South Los Angeles remains mostly untouched by burglars amid civil unrest, but a local resident decided to clean the community, which has been devastated by past riots.
The neighborhood cleanup startedat the corner of Western and Florence avenues and stretched to Manchester Avenue. It was just blocks from the epicenter of the rioting that exploded in 1992 after a jury cleared four LAPD officers in the beating of Rodney King.
The uprisings left over 1,000 buildings damaged, with a cost for the wreckage estimated at more than $1 billion. On as protests continued over the death of George Floyd, his neck pinned under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer now charged with second-degree murder — the South L. A. community undertook a local cleanup.
Residents and organizers, from the outset of the Floyd protests, aimed to see that the neighborhood didn’t see a repeat of the devastation that occurred a generation ago. Friday’s cleanup, for resident Diamond Jones,28, and others, was an important and symbolic step meant to contribute to progress being made in a place they love.
Jones said she felt like South L. A. had “never recovered from those riots because, if you look at our community, there’s still abandoned buildings, there’s still not a lot of jobs.”
Look around, she said, and there’s still a shortage of grocery stores or restaurants that offer healthful food.
“It bothers me that certain [affluent] communities, no matter how damaged they are, will be OK,” but it’s not the same for minority neighborhoods, said Jones, a marketing coordinator for Forever 21 and owner of the clothing brand Nior.
Volunteers of all backgrounds — including several Latino residents who live in the area — arrived at the cleanup with brooms, rakes and other supplies to scrub graffiti off discolored walls, pull weeds from the sidewalks and load hefty piles of garbage into a rented dumpster. (One volunteer even pressure washed the sidewalks.)
Jones called the event a “peaceful protest” like the vast majority of demonstrations across the country that teemed with the promise of change. But there were no signs or chants.
