In 1977 my parents left their beloved Compton, California, with tears in their eyes. They sobbed goodbyes to each of the gargantuan palm trees that had provided shade to them and their children. These palm trees lined the street and made them feel like they were living a California Dream. They had moved from Great Falls, Montana, to South Central Los Angeles after my father had been honorably discharged from the Air Force. They had sought a warmer climate after they had been decimated by those brutal Montana winters. Now they were saying goodbye as they prepared for the onslaught of howling arctic winds that swept across Minnesota.
No longer would they be able to enjoy the bright green year-long lawns that everyone in their neighborhood cherished. They knew that mounds of snow would fill the expansive landscape of their new home. White was all they would see, literally and figuratively, when they moved from this multicultural bastion.
They hugged their neighbors and shed tears. Embraces that lingered longer than they should. Empty promises of future visits hung in the air. My parents were not the core of the community but valuable members. They were good neighbors. My mom would tutor the neighborhood children who needed just a little more encouragement and watch children when their parents sought a much-needed date night. They had found their people and were hanging on to what they had forged with all their might, but Minnesota was pulling them away.
My parents had aspired to live in this Los Angeles suburb for years. Compton was seen as a modern-day black middle-class success story. Black leaders had made the pilgrimage to Compton and blessed it with their approval. My folks had scrimped and saved to afford to buy their dream home in this aspirational community.
Bea and Bob had clawed their way out of the ranks of black poverty. White and black poverty are distinctly different types of poverty within the United States. Indulge me as I return to this point later.
My parents grew up in abject poverty in rural areas of this nation. In their mid-thirties, they found themselves firmly within the nurturing bosom of the middle class. My father worked the night shift for the increased rate of pay while my mother taught at a Catholic school in Compton.
Finally, they were able to purchase their dream home. It remains their favorite home (they have owned seven different homes). Even though they are aging in place in a McMansion in the city where my mother was raised, this home in Compton, California, was their everything.
They had achieved the American Dream in Compton. They had overcome a meager existence that had been foisted upon them because of their race. They had two sons and even a beautiful cocker spaniel named Speedy. This was their dream home, and now they had to say goodbye.
They hoped that both of their sons might one day live in Baldwin Hills, California, the Beverly Hills, for black people. They had that dream for their children, but for them, Compton, in the 1970s, was the mountain that they had dreamed of summiting. Once on the mountaintop, they planted their flag in victory.
The schools were pristine. The roads were well maintained. The neighbors were friendly, helpful, middle-class families that were rapidly expanding with baby after baby. My mother spent a lot of time going from one baby shower to the next.
Compton was integrated at this time. Blacks, whites, and Latinos all lived as harmoniously as possible during this time.
There were few bars on the windows, and metal security doors were absent from homes.
Children would play outside until the street lights came on. Neighbors watched over all of the children as if they were their own. The sense of community was unshakable.
This was my parents' Compton. A utopia not marred by police violence or scarred by an uprising like Watts. It was the most vibrant community that my parents had ever lived in. They loved Compton.
However, in 1977 my father received a job transfer that would bring our family to Apple Valley, Minnesota. They would find a place behind the veneer of smiling white faces, hearts as cold as the Minnesota winters. The white people they had met in Compton were kind and sincere, unlike the Janus-inspired white people they now called neighbors in Minnesota.
The warmth and congenial nature of the white people in Compton had caused them to become lulled into a sense of unpreparedness for the white people that surrounded them in Apple Valley. The white people in Compton were acclimated to living with people of all races. They had been proximate to black people. Where their new white neighbors had never known a black family before, all they had were the racist tropes that they had willfully ingested or absorbed through osmosis living in America.
Slowly, my parents became more and more isolated from the community they now found themselves dwelling in. This made the allure of Compton even stronger and their separation more painful.
Compton, for them, was frozen in the amber of 1977.
I often write about how all groups of people trade in conspiracies. Right now, too many white people believe that a secret cabal of powerful white people has a latticework of tunnels that run beneath Washington, D.C. that allows them to ferry trafficked children undetected for the purpose of them being able to feast upon their blood. They share stories that white people will be replaced, and once they are, they will be made into slaves. These are some of the ridiculous conspiracy theories that white folk believe.
On the other hand, black folks' conspiracies consist of the FBI playing a role in the assassinations of many prominent black civil rights leaders: Martin, Fred, Malcolm, and others.
However, I want to talk about the one that Snowfall touched upon: the CIA flooded the streets of South Central Los Angeles with cocaine in an effort to fund illegal wars in South America.
Chemists were employed to turn cocaine into crack. The profits generated by crack created greed in those who imported the cocaine, those who distributed it, those who used the ancient art of alchemy to turn coke into the more potent and addictive crack, and ultimately those who sold it.
Crack was highly addictive, more affordable, and was unleashed upon unsuspecting black communities, terraforming them into hellscapes populated with violence and people in the throes of addiction. This lethal combination and factories being removed from the center of urban centers bred a destitute dystopia that was difficult to escape—a vortex of despair.
The loss of good-paying skilled and unskilled labor jobs decimated many urban centers. The Great Migration was over, and the era of Mass Incarceration had begun. Black people are the only group of people in the United States to be refugees in their own country. Black people fled the hate and lawlessness of the South to the proverbial perceived greener pastures of the North, West, and Mid-West.
These areas of the country did not want any of these black people who had escaped the South to seek asylum within their borders. However, they wanted to maintain their air of superiority over the white people in the South, so they created a system of racist laws both in their intent and practice to control the black folk. The most notable example during this time period is the sentencing disparity between coke and crack. Even though you must have coke to make crack, white lawmakers decided to make the penalty for selling the latter more extreme. The punishment for distributing or processing crack was almost 100 times greater than cocaine. Five years in prison for five grams of crack, but you had to have 500 grams of cocaine to receive the same sentence.
Racist laws incarcerated so many black bodies; meanwhile, dying rural towns populated by white people needed some form of economic revitalization. To create a win-win situation, prisons started to sprout up in these desolate wastelands like dormant weeds after the rain and choke the life out of the community where the black bodies were shipped from. Black bodies were removed from the urban areas, and the rural white areas now had a steady source of jobs created by the rapid proliferation of prisons. The transfer of these black bodies diminished the political power where they were shipped from but bolstered the might of these rural areas.
The prison boom started in the 1970s and is just now starting to subside.
The confluence of the proliferation of firearms, an easily accessible new affordable potent drug, unemployment, and high profits resulted in increased violence, creating ghettos across America.
Further, those in the grasp of addiction did everything they could to obtain a high: prostitution, burglary, robbery, theft, fraud, and any other crime that could be done to obtain money to achieve another hit from the crack pipe.
Once vibrant areas were transformed into ghettos. A ghetto is a place that is plagued with violence, hard to escape, and very little opportunity.
The conspiracy I believe in is that the CIA turned suburbs like Compton into a ghetto by flooding it with crack. (Here is a fun fact: very few people know…more white people use crack than black people.).
In the very first episode of Snowfall, which takes place in 1983, we see a neighborhood in Compton before crack came through. We are treated with Bob and Bea McFadden’s Compton: verdant, vibrant, and vivacious (see the above photo).
Children outside playing, people working in their pristine yards full of lush green grass, expertly manicured shrubbery, and a cornucopia of flowers bursting in color. Everyone knows everyone and greets each other.
Now compare the same street to the last tragic scenes of Snowfall. Homes that were once open have been reinforced with steel and iron. Windows are now obstructed by bars. Security doors now adorn the facades of the homes, turning what was once an invitation for hospitality into an overt sign of incivility. Homes became fortresses.
Litter and trash are strewn about the streets. Rich lawns are now barren except for junk and blotches of weeds. Homes that once sheltered families are now abandoned. The withered husks of humans addicted to crack parade the streets in search of their next fix. Dealers congregate on the corners taking orders and passing out rocks.
Crack killed this thriving oasis, and we see it in the transformation of Franklin.
When we first meet him, he is handsome, intelligent, ambitious, and rooted in his community. We see him use his wits and courage to score his first brick and then use his connections to flip that brick to create a criminal enterprise.
What we fail to notice about this young man is that he, too, was an addict.
Franklin was like most addicts in the beginning. He was able to maintain while in the early phase of his addiction. Franklin worked hard, masking his dependency. Over time his behavior became more erratic, and his relationships started to fray. He was slowly losing the battle to addiction.
He was addicted to power and money. He expanded his criminal empire and got larger despite the warnings from his loved ones. He was fixated on getting money. That was his addiction, and when those prospects evaporated when his mother excised the cancer that had tormented her family and community, he came undone. Once Teddy was dead, he could not retrieve the fortune he had made selling crack in South Central Los Angeles.
Unable to fuel his addiction with power and money, he dulled it with alcohol.
He now was what he feared/hated the most: his father.
Professor Bruce Western states it better than I could ever dream in his criminally underread book Homeward. He writes on page 170:
"Black poverty, particularly in urban areas, is different from white poverty. Black poverty is built into the structure of neighborhoods and labor markets. Sociologists have described how the neighborhood environments of low-income blacks are usually disadvantaged compared to the neighborhood environments of other racial groups. Being black and poor relegates one to living with other poor people in a racially segregated neighborhood where the local unemployment rate is high, families are more likely to be led by single mothers, and street crime is common.
White poverty that touches the criminal justice system — concentrated among men who are loosely connected to families — is closer to skid row, rooted in mental illness, drug addiction, and the scarcity of treatment services."
This is what crack did to Compton. Crack took a thriving, middle-class community and corrupted it. Compton became a ghetto, and violence was lurking everywhere. The plentiful well-paying jobs moved eastward or overseas. Resources diminished, which created an environment where the stresses of hunger, addiction, and material want made violence more possible.
Poverty is violence.
Those who are impoverished are more likely to experience violence either as a witness, a victim, or a perpetrator. Unfortunately, many times it is as all three.
During the height of the crack epidemic, my parents would receive dispatches from their old neighbors informing them of what was happening. Many of my brother’s childhood friends from the neighborhood ended up incarcerated or dead. As the years piled up and as the War on Drugs raged, the missives became more infrequent until they stopped receiving any correspondence from their old neighbors.
Despite the news reports and newspaper articles, my parents still believed that their Compton existed. The Kennedys had Camalot; my parents had Compton. Unfortunately, both were destroyed by the mischievous ways of the CIA if you are prone to indulge in conspiracies.
In the summer of 1997, my parents and I flew to Los Angeles, California, where I would attend the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. They wanted to show me the old neighborhood and their former dream home. It had been twenty years since they had reluctantly departed Compton.
As we ventured deeper into South Central LA, I could see the look of shock and disappointment wash over their faces. Stunned silence and audible gasps as they saw a hollow shell of their beloved Compton. Their church was in disrepair. Barbwire crowned the ornamental iron fence that enclosed the school where my mom had taught. Abandoned cars lined the streets. Homes that were always adorned in fresh coats of paint were weathered and distressed from exposure to the sun and elements. The lawns were decorated with patches. Patches of weeds, dirt, dead grass, healthy grass, and junk.
Young men occupied the street corners wearing matching colors. My parents were heartbroken. They did not want to stop; they instructed me to keep going, so I drove to USC in complete silence.
We have all heard of white flight. When a neighborhood gets a certain amount of blacks, white people will start to abandon the neighborhood. The precise number of blacks is a secret. Perhaps, it is a proprietary formula that unscrupulous white people have used to make millions by convincing other white people that their neighborhood was about to be invaded by black people.
There was a term of art for this insidious practice called blockbusting. White people used various tactics to do this. Sometimes they would pretend to sound black and call homes and ask for overtly sounding black names and then ask what the address was and then inform the person that the black person they were looking for lived over one street. Other times they would send mail to the people’s homes advertising the oncoming onslaught of black families to their neighborhood. They would do all of this to engender fear in the white folks to get them to sell their homes cheaply to them. They would then sell the homes to other white families at a profit since they knew no black folks were moving into the community.
It was not until the 2010s that the first recorded cases of black flight took place in America. The influx of Latinos from Mexico and Central America caused black people to abandon Compton. Already weary from the crack epidemic, weakened from the 2008 implosion of mortgages after being targeted by predatory loan companies, black folks abandoned Compton.
My father turned 85 last week my mom will turn 86 soon. They are the last of their friends from that neighborhood still alive. One of the last people who knew what Compton was before crack came through. Despite that jarring escapade to Compton in 1997, which they both have decided to erase from their memory, Compton for them is frozen in time: 1977. A time when families took pride in their homes, neighbors watched out for everyone, jobs were plentiful, and the future was bright.
Compton was perfect and remains perfect in the hearts and minds of these two octogenarians.