Marqueece Harris-Dawson has a vision that he intends to become a reality. As the new councilman for Los Angeles’ 8th Council District, Harris-Dawson aims to transform his area into a destination for residents and businesses.
By focusing on key priorities, Harris-Dawson believes his vision will become an actuality in the sprawling district that houses more than 200,000 residents and extends as far north as 22nd St. and Western Ave., as far south as 117th Street and Vermont Avenue, as far east as Pace Avenue and E. 103rd St. and west to S. La Brea Ave. and Stocker St.
The enormity of the area and diversity of its challenges might shake a lesser man, But Harris-Dawson is confident he can accomplish his goals in partnership with his City Council colleagues, city departments and community leaders.
“Number one, we’ve got to have responsive government. When people call, they have to know they’re going to get an answer by a human being that knows something about where they live and that their problem will either get resolved or there is clear communication to them when it will be resolved or why it won’t be resolved,” he says.
To ensure responsiveness from his office, he added, “We’re putting together a really dynamic team, hiring people who grew up in the district or are long-time residents and have a lot of experience, both in the city and the community.”
Quality jobs for residents are also important to Harris-Dawson, who wants to make sure that residents of the 8th District apply for jobs when the city does targeted hiring
“We’re bringing dozens and dozens of new (city) employees every budget cycle and sometimes between budget cycles. I think it is in the interest of our community to have employment.”
In addition, Harris-Dawson plans to work closely with Metropolitan Transit Authority, University of Southern California, AEG, Kaiser Permanente, and other firms to increase the number of vendor contracts to local South Los Angeles businesses as well as summer job programs for teens and young adults.
Another top agenda item for Harris-Dawson is improving the appearance and quality of life in the district by establishing “clean and safe corridors.”
“I want to make sure that our intersections that are traveled by the most people are clean and safe and become investment opportunities for people who are developing viable businesses. Sidewalks are done, graffiti painted, trees are trimmed, that businesses are not engaged in contributing to blight.
“We think those things, taken together, will not just create quantitative change, but also create qualitative change and you’ll feel entirely different about this intersection,” he said.
“Those things make a difference in your quality of life. They change not only the outlook of long-term residents, but they change the outlook of young people as well. When young people see that things can get better, I think it changes their whole trajectory.”
Thanks to his background as a community activist and organizer, Harris-Dawson is skilled in recruiting people to support a cause and he believes that experience will aid him in engaging constituents to participate in realizing his vision of the 8th District.
“What’s nice about Los Angeles is [that] no one will stand up and say, ‘Things are bad, and I don’t really care how they look.’ It’s a good environment. It’s a better environment for us than we’ve seen historically. We must capitalize on that as much as possible.”
And Harris-Dawson is encouraging residents to join him in his efforts.
“One important thing I want L.A. Watts Times readers to know is that we need you more involved now more than ever. One of the things I fear people will say is, ‘Oh, we got Marqueece in, so that great,’ and that’s the end of it.
“Our power and influence on the City Council is based on our willingness and our ability to bring people power to bear. So, we need your involvement. I encourage people to come to City Council meetings. People underestimate the power of speaking during public comment and raising an issue because others are listening. We need to be a district where people should expect to see us there when important things are being discussed,” insisted Harris-Dawson.
“We also need you at your block club meetings, active in your church, active in your fraternity or sorority or whatever it is you are involved in, social or justice organizations. We need you involved. We need you at the table to hear your voice.”
Chants of ‘a new day at MLK’ filled the air as thousands came together to celebrate the reopening of Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital in Watts on Friday, Aug. 7.
The audience was full of California officials including Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, California Attorney General Kamala Harris, California State Senator Isadore Hall, III, Congresswoman Janice Hahn, Assemblymember Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, Assemblymember Mike A. Gipson, Inglewood Mayor James Butts and Councilmember Curren Price to name a few. While the hospital has been opened since July 7, last Friday was a day used to celebrate everyone that made it possible.
“Today’s event was historic, it was epic,” said Nomsa Khalfani, vice president of programs and strategic initiatives at California Family Health Council. “It’s a new day at MLK in South L.A. and I’m so proud to be a part of this experience. It symbolizes perseverance, hope and the need to make sure that we continue to have resources in our communities.”
The new hospital comes complete with state-of-the-art equipment and 131 beds. It is a private non-profit hospital that accepts patients regardless of their insurance status and citizenship. The hospital also accepts patients regardless of ability to pay as their focus is not on profit, but on patient care. Thousands of people were interested in contributing as 650 people were hired out of 14,000 applicants.
“It’s not easy to open a new hospital, in fact it’s one of the greatest challenges in the medical field,” said Manuel Abascal, chairman of the board at MLKCH “There are many words that start with a P, profit, power politics, but we are about the patients and what we can do for others. I have heard thousands of ‘how can we help?’ and not one ‘what’s in it for me.’”
Much like the goals of the previous hospital, the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital is made by the community for the community. The majority of construction workers who spent 1.3 million hour building the hospital live within five miles of the hospital. With the recent 50th anniversary of the Watts Riots, members of the community look at this new hospital as a symbol of how much progress has come.
“We would have to take two busses to get to the next hospital. If your child had asthma, they would die before they got there. If you were in labor, you had to have the baby before you went to the hospital,” said “Sweet” Alice Harris, founder of Parents of Watts. “And when you talk about Watts riots, we rioted because we were hurt. We ain’t hurt no more, and we don’t have to act out. Oh, this is the day, we don’t have to worry.”
Coming off the backs of the Watts riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the King/Drew Medical Center was opened in 1972. After decades of operation, it closed in 2007 due to failure to meet basis standards. Within the next year, there were talks to rebuild the hospital and by 2011, Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas began leading master plan community meetings to get construction started.
“When I was elected in ’08 and saw that this hospital said closed, I vowed and promised to myself that I would work with whoever it was to make this hospital a success again,” said California State Senator Isadore Hall, III. “And I am proud to stand here today to witness a new phoenix rising again from the ashes of this once closed hospital. Today we begin a legacy of health and future for generations to come.”
There is a large sculpture of a puzzle piece that stands in front of the new building. It is there to symbolize that this is just the beginning for the new hospital. While it creates great opportunity, it is just one puzzle piece in what is yet to come.
“MLK Community Hospital is a dream job. It’s a new day at MLK and for all of us, it’s not about what was done in the past, but what we’re going to do moving forward,” said Stan K. Frencher, Jr., director of surgical outcomes and quality at MLKCH. “As we open this new hospital it’s a piece of the puzzle in the practice of medicine here in South Los Angeles. We want to provide high-quality, compassionate collaborative care that focuses on the patient and their family. We want to embrace the community in prevention as opposed to only being reactive.”
This hospital is just the beginning for what Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas has in store.
“Expect to see a new recuperative care-center. Expect to see a new liberal office building. Expect to see a Rosa Parks transit center, because she sat down, the least we could do is stand up. Expect to see a new Willowbrook Library and finally expect to see the restoration of a Level 1 trauma center in the south central Los Angeles community,” Ridley-Thomas said.
Members of the community see this as a day of progress. They see it as a day that they didn’t expect to come.
“It’s so appropriate during this time that we have an uplifting event. A lot of us were skeptical, but to be here today and see that it is open, it is a glorious day,” said Jimmie W Gray, a Los Angeles City fire commissioner who lived in the community during the Watts riots.
They also say that it restores hope in the community.
“Today let people know in the community that people have not forgotten us. People here feel so helpless and so hopeless, there’s so much going on in their lives, to see something like this is a ray of hope,” said Kecia Woods, 45, a special education teacher who grew up in this community. “It shows that there’s still hope and they’re not going to leave us out here and they’re going to continue to help and support this community.”
For more information about the new hospital, visit www.mlkch.org.
He had been using his step-father’s name when he died. That’s why no one knew who he was. When Marquette Price passed away at the age of 42 on December 20, 1986, it took four days for the coroner’s office to positively identify him. “Positive” may not be the right choice of words.
Marquette Frye had been known as the young man who sparked the Watts Uprising on the evening of August 11, 1965, after being stopped by a police officer for suspicion of drunk driving. It was the infamy of that event that led Frye to use the name Price for the ensuing 20-plus years.
Frye had been driving with his brother Ronald on Avalon near 116th Street when he was stopped by motorcycle officer Lee Minikus. Minikus said Frye had been driving erratically and had Frye perform a field sobriety test, which he failed. The reports of what happened next vary: some say that Ronald walked to the family’s home not far away and got their mother Rena Price; others say friends alerted Mrs. Price that her son was being arrested. By the time Mrs. Price arrived on the scene a small crowd had gathered around her son in the hot afternoon sun.
Whether the police were brutalizing Frye and Mrs. Price or Frye resisted arrest, egged on by his mother, are the two competing stories of what happened that day. What we do know is that rumors spread and the crowd began to increase from approximately 50 people to more than 300.
Officer Minikus had radioed for a patrol car to take Frye into custody. Accounts of that evening state that Mrs. Price assaulted one of the officers who was handling her son, which in turn caused her to be arrested. By the time additional officers arrived, the angry crowd was estimated to be at around one thousand persons.
The rest, as they say is history. One of the problems, however, is whose history it is.
When Frye died in 1986 the L.A. Times headline stated “Marquette Frye, Whose Arrest Ignited the Watts Riots in 1965, Dies at Age 42.”
Similarly, when Frye’s mother passed away in June of 2013, the New York Times headline said “Rena Price Is Dead at 97; Catalyst for the Watts Riots.”
And a 1990 L.A. Times piece on “Watts: Then and Now” that spoke with a retired Lee Minikus, was headlined “To CHP Officer Who Sparked Riots, It Was Just Another Arrest”
While media places the blame for the uprising on individuals, others will tell you the cause was systemic.
“Nothing much has changed as far as the relationship between the Black community and the police,” said Bilal Ali. As a teenager, Ali was an eyewitness to the six days of anger that left 34 people dead, staying close to his uncle. As a young adult he worked as a project director for the Coalition Against Police Abuse, co-founded by Michael Zinzun, to address the need for community control of police in the Black community.
“There are more Black police officers now; that hasn’t changed anything [in regard to how Blacks are treated],” Ali continued. “The relationship with the police is still one of a ‘siege mentality,’ one of ‘Us against Them.’ The entire Black community is seen as a ‘suspect’ in the eyes of the police, and this is an entrenched culture with the Los Angeles Police Department which has been pointed out time and time again,” Ali said.
University of Houston professor Gerald Horne agrees. “Unfortunately, despite some progress over the last half century, the conditions that sparked people to come to the streets in 1965 are still with us: particularly police brutality,” Horne said.
Author of “The Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s,” Horne spoke at Holman United Methodist Church on Aug. 8, along with Melina Abdullah of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, in a program marking the anniversary of the uprising.
“But also, homelessness, rising rents, diminished life expectancy, unemployment; the list is long,” said Horne, in terms of the other causes of urban unrest.
Horne noted that the Watts Uprising also provides ‘perpetual lessons’ for us today. Those lessons include “the need for enhanced organization and militancy, and the need for international outreach” for the Black community.
Police brutality is the most well known cause of the Watts Uprising but the anger and despair of the residents was longstanding and linked to numerous other symptoms.
Quality healthcare, education, and employment (as well as a lack of it) have been recurring issues for Watts and South Los Angeles. Loretta Jones hints that part of the problem may be one of mislabeling.
“They talk about giving [to] us equally, and I’m saying that ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ are two different things. Our community needs ‘equity,’ said Jones.
The Chief Executive Officer of Healthy African American Families elaborated that “equity means that I am going to have what I need. 50 years later we’re still waiting for the right amount of funding to be put into our schools. We’re still waiting for decent jobs with an unemployment rate hovering at around 32% while nationally its about 12%. We’re still waiting when African Americans are dying of diseases first, before anybody else, because of a lack of health care.”
Efforts to address the various symptoms have taken a variety of forms over the years, the most notable being the establishment of Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, where Jones also serves on the faculty. The other notable addition is Martin Luther King Hospital.
“The civil unrest we saw in 1965 came from residents' needs and demands for better healthcare, housing, education and constitutional policing. In the aftermath, a brand new hospital rose to provide this community access to healthcare,” stated Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas.
In an e-mail to the Sentinel, Ridley-Thomas cautioned that while progress had been achieved, more needed to be done. “ … To be sure, many inequities remain including health indicators that show residents in South LA suffer disproportionately from medical maladies like high cholesterol, diabetes and heart disease. So, our work is not finished. We will continue to push for more resources for this community and to ensure health and wellness for all.”
The Watts Labor Community Action Coalition (WLCAC) also arose from the ashes of the Uprising. Founded by Ted Watkins, the organization has become a staple institution providing much needed resources to area residents, including Headstart, Senior Citizens nutrition and day care, after school programs for at risk youth, handy worker and weatherization, mental health care, and numerous other critical services.
“… the evidence of poor public policy points to the trail of broken promises experienced by the people of Watts. The people of Watts are generally resilient, considering all that has happened to the place they live in, the schools they attend, the injustices that are routinely perpetrated against them and the geo-political isolation that Watts finds itself stuck in,” according to Tim Watkins, son of WLCAC’s founder.
“There has never been a Watts area representative elected onto the Los Angeles City Council and it’s not likely that there ever will be one as long as voter apathy and general frustration diminishes hope for that kind of powerful change. Even so, the people of Watts are remarkably hopeful for a better way of life and trudge on despite looming conversations about development and who’s coming next to call Watts home,” Watkins said.
Economic development, though far from ideal, has not been absent. Marva Smith Battle-Bey, director of the Vermont-Slauson Economic Development Corporation, declared that although seven shopping centers have been built since the Uprising throughout Watts, Willowbrook and other areas of South Los Angeles, it is not enough.
“We have a community of more than half a million people [in these areas and] those centers cannot service all of the community. It is an improvement, but it is not enough. We still have far too many corridors of retail that are marginal, and businesses that are fledgling and we’ve lost a lot of our manufacturing industries.”
Like everyone else the Sentinel spoke with, Battle-Bey includes the areas outside of/surrounding Watts in her analysis. Her analysis is centered more on the people than the place. “In ’65, everywhere that Black people lived in Los Angeles was Watts,” said Kamau Daood. “When they put the curfew on, they put the curfew on every place that Black people lived … I was on the west side, near Crenshaw and Slauson, and we had shotguns [from National Guardsmen] pointed in our faces, and I saw the tanks rolling down Slauson. I was 15 then,” Daood said.
Actress Niecy Nash received her first Emmy nomination for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her portrayal as Denise ‘Didi” Ortley on the hit HBO show ‘Getting On’. Emmy winner Uzo Aduba (Orange Is the New Black) and Cat Deeley, (host of So You Think You Can Dance) announced the nominations live from the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles on Thursday, July 16, 2015.
Born Carol Denise Ensley, the Emmy nominated actress Niecy Nash reminds you of a sister who will tell you the hard truth while simultaneously making you laugh, and then engulfing you with a big hug right after she straightens you out. You have seen her on “Judging Amy”, “Reba”, “CSI”, “Reno 911”, on the tenth season of “Dancing with the Stars”, “Hot in Cleveland”, as host of the reality series “Clean House”, “The Soul Man “(opposite Cedric the Entertainer) and as a co-star in the critically acclaimed film “Selma”.
In 2010, Nash won a Daytime Emmy® in the Outstanding Special Class category as Producer/Host of “Clean House: The Messiest Home in the Country”.
The California native spoke with The Sentinel about her Primetime Emmy nomination.
Los Angeles Sentinel (LAS): Congratulations! How excited are you?
Niecy Nash (NN): Words cannot express how excited I am. I wasn’t campaigning for it, so it’s especially nice to be honored for my work.
LAS: Does this nomination feel different from your previous Daytime Emmy nomination?
NN: It does feel different because of all the women of color who are nominated this year. Diversity is a high priority for the television industry and I believe that the red carpet should reflect the real work that’s happening in front of the camera. I’m really happy about the recognition that women of color are receiving this year for their work.
LAS: Tell us about ‘DiDi’ your character on the HBO series Getting On.
NN: I love playing nurse DiDi! She is so different from other characters that I’ve played. She’s grounded, so down to earth. There is no glamour with DiDi, she’s a solid woman who wouldn’t be the same if she were all dolled up and fabulous. I would describe DiDi as the calm against all the crazies.
LAS: Getting On follows the hospital staff as they struggle to provide quality healthcare in the long-term care geriatric ward. What is it like working as a part of an ensemble cast for HBO?
NN: We have a great cast and it’s been a joy to work with them. It’s absolutely teamwork that makes DiDi who she is. Laurie Metcalf, Alex Borstein, and Mel Rodriguez are wonderful actors and I share this nomination with them. HBO is very detailed and very good at what they do. Prior to the first day of shooting, I made rounds with real nurses, and experienced real medical training. The preparation helped me to form my idea of who DiDi is and how she would handle different situations. DiDi is very different from me but I would say she high on my list of favorite characters that I have played.
LAS: You are also an accomplished actress and author () any new books on the horizon?
NN: Not yet…I’ve been pretty busy (thank you Lord) working on Soul Man and I have a new show premiering this fall on the FOX network – Scream Queens with KeKe Palmer.
LAS: Congratulations on your new show and the Sentinel wishes you well on your big night. As the summer whizzes by, if you had to describe a favorite summer activity/vacation, where would you go?
NN: Jamaica. Any summer activity that involves Jamaica, my husband plus friends equals a fabulous time.
The 67th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards Ceremony will air on Sunday, September 20th on the FOX Network.