Relentless Pursuit Read Online Free PDF Page A

926,000, representing 12 percent of the population. Then began its inexorable decline.
    â€œThe plague hit,” explains Otis Yette, an assistant principal at Locke in 2005. “Crack cocaine descended upon us. Little gangs took over the neighborhoods. Murder was rampant. So the good people moved out. And the black working-class families disappeared.” The black folk left behind, says Yette, were those with the fewest options open to them. Spanish-speaking immigrants—some legal, many not—began to move into the areas vacated by working-and middle-class blacks.
    Zeus Cubias was one of the newly arrived in 1982, the oldest of three kids born to a homemaker and an upholsterer from El Salvador. The Cubias family settled into an apartment at Imperial and Main—just blocks from Locke—because it was the only affordable housing they could find. Within five months, little Alex, as he liked to be called, was speaking English. By the time he got to Locke High School in 1988, he was just another “knucklehead”—a kid who believed that if he attended school three days straight, he was entitled to take the rest of the week off. He spent more time on the handball courts than he did in the classrooms.
    By then, the school had lost its luster. Over time, Locke’s initially high test scores and graduation rates sank. The dropout rate rose. The school’s legendary music program declined. When Locke got noticed at all, it was not for music; it was for murder and mayhem. In 1987, Manuel Diaz, a sixteen-year-old tenth-grader, was shot while running from a cop. In 1988, a sixteen-year-old ninth-grader named George Hernandez was hit by a gangbanger’s bullet. Seventeen-year-old Walter Stewart died in a gang shooting the year after that.
    The violence hit home for Zeus when his cousin Spanky, a member of Los Hang Out Boys (LHOB) gang, was killed. Spanky had dropped out of school and was working at his father’s body shop just a few streets away from campus. One day a guy pulled up to the shop on a bicycle and said: “Hey, you Spanky?” Then he point-blank shot him dead. The shooter was a gangster, too. Word was out that Spanky had killed a rival homey days before. Spanky’s death was payback.
    After the shooting, Zeus wanted out. Out of South Los Angeles and far away from the forces that had taken Spanky’s life. By then he had met the person who would change his life—an uncredentialied teacher of tenth-grade English at Locke. After Zeus wrote a paper on the movie
Batman,
which had been shown in class, the teacher pulled the wiry young Latino aside and gave him a graphic novel to read. Zeus devoured it, and before long he was reading William Faulkner short stories and taking AP classes. Cubias graduated from Locke in 1992 and started at the University of California at Santa Barbara that fall. He majored in math and decided to become a teacher. Once he was credentialed, he returned to the hood and got a job at his alma mater.
    When Cubias started at Locke—just twenty-one years after it opened—the student body was 78 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic. Four years after he graduated, the ratio was fifty-fifty. During the 2005–2006 school year, Hispanics at Locke outnumbered blacks two to one.
    Even as their numbers dwindled, blacks still enjoyed positions of power in the community. The local papers were black-owned; the administrative positions at Locke tended to be filled by African Americans. (For a few months during the 2005–2006 school year, there were two Spanish-speaking assistant principals on staff. By year’s end, one was gone and the other had announced she was leaving.) When visiting artists came to Locke to entertain at lunch, they tended to be black rappers. The homecoming festivities were largely a black affair. Murals on the outer walls of the handball courts, which were used exclusively by Latinos, honored black leaders such as Dr.