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New York Times, November 28, 2006
Watts Changes, and a Mainstay Bids It Farewell By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 27 The pint-size White Sox beat the As 6-0, ending the
baseball season the other day at Ted Watkins Park in Watts. James Dawson hauled
out the trophies and T-shirts and some final words of direction and discipline.
Win or lose, be sportsmen, Mr. Dawson told the losing players, 11- and
12-year-olds fidgeting with bitterness under his towering gaze. Nobody is
better than anybody. If he strikes you out, he struck you out.
A folding table appeared at home plate, and before handing out the awards
everyone got one he thanked the players and the coaches and, about himself,
offered this: I have been running this league for five years and I hope to do
it for another five years.
J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
With the baseball season over, it was time for James Dawson, a coach, to hand
out trophies to the players earlier this month at a park in Watts.
This is the same league that one of Mr. Dawsons sons coached in, and it was
after a basketball game three years ago that the young man was shot and killed,
yet another victim, it seemed, of the neighborhoods persistent violence.
So Mr. Dawsons words this month were offered as assurance as much to the
club as to himself, for change has come both to Watts and to the Dawsons, now
formerly of East 105th Street.
November 28, 2006
J. Emilio Flores For The New York Times
Mr. Dawson and his family lived in Watts for more than 25 years. Three years
after a son was killed there, they decided it was time to move.
In the neighborhood best known, depending on ones frame of reference, for
the 1965 riots or the Watts Towers public art project, black families are
moving out and Latinos are moving in, a migration taking place in many other
once predominantly black neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
Sooner or later many middle- and working-class black families debate whether
they should continue to be the stable oaks of the community or the seeds of
distant, safer ones in the far-flung Los Angeles suburbs.
South L.A. or Moreno Valley? Watts or Lancaster?
One night not long ago, Mr. Dawsons wife, Dorothy, turned to him in bed and
popped the question he knew would eventually come: What do you think about
moving to Lancaster?
It was not a question, really. He knew her mind was made up. Their son Jihad,
having given up on Watts, was already there, more than 50 miles north in the
high-desert constellation of subdivisions. And who could begrudge his wife, Mr.
Dawson remembers thinking, after all they had been through?
Over 26 years they had raised their two boys in their split-level house and
filled their lives with backyard barbecues, slumber parties and ballgames in
the park.
But an afternoon three years ago shattered their lives and set in motion
their own stay-or-go tug of war, with Lancaster finally triumphing.
On a recent drive to their old house on 105th Street, Mr. Dawson, 55, slowed
a block or so away and nodded to an otherwise undistinguished spot on the
street of bungalows.
This is where Salim was killed, he said of his elder son, indicating a
patch of sidewalk without stopping. I heard the shots.
Salim Dawson had every opportunity himself to leave Watts, but came back.
After graduating from Verbum Dei High School, a highly regarded Roman
Catholic school in Watts, Salim went to Arizona State University but, Mr.
Dawson said, felt dislocated there. Within a couple years he came back,
continued his studies at a local college toward a degree in psychology,
counseled young children and began coaching in the sports league he had once
played in.
Mr. Dawson recalled friendly arguments with Salim over African-Americans
responsibility to community and over the decline in civility among children, in
addition to endless debates about how the afternoons game was played.
We would talk about why parents dont drop their kids off at the park, why
parents are not as responsible as they should be, Mr. Dawson said.
On Feb. 22, 2003, Mr. Dawson and Salim coached games on the basketball court
at Ted Watkins Park.
Mr. Dawson went home and thought Salim was not far behind. Jihad was in the
house. And so when Mr. Dawson heard gunfire, he recalls, he was disturbed but
not overly worried.
Glad my boys are not around there, he recalls thinking.
It did not take long for the knock on the door. Mr. Dawson ran to Salim,
bleeding on the sidewalk. He searched frantically, and in vain, for a pulse.
Salim was 23. The police theorized that he had been killed in a case of
mistaken identity. As far as he knows, Mr. Dawson said, the shooter was never
caught. He and his wife say they do not dwell on that.
Justice is not going to bring Salim back, Mrs. Dawson said. He was just in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
Jihad, now 23, itched to leave soon after. Almost anywhere else in America,
Where you from? is a polite query, but here it carries lethal consequences
among turf-minded gang members. Lots of young men were not answering correctly.
A couple of weeks after Salim was killed, the substitute coach for his team
and a companion were also shot to death for no apparent reason. Mr. Dawson
stepped in as coach of Salims team their triumph in the final game of that
season made the local news and he and his wife decided then to stay, against
the odds.
Maybe there is a part of him that wants to carry on Salims legacy, but there
is also the club, whose membership, he said, has dwindled from several hundred
children in the 1990s to about 100 now. Mr. Dawson has no ready explanation for
the changes.
Parents seem to feel more pressure to work longer hours and more jobs these
days. And some of the newer, Latino parents favor soccer not one of the
clubs sports and do not speak enough English to converse with Mr. Dawson and
the other coaches, who are mostly black. According to Census data, the
population of Watts in 1970 was 90 percent black and 8 percent Latino; in 2000,
it was 38 percent black and 61 percent Latino.
But Mr. Dawson, who like other club leaders opens his wallet to defray costs
for parents who cannot afford the $25 registration fee, said he sensed parents
these days seemed less inclined to participate in their childrens activities.
They have to work, and I can understand, but I work also, he said. I make
a point to make time for this program.
One coach said he thought the numbers had begun to drop around the time Salim
and the others were killed, during a particularly violent spasm of gang
fighting, though the Los Angeles police report that violent crime has declined
in the past couple of years in the Watts area.
There were a lot of killings around then, and people didnt feel safe at the
park, said the coach, Parnell Roberts Sr., a former convict who credits Mr.
Dawson with helping turn his life around.
Mr. Dawson coached when Salim and Jihad played in the league and stayed after
they moved on. Coaching brings a certain satisfaction, like when a player turns
from goat to hero, and he sees the league as a strand, however modest, helping
hold Watts together.
I see the need to provide leadership and direction to the kids here, he
said. They have a lot of problems at home, broken homes, single parents. A lot
of times the male figure is absent. Not to say I am a role model, but I think
it is needed at times.
Mr. Dawson works as an accountant at a nonprofit health agency in Arcadia,
near Pasadena. The commute to work from Lancaster is more than an hour, and to
Watts from home can approach 90 minutes in bad traffic, but he has committed to
coaching two or three nights a week and at games on the weekends.
Other parents initially fretted.
He brings a lot to the community; everybody looks up to him, not just the
kids, said Denise Dumas, whose nephew plays in the league.
Others in the community tended to lean on the Dawsons as longtime, successful
residents. Mrs. Dawson operates a tax accounting business from her home. She
advises clients not only on their 1040s but also on their 10-year-olds.
A lot of people became dependent on us and we became the arbitrators, the
referees, the counselors, she said, sitting in the serenity of her living room
in Lancaster, where the family moved on Nov. 11. They would call year round,
not just tax season, and talk about everything under the sun.
Salims killing gradually changed her outlook on Watts. In their first years
there, she felt part of an effort to revitalize the community.
Even as the ethnic makeup changed children often interpreted for her
Spanish-speaking clientele and the clatter of police helicopters overhead
remained a constant, she said she still felt comfortable.
But she has come to believe it will never truly rise high, not with three
large public-housing projects within blocks of one another and all the social
ills that spill out from them.
We can only help so many people, Mrs. Dawson said. We cant save the
world.
She predicts Mr. Dawson will give up coaching within a couple of years but
may still show up to yell advice from the bleachers.
Dawson like everyone else, what she calls him feels the need to
continue to contribute, but I feel I have done my part, she said.
When word spread that the Dawsons were moving to Lancaster, to a subdivision
called Coyote Hills that is so new the telephone wiring is just reaching the
new homes, a group of neighbors and park regulars knocked on their door. This
time, a pleasant surprise, as the group handed them a card addressed to the
Parents of the Park.
The Dawsons are now settling into their new house in Lancaster, where the
black population has more than doubled to 16 percent of the 118,718 residents
since the late 1980s. In Watts, their former neighbors are working through
their loss.
One of them, Miss Ruby, which is what everybody calls Ruby Mae Randall, 90,
has lived on the Dawsons old block for more than 60 years, and used to look
after their home as they did hers. She has seen the neighborhood go from
Spanish and then black and now the Spanish are coming back again.
Its always changing, but I am staying, she said.
Still, a good neighbor is hard to lose.
I am so sorry to see you go, she told Mr. Dawson, closing the iron gate on
her front door as he stepped out.
Mr. Dawson didnt miss a beat
I am gone in body, he replied, but not spirit.
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