll just put it down as a question mark.
-
Thompson
- A question mark. It has a name Charter something. But anyway, she told
me, she said, "Granddad, we played other teams east of us going toward
Riverside, Colton, out that way." The place I'm trying to think of is
where Henry Kaiser had his steel mill. It starts with F [Fontana].
Anyway, she said, "We played in all of those communities," and she said,
"All of those teams had an African American, two, three." She said,
"What I'm finding is that they're--." And I've got a younger
granddaughter who's here. I think I mentioned, she's in a doctoral
program here, Ph.D. program, and that one is into everything
sociologically speaking, and she told me, "You would be amazed at what
you--it's more difficult in places like Redlands because of the price
and so on." But she said, "And a lot of these folks came from L.A."They were a part of the black community here, and they're gone there, so
in some ways it's kind of a natural integration in terms of what it
should have been in the first place, which is housing, because they live
there. And nobody's upset about that. Nobody builds a school to put the
blacks in, because that wouldn't work in this day and age. They'd
probably have to call out the National Guard or something. So it has
changed to the way that it never was in the first place. In the first
place it was never about the way housing patterns were, because they
were segregated. For those living in the city, we know that among the
African American populations a lot of things have changed. There are
African Americans in the Palisades and places they'd never been in, and
that has all changed. Hispanics not the same quite, because they haven't
built that middle class yet, for the numbers that have come in, the
in-migration and all of that. They can't afford to get into some of
these places. That's why the black community around Crenshaw hasn't
changed--
-
Stevenson
- Baldwin Hills.
-
Thompson
- --because folks can't buy in there. Those houses as little as they are
some of them, expensive, and they just can't buy in. Someone was asking
me that the other day, a prof down at [U]SC. "How come I go around
Crenshaw and I see African Americans all?" I said, "Well, it was tough
for them to get in there, and it's harder for the Hispanics, because
you've got to have decent money to get in some of those homes." You just
can't buy in there like you could in dead-center city, which is central
city as I would call it, down Figueroa and that area.So going back to the district itself, after all of this has been said and
done, the one thing that did happen of any consequence was voluntary
integration, and a lot of kids, and still do--Palisades, Venice, Uni,
these schools have had and still have substantial African American
populations now, and/or Hispanic. It began back then and it still is.
Now, some of that indicates space available, because whites have done
the private school, and there's no question--and you know private
schools and I know Santa Monica area that are full of kids that were
former public-school kids, white and black. There are blacks in there,
too, and you talk to some of those folks, and I have, a few who will
tell you, "I don't want my kids going to no place where the kids aren't
interested in education or aren't studying and work habits. I just want
them around a different thing." Their kids--I'm not going to argue with
that. I just say, "Well, I hope you keep in mind that the hope is that
we can build the public schools to where we might be able to compete,
but we're going to have to do that. We're going to have to compete."Some of the things Obama is saying and this is a new Secretary of
Education, I don't know. This guy is talking about just going private
schools, like that's a solution. Or the latest one--I've digressed,
because it just got to me--the latest one is the Mayor [Antonio
Villaraigosa] should be in charge of the school districts.
-
Stevenson
- Yes, what do you think about that?
-
Thompson
- Oh, my god. What is there, something ordained genetically that a person
that becomes a mayor is by therefore an excellent school education
leader? No, and I'm not saying the leaders haven't made bad mistakes.
They have. But that is, to me, patently ridiculous. This is the emotion
I feel about it--if you can't fill the potholes, how in the heck are you
going to run the school system? And I've got strong feelings about the
size of the school system. I've said it, and they need to address that
issue. Just to turn it over to the mayor to run it--it is different
because a lot of the patterns for that kind of a thing in cities, a lot
of it uses Chicago as an example.Chicago politics are very, very different from anybody else's politics,
because as I recall, [Richard J.] Daley [Sr.] had a strong connection to
the legislature in Illinois, to the extent that when he took over the
schools they could pull money almost directly from the state legislature
to them. That doesn't exist here, and this just is not the same control
issue that it is there, and Chicago politics are Chicago politics, and
simply to wave a magic wand and say, "Oh, the mayor should be running
this," is ridiculous. So I'm sorry, Prez, Mr. President, but this guy
needs to stop and think, because quick fixes aren't what we need. We
need a concerted effort towards improvement, but it needs to be
inclusive. It isn't about one person. Look how detrimental that is to a
reform movement which says, "The schools should change and be more
collaborative," and the collaboration being the teachers ought to be
involved in what they teach.Yeah? Duh. Parents should be involved. Now, are parents going to run the
school? Heck no. Parents don't want to run the school. The parents want
input to what happens to their kids. But other parents don't want to be
bothered period, and that's a parent we need to get. We've got to get
these parents and say, "No more. It's your kid. Now, you get
interested." And I don't know, we ought to find some way to make them
get interested, give them coffee and donuts when they come. That's
kidding. But do something that inspires them to get involved, and you're
not going to ever get all of anything, but you can get more, and just
taking a mayor and putting him or her in charge doesn't solve anything.
I couldn't alone fix L.A. Unified if I tried. Took me a while to
understand that, especially when I sat back after I left and looked at
it. Oh, my god. It was an incredibly difficult task because of the very
magnitude of it and all of the people involved and all of the different
mixes of people and all of the politics, different politics.The board members who had political aspirations are one part. The
politicians over here that felt they could control a lot of what
happened in the district because they knew them, all of that plays into
it. So if you ask me again, other than that I don't feel too strongly
about the mayor running it. [laughs]
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Well, I have a follow up, though. I was wondering if you could tell
me about the background of Crawford v. [Los Angeles] Board [of
Education]. For those listening not familiar with it, what was the
background of that? How did they get to that point with that case being
filed, and what were its implications?
-
Thompson
- The issues related to me of Crawford v. the Board--now, first of all, I
was not directly involved with the whole process, the litigation. They
formed a whole unit of about ten to fifteen people who dealt with that,
and it was in the time of Jim Taylor. Those people were to look at all
aspects of integration, but they were also under what was happening
under court mandates, so they were in a sense being directed through the
board and the superintendent to take actions that would be consistent
with whatever the rulings were legally that they would have to do.Back at that time I was all of that, I was a principal, assistant
principal, principal, I was in that mode in schools, and as a result,
most of what my experience was about had to do with the effect of it,
and what was the effect on the particular schools, particularly I wasn't
over several schools, I was over one, and particularly as it applied to
Maclay when I first became an assistant principal in the valley, which
happened to have been an integrated school. I'd better stop there a
second, because that was very special. It was integrated without a bus.
There was no bus involved. These kids came out of Shadow Hills, white
kids. Shadow Hills was an area above Sunland, Sun Valley, that area, and
they were kids of [L.A.] Times writers. They also were kids that
generally most of those families had horses and that kind of stuff, so
they a totally different breed of cat to most of the kids you had in
school. Then we had a number of Japanese kids that came off of,
generally speaking, the nurseries and so on along Foothill Boulevard.
The African American kids came out of the vestiges, of what remained of
the old Joe Louis Tract business and lived in the Pacoima-San Fernando
area.But as that applied to Crawford, that was an integrated school fighting
to remain integrated. We had a white principal, Fred Frasier, a big old
guy out of Iowa, a farmer type, but a wonderful human being that just in
his own jovial way--but he was plenty bright, and he and I and a Jewish
head counselor, an Italian assistant--we were all mixed up, and we made
an oath that we were going to fight to keep that school integrated with
whatever it took. We took an attitude towards Crawford of here is an
example of what Crawford was about, in our minds, and we were going to
in our own way fight to show that this could happen. It was a devil of a
struggle, because when you have folks that have been in--as now adults
who were kids and were living maybe in the South or wherever all these
folks, and they came from all over the place--a good Jewish population,
too, now that I think about it, was also in there. But when you have
these kinds of things, the adults involved bring their baggage, what
they went through, and I don't care if it's white or black. Some of the
whites complained that they'd lived in black neighborhoods and got beat
up all the time. I know that happens. I remember in the Hispanic
community where the whites got beat up regularly by the Hispanics, and
vice versa.So when it comes to Crawford, Crawford we felt was about, first of all,
about a better educational process for African Americans, and that was a
focus, African American kids. It was about how what these kids are
living with now is not acceptable, in totality, teaching, facilities,
because they were all old, generally speaking, falling apart. All of
these kinds of things is the life educationally of an African American
child, and Crawford was about, "That can't be right, not in this
society." I'm putting it in my own words, but that's the thing that came
across to us out of Crawford. Crawford was about changing that attitude
that said, "This is okay. After all, it's them." And make it different.
And we were hoping it could be made different.When we saw what was happening under the mandatory busing part, which
wasn't going to work, and it wasn't going to work because it wasn't
accepted, and it wasn't accepted because of the attitudes of the people
that would have had to accept it, and that is the middle-class-and-up
white population was not going to accept that stuff. And we became
discouraged. I had since moved from that school, and by the way, the
principal of that school, the white guy I described who was such a
wonderful influence in terms of fighting to maintain the integration of
Maclay Middle School, he was moved to Manual Arts. He was moved there
because that's when Margaret Wright got arrested in the hallways,
protesting the principal they had there then, who they removed after
they arrested Margaret. She always laughs about that. And they put this
guy in there. He and Margaret became fast friends. He said, "Margaret
Wright's a tough old girl," but he said, "Man, I respect the heck out of
her." And she told me, "That big old country boy, he's straight up," and
he was.But when he left, then they moved me, and I'm not saying we were all that
important, but I think we were. We were certainly committed. [makes
whistling sound] The parents found other ways, because the staff that
came in there, they were certainly competent, but not committed, and
Crawford above all required a commitment. It inherently had to have, for
that process to work, and the process of what we're going to do to
improve the lot of African American kids, which was to me the whole
purpose to the thing, by whatever process we thought might help. Whether
it was mandatory desegregation or whatever it might be, that's what it
was. And in looking at all of the things that had happened, like I use
for another example the integration of the staff and what happened under
that, we came out of it and lost. As the African Americans used to tell
me, "We will lose. When it comes down to the nitty gritty, we will be at
the back," and they were right. They were absolutely right, Alva.And so when you ask me from an operational end of Crawford, not knowing
all of--I knew who was doing all the stuff related to the legal
implications. That was the likes of Jim, Phil Jordan was in there, Phil
Linscomb, there were people like that who were all in there, just doing
a yeoman's job of trying to make it work, but always under what was the
requirement under the law. We couldn't violate the law. We could only do
what we were allowed to do. But it was being restricted to the extent
that we finally figured out, it occurred to us, uh-oh, this is going to
come down to where it's voluntary. Voluntary is fine, but it ain't going
to do it, not with the magnitude of this problem. And until it's
accepted--going back now to what we said about blacks a minute ago and
where they live now, until that's accepted, and people don't mind seeing
blacks in their schools because they live here, until that happens we
just didn't see a lot of hope. And we were a bit bitter about what we
noticed.Someone had said, "Well, what's the one thing that stands out in your
mind about all that period of time?" I said, "I never saw a change, a
substantive change in the teacher corps that we were able to hire into
our schools. Never." I said, "I'm talking about forties," in my
lifetime, "forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties. When I was
there in the nineties, we were still fighting it." These schools have
never been properly served by even the staff dealing with them, much
less parent involvement and all that stuff. They never have had that.
And so as I look back on all of the effort--yet, we went like this. We
went through the battles and battles, and it came right back to where,
okay, these kids are all in their school. Some of them escaped and went
to Palisades. We know what happened to them there. It was not
necessarily good. However, the circle I just described did move here and
did it again. As we say, as African Americans this happened to us all
the time. But each time that circle goes around, it moves a little bit.And the people in Pali, there are people there now who have met African
American kids, talking to one the other day, and she said, "You know, I
have to say my attitude has changed. My kids brought some folks over,
African American kids," and I said, "You found out they were--?" She
said, "Yeah, I know." She said, "It's embarrassing, because how stupid."
But she realized it. And she was, "Yeah, I had feelings about African
American kids, but now that I've had a chance to really see them," and
some of that has to do with the Obama thing now, I think, the
acceptance, and who knows where it occurred, but it did. Some of it did
occur and there were changes because of that. We can never minimize the
importance of that kind of thing, even though it doesn't seem to be,
because it's not in the amount or numbers we'd like. But those things
happened, and they were just that much better in terms of white folks
accepting African Americans.So am I optimistic? Yes, I am. I don't know if human beings will ever
solve racial problems, Alva. Maybe when it gets to the point where they
can't recognize them. My dad used to say this. He said, "The day that
they look around and everybody kind of looks the same--." I said,
"That's frightening, Dad. I mean--." "Yeah, but--, he says. He made a
comment. He said, from his perspective, he says, "I have watched this
and watched it in human beings, and if it isn't that, they'll find
another reason." It's the old business about the teachers that did the
eye thing, remember? Blue eyes and brown eyes and black eyes and all
that?
-
Stevenson
- Yes, yes.
-
Thompson
- Well, we're going to find as human beings something that I can say, "I'm
better than you," because I'm frustrated and I'm insecure and I'm all
those things, too. When I was in China I saw it, in listening to the
discussions about the peasants and so on, or Mexico, Indians versus more
Spanish. Everywhere you go, even the Africans. We're just human beings.
We're basically insecure. But who knows? It may help, it may come
around.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Last question before we fold this session. I'm to continue this
discussion on the next. One of the outcomes of Crawford v. Board was
mandating busing. How did the dialogue, the tone change, particularly
thinking--you've already mentioned people like Bobbie Fiedler on the
board, but then in the community and an organization she was involved
with called Bus Stop. Now, how did the whole tone change? How
contentious did it get? One of my interviewees spoke at length about
getting death threats even.
-
Thompson
- Oh, yes.
-
Stevenson
- Yes, and could you discuss a little bit--
-
Thompson
- Oh, yes, okay. Again, I was somewhat removed from it, and the person I
was thinking of was Tom Bartman and the Bus Stop thing. They were all in
that. I do recall being in some closed sessions of the board for one
reason or another when I came downtown finally in the eighties, early
eighties, and it was really contentious with the likes of Rita
[Walters]. Rita has incredibly strong feelings about a lot of this
stuff, and she didn't mind telling the Lord, "This is the way I feel."
That was the way she was. And, of course, there were others who were
liberally placed like that.The board itself was incredibly contentious between them, and that was
the heart of it, and the whole Bus Stop thing and the willingness to
battle, and I can't help but say that there were some who felt, well,
these were Jewish Americans, and they should have been at the forefront
of this, rather than stopping it. But it turns, and I don't know quite
how that happens, but it seems to me it turns on my kids and all of a
sudden that takes priority over everything I think about
philosophically, and I'm going to think about--and it's the reason that
black families that have the wherewithal will pull out and go somewhere,
too, because I'm concerned about my kids, and when it gets personal,
that's the kind of stuff you do get.I can recall board meetings, because I also was working for--the lead
attorney was Jerry Halversen, and he's a very famous person in L.A. in
terms of the legal end of integration and everything else. He was the
person at the point with a lot of it, with other people that were
private attorneys brought aboard. We did a lot of hiring of private
attorneys to deal with what the courts were saying and to also deal with
attempts by Bus Stop and other groups to get injunctions and everything
else to prevent some of this. I can remember being in board meetings
when the then superintendent would say to one of us, "Would you tell
school police there's an individual that I'm really concerned about
sitting on the side over here?" Some of these people, Alva, would
radiate such hate that even sitting there and trying to be
objective--and I was sometimes in place of another person I would sit in
in their chair, and I did have some connection to the operation of the
school police department, because that was a part of Halversen's thing,
and I was his assistant. And I remember that some of the people you
looked at were of real concern, again because of the hate, the obvious,
the way they were looking at people.Now, none of that ever spilled in. We had others sending letters, and I
know because of the school police connection that letters were sent
threatening physical action, and we did not take them lightly. I mean,
all you had to do was think back to Kennedy, Martin Luther [King, Jr.],
and you knew that you'd better not be so stupid as to think this can't
happen, anymore than there isn't a danger for Barack Obama. There is a
danger, let's be honest, and it doesn't take a lot of people. One nut,
and we always used to think about that, so the concern was that really a
lot of hatred was generated, and no matter how you paint that it carried
racial overtones of black kids and all that stuff, and it was there, and
reactions to and all that went with it.There were times when we weren't certain that we would have a board
meeting and not have something serious occur. Thank God it never
happened, but that didn't mean it couldn't, because that kind of emotion
is very core-like. It's very basic. It's about how I feel about you, and
I think you're the wrong color, and I'm being forced to want to accept
you or yours, and I don't want to do that, so what am I going to do
about it? And look what's going on even now. I mean, some of this
senseless stuff. It didn't take a lot of logic for some of this to
occur. We worried like crazy about some of these buses that we were
sending these babies on into valley schools with some of this stuff, and
organizations like Bus Stop aren't necessarily organized to be
physically violent, but they carry a fringe element that is physically
violent.
-
Stevenson
- Right, right.
-
Thompson
- And we saw--I noticed, and others, all of us knew that that was a
potential. But honest to God, the ones that really scared us were the
kids, because those buses were so vulnerable, pulling up there with all
these, in many cases, little babies. We were transporting
kindergarteners. And by the way, a lot of that was because there was no
room, so we were moving these babies to where there was space. Well,
okay, that's, I guess, laudable, but amoral as far as I'm concerned.
There's no moral values at all involved when you do things like that.
But the threat to our kids was, we felt, enormous, and we had thousands
that we were shipping all over the place [unclear]. I say, we shipped
them. We put them in buses that carted them off like mail, and it was
frightening, and there were threats related to that. "You're going to
have these kids getting on the bus and I'll be waiting for them," and
all this kind of thing. And then, of course, we would respond with
undercover this and that.And LAPD was very supportive of the efforts to safeguard the kids, and we
would take them to football games and things and took extra precautions
about getting them out. So all that to say that Crawford, for all of the
noble things that it wanted to do that we felt was a part of the process
to cause something to happen for what should be happening for our
African American kids, organizations, again I repeat it, organizations
like Bus Stop in and of themselves aren't necessarily violent, but the
emotion that has been stirred up related to mandatory busing, they had
fringe elements that were definitely fringe, as in off the deep end, a
lot of them. It never really happened, so maybe that helped it, if you
want to be that--I mean, it's the old good-and-bad news thing, bad
because it never solved anything. All we did was the voluntary. We
didn't solve a thing. But on the other hand, I guess the nuts could
stand back and say, "Well, you didn't do anything either. You didn't
mandatorily bus anybody."That's kind of the feeling. I want to give it a little more thought.
Again, I have to apologize to you, because I was not directly involved
in all the machinations they went through related to Crawford. All I
knew was the results of and how it affected the schools and how it
affected how we reacted. And then when I came downtown it was still
going on. When I came downtown and before I became an associate
superintendent downtown I was assistant to Halversen, and in that I
definitely was involved with the school police department, which he ran
among ten other things, and I was into all of them, and I was well aware
of the threats and the concerns, because I was in meetings where these
were discussed, and it was very real. The sharing by police, law
enforcement, city law enforcement, county law enforcement, sheriffs,
with our people was very pointed that they were worried and hoped that
we got through this without kids getting hurt, or for that matter
adults. I said, "Hey, we're sitting up there in that horseshoe looking
around, like, whoa, it's an interesting place." That's kind of my take
on it.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. This is a good place to--[End of interview]
1.5. Session 5 (April 20, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- I'm continuing an interview with Dr. Sid Thompson on Monday, April 20,
2009. I have some follow ups. One, you alluded to the African American
students who attended school on the Westside at high schools such as
[Pacific] Palisades [High School] and so forth. What were their
experiences attending those schools? This was going on at a time when
they were trying to achieve integration, and a lot of black parents who
could were sending their kids to the Westside. But from the students
perspective, if you can, what were their experiences in those days?
-
Thompson
- The ones I talked to, and sometimes it was a mixed bag as to why they
were going, some of it was athletics. I always said it began with the
natural tendency on the part of African Americans to want to go west,
because west was better. That's where all the folks lived that had
money, and they didn't want them there, and so that made them want it
more. So there's a natural thing for that as we all know in history, in
our history, until we hit the Pacific Ocean, and then we had, "Oops,
can't go further there." But my sense in talking, and I talked to a lot
of them--I would talk to the kids who were going to Pali[sades] across
the street from me. I'd just go over and talk to them, and they were
great kids.Invariably there was a sense that that was a better school, and better
meant--they said they had heard that the faculty at Crenshaw [High
School] was a good faculty, which it was. When it opened they got really
a choice of a lot of good teachers, so that wasn't the issue. It was the
issue of the kids. It was a perception that these kids, white kids from
upper-income families, demanded the best, and therefore those schools
demanded the best. And the kids' sense was that in going there they were
facing more challenges in terms of competition, peer competition, than
they would have had at Crenshaw or any black school coming out of the
central city, and that was a very deeply seated perception. There were a
couple of them I got to know well, and then there were other kids that I
got to know through various things, and when I asked them, I said,
"Okay," because I visited a lot of those schools when I was at a higher
level, when I went to deputy superintendent I went out there and
observation on campus, lunchtime, blacks all together, whites all
together, Hispanics together, Asian kids together, so they had an
integrated-segregated population.They were integrated by being on the same school site, but segregated by
the social behaviors, remembering that, as we all know, this is
adolescence and beyond, and when that time hits in many families these
cultures really take root. No, they've taken root, but they really are
followed in the sense that--I experienced that. When I was in junior
high and elementary, it didn't matter. Once you hit high school, upper
middle, like ninth grade, and then eighth grade, ninth grade, and then
high school it was a very different world. Well, the same thing was true
for these kids. They found that although some changes had occurred--I
noticed, for example, white boys walking with black girls, not as much
as black boys walking with white girls. I think some of that has changed
since. So that part was very different. They wouldn't even let us do
that. When I was in school, you'd better not even with a Mexican girl,
as I think I mentioned.So these kids have gone to these schools and, in fact, many of the
African American kids, my take was that they really did want an
integrated experience. They wanted to get to know these white kids, and
they wanted to mix with them and so on. In the main, it just did not
happen. Right now I'm just dealing with the social part, and then I'll
get to the school part. The social part, the athletic teams--athletes in
a team will mix. There it's a question of whether we win or lose. That
becomes paramount and everything else kind of goes secondary. So those
kids, even in the girls' side and boys' side, the mix was generally
speaking better than the whole population. The whole population didn't
have that kind of vehicle for causing the mix to occur, and the kids did
what was safest, and there may have been a variety of reasons. I'm sure
there were some parental, "Don't you dare," and then in others maybe it
was the culture, "We stay with our own," kind of thing, and that's the
way it was.So the social part never really occurred except in individual instances.
Like I said, I have seen white kids with black kids and not necessarily
holding hands or anything, just with them. I've seen them on the campus
and at lunchtime mix in the sense of talking to one another and so on.
But generally speaking, other than another vehicle, athletics or
whatever, drama, whatever the thing may be, they did not mix. So the
dream of voluntary integration, it was voluntary but it wasn't
integration. The site was integrated, but the kids weren't, and that was
one.Another thing that was very obvious if you went around to the classrooms
was where the black kids were and where the white kids were. White kids
were in AP classes, and as we know, the Asian youngsters, too, and the
black kids, typically speaking, were not. So what happened? Well, kids
came in with deficits, and in the main they sometimes came--there were
integrated middle schools where kids had traveled over to go there,
[Ralph Waldo] Emerson [Junior High School], but a lot of kids came out
of central city and it was in high school that they did the transfer, or
later middle and then high school, so they came with deficits for
whatever reason, bad teaching, didn't get it, whatever. So the kids went
into high school with some needs, and my experience, quite bluntly, was
that most teachers, longtime teachers at some of these Westside schools,
weren't used to that, having to deal with that. The kids all came in
prepared, doing homework, had a good background in mathematics, good
background in English and came in ready, and the teacher would take them
from there. Kids that needed that, "Well, that's not my job." And I
actually heard that, "That's not my job. I teach English 1-A. I don't
have to go back and try to catch up with what he didn't do in the fourth
grade."So there wasn't a lot of sympathy or empathy for what it was these
kids--what their condition was and what they needed. So as a result, of
course they could not get into AP classes. In some cases there were
actual exams to get into those classes, and we did away with that.
There's still other ways. Somebody makes a selection by whatever means,
and we know how that works. You didn't see African American kids in the
advanced classes, you just didn't, and it didn't mean they weren't doing
well in the regular classes, but they just weren't in the advanced.
There were white kids doing well in those classes who weren't in AP,
too, for that matter. I mean, I'm not saying it was all just because
they were African American. But the kids as a group were obviously
missing from that whole strata of upper-level courses in the academics,
and that was school after school. I'm not talking about Pali--all. Go
out to the valley, I saw the same thing at El Camino, Taft [High
School], so it wasn't isolated. It was systemic, but not de jure. It was
kind of de facto. It just was.And again, for a whole variety of reasons, among which, and I want to say
it again--these teachers were not prepared to deal with these kids. What
the district did was to just send buses in and pick up busloads of kids
and take them out and deposit them. There was no preparation to the
teachers of, "Okay, here's what you're getting. Here are the kids that
are coming. These kids have some special needs, and no, you weren't
hired just to teach this level. You teach kids, what their needs are."
They had absolutely no concept of that. Now, a few did. By their innate
makeup they were just people that were concerned about people, because I
remember there's a famous story going around UCLA right here that in one
of the public high schools, better, allegedly better academic schools,
the teachers were fighting having to deal with the remediation. It was a
lot of infighting and a lot of screaming and shouting, and there was
stuff involved in the faculty's discussions--I won't name the school,
but that the people that were sensitive to the issues knew what they
were hearing in terms of some real belief structures about African
Americans and Hispanic kids, and that wasn't their job to straighten
that out, that was societal.When those kids--they had this attitude about that kind of stuff. When
they proposed that, the administration said, "We really need to deal
with it, and we need everybody to be involved, and we do need the
classes that can cause these kids to be brought up to another level,"
whether you could or couldn't was question mark. And in one of the
meetings, one of the staunch supporters of the, "I don't get into this
stuff, I'm an old-time physics teacher and I don't do that thing, I
teach physics, and the kid isn't ready, that's his problem." Well, in
one of the meetings, before the meeting went to a discussion, they
presented data on these kids. They had some longitudinal data, what
happened in elementary, middle, and then to senior high school. It was
quiet when they finished, and some were going ho hum and reading the
paper like they will do when they want to signal that they don't give a
darn and they're just not in it.This guy raised his hand, stood up and he said, "We can't have this." We
looked at him, "We can't have what?" "We can't have kids in this
condition." He went off for about twenty minutes, and the people
presenting this stuff were just stunned, because they were waiting for
him to just blast it. He said, "We can't live with this." He said,
"These are kids." And then he said, "Let me remind you, these are
American kids. They're ours." And he made this pitch for ten, fifteen
minutes, and when he finished he said, "Okay, I don't know if anybody
else is joining me, but I'm willing to talk about this." And he said,
"And I've discovered with the data," shows you what data can do, by the
way. He said, "With this data, it shows me a real sense of urgency." He
said, "We can't lose this generation." And when he finished, I think
they said he had eight or ten, "Okay, well, John, if you want to do
this, I'll go with you." See how it happens? One person, respected, sees
a light, and in this case it was data. He'd heard all that stuff before,
but he'd never seen it.And, for example, we have data I'm working with, a longitudinal database
with USC, the district, L.A. Unified, has a huge longitudinal database
that is now starting to really come to the fore, and it's a database of
almost 700,000 kids, an incredible database. When you look at that
database and you look at the African American and Hispanic youngsters,
Alva, in the seventh grade, if you took a cohort of those kids in 2005,
they went into seventh-grade subjects. If you just took math and
English, 49 percent would fail, 49 percent, and of that number 54 to 56
percent would drop out, so the die is cast way back. We know that. I
mean, inherently we know it, but until you see it, and we used it
Saturday in the PLI, the Principal's Leadership Institute], where we're
training teachers who want to be administrators, and we tell them, "You
talk social justice. Look at this. Forty-nine percent fail, and those
two classes are the primary predictor for who is not going to make it
into high school or out." And I don't care, Sid was a part of it,
straight up. We used to do a dance around dropouts. "Well, hell, a lot
of those kids move on to other schools." Nonsense.Matter of fact, I'll give you something that I found startling Saturday.
The professor of educational research from [U]SC is an old friend of
mine, Robert Baker, Bob Baker. He said, "When you look at the kids that
drop out or that are coming through and go into these classes and don't
make it," he said, "the dropout rate between ninth grade and twelfth
grade is way over 50 percent." And we know that. And he said, "But the
other startling thing that's different today than it was a number of
years ago," he said, "all that stuff about the mobility?" He said, "No.
Seventy percent of the kids who failed--," no, not who failed, "all of
them in the seventh grade were in L.A. Unified schools in the fourth
grade." He said, "They didn't move around." In other words, the schools,
the feeder schools are far more stable than we like to admit. We simply
are not meeting the problem. We're dancing on it and we're giving
excuses for it, but the fact is these kids are not making it.So what we told him Saturday was--with all the mess of the economy and
all that stuff, the social-justice issues for these kids still exist and
maybe a little worse, because of the financial problems of these
families--who gets hit first? We know who gets laid off or never had a
job in the first place, so it stands to reason. So when you look at the
data, it says you cannot obfuscate with this nonsense about mobility,
people moving and all. Uh-uh. These kids are not getting it, and we have
to face that, and what are we going to do about it?
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Good question. I mean, where did the responsibility lie then and
now for advocating for African American children?
-
Thompson
- Good question. I think the answer to that question is a totality of all
concerned, and it hasn't been that way. If we look at No Child Left
Behind, it goes after teachers, administrators, and school districts.
No. No, no. A kid is educated, a youngster is educated by a total group,
not always productively, but it is. The education of a child exists in
the family, the community, and the school, and you can't isolate this
one and say to teachers, "It's your fault and you've got to fix it." It
isn't going to work like that. It is that all of us need to fix it, even
if we aren't educated and don't know how.I think I may have mentioned this before. I don't see anything that's
addressing parents. "Look. Hey, you've got a responsibility. The least
you can do is send him out that door and tell him, 'You go and get an
education.'" It's what the Asians do. It's no different. There's nothing
in their brain that's different from somebody else. Their parents send
those kids and tell them, "Get in there and learn. Don't come here
giving me any excuses. Just get out there and learn." I used to come
home and tell my dad, "You know, Dad, that history teacher of mine--."
And one time I remember he took my arm and sat me down and he said,
"Listen to me." And there were four boys. He said, "Don't ever come in
here telling me about your teacher, because it isn't you and the
teacher. It's you and the subject, and I'm holding you responsible for
that subject, so no excuses." So I figured, well, if the teacher's no
good, I've just got to keep it to myself and shut up.So the answer to that question, it's a coalition of all of that that
cause it to happen to these kids. If a kid goes home and senses that the
parents don't care, and I'm not asked about my homework, like I always
like to say, it doesn't matter whether it's right, wrong, or in between,
you know junk when you see it. If the homework has been addressed at
least in an orderly fashion by the kid who put time and effort into it,
that's a plus. That's the least a parent could do. Now, back at the
school it takes nothing away from the need for qualified teachers, and I
believe strongly that that coalition of folks, if we could get the
parents involved more than they are, and I see some good signs where
people are really working at that, and I have to digress a second. I'm
going to come back to that coalition, working at it.Some of these kids, the youngsters, they have a sense that because the
parent isn't really putting pressure on them, they come to school and
they sort of take an attitude when they sit down of, "Teach me, I dare
you." And then the teacher takes an attitude of, "Oh, well, I'm here to
get my check, and I can't do anything with this kid anyway," so it's
kind of like some kind of collusion going on. Everybody is just sort of
saying, "It's not my fault." Everybody sits back, and the loser is
little Charlie, who doesn't understand all this anyway, but he'll take
the line of least resistance. Not every kid. There are some that are
ornery, and they're going to get it no matter what, in spite of their
parents or anybody else. It's always amazed me with kids, but there are
not that many of them.The vast bulk of kids need support, and when we get together--I mentioned
this, I think, in an earlier session, my observation of the way schools
generically, generally have handled parents is they don't want to. They
really don't want to. Everybody plays this game of, "We invite our
parents to come down for back-to-school night." What is that? Why don't
you invite the parent in to talk about their child, and for whatever it
takes to get to that kind of specificity, that's what you need to do.
They've got to get it here. If they don't get it there and get into it
there, then it doesn't happen and it just goes. It drifts and drifts and
drifts, and the child sees no point. If the schools truly want the
parents to be in there, then they need to be required. There should be
something that says, "What are you doing to get them there? What do you
mean you threw a party and nobody came?" Because that's generally what
happens. "We had a PTA meeting." What? What's that do? You need it to be
personalized.And before I forget that, there is a move afoot in L.A. Unified which I
heartily applaud. They were fortunate to get a bunch of bond measures,
and there are people fussing at them for building all these schools. But
what they're doing, they are deliberately going after small schools, and
that's the way to go. If there was one thing I can see that would make
an immediate difference for many of these kids, it's that they would be
in a small unit in which everybody knows them. Instead of Fremont with
5,280 kids, not even a number. One kid said, "Man, we ain't even got a
number." He says, "We just go around this place," and he said, "If I'm
not in class, I'm not in class."I asked a kid in one of the small schools, Eastside, and I asked him, I
said, "So what do you like about this small school?" He said, "Well, in
a lot of ways it's a pain in the neck, because everybody's on you." He
said, "But you know, Mr. Thompson," he said, "when I was in middle
school," this was a high school, "when I was in middle school and I
ditched or I just didn't go to class or I whatever, stayed home," he
said, "so what?" He said, "In this small school, they called the second
day." He said, "I had a teacher call me and say, 'Why aren't you in
school?'" And he said, "And I went, 'Well, I--.' And she said, 'Don't
give me uh-uhs and buts, you get your behind in here.'" And he said,
"I'm for it," he said, "because it's personal. It's like they care." And
I think that's not the answer by any means, it's a lot more than that,
but certainly you begin with the fact that a kid is more than a number,
more than just another one of the millions going there, and the people
care. The kid said to me, "That's what I like the most about it. People
care."He says, "And you know, when you have the teacher and you have the
teacher again, and you start to know the teacher, and you know her
commitment or his, then you can appreciate it. It makes you want to--."
He said, "I got involved." The fact is, this kid is really involved, and
he was a pain. They were kicking him out of class, and he wasn't in
class half the time. When he was there, they wanted to shoot him. But he
said that he has turned around, first of all by his attendance, and
secondly, he starts to get interested in the classes, and they teach
collaboratively a lot of humanitas, if you're familiar with that
program, where they combine subjects and they teach to themes. It's
thematic teaching, and it causes a lot of interest on the part of the
kids instead of just, "Sit down, shut up, read the book, and answer the
questions at the back of the chapter," which is the easy way.That's a long-winded thing to tell you that, okay, small schools, that's
something the school needs to do right from the start as much as that is
possible, very difficult, though, Alva. When there's a traditional
school and you want to go to those small schools, you find out you're
bucking the culture. We had a group from East L.A. who presented
teachers, young guys, these are young folks who are teaching, but they
are setting up small schools within [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt's [High
School] 5,000 kids, and they told me that you just cannot believe--he
said, "You know Roosevelt, Mr. Thompson." I said, "Yeah, I sure do." He
said, "Well, the traditions of that thing are all about a traditional
high school, the football team," because when they play [James A.]
Garfield [High School] it's a huge Eastside event that goes back to the
twenties. Well, those traditions are good, but those traditions also
kill you, because they're saying, "Why should the school change? I mean,
I went here."And a lot of the teachers in that school went there, so they went in a
traditional school. They came from parents who probably put pressures on
them, and they went on and they finished college and did all that thing
and they're teaching. But they have an attitude that says, "It was good
enough for me, so therefore why do you want to change it?" And this one
teacher, a young fellow was telling me, "Boy, what a struggle." He said,
"Sometimes I tear my hair out. Why do I even bother? But I know it's
right. But you are fighting the culture." And that's what I tell you
about the school district, it has its own culture, and it's like a
person, dares you to make a change. So I see us, we must, we have to
have a coordinated collective view of a child's education. It is not one
or the other that'll cause the change. I don't care if you threaten
teachers with a beating. I don't care if you threaten them with no pay.
You've done all that, figuratively, and it hasn't worked, because you're
attacking it as if it's this entity, and it isn't. It's this entity.And I think I mentioned it would be so much better if--I just hope
someday [President] Barack [Obama] decides to go nationwide and say,
"Listen. The education of your children is you and your children and the
schools and a school district, but you're critical. It isn't going to
happen without you. And, no, you don't have to be an educated person
yourself to cause--." That's been our history. We've had immigrants
since time immemorial. The slaves came, look what happened to them. We
beat it out of them, but they dared to read. So there's been a lot of
stuff that's hindered, but we need a collective view of educating a
child, with some assistance from things like small schools, beginning
with, first of all, qualified teachers.Somebody said to me, "Well, how do you get qualified teachers in the
United States?" And I said, "Well, I hate to tell you this, but you've
got to pay them like it is. If you don't pay people to indicate a regard
for what it is they're doing, then it sends a message from the start
that says, first of all, the people you're getting are inferior, because
they can't do anything else, like the old George Bernard Shaw thing.
It's all of that, and if you don't decide that this is important for
these kids, therefore we want the best teaching them, then I think
you've already sent a bad message, and there's no way around it. They
don't want to hear it, but that's it. If you want the best, you want
your kids to have the best, you have to recruit them.Did I mention to you that we had given this huge salary increase, and
then that was when I had to go to Willie [Lewis] Brown [Jr.] and take
money back and all that? But when we had offered that huge salary
increase that we could not afford, we had done it years before, that I
saw people in that hiring line, physics grad from Yale, and I said, "So
how'd you get here?" He said, "Listen. Your salary is pretty close to
what I would have made going with [Dow] Corning or one of the big
companies." I saw a message. Well, we can't afford the salary increase
we gave, but it was the right thing, because look at the talent I'm
looking at in this line, qualified, bona fide people.
-
Stevenson
- Well, let me ask you this. In our community, are we still in this day and
age dealing with a certain attitude which doesn't emphasize education?
Particularly I'm thinking about young African Americans who want to
excel but are fighting against this attitude that in some quarters is
still entrenched. Is that still a problem?
-
Thompson
- Yes, Alva, it is. I think it's better. I always use an example of telling
my younger brothers, I said, "You know, I looked at some of these
athletes, even the boxers, who typically come from a rougher background,
and when they interview them on television they don't sound like Joe
[Joseph] Louis [Barrow]. Joe couldn't speak." [imitates] "Well, I hook
him with a left hook--." He had street lingo. These kids nowadays, I
listen to some of these basketball players, and you have to say to
yourself, "He's literate. He can talk. He can speak." And I'm not saying
he doesn't have an accent, but that's not the point. It's not the
accent, it's the use of the English. I think in spite of all the
problems, gnashing of teeth that I do and hair pulling all of us do,
there's been an improvement. There is no question in my mind that the
black youngsters are coming more prepared with language skills and so on
than they had before, and again, that bodes well for what may happen
educationally. But it's also--okay, it just crossed my mind.They had this program, "48 Hours." I tuned it in the other night, and
it's real. People get shot and all that, and typically it's us, which
really bothered me. Lately I notice they're getting some whites; I think
somebody jumped on them. But you know what, Alva? When I listen to that
program and I see the kid that--and a lot of times its a sixteen-,
seventeen-year-old, either shot or did the shooting or both. When I
listen to those kids, when I listen to the people talk, when they
interview the ones on the street from that ilk, that's the
disenfranchised part of our population. They still speak street. Their
whole value system has been skewed. They've never had anything, still
don't, and we've not been able to break that. I think it's less and
less, I'm hoping, or at least the ones that are moving on and have some
interest in something, whether it's academic or athletic or whatever it
might be, those are the kids that I see improvements in the way they
speak. Maybe television--I don't know what measures that, but we still
have a sizable part of this population who are disenfranchised.I always like to say the bottom of the totem pole is a black street kid.
All he knows is survival. And when you see that program, as bad as it
is, and sometimes I can't--I don't tune it in all the time, I can't take
it. But when I do, I see a part of this generation that is still street,
survival by any means. They see kids with wads of money in their pocket
from selling drugs. What are they supposed to do? They don't hear at
home, "Go get an education." Mama doesn't ask them the first question
when they get home, "Do you have homework tonight? Are you going to do
it? Did you do it?" They don't hear that. They're in the street. So,
yes, and we have to face that. We have to understand that, and if we
choose to ignore it, then we've allowed the disenfranchisement to
continue. And they're out there. That's your gang kid. What else has he
got? He figures why not? I don't have a family like a family, and even
if I get killed, well.It's so sad because they'll say, "Well, that's the way it be," as one kid
told me. "Man, that's the way it be. Get out here and if I get killed I
get killed. Going to die anyway." So I see an improvement for those that
are moving. There's been a quantum leap in the least twenty, twenty-five
years in terms of what I see educationally with those kids. Even the
ones that went out to Palisades, because what they did, they'd hear
standard English. When they're in some of our inner-city schools, they
don't hear standard English, unless their teachers, unless they're in
the classroom and I've seen teachers at Markham in Watts, these black
teachers from, like I told you, Xavier [University] or Southern
Christian [University]. "Hey, listen. Don't walk in my classroom using
that kind of language, and I don't mean cussing. I mean just the way you
speak. You've got to stop that."I remember old Miss Williams, boy, she was one tough cookie, and the kids
loved her, but she was on them like, a kid told me, "mustard on a
hotdog." He said, "If I opened my mouth and said, 'well, I be--,' she
said, 'What?'" Well, okay, that's what it takes, and you have to have
someone doing that. But I had a black parent--that was something I left
out. A black parent told me, "Really what I want my kid to hear is
standard English, and I want him to be able to converse in standard
English, and I know he will hear that at Pali. I'm not sure he'll hear
it at Crenshaw." It was heavy. It was hard to deal with a little bit,
but a lot of truth to it. She wanted him competitive, and she didn't
care about right-wrong, integrate-desegregate-segregate whatever. All
she wanted was she wanted this kid to have a start, and she saw that
start as language. No dummy. She's right. It's just that it's a shame
that it had to start that way.And you know, look. At Crenshaw there were times when I took a kid around
the corner and I talked in street to him, never obscene or profane, but
street. I have to get his attention, so I'm gonna talk the way he talks.
"Now listen to me, you little dummy. I want to tell you something." And
sometimes it takes, as somebody said, a "come to Jesus" meeting, to say,
"Listen. This is the way it's going to be. Now get out there and do it."
I heard a custodian do that one time with a kid, just beautiful. I
wanted to yell, "Teach!" But he was telling that kid in no uncertain
terms. Well, there's a time and a place for that, to communicate, but it
doesn't mean that that's the way you're going to communicate to that kid
all the time. I had a newspaper, the school newspaper, and sometimes
they'd slip into the lingo.There was a school police officer who was assigned to our school who
would use the expression, "Nigger, please." Kid would come in and give
him a story. "Oh, nigger, please." Well, he was talking street, and what
really floored me was when they put it in the Daily Cougar. It wasn't
daily, but whenever it came out, and they had the expression in there,
quoting him. And I called him in, I said, "That's what you want to be
quoted at?" He said, "I was just trying to get--." I said, "No, no. I
understand what you were doing. This kid was in serious trouble and you
were trying to jack him up and tell him, 'Listen. What you're doing is
going to end up in jail.'" I said, "That's important. That's critical.
But isn't there a way to do that without using expressions that
perpetuate the kind of thinking that we see these kids with all the
time?" I said, "They use the term MF, they use all that stuff all the
time like it's an inner part of their vocabulary. It shouldn't be." I
said, "It can't be. They can't move on talking like that." He was great.
He said, "I know, Sid." He said, "I know you're right." He said, "Okay,
I'll be cool." So I said, "Okay, that's all I want."The term is one that we now--and I love the fact that in society now we
use "the N word." I like that. We can't even say it, because we
shouldn't. That's good. But again to go back, because it's so important.
We have a generation in those streets, parts of a generation that have
not moved--honest to God, Alva, I don't think they've moved since
slavery. They just haven't been able to make it. They're the chronically
poor uneducated, and in that program when you hear the mothers talking
to the kids, you hear that same "poor baby" kind of defeated attitude,
like this is the way it is, or, "You know, he went over to his
girlfriend's house," and they talk about girlfriends and drugs and guns
like nothing, part of the culture. So that exists and that's not easily
broken until this society figures out what it's going to do about
poverty, people like this, kids like this.It's a crying shame when you look at that program and you see
fifteen-year-olds--there was one the other night, back a while ago that
I happened to tune in on, and he's fifteen and he killed one or two
people. You shake your head, "My god, this kid's going to be in jail
forever. That's his life." Anyway, then they talk about the prison
population. Well, guess who they are? The very people you and I are
talking about right now. That's that disenfranchised part of the
generation that never got out of the street, and they don't go to
school, or if they go it's, "I dare you, teach me," or it's to chase
girls or vice versa, and narcotics, the gang thing, all of it is a part
of it, because there's nothing else for them.So I think this country needs--and again, I don't know that there is an
answer, but I know education has got to be a part of it, and it's going
to take somebody with a lot of recognition, like Barack, the president,
or a Villaraigosa. He's running around trying to take over schools.
Forget that, Antonio. Get to the population. You're a leader. You tell
them. Tell these parents what they need to do. You can do the other,
too, if you want, I don't care. I don't see where a mayor has ever done
anything with schools. They haven't figured that out yet, but it's
needed, really needed. That's a part of our society that we have not
fixed, haven't even begun to fix, and they're still there.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. You mentioned the use of the language by young people, and I know
some years back there was a movement in certain quarters to acknowledge
the, quote, unquote, "black or African American English"--
-
Thompson
- Ebonics.
-
Stevenson
- --and to not denigrate that, while at the same time being sure that these
children are English proficient. So could you discuss that a little bit?
It was quite a big issue up in the Oakland school district at one point.
Maybe you could discuss that a little bit.
-
Thompson
- Yes. I remember the whole discussion on Ebonics, and it was a major issue
for this L.A. Board of Education. They were talking about it. My view is
along the lines of what I said a little bit ago. There is a time when
you want to get a youngster's attention and communicate with him or her,
and there are times, and I've known it--it doesn't happen every day by
any means, but it comes at a time when you've talked to a kid and you're
up to here in frustrations. How do I get side that head? And you decide
consciously that you're going to go street to see if it puts a spark in
him, if his eyes light up, "Okay, man, I got you," that kind of thing. I
don't think you teach Ebonics, it's there. It's there. It's a part of
our language, it's part of the culture, and when I came up as a kid I
heard it all the time, and the way I'm talking right now is one thing,
and the way I would talk back in those days with my high school buddies
might be another. And again, I don't necessarily mean profane, obscene,
all that. No.The approach to the subject-verb agreement and all that, sometimes you
deliberately do things in a way that causes the kid to look at you and
say, "That's not the way you normally talk. Therefore, why are you doing
this? Why are you talking like this?" you know, that kind of thing? I've
seen a kid look at me like, "So man, what's wrong with you?" One kid I
remember told me, "So what are you so upset about?" [laughs] I said,
"What makes you think I'm upset?" "The way you're talking. You don't
talk like that." I don't, no. But I said, "Guess what?" "What?" I said,
"Look at you. You're asking me about it. That's the most response I've
had out of you the whole time." I said, "You normally don't say boo. You
just sit there listening and go on off." He said, "Well, that's true."So the Ebonics thing, it isn't a question of having to teach Ebonics.
It's there. If it isn't there, so what? It's not there. If these kids
are going to get success in this world in a place like this, they'd
better understand standard English, fact, anywhere, not just here. On
the job. You go to an employer, you don't know how to speak, or the only
way you can speak is street, and the employer has someone sitting next
to you who does speak standard English, guess who he's going to take? So
you've got to deal with that. The whole battle with that Ebonics thing I
always thought was a sham. I said, "Come on." If you want to communicate
and you feel a need at a particular time to go to that, I don't say--a
lot of people say, "You slip down to--." I said, "No, no. You don't
denigrate it. You've said that, too. You don't denigrate it, because
that causes the opposite. You're saying that I'm no good and the way I
talk is no good. No, that's not what you're about. What you're saying
is, 'Look. You're trying to go here. To get there you've got to do this.
Keep this for the times that you're talking to your buddies and you're
off someplace and you want to communicate in your own special way, like
a foreign language, nothing wrong with it.'" And I said, "Others do it
all the time."I heard the Middle Eastern kids, when they don't want folks around them
to know what they're doing, they go to Farsi if they know it, and they
use it. Spanish kids the same way, except a lot of people know Spanish
nowadays, and they have to be careful. But I don't see it as a major
issue any longer. I've noticed it's kind of quieted down, and again I
see changes in our young people that make me believe that the use of
standard English is starting to help. I don't know if some of that is
because the black population has diffused and gone east and is now mixed
into the greater population, and that may help a lot in terms--for our
kids, selfishly, it may help a lot for our kids in terms of acquiring
standard English. They'll hear it, and that may be a factor. We don't
have huge enclaves of African Americans here anymore, and that may help
them. The Hispanics, that's not true. They still hold as a group pretty
much, and they're diffused. I see them in a lot of places out there, and
their kids are not the kids you used to get out of the Eastside. So the
more the kids diffuse and hear other languages, standard languages,
standard English, the better I think it is for them to acquire it, to
just get there. And I'm very optimistic about it, some of the changes
I've seen.
-
Stevenson
- I've got a follow up. You talked about the desegregation and integration
at our last session. What is the legacy of some of those voluntary
programs? You spoke about some of them. There were other programs like
the Permits With Transportation.
-
Thompson
- Yes, PWT.
-
Stevenson
- Right. So what are the legacies of some of those programs that are still
with the district today?
-
Thompson
- There are kids still--because they demanded to be able to go to other
schools, and even though the court thing has stopped pretty much, there
is still a sensitivity on the part of the districts that they don't want
to do something that flags, uh-oh, they're getting into some de jure
stuff here now, that sort of thing. There really is. I can remember in
L.A. we would say, "Listen. We'll do the Permit With Transportation. We
can't do mandatory, it obviously didn't make it, so it's voluntary." But
whenever somebody started talking about forming a charter
school--Palisades, they formed a charter school out there, the high
school and one of the elementaries, and I don't think Paul Revere
[Junior High School], but they have a little bit of it.When they formed those schools, every meeting that I had ever heard there
was always some discussion related to, "Well, we don't want this to
appear now to be some way to get white schools." This was coming from
white folks. "We need to make sure that this is still integrated,"
because by this point they'd had black kids, for example, brown kids for
some time, years, and they recognized that they didn't want any part of
looking like they just figured out a way to cut those kids out and have
a white school, because they were also in need to operate of state
funds, and they didn't want to get the state and a bunch of attorneys at
the state level in the middle of saying, "Wait a minute. What are you
guys doing?" And so how do you make sure that your population is going
to be served in this new school? And I found that to be a major leftover
from voluntary integration. It did cause an awareness, and there's still
governmentally a sensitivity to anything that smacks of de jure
segregation. If it is, it is. I mean, you're stuck, housing patterns and
all that being what they are.But I think that was a major plus that came out of the voluntary, along
with even if they don't fully integrate in the sense of being buddies
and going out together and all that stuff, the proximity and all of
those things are good for both. I heard a fellow on the television the
other day, and I can't remember the program. It was about three, four
weeks ago, and he was talking about our society. Some of it I heard at
the time when Barack Obama was elected. In fact, that was the first one,
yes, a guy said, "Listen. I went to school and we had voluntary
integration, and we had African American kids and Hispanic kids at my
school." He says, "And I want you to know, I developed a far different
attitude to what I know my elders, my parents and grandparents
experienced." And he said, "I don't fear anybody," not physically, but,
"I don't fear a proximity to people that aren't like me." He says, "I've
learned that." He said, "When I go on a job and I see different people,
it's part of the old scheme. Hey, that's the way it was in school." And
I think that's a plus that has helped.Somebody said, "You know, the Obama thing showed that down deep there
isn't an inbuilt fear in most people about African American or Hispanic
or any other group. It's not. There's some stereotypic stuff that comes
to the surface sometimes, but generally speaking it's not there." And
that's my sense, too. A lot of these young folks have had experiences
now, even if they didn't date them or any of that, they at least rubbed
shoulders with them, talked with them, found out, hey, he's a guy just
like me. He's a nice guy, that sort of thing. So I'm one that believes
that the voluntary was more positive than not. It didn't do all of what
we wanted, but it couldn't, because that culture is deeply engrained and
it's going to take generations to drum it out of the core, but I think
we will. My dad used to say, "When they all look alike, it ain't gonna
matter."
-
Stevenson
- Okay. You talked a little bit about your experiences as principal at
Crenshaw High School, but I'd like to find out a little bit more about
your experiences there, what you think your greatest challenges were,
successes were. You were there early in its history. It was built in the
early seventies?
-
Thompson
- It was built in the late sixties, and I went there in '71, so, yes, I
went there--in fact, the opening principal was still there. He's the guy
I replaced. They had some riots, one thing and another, and the school
was in a bit of a mess when they sent me. I look back on Crenshaw, and
it was huge, way too big, 3600, 3800 kids on traditional calendar, as I
think I told you, and that is just incredible. I mean, I look back on
that and I don't know how we did it, getting those kids in class and not
in class and all the stuff that went with it. The good things--I think
first of all we established some order in the school, because when I
went in there apparently there were display cases smashed, all kinds of
stuff that was the result of the rioting that occurred, and it wasn't as
a part of the Watts thing or any of that. It was just an uprising in the
school.Well, we got it under control, got it in order, basically got the kids in
class, had a wonderful AP and a basically, except for one, good staff,
and we were able to do a lot of good things for the kids. I mentioned to
you about the--well, they were mostly all African American, a few white
and a few Asian, Hispanic, but mainly black--the kid that told me when I
asked him how he liked things at the school and he said, "I think that
when the sheriff said, 'Build me a jail here,' they built this place."
And I mentioned that that was because we had really nailed it. We had
gone out of our way to get it in order. "Get in class. You guys stop
shouting down the hallway, and do this, and do this, and do this, and do
this." And I realized that we had really put a foot on the place, and
that's when we got that idea to go to the school within a school. And I
think that was a great idea, even though it didn't last. When I left,
they killed it, which is one of the problems with all these reforms.
They're always a product of somebody.It was not me who developed that school within a school. The interesting
part is a group of teachers came to me, white and black, who said to
me--and they generally were younger, although not entirely, and said to
me, "We need to separate out some of these kids just so we can deal with
them as individuals, because it's too big." We had gangs, we had
shootings, all kinds of stuff. We met on many weekends to talk about it,
and I got to where I really agreed with it. They took out a group of
kids, I think it was 500. We illegally altered some bungalows, because
they were federal buildings and you're not supposed to do that, but I
had a couple of good carpenters on the staff, and they banged up some
petitions and did some things and did what they thought they needed to
do to make a couple of little office spaces. But what they did was to
take responsibility for those kids in attendance and everything, and I
thought it was the beginning of the small schools, beginning of the
small learning communities, all of that which says, let's get it to a
manageable size where a kid has recognition, and I really was proud of
that.I'm proud of--not me--proud of my staff, who sat down and we worked it
out collaboratively. It wasn't me imposing it. It wouldn't have worked.
They wanted to do it, and they had a lot of heat from the more
traditional, older faculty left with the traditional school. And the one
thing I said was, "You cannot select the kids. Kids will voluntarily
come into the program, because I don't want it that we've creamed the
best and all that stuff." And they agreed, and so a lot of the crying
and moaning from the people around the staff lessened, because they
didn't select them out. The kids volunteered in, and they didn't bother
anybody else. They tried to do everything themselves. They built their
own laboratory, chem lab, their own physics center. They did all their
own things, and all it meant to me was it shows you what people will do
when they really want to do it.The thing that I've not been able to address with Crenshaw is, okay, but
when it leaves, it's not memorialized. There's nothing that keeps it
going. A new person comes in and, "Oh, well, I don't want to be bothered
with that, and let's just have a traditional school. It's easier," and
so it goes right back to what it was. And that's been my experience, by
the way, even with this bigger district, the school district. We did
some changes administratively and the minute you leave somebody else
comes in and says, "Why are we doing that? I don't want to be bothered
with that. I just want to have it like it was." And that is the biggest
enemy of reform going. It's the traditional culture that is always
lurking, almost saying the Bill Cosby thing that he did about Noah,
challenging the Lord, and the Lord says, "How long can you tread water?"
Well, it's the same thing. The system looks at you kind of like, how
long can you keep this up? Because the minute you can't, I'm right back
where I was, and that's what happened at Crenshaw.Now, I look now at what's happening, and I have a lot of feeling of hope,
because they're looking to go to these small learning communities and
have the school into sections where kids can actually be known and can
talk to the teachers, and so there's a plus that's coming. Now, what I
like about what's happening now within the district, they have taken the
small-schools thing and they have made it a policy. They are moving to
small schools. Well, that's a whole different story. See, that says,
"We're changing the culture of the whole place." Won't be easy. These
kids [young teachers] that spoke the other day at that Saturday class we
just had, from Roosevelt, time after time every one of them said, "It's
tough. They fight us. Why are we doing this? Who cares?" this kind of
stuff. But if the system says, "We as a system are not going to be a
traditional school system anymore," well, that's a big step, because it
means you won't get support for it, going back to it.So I'm very hopeful, Alva, that that's going to cause change, and I think
that when these people realize it, that folks are not going to stand for
the old nuts-and-bolts way of doing business, that maybe they'll
realize--and the other thing that needs to happen--it gets me
going--places like UCLA. I hear these folks and they'll tell me, "So
what's happening about it?" I said, "You know, they're changing." "Well,
don't you have to change the way you teach teachers, potential teachers?
Don't your teacher-ed courses have to change? These teachers need to
know they've got to be collaborative. They can't go into a school
expecting it to be like they knew, teacher in front of the class
lecturing, classes in English and history and blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, and go home." You can make it that way. You did. I understand
that. But that's not the reform part of this, trying to deal with the
kids we're trying to reach, who we're talking about. It's going to take
a personal kind of effort, and the fact, again, that the district is
doing that I think is huge, a definite plus. So I'm a little bit
optimistic in my old age with what I'm seeing. Can they hold it up and
make it work? I don't know. It's a tough one, because so many people
came through the old system.
-
Stevenson
- You mentioned this small group of young teachers at Crenshaw that
approached you with this school within a school. Were there precedents
for that? Had it been tried in other districts at the time?
-
Thompson
- Great question again. One other place, one other out of the fifty-seven
high schools in L.A. Unified, Uni. University [High School] had it prior
to us. They started, and you know who was the main instigator? African
American. The brother of Billy Dee Williams [William December Williams
Jr.], the actor? His brother was a teacher--
-
Stevenson
- And his name was?
-
Thompson
- --and I can't remember his first name. He was Williams, and he was a
prime mover with a group of teachers at Uni, because when our people
heard about it and it piqued some interest, they talked with him. We
talked with him, and he came over a number of times and talked with us,
with some of the folks on the staff. He wasn't an administrator, he was
a teacher. So, yes, and it showed you that if something has promise and
it works, give it a shot. God, everything else isn't, so try it if it
make sense, if you really want to do it, and these teachers I had really
wanted to do it. They went over to Uni to see what it looked like, liked
what they saw. Uni is a different school, because Uni was at that time
primarily white with some blacks that went in on voluntary integration,
old-time community of Asian, very small but a collective Asian community
and Hispanic pockets, but it was a different type of school to Crenshaw,
so it worked at Uni. We weren't quite sure whether this is going to work
here. Who knows? But we felt it would, and I think it did.
-
Stevenson
- It's interesting you should mention Uni, because another interviewee
talked about Uni as a sort of innovative place and made mention of the
fact that students traveled some distance just to go to Uni.
-
Thompson
- To get to Uni. Yes, and why? Well, there was a perception, professors
kids went to Uni. There was that elitist kind of thing. Okay, it's a
human thing, a part of the human experience and the way human beings
work, and folks saw it just like going west. It's a place to try to get
into, and Uni had that rep clear back when I was at Belmont. I don't
know if there were any black kids at Uni; probably not in the forties
and early fifties. And then after that in the sixties to seventies is
when some of that broke down, and they had a kind of avant garde
faculty. Williams was avant garde, definitely. In other words, he was
looking for different things to do, creative things particularly,
because when he was there, there were African American kids there, too,
by that point, and he saw the need. And he would tell me, "Sidney, it's
critical." So, yes, Uni was the place.
-
Stevenson
- Well, getting back to Crenshaw now, then and I think somewhat now the
neighborhood around Crenshaw was pretty middle class and actually at
close proximity to Baldwin Hills and those other neighborhoods--
-
Thompson
- View Park, all of that.
-
Stevenson
- Right, more influential African Americans. So did many of those young
people, particularly the more influential families attend Crenshaw? No.
-
Thompson
- Most of them went west. If you were to be at the gate of Crenshaw High
School when we let school out, a mass of kids would come out of the
school, go to the corners and go east back towards Jeff, Locke, Fremont,
that's where they came from, by hook or crook, some of it crook, false
address. They wanted to get to Crenshaw to get out of their local
schools, which they saw as more impacted with the gangs and so on than
Crenshaw was, and God knows we were impacted, really impacted. But they
didn't go west. Now, that doesn't say we didn't have--we had Margaret
Broome. I remember her well because her daddy was Lawrence Broome, who
was a commander, I think, in LAPD. He was a senior officer in LAPD at a
time when there weren't a lot of senior officers. Jesse [A.] Brewer
[Jr.] was another one. He's passed, and I don't know if Broome is still
alive, but they lived up in Baldwin Hills, and they wanted their
daughter, he and his wife, who was another bright, wonderful lady, they
wanted their daughter to go to Crenshaw. I think she was student body
president, and she ended up here and was an honor graduate from law
school.There were kids that did come down off the hill and go to Crenshaw, and a
lot of times almost from a sense of duty on the part of the parents, but
most parents up there, uh-uh, west. Westchester [High School], Venice
[High School], Uni, those schools, [Alexander] Hamilton [High School].
-
Stevenson
- Okay. That's probably a good place--[End of interview]
1.6. Session 6 (April 27, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- I'm continuing an interview with Dr. Sid Thompson on Monday, April 27,
[2009]. First I'd like to begin discussing your experience when you went
downtown to the district office, first as region superintendent, later
as associate superintendent. What was the experience like? What were
your duties? What were the challenges? Any challenges relating to, say,
acceptance of an administrator at that level, of color, would you maybe
talk a little bit about that?
-
Thompson
- Let me address that one first of all. Things had changed in the
seventies, sixties, seventies, certainly in the seventies and then from
there forward into the eighties, nineties, and so on. I didn't have a
feeling of any overt feelings about my ethnicity or anything else. My
experience was always that people wanted to help and that that was not a
major issue. I'm certain that for some people it will forever be a
problem, and you're never going to necessarily get rid of it. But as an
institution, I didn't see it as an institutional problem.They first made me--I went from Crenshaw High School, I went as what they
called a deputy area administrator. There are all these names for these
things. It's essentially the same thing. It's an assistant to a local
district superintendent. They were then divided, I don't remember, I
think twelve or thirteen districts by letters, A, B, C, D, and each of
those had a local district assistant superintendent who reported
downtown but was in charge of those schools that were identified. They
had a full staff of two deputy area administrators. I was appointed as
one, replacing somebody else, replacing another African American, in
fact, in Local District B, which at that time was Huntington Park,
Southgate, Bell Maywood.I found that fascinating, because those communities were primarily blue
collar, began as primarily white, and I remember as a kid if you went
down to Watts, you did not cross Alameda to any of those cities. You
did, you had a problem with the police. That's the way it was. A lot of
that had changed. The browns, Hispanics had moved in, and they were
turning heavily Hispanic, and some of those schools were absolutely
massive. Huntington Park High School is one of the early schools that
went multi-track year round, and I was there as it went into that. It
had begun before me getting there.The Local District Superintendent was Sid Brickman, and he was a
wonderful, wonderful mentor, really helped, excellent local
superintendent, and he kind of oversaw a lot of that going multi-track
year round, because Huntington Park was huge, South Gate High School and
their accompanying schools, the schools feeding them. At one point Miles
Avenue [Elementary School], which feeds Huntington Park, was at 2700
elementary kids. That's criminal. I remember something like fifteen or
eighteen kindergarten classes, the little guys lined up like ants going
to lunch, there were so many of them. They've managed now to bring that
down to something human, as I call it, because that was not right, but
they had no choice. The kids were there and they had no school to put
them in. And I always remind us that when we had those huge populations
in the valley, that didn't stop us from building schools, boy. We built
them, because the middle class demanded it. These folks had no say and
had no relief other than multi-track year round. We even tried half-day
sessions, which was, talk about criminal, because the second half of
that day kids didn't come to school. Talk about a dropout rate, it was
cataclysmic.So when I went into that district, I had an opportunity to see a lot of
that beginning, and it was still--that job was not really a downtown
job. You were at a local district office. You certainly were connected
downtown, and you went to meetings and all that, even as an assistant to
a superintendent. I did that for a while in the late seventies, and then
in the eighties, early eighties, they appointed me to replace Sid
Brickman as a local superintendent in that local district, and it was an
experience. I may have mentioned this back when we were talking about
integration and so on and the problems of segregation, but one of my
memorable times in that job had to do with--I had an assistant, Gabe
Cortina, who came up with an idea. We were trying to find places to put
the kids, and we had a lot of kids that were not fitting into the
regular schools. They were the--I'm blanking--the alternative schools.
They were the kids that went to continuation schools, because they
couldn't fit in a big school. There are kids that just don't fit to
that, and they'll ditch or do whatever. They just don't want to face it.
But they'll go to a small school.So we were looking for small schools to take some of these kids. What we
wanted to do was get some of them that are on the street--they're
typically minority, heavily Hispanic and some African American, and we
wanted to get them in school. We had worked a deal with a church, a
local church that had an annex that they said we could teach classes in,
and we thought, man, is this great. So we formed a little school, even
named it, and we took kids off the street and put them in classes in
that school. I had a call that said, "They would like you to appear
before the Huntington Park City Council to talk with them about it," so,
"Yeah, great. I'm always looking for a chance to say, hey, look what
we're doing." So we went down there.I want to give you a feel for that meeting. They're seated in a raised
dais. That dais was up here, I mean, up there. It was like eight feet
between me and the audience and these tin gods sitting up around this
circle way above us, all white, all male as I recall, all older. They
were sitting there, and I went up before them, and I said, "I understand
you have questions about this school we have formed, and the reason we
did it, these kids have been on the street and we thought here was an
opportunity to put them in school and have them doing something
productive," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They looked at me and it
was almost like this. "We want that school closed by sundown today."
-
Stevenson
- What year was that?
-
Thompson
- That would have been about 1981, '82, right around in there.
-
Stevenson
- Interesting. That's fairly recent.
-
Thompson
- That's fairly recent, yes. But remember now, all-white, all-male, that's
what flipped in the next fifteen years.
-
Stevenson
- Demographically speaking.
-
Thompson
- Demographically. It went all Hispanic. The Hispanics voted them out,
thank God, but they told me to close--it was almost like "High Noon." It
was like two cowboys in which one tells the other to get out of town by
sundown or he's dead meat, literally. I was floored. I sat there looking
at them and I said, "I don't understand. Why do you want me to close
it?" "We don't want those kinds of schools in our community." I said,
"You don't want schools for these kinds of kids?" "Now, don't go making
something out of it that it isn't. We just don't want these kids who are
juvenile delinquents." I said, "That's a huge assumption," and I argued
with them. I was angry. And they told me, "We are unanimous in this. Get
it out of our city." I had to close it, because L.A. Unified is made up
of not just L.A. city, but all these municipalities who buy in but have
control, municipal control of permits and all the rest of it, so all
they had to do was lift the permit that we had to have a school in that
church annex, and we were dead. I'll never forget it, because it was so
blatant.
-
Stevenson
- Yes.
-
Thompson
- I always thought just a bunch of thugs sitting up there ordering
something that is almost criminal in terms of what--if you were to say
that or put that in the newspaper, anyone looking at it, even a racist,
I would think would say, "Well, at least they're all in their own school
and they're doing something rather than on the street threatening
citizens or something," if you want to look at it in the worst
situation. So I learned a hard lesson from that, that sometimes
politically there are things still out there that have nothing to do
with reason or nothing to do with moral values or nothing to do with
education. Take any value system, positive value system, and quite often
there are things out there that just don't tie to that, don't have a
real-world tie to it. And they were blatant. I mean, they were glaring
at me, and me looking like me anyway didn't help, so all the way around
it was a very, very unpleasant situation.Gabe Cortina was with me, and he obviously is Hispanic, and Gabe went out
of there, he was just, he said, "I couldn't believe it, Sid. Good God,
what?" I said, "Don't even try to figure it. It has nothing to do with
reality. It has nothing to do with moral values of what's good for kids
that I think we should all be about. This has nothing to do with any of
that. It has to do with, one, egos, two, race, and they're almost equal,
they equate that way. And then the third one would be, they may have
some real concerns about juvenile delinquents, but," I said, "they're
making judgments. These kids aren't juvenile delinquents." Matter of
fact, they had attendance problems, not behavior problems. They didn't
hit kids and tear up the place and be physically aggressive or anything.
They didn't do that. Most of them just didn't come to school. They were
not delinquents.Anyway, the experience being in the field was a good one and having to
work with principals, because we had elementary, middle, and senior high
schools in those local districts, so you had to work with them
administratively, and that was an eye opener for me. I got a real charge
out of going to elementary schools, which wasn't my level. I was a
secondary person, math, but I went to elementaries and I remember
marveling at these kindergarten teachers. I had forgotten having been
one. That was too long ago and couldn't remember it anyway. But some of
the things I saw were so beautiful in terms of people just killing
themselves for these kids. In other cases, I observed people that had no
business being in the classroom but were protected under the contract,
and that wasn't doing anybody any good, not them, not the kids,
particularly not the kids, and that was another lesson I learned.Going from there, I was only there about two years, and then I was
informed by my--how did that work? I did that, and then I was told--ah,
I've got it now. It's been a while. Before I went to that job I was
still an assistant to Sid Brickman, and he called me in one day and
said--because I had told him, "I've got to get a car." I said, "Man," I
had some poor old wreck of a car, and I said, "I've got to get rid of
this wreck." I said, "It's getting to the point where I won't trust it,"
and it was just general talk, "And I'm going to go out this weekend and
look for something." Well, he called me in and said, "Don't buy a car."
And I said, "Why?" He said, "Just don't." I thought, that's weird,
except I knew there were district cars, and so I said, maybe they're
changing my job, I don't know.Then I got a call to come down and meet with the then superintendent, who
was Bill Johnston, and I went down to meet with Bill Johnston, and on
the way to his office I ran across an old friend of mine who had retired
and was running--he's the guy that hired me at Pacoima [Junior High
School.] He was running the administrative association at that time,
retired, of administrators. He saw me. He was down for a board meeting
and he said, "Sid, they're going to be bouncing you up to something."
And I said, "What?" He said, "Yeah. Are you down here to see Johnston?"So I went in to see Bill Johnston and it was weird. I'm not sure why I'm
there, and Bill had been a good mentor for me. He liked Crenshaw and
those kinds of things. So he calls me in, and in those days they were
smoking in the offices, so he had a big cigar which he always twirled,
and he had this low voice, "Sid. It's good to see you." And he got to
the point, he said, "We are considering moving you to an associate
superintendent level." I hadn't even been an assistant superintendent.
That's not common. So I said, "Really?" I got about that far and
then--now, I'm telling you this because it was a fact. Jim [James]
Taylor came in and Jim said to Bill Johnston, "Bill, can I say something
to Sid?" And I remember Bill looking like, what? Like, what's going on?
And Jim, who'd been a friend for many years, said, "Sid, we want you to
have an experience coming down here and to get used to this place and
know how it operates, so we'd like to bring you down and have you work
down here for a while and learn how this place works and operates and so
on," which I said, "Well, that makes sense." But it wasn't an associate
superintendent level.That was because there was some posturing for--they knew Johnston wasn't
going to be there much longer, and in the posturing for his job as
superintendent there were three or four candidates for that position,
and there was a lot of jockeying related to that, and they didn't want
Thompson coming in the middle of it messing it up as an associate
superintendent. Now, what did I learn from that? I learned from that
that, yes, there are politics, and yes, it's a real world, and you're
not going to get rid of that. That's always going to be there, and how
that plays out is related to the political clout or climate related to
the people trying for the position, who want this position, and there
are people that would die to be the superintendent. I know some of them.
I didn't call anybody. I kind of talked to my wife. I went home, and she
was a principal in L.A. and understood how it worked, and I just said,
"You know, I'm going to keep my powder dry. I'm going to do whatever
they ask me to do. I am not going to question. I'm not getting into, 'Is
that why you called me downtown, to tell me you wanted to do that? You
could have just done it.'"But it was this other thing, and Jim had been approached, and Jim just
didn't want a lot of upset and me in the middle. So that's one thing
about--Jim is such a good person, and I've always respected that in him,
with high moral values and judgments, so I knew why he was doing it,
what it was about. Well, the funny part was that this was like May,
April, May, so I was supposed to be coming downtown, and I didn't get a
call. I think it was about August or September, and Jim called me and
said, "Sid, are you downtown yet?" I said, "No, Jim, I'm home." He said,
"What?" He said, "You're supposed to be working with Jerry Halversen."
So Jerry, who was buried with integration, the legal side--he was the
attorney, the lead attorney for the district. He was also the
superintendent in charge of personnel. He had about three jobs. He had
the school police department, which was huge, big as Long Beach,
actually, Long Beach P.D. He had a monster job, and I was supposed to be
an assistant to him, to learn the ropes and so on.So I get a call. Jim said, "Sid, come down tomorrow." So I went down and
he took me in, and I met Jerry formally. I knew him, but I met him
formally, and he was a wonderful guy. He said, "Sit down." He had me in
the office, and he was holding conferences with board members that were
very sensitive. He had people like Kathy [Kathleen] Brown-Rice, and her
dear brother was gov[ernor of California], and there was all of that by
phone, and I'm sitting there and I go, well. I look at Jerry and I go,
"You want me out of here?" And he said, "No, I want you to hear this. I
want you to learn." So I really--because I learned, and you know, Alva,
I've looked back and that point and I said, the best thing I ever did
was to shut up and observe, just keep your mouth shut and observe,
because there was so much to learn, the play, byplays between these
individuals, how the superintendent related to them and how he had to do
a dance between their operation and his. And there is a fine line that I
observed there between the superintendent doing that dance to maintain
the balance and then becoming involved in the politics of it, which is
forever dangerous. It's okay if you win or you're on the winning side,
but if you're on the losing side you are dead, and I learned a big
lesson there.And also knowing to observe, keep still, observe, watch what's happening,
and in the case of a superintendent I was learning early on that you're
looking not just at the board. You had to look at the mayor's office,
you had to look at all the offices that impact that thing, and it
determined a lot of how you might behave or choose to behave because of
those kinds of interactions. So coming downtown, I was called in by a
guy I've known for many years and respected, happens to be a Hispanic
senior school official, and he called me in and he said, "Sid, you're
coming down here, and I just want you to know that this is an
interesting place. It can be a dangerous place, depending on what your
interests are." But he said, "I wanted you to know that you have one guy
here that if you ever have a question, you know you'll get a straight
answer," and I always could from him.I've deliberately left his name out, because it gets a little bit tricky.
Oh, heck, it's John Leon, and John Leon was an associate superintendent,
but he wasn't in the inner-inner circle, but he was certainly senior and
respected. But I mention him because it shows the kind of thinking that
a lot of people had at that time, even then, that was wholesome,
healthy, offering help, not telling me, "You'd better do this and this
and this," none of that. You make your own decision. But if you're
questioning that decision in terms of what you ought or ought not to do,
you could always bounce it off him. Jim was the same way. You could
always go to him and say, "Hey, I'm dealing with this and this, and what
do you think?" and so on, and count on a pretty astute answer, but
certainly a moral answer about kids and how does this affect the bottom
line of what we're trying to do?So coming downtown was an experience. In the first few weeks I learned so
much, but it was sitting in Halversen's office and observing the
interplay between various power centers within the district, the board,
in staff, the interplay between people that were on a level with Jerry
but weren't. In other words, they were associate superintendents, and
there were several of them, but he was right next to the superintendent
because of what he represented, the legal and just pure respect for his
thinking, because he was a solid thinker. He did his homework and he
knew what to watch out for.The movements down there became after that somewhat political in the
sense that as I went from being an assistant superintendent in the local
district and then coming downtown, and then moving up to an associate
superintendent level, which I did, and the support of people like Rita
Walters. Rita was an incredible force down there. She was one tough
individual. Rita was tough-tough for a little thing. But I'll tell you,
she had moral values that some people don't--she had more in her little
finger than some people had, didn't have in their whole body. Her
decisions, I'm not saying they were never political. That's not true.
You're not a politician and never not make a political decision. You
have to sometimes. I mean, that's just part of the game. But what I
admired was that her decisions were about kids, always about kids, and
she'd jump up and pound that table and that little foot would be
bouncing up and down and she's making a point, and I respected that with
Rita. And Rita was one of the people that insisted on having a balance
of representation in the staff, and she would hammer for African
Americans and Hispanics and Asians, and it wasn't about having one or
the other. It was about representation.So I was able to move up. I went in the eighties to associate
superintendent and then I went to deputy superintendent, and they were
running two and three deputy superintendents. And at that time, to show
you the politics of these things and how the real world works, Bill
Anton was the senior deputy superintendent. He was the guy that had been
there the longest, and I had no doubts in my mind but that he would be a
superintendent, because he just had all that respect coming out of the
Eastside, and they had not had a Hispanic superintendent. So the play
between Bill and I--and sometimes we would clash. We would argue about
things, but I always felt like, no, but he is the senior deputy super,
and I respected that, and I think he realized it. When they wanted to
name a school after him, I went over and lent my support to it, because
I just believe that what he represented to the Eastside was that
important.So Rita was always there, not just pressing for representation, but also
pressing that we would represent what we were trying to do for the kids
that needed it, and I always felt like at a board meeting if you were
bringing up--I had one occasion when I was totally wrong, but I was a
victim of my own traditions, probably more West Indian than anything.
But I had an occasion where they were talking about doing away with
corporal punishment and I argued to keep it, and why? Well, I came up in
it, not only in the West Indies but here. I mean, in elementary and
middle school I used to get swatted for opening my big mouth and not
shutting up, and I always thought, well, I'd get one and that would be
it for the year or two years. But it was later, and I thank God that I
did have sense enough to at least think about it, and I thought about it
and thought about it, and I said, "No. We're at a time now in this
society where we shouldn't be hitting kids," and I did a flip flop and
supported not swatting.The union, by the way, was demanding swatting. It was interesting. So I
had to serve on a committee with them as to how this was supposed to
occur, and they had so many restrictions, I mean, it would have taken an
act of Congress to say, "Swat a kid." So it wasn't--that was another
thing. I said, "What are we doing? This isn't worth all this, to swat
some kid? Forget it. And it's wrong anyway." So Rita said, "It's about
time." I said, "Guilty, Rita." But we could talk like that, which was
good, and we could make our statements known. But it was keeping a
careful eye on our kids, to try to say, "Are we doing what's best for
them?" I did remember when I did my flip, I said, "But I want to remind
us, you can thoroughly emasculate a boy with your mouth. You can make
him feel like nothing. There are worse things than swatting him on the
behind. We shouldn't be doing that, but we shouldn't be doing this
either." And I said, "There's a lot of this going on. 'Well, I never
touched him. I didn't grab him, I didn't this and that.' Yeah, but you
berated him, and sometimes that stuff is--I've seen it, where someone is
downright vicious with it."And that's something we've never really addressed. I'm thinking about
that right now, and I'm just thinking, you know, we've never addressed
that. There's no policy in the board that says, "Thou shalt not berate a
kid," because you can't define it. Where do you draw the line between
berating the child and correcting the child? And we know there's a line,
because we know when it's berating and we know when you're trying to
correct. But to define it such that you can use it as an assessment
tool, for example, you can't. It's judgmental. But anyway, those were
the kinds of things we went through in the eighties, and as I was
downtown, as I said, I tried to be careful about the position of Bill
Anton, who was a senior deputy, and sometimes I'd bang heads with him
because we'd disagree about how something should be handled, but in the
main I respected that.And when the board, when they went after Leonard Britton, after Harry
Handler retired--Handler was the superintendent from the early eighties
to the later eighties, and when they were going after another
superintendent, both Anton and I applied, and that's when they picked
Leonard Britton down in, was it Broward County? Anyway, Florida, and he
came up from Florida as the superintendent, and he was brought up by
board members. The board perceived at that time that they would have to
go outside to get a superintendent, because, "We've got to do something
creative and different," and different usually means you go to somebody
else. Doesn't mean necessarily you were creative, because who'd you get?
And he came out and I made it known openly, "If he's the superintendent,
I will support him." Others weren't so generous. They were really after
him. They were angry about his selection, and when the board finally
decided--he only went, I think, two years, and the board decided that
they had to do something else.And it occurred when I was on a trip. I was somewhere, and when I came
back he'd been booted out. I went, whoa. And Bill Anton had been put in,
and they called me in and said, "You're the deputy." I said, "Okay."
But, I mean, I was only gone a little while, got back and all this had
happened. And that satisfied one political piece of the puzzle, because
the Hispanics had been yelling for a long time, properly, that they had
had no superintendent. Superintendents were all white and typically
male, and he's a male, but okay, he's at least Hispanic. So Bill was the
superintendent, and in the main again I had no problem supporting him,
because he was the superintendent.I believe in major institutions like this one, again, you have to stay
focused. What is it that we're trying to do with this institution? Well,
one thing we're trying to do is to educate 700,000 kids, which is
incredible, but you have to stay focused to that, and if you get into
personal, adult types of skirmishes, you detract from the kids. You
detract from the focus. It becomes an adult focus, and that happens far
too often. Even at the adult level in city council or wherever it may
be, supervisors or whatever, even if they're not dealing directly with
kids, they are dealing with adults, and you're there for a purpose.
You're there to try to make this society work, and if you're busy
playing mind games with someone that you are jousting with about a
position, you lose that focus and it shows, and pretty soon it's all
about that. And you'll see our headlines and everything is about what?
Not the job. It's about the people, the individuals, and that's very
sad. The more we do of that, the worse it is.I love what's happening with Obama, as an aside, but I worry that people
are putting this personal, human thing on him to the point of where he's
a human being, he is not God. He's being expected to do this and this
and this and this, and he's doing an incredible job of it, but it's just
an unfair position to be placed in, unrealistic for a human being,
running a massive institution, a country. Well, in this case it wasn't a
country, but it was a massive institution locally, and I always felt
that we were honor bound to try to do what we needed to do for teachers
and for the kids. Bill Anton, when he got into the nineties, he went in,
he was there for a couple of years, and he decided that he just had had
enough of politics and everything else at his age, and he decided to
resign or retire.In a nutshell, I was initially a temporary appointment and then a regular
appointment as superintendent in '92, and my experience of having been
downtown under Halversen and having a chance to observe how it all works
held me in reasonably good stead. I at least knew where the skeletons
were, which is essential, and it gave me some thoughts about how I
really wanted to approach the district as an organization, changes I
wanted to make. I for one did not believe in local districts. Local
districts to me had no basis in fact. The basis in fact for me was, here
is Manual Arts High School. Who are the feeder, primary feeder middle
schools? Okay, there are three of those and there they are, Virgil
[Junior High School] or whomever further south, [John] Muir [Junior High
School] or whomever fed it, and then there were the elementaries that
fed that, and to me, to the community that represented the educational
focus, the educational system that affected the kids that lived in that
community. What happened in elementary educationally? What happened in
middle, and what happened in high school? That was the more logical, to
me, organization than a random collection of high schools and middle
schools and elementaries and you were treated as a group. That's apropos
of what?So I reorganized them into complexes, and I took away--I didn't have
region superintendents. I had directors of the various complexes, and a
complex was the high school, the feeder middle, feeder elementaries, and
I always felt that--I loved it one day when a high school physics
teacher saw me somewhere--I knew him--and he came over and he said,
"Sid, I want to tell you something." "Yeah." He said, "You know the
complexes?" I said, "Um-hmm." "You're getting heat on that." I said,
"Yeah, because the old traditional system was to really be organized by
high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools, as if each one
didn't exist together. It was separate, and I never could fathom that."
He said, "I went down to an elementary school in my complex to watch a
second-grade teacher teach a science lesson." He said, "I came out of
there bowing to her." He said, "First, I don't know how you handle
kids." They were little ones, and with all the stuff they get into and
the talking and the fidgeting. And he said, "And she just did an
incredible job, Sid." He said, "I'm going to help her though with some
of the science lessons so that I can give her some simple experiments
she might want to try."In other words, he was looking at it now not as 9-12 but as K-12. He's
looking at the elementary saying, "How can I help her?" And she was
saying, because she spoke at one of the meetings, and she was saying,
"I'm so appreciative of people who are the experts in a given subject,
who are willing to come and help us and show us some of the things that
we can use with the elementary, and they in turn get to see the kinds of
teaching processes and methods we need to use to get into the head of a
seven-, eight-, nine-year-old," and I thought it was a good thing. But
when I retired [snaps fingers], gone the next year, right back to the
traditional high school, middle school, elementary. Remember what I said
way, way back, that this district is like a person? It waits, and it
says, "How long can you tread water? You're out of here and I'm back to
what I used to do, the way I used to do it." And sure enough, that's
exactly what happened.We went through some trying times when I was superintendent from '92 to
'97. We went through a depression, no, a recession, not as deep as this
one by any means, but it was deep. We were going bankrupt, and I think I
mentioned I had to take money away from the teachers and everybody in
order to preserve the solvency of the district. It was not popular. I
had to do some things I didn't want to do. They had Willie [Lewis] Brown
[Jr.] as the mediator. Did I mention this before?
-
Stevenson
- No.
-
Thompson
- Okay. Well, let me deal with that a little bit, because it was traumatic
and it was huge. We were in a near-bankrupt state in '93, '94, during
that period of time, '95, all through there. Henry Jones was the chief
financial officer [CFO], African American, wonderful, wonderful, we're
close friends still, one of the people with deep moral values in terms
of what's right and what's wrong. I could turn my back on Henry and not
worry about the financial end of the system. There would not be games
played, not with Henry, because he was so talented. And by the way, he's
a study. He came in this district from Texas, Galveston, as a custodian.
He was a custodian going to school at night, and if he worked at night
he had to go to school during the day. He did whatever he had to do. But
he came out, he was an accountant. He worked his way up from accountant
to chief financial officer for a six-to-seven-billion-dollar operation,
a little black kid out of Galveston, like that.To me, you think of how you were born and the things you had going for
you. Henry was--he had a big family. They were poor. They didn't know
where the next meal was coming from. Well, we were fairly large and we
didn't know either. But he was coming out of Galveston, Texas, and he
was the one who came in and said, "Sid, I don't know how to tell you,
but we're near bankrupt." So I said, "Oh, my god." So I found out that
five, six years back in the Leonard Britton time they had granted pay
raises that could not be met by the existing budget, and when you grant
a pay raise it's forever. Each percent was about, at that time, about
nineteen to twenty million dollars for a 1 percent increase of pay,
because it wasn't just teachers, it was all employees. That's the way it
was negotiated. They granted an 8 percent salary increase, eight times
twenty, that's 160 million for that, the next year another 8 [percent],
another 160 [million], and then the third one, they called it "eight,
eight, and wait," the third one was to be seeing how much money we had.Well, after two years we were near bankrupt. We would have been bankrupt.
It's was nights of going through and Henry saying, "Sid, I've gone
through it and gone through it. We need to take back 10 percent." My
God. How do you take 10 percent away from teachers? Helen Bernstein was
this union leader, volatile but bright, and I had a lot of respect for
Helen Bernstein, had a mouth like a sailor; she was terrible. But she
would shut that door--she came in, slammed the door, "Sid, blank, blank,
blank, blank," and she went on and on. "What is this mess? We can't have
this? You can't be taking money back." And I said, "Helen, I've always
been straight up with you," because we had been in LEARN together,
remember? LEARN began under Bill Anton, and I pushed it and pushed it,
because I really believed in it. I believed in a collaborative approach
to running schools, and we had the principals and the chapter chairs or
the elected faculty rep, it didn't have to be the chapter chair from the
union, who went away for a weekend and talked about how they were going
to handle budget and how they were going to handle different things.
Half the schools had been through that process when I finished. That
went nowhere the next--after I was replaced. Absolutely no where--it was
killed.But Helen and I, because then she was killed, literally, she was killed
in a traffic thing where she crossed a street, Olympic [Boulevard] up
here towards Westwood. She crossed the street in the residential area,
but as you know, Olympic is a huge street. It's about four lanes across,
five lanes. She tried to run across and she couldn't see and it was late
at night. She got hit and she was killed, and that was a huge loss. When
she shut that door and she started going at me then I said, "Helen,
we've always been about kids. I can't let this place bankrupt. I'm
getting calls from two senators, U.S., a call from the governor's
office. They don't want to take over L.A. Unified, because that's what
happens. You go bankrupt and the state takes it over. They said, 'Take
over L.A.?' They couldn't handle Compton, right, and Richmond and
Oakland, much less L.A."So I told her, I said, "Look. You bring your budget specialists. You can
hire them if you wish, but bring them in, and I want you to go through
our books, take time and comb through and tell me there's money." They
took a month, massive budget, and she came in, "It's not there." She
said, "Sid, we're going to be bankrupt." She said, "We've got to do
something." She said, "My teachers will strike." I said, "I know." And I
said, "And all these politicals are calling me up because they're afraid
there's going to be a strike, and we can't have one." We had had Rodney
King. We had a bad strike in the seventies which was terrible. It took
years to get over that one, and then we had the Rodney King thing later,
much later, and then we're going to on top of that do this at a time of
a recession? It would have been a mess.So she came in one day and shut the door and she says, "I can get Willie
Brown." Well, Willie was speaker of the [California] Assembly. She said,
"My people will listen to Willie, but you guys have to be willing to
listen to him, too. He's the mediator." So we agreed. The board
president was Leticia Quesada. She agreed, and we began a series of
meetings with Willie Brown. There was Helen, me, three of her deputies,
there was Leticia, six, and then Willie had an African American--I'm
blanking on her name, always dressed with an African garb, beautiful
dress and so on. She was an old timer, she'd been around a long time,
and he wanted her there because he thought she could keep an eye on
Helen, because Helen could get volatile, so she was to calm Helen down.
Her training was psychology, this African American lady. I'm blanking on
her name, I can't believe that.Anyway, we began flying up to Sacramento. We met with him in his offices
up there after the Assembly met. He would fly down here to the
California State Building downtown and we would meet there. I remember
one rainy night when we were meeting, and my wife called me that we had
a potential flood in the backyard. I lived up in the hills right above
here. And he said, "Where do you live?" I said, "Up the hill." "Man, you
don't belong up there." That was Willie. "You're supposed to be in the
flatlands." I said, "Yeah, and I'd be flooded." He said, "That's true."
The man, I just had a ton of respect, because it was also because he
could grasp things. You would talk to Willie and he would ingest it and
then give it back to you better than you gave it to him. It was an
incredible display of his knowledge. He had that reticulosis, the eye
problem, and he always read print that big. He'd have to hold it like
this. But once he heard something, he retained it, and we went through
all of that.And then one night we'd been doing this for about three months, meeting
with him, the board president, me, the union president and her staff,
and one night we had come in and we were having coffee. We never had
food or anything. We just met like about five-thirty, six o'clock. I
remember he said, "Sid, I need to talk to you." "Okay, Willie." So I got
up and we went out, and as we went out he put an arm around me and he
said, "Bro--," and I thought, oh, god, here it comes. When he starts
that Bro business, I'm in trouble. He said, "I've got to tell you, you
don't have anything to give up. No money." I nodded. He said, "So you
know what it is." I said, "Power." He said, "Yeah." He said, "You're
going to have to give up some things that you guys have held sacred for
administrators. For example, whenever you want to assign a coordinator
to coordinate a reading program, to coordinate early childhood, to
coordinate [other things]--."I'm not talking about administrative positions. I'm talking about
positions typically at the school level, and the principals did that
because--and it was a good reason. They did it because they were
training some of their people to move up, and they wanted them to have
experiences. We had to give it up, and the union now would vote at the
school for who would be in that position. Department chairs, physics,
math, language, English, that would be voted, not appointed. Well,
needless to say the administrators were really upset. I had to call them
all to a meeting in East L.A., and that was not an easy meeting. It was
me alone on the stage. I took responsibility for all of it, and I said,
"What was my choice?" And I said, "A strike?" "Yeah, let them strike!" I
said, "No, no. This city has been through a major riot, and not only
one. You look back in its history, it's more than that." I said, "And
now we have a recession, and now we're going to do something to the
teachers, and we're just going to do it to them and tell them, 'What are
you going to do about it?' And you're saying to go ahead and strike." I
said, "No. No. I'm not going to do that to the kids. I'm not going to do
that to this city." I said, "We're going to give up some power, because
it isn't the end of the world. It's just that that's the way we've been
doing it."And I know people--I had a student in a doctoral program that I was
teaching in recently, the ELP [English Language Program], who was a
former--was, no, no, wait. He was a principal, a senior principal,
elementary principal, and I told this story. Well, it turns out that he
was a principal at that time, and he said, "I never really fully
understood why you had to do that." He said, "But when you start talking
about--," because I didn't go into details on the stage about which
senators; I didn't do that. But in this class I said, "There were
senators, U.S. senators, Congress people, the state superintendent of
instruction, the governor's office--he didn't call, but his office--the
board, California State Board of Education," I said, "who were saying,
'We can't let the city slip into this.'" I said, "And what would you
have done?" And he said, "I never really fully appreciated it." He said,
"And I'm thinking now if that had been me, oh, my god." I said, "Yeah,
because we took 10 from principals. I gave up 14 (as a superintendent)
percent," I said, "so everybody was burned in this, but we had to give
up something."And that was probably the most telling thing for me except for one other
one. As I look back at my time as a superintendent, I had moments of
feeling up here and times of feeling down here. There that was, which
was never a good thing. It was an ugly thing, but had to be done, and I
made up my mind to do it. And Helen was still alive at that point. It
was about a year later that she was killed. But I went, had occasion to
check at a school that was primarily African American, a middle school,
central Westside location, and that school--I was looking at scores, and
I had some people check it because I wasn't sure what I was looking at.
But after we checked it all out, what I was looking at was kids who had
come in, and it was a six, seven, eight middle school, six, seven,
eight, and the kids who had come in in the sixth grade who had scores in
mathematics, for example, arithmetic, of A, grades of A from fourth
grade, third grade, and they are now in the eighth grade--and there were
a number of these kids that never had algebra. And I remember going,
"Wait a minute. Why would you not put them in an algebra class? Was it
just you overlooked them? What is it?" And I'll never forget a principal
who looks like us, who said to me, "You know how it is with these kids.
Kids don't want to do nothing. These kids--."And I went through the roof. I was so angry that I went back downtown and
I did something I didn't really consider. I said to several board
members, "You know what? We ought to mandate algebra. I don't care if
they fail. They're failing arithmetic some of them." I said, "Maybe if
we give it to them and give them a chance at it they might make it."
Well, first of all, we didn't have teachers to do that. There was a
whole lot of things. And I knew I was angry, and at least I'd learned
over the years wait a day, wait two days, wait three days. I took a week
and then I said, "Okay, but at least what I can do is to encourage
schools to give kids placement in algebra, and certainly there should be
no excuse for A's and B grades and not having an opportunity. That
doesn't make any sense."So then we decided to start a program, formal district program so that we
were going to push that, the algebra piece. We were going to push for
not just taking--there were options for science courses at the high
school level that were watered-down science courses. And I said, "These
kids will never know what the competition's going to be at the
university and college level unless they face some of that competition
now. They've got to see quality courses." And we pushed for that. We
called it the Call to Action, and I did it formally before the board,
that we wanted to use this as an emphasis to the schools. Now, we had
not gone into the No Child Left Behind yet. That came later, but which
forced not that focus but a focus on assessment. "We're going to test
these kids and test them till they're crazy, and that'll be the measure
of whether they're educated or not." Well, good God. That is so
ridiculous it's almost childish.But we did push for what I just said, for this Call to Action. That was
significant in my time as superintendent, and we really pushed it. We
finally passed a bond measure, which I attribute to the President of the
Board, Mark Slavkin, a beautiful job. He just argued and argued, and we
won. And remember, at that time it was a two-thirds vote for those bond
measures. It was later in the Romer time that it was changed to a simple
majority, and that made all the difference, and now they're building
schools all over the place. And I think it's a good thing, by the way,
because they're talking about small schools instead of huge schools.But one of the most significant things that happened to me as a
superintendent came--I was getting pressures under LEARN. They had a
LEARN board made up of business leaders and all. It was a big group,
twenty-five people, which is too big for anything of that type. But I
noticed the mayor, not Tom Bradley--the mayor at that point was [Richard
J.] Riordan, and there was a push, the beginnings of a push for outside
control of school systems. [Richard J.] Daley in Chicago had taken over
the Chicago schools. But Chicago is a different place to L.A.,
politically and every other kind of way, because I found out the mayor
of Chicago has a lot of power with the state legislature, which is not
true in California, and could get money out of the legislature just by
dint of being the mayor.
-
Stevenson
- That's very different.
-
Thompson
- Very different. So this mayor decides that maybe this is something he
ought to look into, and I noticed pressures beginning of turning the
budgets over to schools. I said, "Before you turn the budgets over to
schools, you've got to train these people. They've never done that, and
you're talking about a budget of hundreds of thousands, millions in some
cases, of dollars. I don't have any problem with that, but we've got to
do it the right way. You can't dump this on a principal that you're
saying should be out there checking instruction and this and this, and
then start dumping all this administrative stuff on him or her and not
give them any training." "Well, you've got to make it happen." I said,
"Well, I'll make it happen on my watch, but the proper way. I want the
training."I talked to Henry, my chief financial officer. He said, "Sid, even in a
directed situation like we have now, where we're directing, they screw
up something fierce." He said, "And the reason is they, one, don't have
time, or, two, many of our administrators are not at all trained
financially. They're trained in education, this and that and all that,
but they're not trained as budget directors of their schools, which they
should be if that's what they're going to do." And I said, "Henry,
you're right. What we want to do then is to start a training process for
them to do that, but we aren't turning the budget over until that
happens."
* * *
[This portion of the text has been sealed at the request of the interviewee.]
* * *
-
Thompson
- I wouldn't have retired. I would have gone on and tried to push more
LEARN schools. But I could see the handwriting on the wall, and what
they did, they used Belmont High School to get rid of Ruben Zacarias.
That's all that was. They knew they could build a school there. That's a
bunch of nonsense. I went to school on that site at old Belmont, and
it's on that same oil field, so that's nonsense.It was used, and that's the way money works. It was used by [Eli] Broad
and these people as a way to get rid of the superintendent. They then
got rid of the chief legal officer, Rich Mason, Richard Mason. They got
rid of the chief business officer, Dave Cook, and they got rid of--and,
oh, Henry knew what was coming on the chief financial officer, and he
retired right after me. So I had a view from a superintendent position
of how the political structure works. One of the board members called
me, one of the good board members, who worked hard for kids and so on,
he called me and he said, "Sid--." Now, this is after I had left. And he
said, "Sid, I am not going to be on the board anymore." And I said,
"What are you, retiring?" He said, "No. I'm going to get beaten." I
said, "Why? What are you saying? You're incumbent. Good God, you've been
there for six, seven years." He said, "They just spent $200,000 on my
opponent." He said, "Two hundred thousand dollars in an election of a
school-board member wins it. I can't match it." He was right.And what did I learn in that? It was an ugly--that like it or not, these
things can be bought. With enough money they can be bought. And they got
rid of all the people I mentioned. They bought out a couple of board
members and brought in some others. I don't mind about the ones--some of
the ones that came in were good people. I have no problem with that. It
is the process that worries me, that the control was not by the people,
the control was by those who could manipulate the people, by signs and
little things on TV and radio and so on, with money, with enough money,
and they did it. And it just--it was a lesson.But you know, I wasn't bitter about it in a sense, because I said, "You
know, it is the way it is." Had I been in Chicago's politics, I would
have accepted it right at the gate, because that's the way it works
there. But it didn't work here, by the way, because the mayor, while
they were getting all these votes, couldn't get the four together that
would have put him in business, so it didn't work anyway. But it changed
the whole face of the board and who was running it and all the rest of
it. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. It's just that,
again, it is that happens when it's controlled by serious money being
used to manipulate the way that they perceive it ought to be, and these
people, "Because I'm a billionaire, I know best." Well, you're a heck of
a good businessman, that's a given. But anything beyond that, no, not
necessarily. But they don't see it that way. This ego goes and pretty
soon they begin to believe that they are the one to dictate what it
ought to be, and that's the part of politics that's a problem.So it didn't end in an ugly way, really. I retired. I could retire. I was
in my late sixties, and so that wasn't all bad, and I went to work then
out at UCLA, and that's when I came here, and I've loved every minute
I've been here. I like the stuff I've been doing, and have I learned by
being here at UCLA and looking back, is there anything? Oh, god, have I
ever. I would like to think that I would be a far different
superintendent if I were to go back, if I were young enough to go back
now.In fact, one of the things I discovered--I was saying that to somebody.
It's just too bad that when you're in the job, there isn't a way to let
you take a month to step out and look back at it. You're always buried
in it, and you react, react, react, you know, bankruptcy, this, that,
lawsuits, board, political whatevers, the mayor and everything else that
happens until you're inundated and you lose--it's hard to keep your
focus on where you wanted to be, which was kids, because most people
don't see that job as about kids. They do as this, on the big, but they
really see it as, what are you doing with the adults in this process?
And it's about teachers, and it's about custodians, and it's about
police officers and bus drivers. You know, that district runs more
buses. They ran as many buses--we were running as many buses as MTA at
the height of all that busing of kids, voluntary-integration stuff. We
had 2300 buses. We chartered some of them and released some and did all
kinds of things, but we had a bunch of buses running kids.So it's massive, and that's another thing. Because it is so massive,
there are a lot of people that put their fingers in that pie because it
is massive, and there's a lot of money involved, and you always have to
be very careful about that. And I've seen across the nation where
superintendents have gotten in trouble because they didn't watch that,
and they might have had somebody they had their back to who they
shouldn't have had their back to.
1.7. Session 7 (May 26, 2009)
-
Stevenson
- I'm completing an interview with Dr. Sid Thompson on Tuesday, May 26,
2009. I wanted to find out if you wanted to say more about your tenure
as superintendent of schools.
-
Thompson
- Well, there were several things that come to mind when we speak of that
period of time. I think I may have mentioned this, but one of the ones
that just stands out to me is somehow when people take those kinds of
positions with all of the political implications and the needs to work
with boards of education as well as in the case of [unclear] a huge
staff, and above all, mountains of children who need a lot of help. I
look back on that period of time and I just always have felt a little
dissatisfied, frankly, dissatisfied that I look back at some of the
problems that existed when we came in, and we never seem to quite
address them and get them fixed, probably that's the word. We don't seem
to get them fixed.I've reflected many times about why that is, and I think a lot of it has
to do with our inability to fight the culture, to change the culture.
It's deeply embedded, and the culture isn't necessarily a bad thing, but
it is the way business is done, and when the business being done is not
necessarily successful, then there is a need for finding ways to make it
change. It's a lot easier said than done, because I've noticed over
many, many years living in this state, for example, that increasingly
people in authority, whether they're legislators, superintendents, or
whatever they are, there are processes of behavior that are expected,
one, that's good and bad, and number two, over the years I've noticed
the, to me, growing lack of leadership, including me and everybody else.
I'm not letting anybody off the hook in this.I'm looking at this current condition of the State of California, and
it's been a while getting here. It didn't just happen in the last couple
of years. But the fact that there is little to no leadership, beginning
at the top, and Arnold Schwarzenegger notwithstanding, I think he came
in, he wanted to do a lot of things, but there was an inability to do
it, and the inability is locked up in the processes by which we bring
about change. People talk about one of the key things as a
superintendent that you face in that job is always budget and money, and
especially in a huge district that has increasingly become poor. It is
not a middle-class-to-up district any longer. It has a few enclaves that
are that way, but in the main it's a poor district, and therefore money
becomes a very important driving element. It says how many teachers you
can hire, how much you can pay them to attract them, all those kinds of
things. And in looking back, I've realized over the years that we've
kind of lost touch with the kinds of leadership that are necessary to
cause change.I think I sat in on one of the key periods in time when there was such a
thing. I had Willie Brown, and so did the union, to mediate our dispute
on how to handle a major budget crisis. I don't know who you'd call on
today to do that very thing. I don't know if there is anyone that has
that kind of respect. And he did not always do what his Democratic Party
wanted him to do, and he certainly didn't do what the Republican Party
always wanted him to do, but he worked between those to make things
happen, and I think that's a signal to the ways that a lot of us should
be working. We should be working between issues, within cultures,
pulling out the best and causing those changes. But what typically
happens is that it's a political process, and it acquiesces, and when
you have four board members required before an action is taken, you
almost inevitably deal with the politics of that board and who put them
in office and who they answer to, because that's going to determine in
many ways how they're going to react to things.So when we talk about change, when we talk about the things we ought to
be doing, there are things that do happen. I see some signs coming out
of L.A. Unified that are good signs. They're talking about small
schools. I love that. But for the kinds of changes that I am talking
about, the need to change the entire culture--let's stay with that
word--around our teachers, how we attract them, who they are, and
inevitably in this country how we pay them--but we're in a time where
everybody wants everything, but they don't want to pay for anything, and
I don't know how you bring those to some kind of a solution. But you're
not going to get something in this society for nothing. It isn't always
money, but you have to be willing to say, this is important enough that
we need to make sure it works, and we have not done that. We're laying
off teachers now with all the mess that's going on with the money in
Sacramento. It's a tragedy.But that's not all. It's all the other things that are happening, and
invariably, to me, they attack those most ill equipped to deal with that
kind of a process, a problem, our poor, particularly our minority poor.
They don't have a lot of ways, places to go. All they know is more of
the same. "I'm nothing, there's nothing for me, therefore I will find
ways for me to survive," and they do that. As a superintendent I look
back and I think the one that hurts the most is that teacher thing. We
have not been able to respond to getting good teachers in front of kids
most in need, and quite frankly, that hurts and it always has and always
will.I did a lot of things I thought were good, and there were things that I
thought were not what I really, looking back, would have wanted to do.
Sometimes we acted out of necessity, because there was no other way to
get this, much less this, and sometimes you have to do that. You have to
accept this to begin a process hopefully to address that. But a lot of
times you get that, and that's as much as you're going to get, and that
part really does hurt in terms of a career as you look back to the kinds
of things you would like to have done. I did meet some wonderful people
in that job, and I'm ever grateful for that, and some of those board
members, presidents of the board were just wonderful people, and I thank
them for that relationship that we had to see that, because otherwise
you get very bitter and you start thinking everybody is bad and nobody
wants any--all that stuff. And that's not true. I'm even convinced that
the worst teacher wants those kids to learn, the worst teacher, unless
he or she is sick, and I didn't meet too many of that.So that's the one thing that stands out in that process. We battled to
try to raise the standards for the youngsters, that they would seek to
attain those standards in order to become more viable as potential
college students and then later on to go on and be something of some
success in the greater society. But in looking at these youngsters, I've
really come to understand in my own thinking that this world of
education has to deal, like it or not, has to deal with schools, with
the powers that enhance those schools, state, it's there, the district,
it's there, and it's an entity designed originally to assist in all
this, but it's the schools and the school districts, those entities that
support it, meaning the state and local government, and then it's two
other elements that I mentioned before that are just absolutely
critical, and that's parents and community and the students themselves.
And until we get in these kids that they are not born dumb, they are not
born unable to learn, they're born with certain God-given mental
capacities, but the fact is we're not getting to those capacities, and
they've got to figure how to do that.And we've got to get to the parents, even if the parent was a complete
washout in education. That's not the issue. The issue is, what do you
want for your child, and what do you insist has to happen for your
child? And in insisting, those parents will go after schools as they
should. Those parents, though, will also go after students as they
should, and themselves in terms of what this kid needs that sends him or
her off in the morning with a viable realization of what they're about
when they go to school. And that's a whole area--we just haven't dealt
with it. We talk it, but we don't get in to do what we really need to do
to cause those kinds of change.That's something that I've used in my doctoral classes here and I've used
with these Principal Leadership Institute [PLI] cohort members, the ones
that are going to be administrators, that that is needed. You cannot
play this game of, "We welcome our parents," when you don't mean it or
you don't do it. It means you've got to work. You've got to work at
doing that, and like it or not, sometimes you're going to have to go to
those homes and those places where these people go, to get in their
heads. But a lot of us find ways to avoid that. We can't avoid it
anymore. If we really mean that we want to address the issues of the
education of those lowest on that totem pole, we're going to have to
really work to get them involved, and that goes for every facet of this
country, from the president on down. You talk, talk, talk.I don't mean Obama now. He's saying a lot of things. I'm not sure I agree
with all that's being said there or with the Secretary of Education. I
have some real questions about commitment to public education, and I
don't think we're going to address the ills of our kids, our poor kids,
if we don't address public education. These kids are not accepted into
private this and that and all the rest. They come in there talking
non-standard English and looking scuffy, and nobody wants them. It's
reality. So who's dealing with them? Well, the public schools. Okay, but
if we're saying that the public schools really aren't up to snuff, then
what are you saying? These kids are forever doomed to be in a system
that will fail and will fail them? Can't work like that. We can't mean
that. And you know Alva, that's still tied to the whole world of
poverty, too, which we haven't solved and I'm not sure is a priority for
many people either. Again, I hear a lot of talk, but I wonder. Those are
just some thoughts.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. Last week the May nineteenth election we saw Propositions 1A
through E fail, went down. What is the message there from voters,
California citizens? Just in general, what is the message, and in
particular, because so many of those Propositions have to do with monies
that would go into education.
-
Thompson
- Boy, we've sure been reflecting on that one. I put it in two words, "Fed
up." The public is fed up, but they ought to be fed up with themselves,
too, because they're part of the problem, a big part of the problem.
Again, we want everything, but we don't want to pay for it. Well, okay.
You want to fix the infrastructure, you've got bad roads, you have bad
bridges. I'm going to digress for just one second. I told you early on
in these discussions the one thing I really fear and we all fear is a
major quake. I think of something like that and I think, what is this
state going to do if it's really hit by something of that magnitude?
It's scary.But people are fed up with--they want leadership. I think they want the
right things. They just need somebody to tell them, "Here's what you
have to do." But every time somebody comes up with a message that, "We
need to do this and this, and we've got to pay for it," you've got the
Republicans on one side saying, "You can't spend a dime to do it. Fix it
by taking money from your bureaucracy," and the other side, Democrats
saying, "You can't do it without that." Well, somewhere in between there
must be a middle ground. I think back to the likes of Pat Brown and
people like that. They thought ahead. What we have going on right now is
people think about today, me. They don't even think about their own
grandchildren. What is going to be there for these youngsters who are
now coming up? I have great-grandkids at this height and age, and I
think of them and I think, what's there for them besides being saddled
with some monstrous bill that we took as a loan to get around having to
pay now for what's really needed.So I think what happened in 1A through E, a lot of that was people were
fed up. And nobody--I don't recall, Alva, anyone saying, "This is what
this is about. Look. Here's the problem. Now, we're going to take these
measures to meet it, and here's how we're going to meet it," and really
take the time to explain it. That was jammed on the public, and the
public reacted with, "Oh, no, you don't. You've been doing that to me
all along and nuts to you and all of your camels you rode in on. I don't
want to be on that. I'm not getting in that." And they voted it down.
They weren't anti-education. Most of those people are not. They're just
anti- being fed a line of nonsense about how this can be fixed. I looked
for leadership from the governor, I didn't see it. I looked for
leadership coming out of the legislature, both the Assembly side and the
Senate side. I didn't see it. It fell flat on its face because people
are tired of it. But again, none of them blamed themselves either, and
they should have, because they're part of the problem.But until we--I'm beginning to think that this state is going to have to
go to rock bottom and swim with the alligators and then maybe people
will start to say, "How can we fix this?" You noticed in that 1A through
1E, nothing in there addressed the two-third vote of the legislature for
the budget. Is that a major issue? I think so. We're one of three states
in the whole union that does that, and we all gripe about it, and it
didn't even appear. If some things like that had been in there, people
might have said, this is real. What they saw was another dodge, finagle
with it, borrow, move, shell game and we'll get through this, but we
won't solve it for next year or the year after. And I think again in two
words, people are fed up. They're tired of it. And they're not sure what
the answer is, they just know this isn't the answer.
-
Stevenson
- Very true, very true. Something else I wanted to ask you. Given the
similar history of struggle between blacks and Latinos, during your
career how did black and Latino administrators, teachers work together
on issues related to both groups over the years that you were in the
district?
-
Thompson
- Well, as in any large collection of anything, I always like to say if you
have a large collection of saints, probably 20 to 25 percent aren't,
probably 20 percent are, and then falling in between are varying degrees
of yes and no. In a large group like dealing with the Hispanic
population here, both teacher and student and administrator, all of
that, not both but all of that, and in dealing with the African American
side, one, I have been very pleasantly surprised that there has been
more cooperation than not, even though they had separate organizations.
For example, there's the Council of Black Administrators [COBA], and
there's the Council of Mexican American Administrators, and they operate
as two separate groups supporting their particular group of people.But I have found that they tended to work together many, many, many
times, and as a superintendent I was very concerned that we had the
balance, including the Asian population, because that's a growing
population on the Eastside. In San Gabriel and that area you have a lot
of Vietnamese and all kinds of folks, Hmong. You've got everything.
Well, that to me, if we're inclusive we've got to think of all of those,
and that means that we need to think of them in terms of inclusion just
as the president did today with putting Sonia Sotomayor up for Supreme
Court. He says we have to look at the total population and then say is
this representative of that population? And I don't care what the right
wing and other, the Left and whatever say, that is important. They have
to be included. And I found more times than not they realized that they
were in the same canoe with the leak, and they'd better help bail. So I
was pleasantly surprised by that. I thought there may be some problems.Now, we had individuals that did play that. We had blacks who were
saying, "The browns are coming in and they're taking over all of our
houses and they're kicking us out of our community." Well, yes, but a
whole lot of blacks chose to also move east. They made that decision.
Whether it was for the fact that there were a lot of Hispanics now in
their community or they just felt, we want to get into the greater
whatever, middle-class America, and we're moving out to Covina, well,
however they did it, they did it. So in a nutshell, I was surprised
pleasantly by the, in the main, cooperation that existed between them
and seeing the greater good that comes to all kids, not just the ones
that are of one color or another. They're different, and so there's
always human beings being human beings. There's always a problem because
it's different, both ways, but more towards the good than not. It was a
pleasant surprise.
-
Stevenson
- Maybe you can talk a little bit about--you retired when you left L.A.
Unified as superintendent, you retired and what you did after that.
-
Thompson
- UCLA?
-
Stevenson
- Yes. Yes, and on several fronts I see from your resume that you were an
instructor of doctoral candidates, coordinator of a joint UCLA-USC
program--
-
Thompson
- Yes, we're still doing that.
-
Stevenson
- Right. The Center X program with LAUSD, Principals Leadership Program and
also senior fellow. If you could talk about the range of your
assignments and experiences here at UCLA--
-
Thompson
- Most of those assignments dealt with--I always think of myself after
retiring from L.A. Unified as being in three primary areas, all of them
UCLA-associated. That's the association I chose, and they chose me.
Number one was when I first began, was the Educational Leadership
Program, which is a doctoral program, and that was a formal teaching
assignment with another professor, and we co-taught that class, a
beginning class of what the world of administration and educational
leadership looked like. That was major and in my mind remained as one of
the major things I did, and I did that all the way up till I retired
just a year ago. That was very fulfilling, and it was fulfilling because
we had in those students generally younger, and anybody under sixty is
young for me, generally younger students that gave me hope. They were
bright, and in the main they are. They're selected. They come with a
host of experiences that they've had as teacher or whatever, all the
in-between jobs they had as a coordinator, as a department chairperson,
whatever it was.These students give you hope because they were bright, they were willing
to listen to the kinds of things we do as a matter of course and why
they have heard us, or why they haven't helped us as much as they should
have, all of those things, but I also liked hearing them talk about
their commitment, and many of these young people have strong commitments
for change. They get very frustrated with the leadership they find
sometimes in their own schools, and they get frustrated because they see
a leader who's like this, tunnel. "I come in at seven-thirty, I leave at
four-thirty, I attend the football games, I attend the basketball games,
I go to the assemblies, I do all of the administratorial things," but
they don't seem to find the burning desire to go in and do what I was
complaining about myself, about our ability to cause change. And the
hope for change to me will come in their leadership types, and then I'll
go to the others, because they're very much related. Their leadership
types were generally a lot of principals, so they were at a certain
level, not all, because we had people in educational industries who were
in that program who wanted a doctorate, sometimes for their own good,
sometimes because they wanted to know more about educational leadership.
So the leadership program was at this level.The Principal Leadership Institute, that's the second of the major two
that I've been in, the Principal Leadership Institute takes people in
the field that are at this level. They are in the main teachers who want
to be administrators, so they haven't gone that other step. Now, some of
them are going to leapfrog and do--they get their credential, they get
their master's. They're going to leapfrog and want to go right into the
doctoral program. I've had a few do that, a few try but didn't make it,
didn't get accepted. It's tough competition to get in there, probably
fifty, sixty, seventy applicants, more like seventy, and they might
select twenty-six or twenty-eight, so there's a lot of cutting there,
and it isn't a given that you will be doing it if you just decide to do
it.And that one, the Principal Leadership one, which is a notch lower
because they're teachers--I say lower in terms of hierarchy of
leadership--the teachers that are in that program, same thing. Many of
these people sit and they're very concerned about what they see, both in
terms of the administration and not just the school but of the district,
with, "How can they think like this and here we see that?" But also they
tend to be, the ones that are, to me, really critically looking at
society, they're critical of their peers, and they will come in and say,
"I see people that don't want to do a blessed thing. 'Leave me alone.
I'll teach my 150 kids a day in high school and that's it.' Yeah, but
don't you--'I'm not interested in change.'" And there are people like
that.Fortunately, some of these folks don't give up, and I love it when I'm
working with them and they'll say to me, "Guess what happened?" "What?"
"The biggest opponent of this proposal that we're trying to bring before
the faculty just came up and said this, and, 'I don't want to get into
fights over this. I want to do this really. I fuss about what you're
doing, because I'd like to see it done a different way,' that sort of
thing," so they're learning. And this person I'm talking to, the
student, says to me, "My God, I couldn't believe it. He or she actually
came around." And I'm saying, "Yeah, because you made sense maybe?
Because you were persistent," and above all they're not people given to
failure, so there's a good side to the job of teaching that can
sometimes help. So again, two different levels, but both of them I have
found an overwhelming concern, not every one of them, some play the
game, but generally speaking an overwhelming concern to deal with the
issues of poverty and the issues of non-involvement for African
American, Hispanic youngsters in particular.By the way, I noticed when I left the district there was a growing
recognition in the Asian community that, "You know, we always believe
that all of our kids want to work cooperatively and they study hard, and
we've got some kids that aren't making it, that are off--they've picked
up the American style, rap." That doesn't mean bad, but sometimes it
takes over, and while you think every Asian kid sits down and is just
academic as the devil, not true. We've got a lot of kids that aren't,
and they're a problem for themselves, for their family, for the
community. So there's a real need with this. Of the three things I've
done I gave you two. One was the leadership here, the principal
leadership here with the level of where the people are in the
educational hierarchy, but all of them striving to ultimately do the
same thing, because they want to be leaders and they want to cause
change, and they recognize it's not going to happen easily. It's a
struggle.I told them I looked at the same problems fifty years ago when I came in
the district. I was a student in the district, and I haven't seen a real
ability to cause change, and yet some funny things happened on the way
to the forum. There are changes that are occurring. All of a sudden L.A.
Unified is talking about going to small schools. Formal, this is not
a--they took a stand saying they're going to build small schools, and
they are. And I happen to think there's few things we can do more
significantly than that. Stop this 5,000-student high school. It's
immoral, purely immoral. It does not belong. It doesn't help kids; kills
them. So there's some good things that come out of that.Now, it happens that the third thing, the doctoral, the PLI, and then the
third thing is the collaborative that I do with USC with a fellow by the
name of Bob Baker, who is a true researcher. I'm not. I'm an operating
type of person. I was an operating superintendent. In other words, I'm
more interested in the delivery end, but Bob Baker is more interested in
the research end, and we're a pretty good team that way. He's SC, I'm
UCLA, and just to refresh you, back when I was superintendent I was
looking at this monster longitudinal database that we were developing
for kids, 700,000 kids and we were developing a data system that
followed them from here to here. And I was thinking what an incredible
instrument, and so I came out here and talked to a former
superintendent, Harry Handler, who worked with Jim Taylor and all those
guys, and also I then was introduced to Bob Baker at SC, and I said, "I
want this to become a research tool for the major universities, to
support the kinds of things we need for our kids."I always remember going before the board talking about smaller class size
and all that stuff, and we had no basis in fact that it would do this,
this, or that. We didn't know. We were shooting from the hip. We were
talking empirically, just by doing it many times we felt. But I remember
I was up there one day talking about bilingual education, and I was
saying to myself, "I feel all alone up here." So where are the major
institutions? Where do they stand on this? And that's the kind of thing
I'm still not there. There are people out here that don't want to get
involved. Some have the kinds of feelings that lead to the non-decisions
that you referenced at the beginning of this. But the two deans, SC and
UCLA, went with it and said, "Okay, you want to do it? We'll form an MOU
with you," and that's part of the reason I came out here.So what do we have? We have this desire to make systematic change, but we
also with that third thing, the collaborative, we are hoping that the
longitudinal data available regarding these kids begins to show us why
it is that youngsters do very well in Pre-K, K-1-2. We know in 3-4 they
begin to go into parts of the curriculum that are more esoteric, that
are the kinds of things that demand reasoning that's a little different
level to, "This is yellow, this is green," that sort of thing, so we
know it is different. But our kids begin to show the elements of failure
at that level, and then there's, of course, the big jump at adolescence
from 10-11 to 12-13. We found, for example, that--I'm digressing, but it
sticks in my mind--we found that the seventh graders that failed
seventh-grade math and seventh-grade English, they are going to drop out
almost 85 to 88 percent. They don't recover from that. Well, that should
have real significance.But what are we doing with middle schools? Nothing. We've been fighting
the fight up here in high school and down here at elementary. In here,
to me, is where the real--I began as a middle-school teacher,
junior-high teacher, so it sort of sticks with me. That's where they are
falling flat on their face, and I don't see the attention educationally
being directed at that. So this third thing, the collaborative, to me is
incredibly important, but I worry. I worry because I'm seventy-eight,
Bob Baker is eighty-one, and unless we find ways to get younger
professors at both institutions involved in this, it won't continue,
which is another problem. We get things, they look good, they look
promising, but they die out. Other people come along and say, "I don't
have time for that."
-
Stevenson
- Could you talk a little bit about how to attract young people not just
into teaching but into educational administration, and particularly
young people of color? How do we attract them, since you mentioned this
problem of getting more people into the upward stream?
-
Thompson
- It's a tough one, because a lot of times--if you had asked me at age
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen about going into education, "Heck no. I'm
going to sea." Remember, I told you, so ships, that was my thing. I even
told one of my teachers who thought I had some capacity that I was going
to be a tugboat captain. I was ten years old. "Tug?" She says, "You
ought to be a lawyer. You're not going to be a tugboat captain." Well,
you know, there are things we think when we're little and romantically
and all other kinds of ways, and I had to get that out of my system,
which I did, luckily. But how do we--I think we do it by example.I have had students I had in mathematics who came back to me later, some
of them. We had a reunion. These were kids that were with me in 1957.
The reunion was 2004. We met as a group, husbands, wives, whatever. I'm
looking at grandparents, and I was their teacher, and I had always told
them about teachers that inspired me, some of whom didn't make a lot of
sense as to why they were inspirational. Little Miss Sweet, who was
sixty-five years old, taught me trigonometry, that big, never married,
typical, if you want to use the term, teacher-spinster, incredible
teacher, tough as nails, did not believe in collective nothing. She
stood up and taught us trigonometry, and I remembered later on of all
the teachers I respected, she was one of three, who didn't do anything
but the traditional method, but it's respect. And if our kids can see
teachers who draw from them respect--I always maintain you're not going
to get all of them to go into teaching. You wouldn't want them to. But I
think as they see successful people, that draws them to the profession.Problem we have is that they see the profession as one that's second
class, and some of these kids that have talent say, "I've got more
talent than being paid what a teacher is paid." They respect the job.
They don't respect the standard of living it causes, and that is a major
drawback to some of the things we try to do to entice them. That's why I
believe we need to make it competitive. Like it or not, it needs to be
competitive to get the kind of talent that we ought to be having in
front of these kids. So I don't see it happening by--there have been a
couple of magnet schools that have been formed that are teaching
academies, and they've had some success. They've had some of those kids
go on to be teachers. But I'm not sure you can really do it by specific
calling and saying, "We want you to be a teacher. Therefore, this is
what a teacher--."First of all, a teacher needs the foundation, and that means a legitimate
education. You need to know your subject field, really know it. Don't
play with it, you've got to know it. All of those things need to happen,
and then maybe as people see success they will also join in. I can't do
it any better than that. That's about what it takes, because there are
so many other things that draw kids away that get the spotlight. We all
know law and all those things. We've got more lawyers than we know what
to do with, but nevertheless, how do you argue it when people see
success?
-
Stevenson
- Would you also say that maybe calls for introducing not just education
but other fields such as science, medicine, introducing particularly our
young children of color at younger ages--
-
Thompson
- Yes. Those are worlds they have no concept of. They do go to doctors, but
they don't see research science, for example. Not only do we need to
introduce it earlier, but we need to get a position of worth to those
things. These kids see worth as Kobe Bryant, whatever football player is
the big gun at this particular time, baseball, in other words athletics,
and then there's the whole world of entertainment, and, of course, this
place is rife with it, L.A., Hollywood and all. And it's awfully hard to
tell kids a half of 1 percent might even be able to make a living doing
that, much less being at the top of that, to make the millions that they
try to see for themselves. How many Kobe Bryants are there in the whole
world? I mean, it's that kind of a thing.But we somehow need to get some worth, and that means in recognition. I
used to really--I mentioned this to you, I think, earlier. I just
couldn't stand going to NAACP [Image] Awards things, and the only thing
I saw up there were athletes and movie actors, and these kids are
sitting there looking at this and all taken with it. These institutions
need to give worth to trades. I would love to see them get some black
electrician up there that's been eminently successful. He's making
probably a pretty darn good living. Why isn't that--the recognition is
this, and why? Because they get money from that. I'm just being a little
bit cynical, but not really, because it's true. I've seen time after
time where the recognition has gone to those kinds of people and not to
the ones that kids really need to know are in the world and where
there's more likelihood that they have a shot at that than just being
some superstar jock or super actor or actress.
-
Stevenson
- Maybe you could tell me something about your involvement with groups,
organizations outside the educational sphere, in the community or in
other arenas.
-
Thompson
- They've all tended to be educationally involved. I do a lot of work with
institutions I came out of, Cal State L.A., U.S. [United States]
Merchant Marine Academy. I've been on committees associated with those
institutions. I've been on committees associated with scholarship
programs for those institutions. I obviously also told you about my love
of sailing, and so I'm on that Los Angeles sail-training institute down
in San Pedro. They have three ships that they use to take poor kids
generally out on, so they see the ocean. I'll never forget the kid who
said to me once, "Is that an island?" "Yes." "What's the name of it?"
"Anacapa Island." "You mean that that's it?" I said, "That's an island.
An island sits like this." Basic. How old was he? Fifteen. It shows how
neglected he's been. So anyway, that's why I'm in that program.They all have an educational bent to most of them. I'm trying to think.
I've done other things, but in the main they've been education, and I
have restricted the committees mainly because I've been so darn involved
with the institutions I've worked in that I tend to throw myself into
them, and I don't have a lot of time to spend. I'm on the board of
directors of my condominium, for example. Sometimes I'm very jealous of
the time it takes, but it's very different and it's totally unrelated to
education or anything else. But I live there and I figure, oh, what the
heck, go in and help them. So I do, and I take care of maintenance for
them for the maintenance company, to be sure they do their job and all
that. But I don't get too far afield from education, only because of
time, already committed to most of my time.You know, I'm supposed to be working thirteen hours here a week, sixteen
hours a week, but I'm actually working more like twenty-seven,
twenty-eight. Well, I don't say that with any, "God, I'm working myself
to death." I don't mean that. I enjoy it, and I don't measure it in
time, so if it takes more time that's okay with me. More money, more pay
[unclear] Uncle Sam [takes it], so okay.
-
Stevenson
- In regards to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, as compared with when you
went into the academy and just that profession as a career, are there
more African Americans today?
-
Thompson
- Yes. They're still having trouble getting African Americans into the
service academies, although they all are pretty well represented with
African Americans, Hispanics, and so on. That's a good question. Part of
the problem is because of a good thing. The competition for these kids
has changed. Now the Ivy Leagues go after these candidates, and a kid
that has the ability to go to Annapolis, West Point, or King's Point, or
one of these points, and the Air Force Academy, the ones that can do
that also can have options to go to Harvard or Yale or Princeton and
elsewhere. That's a good thing.In terms of careers I would mention, because I happened to be talking to
my brother--I have a Navy brother who's retired, and he just walked the
marathon yesterday. He's eighty years old and he finished. So I went
down to see him last night. We had dinner, he and his wife and me, and
we were talking about this. He's a retired naval officer. He was a
captain in the Navy, which is like a colonel. He was mentioning that he
went to a reunion of African American naval officers. Now, at one time
he and I were it [the only black officers] for the West Coast. There
were no other black naval officers. That was 1952, '53, around in there.
The Commander of the Atlantic Fleet is a black admiral. He heard
something that just caused him to pause. He said, "Sid, I don't believe
it, only because it would be so few." But he says, "You remember the
Mersk Alabam," with the merchant skipper that was taken prisoner, and
remember they shot a couple of Ethiopian pirates and got him, freed him
and all that? He hears--and I'm saying it for a point--he hears that the
commander of the Far East something [Naval] command, that would be the
admiral in charge of all of the naval fleets in the Mediterranean, the
Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, that that's a black female admiral. I
said, "What?"
-
Stevenson
- Oh, really.
-
Thompson
- Oh, my god. I almost did a back flip. I said, "You've got to be kidding."
He said, "Sid, I don't know whether to believe it or not, but that's the
word I have." And he said, "Now, she may have been a flyer." She may
have been handling jets. There are.
-
Stevenson
- Oh, there are, yes.
-
Thompson
- Oh, yes. Not many, but they're out there, and that would be one way to
command a fleet command is to have been a pilot, because a lot of the
fleet is made up of aircraft carriers. Well, all that to say, my god,
Alva, that is an incredible change. Good God. It's like we were talking
about L.A. and the restricted beaches, the restricted covenants on
houses, the area that my parents could not go on Wilshire Boulevard to
go to a nightclub. They were expected to go down on Central [Avenue],
and they would not accept them anywhere else. The place I tried to go to
go swimming on [as Boy Scouts] Vermont Avenue, believe it, Vermont of
all places, and we were refused. We had to go to a movie, my brother and
I, because we were black. Those things have changed, and they've changed
not with a lot of fanfare sometimes. They just happen. Well, that's all
good.And I think that I was black and I was a superintendent. They had Brewer,
even though they got rid of him, he was a black superintendent. There
are changes that have happened in our lifetime, and I think that is also
another thing that tells our kids these things are to be done. I'll give
you another example. Oh, god, this age thing kills me. What is his name?
The new head of NASA [Charles Bolden, Jr.] is a black astronaut. I've
met him a number of times, flat-out brilliant, short, a short guy, kind
of strongly built, but flat brilliant. This man has commanded four
different missions in space, so he's no political this or that. He's a
bright guy, Annapolis graduate. Well, that's what kids have to see.
They've got to see that and say, "Wait. What? Who is he?" Not to mention
Obama, the ultimate. These things will all help us. They all help, not
directly, they're very indirect. They don't help us enough if we don't
take advantage of them in terms of how we use them to make our kids
understand that these things can happen now, but that doesn't mean it's
easier. It just means it can happen from a variety of circumstances
sometimes.But it also involved being ready for those circumstances, which Obama, I
think, was really there for. He was ready for that. Whether he can do
anything with the mess he's inherited is another question, just like the
state. But I think that those kinds of things, Alva, are very subtle
changes for our kids. The thing that worries me in that is when we look
at black, African American youngsters, okay, and we start at the top of
that, the ones most successful, most can-do, parents pushing them,
parents driving education, when you come down from that there reaches a
point where the kids at the bottom--again, it's that totem pole I
referenced--the kids at the bottom of that totem pole aren't even in a
position to know the kinds of things I just referenced to you, so it has
no meaning until they can know it.And I'm not sure that the schools do that. I'm not sure that their
teachers, who are all hell-bent for leather on kids reading well--I'm
not arguing they shouldn't read well. Of course. But that isn't all.
Does anyone take the time to say, "By the way, look at this young fellow
here or this man here, look at this young lady, look at this woman. They
look like you, too, by the way." See, we have to lead them to that.
That's teaching. Teaching isn't just a subject. Teaching is about the
whole society. There are plenty of good examples out there now, still
not enough, but sure a lot more than before, and nobody's made a big
deal of this guy taking over NASA. Everybody's saying, "He's qualified."
-
Stevenson
- It was almost, in terms of the news coverage it was almost--
-
Thompson
- Yes, just happened. Yes. And, in fact, I had to search for somebody to
say he's African American. He's kind of light-skinned and it's hard to
see in some of the pictures, but he is African American, and they said
it in the "Times" on the last article, and I just said to myself, man,
this is absolutely incredible. I mean, back a few years ago you and I
would have said, "What? No way." Well, guess what?
-
Stevenson
- Okay. I have another question for you, reflecting back on your years as
superintendent and being aware of what that encompasses. What is going
to be the greatest challenge that Ramon Cortines is going to face in
terms of current challenges in the school district?
-
Thompson
- Yes. He's in it now. He is facing the possibility of bankruptcy. He's
facing that. We faced it in the nineties, but not to this degree, and I
had Willie [Brown] that came down. We had Willie, it wasn't me. It was a
union, and he negotiated and caused it to work, but then you had a
working legislature. What Cortines has is it's very lonely, because he
doesn't have a working legislature. All he has is no money. He's
seventy-three or -four years old, and it's a tribute to him. He gets in
at six-thirty in the morning and he doesn't get home till whenever he
gets home. I know those hours, that's what it takes. But as a much older
man, those things become very difficult. He's in good shape, he's very
trim, but he's, I think, beginning to show the seeds of, "Oh, my god,
how can you fix this?"And then he becomes a dirty guy. The union wants--"In spite of all that,
you've got to give us more money." You can't, you can't. Where's he
going to get it from? I think the greatest issue for him right now is
the budget, is the money, with a district that needs a lot of help and
doesn't have resources for doing it. I'll give you an example. The small
schools, they have formally stated as a board policy that they're going
to go after small schools and build small schools, which is great.
There's no mention of training to run small schools, and is that
necessary? Oh, yes, because if not what they will do, the
administrators, knowing nothing else will run a small school like he
ran, or she, a big school. That's not what the point is. The point to
going small is a kind of personal kinds of collaboration and involvement
you can get, and if you don't cause that to happen in your school, you
haven't provided the kids with a thing. They're still a number, only a
smaller number.So Cortines is facing the issue of things he wants to do but can't, and
when you have no money that's what you face. You have all sorts of
thoughts about what could happen, and I think he's committed to the fact
that teachers ought to get more pay, just as I was, and we ended up
taking money from them. In this case they didn't take money from them,
they just get rid of a whole of them, and that's the kind of stuff which
means that the kids will be sitting in a classroom--see, people don't
understand. When they cut, not cut, well, they cut the budget and then
they say that, "We are going to increase class size by three." Well,
yes, but what happens--in a high school there are classes, for example,
that have labs. There are classes that have equipment of some type, and
there are restrictions on how many, or advanced-placement classes that
have twelve to thirteen. When that happens, somebody over here is
picking up the other eight or nine kids that aren't there, and that
means that some of these people are running classes of forty.In some of the early-day classes in algebra, I ran classes of fifty-two.
I had to move chairs in. I taught classes of fifty kids. So it isn't
just two or three in every class. It bubbles much bigger in other
classes like English classes, and that shouldn't be happening, but it's
going to. And Cortines, I think there is no other issue he faces more
troublesome I'm sure for him than this money issue, because so much
hinges on it. Services, he's cutting services like crazy. After-school
this and that, all the things that motivate kids are going to go by the
tubes, art, music, drama. They'll find ways that the people will just be
going down to bare bones, and that I'm sure for him--he's an educator,
he's been around a long time--I know it's got to be incredibly
troublesome for him. But he's not going to be able to do a thing with
that till they solve this budget issue for the schools, and I don't see
in his lifetime--I don't mean his natural lifetime but his professional
lifetime--I don't see that becoming significantly different in the next
three years. It's going to be bad news for two, three more years. The
full effect of this is just beginning.Remember about this now-ism that we have? Nobody's talking about next
year, which everybody who has a brain in their head is saying it can't
be better, probably worse. We can't borrow money out of New York, and
that's what we counted on. People don't really appreciate that, but you
always had a cash-flow problem. When you begin a school year, '09, well,
let's go to the other one, '08 to '09. You have a year. The money comes
in from Sacramento to support salaries and all the things you do. But
that money, there's a shortfall between roughly April and June, when you
don't get the money that it takes to run the district. Then you go and
borrow. In the case of L.A. Unified, they would go and borrow maybe 400
million dollars to get them through, and then pay it back on the next
year's budget. What if it isn't there?And guess what? Generally you go to the money markets in New York to get
that kind of money. You can't go too many places. You go to New York.
New York is saying, "Oh, yeah, we'll lend it to you," and the interest
rate is up here. "You'll be paying us back on that half what you get."
Well, you can't do that either, because you cannot operate a school
district deficit. You can do this, because there's a provable way that
you can show the money is coming in in the next budget. In this
environment you can't prove that, and everybody's going to say, "So
where's it coming from?" And, "If you want the money from us, you're
going to pay for it big time." Well, Cortines is in the middle of that
right now, and he has no solution for it. Nobody talks about it, but I'm
not sure how they're getting through between here and June. It's going
to prove very interesting.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. My last question is, is there anything additional you'd like to add
to this interview before we close it?
-
Thompson
- I've had a lot of fun, fun in the sense of being able to dig in and go
back and look at some things that I hadn't even thought of until the
question is raised, or something that accompanies the question causing
another question, and you go, wait a minute. Yes, I remember. So I've
had an interesting time with that for me personally, being able to think
back on what happened and what didn't happen. So, no, I think I have
reached back and pulled out--I tried not to hold anything back. I've
tried to tell you exactly what I felt. I am sure only that in the next
couple of days something will come to mind maybe, and I may call you and
say, "Alva, you know something? I just remembered something." And I may
do that if it's okay, but no, I'm fine.
-
Stevenson
- Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for this interview, Dr.
Thompson.
-
Thompson
- Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure.[End of interview]