Relentless Pursuit Read Online Free PDF

Martin Luther King Jr. Locke, like all schools in the district, celebrated African American History Month each February.
    But the way of life in the neighborhood was Latino. Taco stands outnumbered soul-food takeouts. Billboards were written in Spanish. The majority of home buyers were Hispanic. Posters celebrating Latino history and culture started appearing in Locke’s hallways. The king and queen of the 2006 prom—along with every other member of the court—were Hispanic. (The principal personally intervened in the voting and announced a “tie” for one spot in the court so that at least one black face would appear in the commemorative photo.)
    The transition from black majority to Hispanic majority had not been a smooth one. Maribel Gonzalez, valedictorian of the Locke class of 1998, who went on to UCLA and joined Teach For America when she graduated, remembers that race riots occurred all four years of her time at Locke. After a while, she became inured to most of the racial jousting. But it was hard to forget the riot of 1997. Maribel was a junior. Fighting broke out between blacks and Latinos at lunch, and LAPD swat teams were called in. When order was restored and kids returned to class, a lockdown was declared. Cops surrounded the school, patrolled the nearby streets, and manned the traffic stops. When the bell rang at three o’clock, kids were released class by class. By the time Maribel left Locke that day, it was five-thirty. The incident that sparked the fracas? Two black students had inadvertently bumped into a Latino student, knocking a can of soda from his hands.
    When former student Corwin Twine returned to Locke as a teacher in 2001, he was shocked. “I couldn’t believe it,” he recalls. “Kids were shooting dice, having sex, doing drugs—it was like a freaking war zone. And there were certain people working here who were scared. You could tell by the way they talked to the kids.” Twine reassured one frightened white teacher: “Dude, they won’t mess with you. They kill a white guy, you know how many cans and rocks they gonna turn over here?”
    In 2005, the two cultures coexisted, uneasily. Most teachers made an effort to “integrate” the races in their classrooms. But outside, on the quad and the scruffy playing fields, the cultural turf was clearly demarcated. The handball courts belonged to the Latinos. The football field and basketball courts were all-black terrain. On the quad, Latinos would “kick” along the south boundary. Directly opposite, facing them, were the African American students. The cafeteria divided pretty much the same way: as you entered, it was blacks in the left-hand corner, Spanish speakers in the first few benches, special ed students tucked away in the right-hand corner. The area just outside the cafeteria—the eastern edge of the quad—was a kind of demilitarized zone bounded by two trees. The African American football players sat under one. Under the other was a group of Latinos, some of them athletes, too. The understanding was that between the trees there would always be peace. The treaty has yet to be broken.
    Even in 1967, when Locke was a spanking new $5.4 million school built on 25½ acres in the middle of a moldered community, closing the achievement gap for all the at-risk students it enrolled was going to be an uphill battle. The 1965 McCone Commission had found that the achievement test scores for students in the city’s disadvantaged neighborhoods, like Locke’s, were “shockingly lower” than the citywide averages—in all subjects and at all grade levels.
    But few could have imagined that forty years on so little would have changed. In the 2005–2006 school year, by virtually any and every measure—whether by state, federal, or private-research yardsticks—Locke was one of the lowest-performing schools in all of the Los Angeles Unified School