www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jefferson6jul06,0,6512314.story
E-mail story Searching for Lessons in Jefferson High Melee Race was one factor, but roots of the tension run deeper than skin and wider than one school. By Sandy Banks and Nicholas Shields, Times Staff Writers They had been milling around for an hour in the sun, 2,000 restless, agit ated teens packed onto Jefferson High's football field, waiting for the earthquake drill to end and lunch to begin. When the bell rang they rush ed the gates, shoving, elbowing, knocking classmates aside. In the crush, two black girls began tussling over a cellphone or a boy, o r maybe a boy's cellphone.
As school police officers dug them out of the center of a heckling crowd, a Latino boy launched a milk carton across the quad. And in the days an d weeks that followed, racial skirmishes on this and other Southern Cali fornia campuses unmasked a current of racial tension that has alarmed la w enforcement and school officials. But for two months after that April 14 battle, Jefferson's black and Latino students faced off in spontaneous skirmishes, orchestrated beatings and at least two mo re large-scale melees. Twenty-five students were arrested, three hospita lized and dozens suspended or transferred. Hundreds more stayed away fro m classes, and those who showed up did so with fear. "I'm scared even to go to class," said 16-year-old Keiana Scott, as she s tood on the lawn outside school a few days after the second lunchtime br awl. One of only about 300 blacks among the school's more than 3,800 stu dents, Keiana warily eyed a passing group of Latino schoolmates. "I've g ot to look over my shoulder every five minutes to see if somebody's abou t to whup me," she said. No Single Cause The unrest comes at a time when Los Angeles has emerged as a national sym bol of racial cooperation. A coalition of black, Latino and white voters in May elected Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles's first Latino mayor s ince the city's pioneer days. But the confrontations between blacks and Latinos, which have struck camp uses from the South Bay to the Inland Empire and Antelope Valley, sugges t that stubborn cultural differences, racially charged gang feuds and so cial and economic competition can combine to cleave Southern Californian s along unexpected racial lines. "This is not just at one school, and it's not just kid stuff," said Khali d Shah, whose Stop the Violence Increase the Peace foundation has been w orking for years to broker truces between warring black and Latino gangs in the Inglewood area. "There's a rise in community violence as it relates to blacks and Latinos , and that is seeping into our schools. When you start seeing large grou ps of one race fighting against a group of the other race, we can't, as a city, afford to ignore it."
on any one thing," said Ron Rubine, a couns elor at Carver Middle School in South Los Angeles, which has had its sha re of black-Latino conflict. "For some kids, it's a race thing, for some it's a gang thing, for some it's a boredom thing, for some it's just lo yalty to friends. If there was a fight among the staff, we'd align ourselves with the people we hang around with. We hav e our public face, but look at what we do in private the way we gossip , the things we say about other people, other groups. Rapid Escalation A close look at the first Jefferson fight shows how racial tensions can q uickly balkanize a campus even one where peacemakers outnumber trouble makers. Steve Bachrach teaches in the school's Film and Theater Academy, a self-c ontained "small learning community" on campus. He was in his classroom w ith students when the quad fight began. But a few minutes later another kid shouted, "Race riot brown on b lack!" Outside, Bachrach saw half a dozen kids scaling the school's chain-link fence, desperately trying to escape from campus.
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