With So Much Pressure, Many Kids Can’t Be Children : LETITIA MOZEE

I came from a little place called Vicksburg, Miss. One day, we were going over to another town called Greenville to shop. We were in a hurry to get back home because I told the children we were going to a drive-in.

At the time, they had this one black drive-in, but on the way home we passed another drive-in for whites. My daughter said, “We don’t have to go all the way back home. We can go to the movies there.” My husband, Herman, and I didn’t know how to explain to her that we couldn’t go there because we were black.

Right then Herman decided that we would leave the South. So the following year he applied for grants from the National Science Foundation all over the country. He said we would move to the first place he received a grant. As fate would have it, it was a grant to study and teach science at UCLA, so we moved to Los Angeles.

We had only been living in Los Angeles for a short time when the Watts riots broke out. I remember coming home with the children from a movie on 190th Street. There were police cars everywhere. We didn’t know what was going on until we got home and turned on the television.

At that time, I was a substitute teacher at Manhattan Place Elementary School. I am still there, but it is much more difficult for me to do my job as a teacher now.

I spend most of my day dealing with the social and behavioral problems of my students. I find myself listening a lot more to my children. I try to take them all into my heart. Everything that they see and live through is still in their minds when they get to school. Then they have to put that aside and get up some motivation for academics.

My students share some very sad things. We do a lot of talking and a lot of writing. Sometimes, when they are brave enough, they will pour out their little hearts in group discussions. I try to get them all to have constructive input as to how they can make things better.

A lot of their problems have to do with the fact that their parents are working. Many of them have no father in the home, and then the mother has to work. With the mother at work, they have to go home alone. The older children have to pick up the smaller kids and take them home and take care of them until their mothers get home. And then at some point, they have to get their homework done.

They also have to deal with pressure from a lot of groups. I don’t like to use the word gangs, because a lot of the kids out there are not necessarily gang members. Sometimes it is just easier for the media to use the term gang. They think that that is going to sell more papers, have a bigger impact on white Americans if they use the word gang. Many of the things they report as gang-related have nothing to do with gangs.

Even with the so-called gangs, I still feel safe. I used to teach some of those kids. A lot of these young men have respect for people in the community, especially if the person has had some impact on their lives. Many of them are involved in gangs because there has been some kind of drastic disappointment somewhere in their lives that they can’t overcome. They are alone and afraid; they seek comfort and identity through joining a gang.

Some of them act out their problems in the classroom. They fight, break furniture. The kids fight so hard these days. They are so angry and they fight until they almost see blood.

A lot of these kids are recruited to sell or carry drugs. Many of them care a lot for themselves or have good guidance and climb above it. But when shootings happen in and around the school, that keeps the kids in fear.

Children shouldn’t have to see things like that. That is not part of growing up and I don’t see it as being normal. It is very hard for these kids to be children.