Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa showed up at the latest unity rally in Harbor Gateway on Saturday. TV showed him wearing a black sweater, and the paper says he invoked the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A month ago on Monday, two 204th Street gangbangers are suspected of shooting and killing 14-year-old Cheryl Green just because she was black. Two kids, 18-year-old Jonathan Fajardo and 20-year-old Ernesto Alcarez, are facing hate crime charges for her death. Activists and community leaders who've been invested in "black-brown tensions" have been staging the usual rallies and roundtables. They did the same in Highland Park recently, where brown cholos "wanted all the blacks out" with a fatal resolve. But check these lines out in the new story from Harbor Gateway:
Since then, black residents have held several marches in the neighborhood, saying they are being besieged by a gang with a policy of ridding the area of African Americans.
This upset Latino residents, who said they had suffered abuses at the hands of blacks.
They noted that Arturo Ponce, 34, was gunned down outside his apartment on 205th Street the night of Dec. 5. Ponce, a cook, was known as hard-working and with no gang affiliation.
Grim and depressing, all of this. And angering, considering blacks and Latinos have lived side by side in this city since it was founded, share many of the same social and economic ills, and the cultures are so similar and complementary. There's now yet another Big Plan to stop gang violence in L.A. Where are our artists? Our writers? Check the newest post on race and gang violence from the hard-core good L.A. blog on gangs and crime, In The Hat. "In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." (MLK)