Watts Teach-In: “Restorative Histories” through Activist-Led Scholarship

What is the role of a historian? Is it to publish or perish? Often, the emphasis on research publications in the academy, specifically on Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities, manifests as gatekeeping, unreciprocated extraction, and a mining of cultural wealth that leads to a deep distrust of scholars and the academy, sometimes severing relationships. In California, the reality is a long history of historical trauma emerging from state violence and environmental racism inflicted on communities of color such as Oakland, Bakersfield, Stockton, San Francisco, San Pedro, and Los Angeles. For instance, when we think about the production, collection, and preservation of history in Southern California, how often are the personal stories of the Watts community included in the historical narrative? We have seen examples of what GVGK Tang called “columbusing,” the appropriation and extraction of community knowledge without reciprocity, by academics, organizations, and grant-funded public-facing events that have misrepresented BIPOC communities to claim authority over the historical narrative.¹ These acts of academics, treating communities as a new frontier to be discovered, explored, and exploited, have only widened the gap and deepened the barriers to maintaining healthy relationships with the communities we serve.

Drawing on collaborative authorship and a shared pedagogical vision, this article focuses on community-based work from Los Angeles, specifically dialogue- and action-based projects that emerged from our participation in a Watts Teach-In on “Black and Brown,” organized by senior human relations specialist Fidel Rodriguez in June 2022—as part of the “LA vs. Hate” initiative for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission—in conjunction with mother-son community organizers Wajeha Bilal and Daude Sherrills, lifelong Watts residents whose lived experiences and in-depth oral histories form the basis for this article.² The purpose of this community-organized dialogue was to dispel the myth that Black and Brown communities are unable to collaborate in Watts to find common ground in a shared history that impacts the next generation. Additionally, as we listened to Daude and Wajeha speak about the history of Watts, and the importance of the three pyramids located inside the train station, we realized that this teach-in could also be a way to preserve oral history narratives. Our collaboration with Fidel Rodriguez began nearly ten years ago, when Lani shared our public history project The Wall of Dialogue at the Rise Up social justice conference held at the California Endowment. Dawn has family ties to Watts and South Central, and her husband is a former Crip from Compton who was incarcerated as a young adult at the California Institution for Men in Chino. We understand that community stories from these spaces are often diminished or ignored, minimizing the work of history-makers like Daude and Wajeha in the community.

We were invited to collaborate with the Watts community because our previous work had demonstrated a community-centered pedagogy derived from deep kinships with students and grassroots organizers from the area. As public historians and community practitioners, we call for “restorative histories” that elicit the creation of spaces in which communities can empower themselves on their terms, while acknowledging the need to sustain a healthy reciprocal relationship that repairs historical trauma and rebuilds trust among community stakeholders. State violence is the economic, social, and political conditions that seek to perpetuate a cycle of poverty and violence in our communities while denying agency, identity, space, and the ownership of community history and cultural wealth. We engage in a skills-based, active-learning pedagogy that prepares students to think critically about history and community. Founded in 1947, Cal State LA is one of the most culturally diverse four-year institutions in the country, located at the intersection of the largest Latino and Asian communities in the nation and close to the largest African American community in California. The majority of Cal State LA students are the first in their families to attend college, and many are first generation. Our mostly working-class students emerge from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds, and our project-based learning activities center the community and give students ownership of their work in a way that an exam never could. Many of our students reside in South Los Angeles, and our pedagogy remains centered on the community. We move the practice of teaching California history away from the lectern, journal subscriptions, and the university setting, to amplify the voices of communities and people that are often silenced and omitted from the history textbooks. Working in collaboration with the Autry Classroom Curators program, Dawn and her students developed a 2018 photography exhibit at the Autry Museum—We Are the West, Too!—that focused on identity, urban history, barriers, community memory, and public space. Watts was one of the communities featured in the exhibition.

Our project delivered a holistic and non-hierarchal dialogue in which every stakeholder had an equal voice in the space, so that the emerging work honored the experiences of the community members who advised us. This collaborative work emerges from conversations with members of the Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles, with the clear understanding that the production and preservation of knowledge, culture, and community history is not an exclusive right of historians in ivory towers. We recognize that the ownership of the cultural production rests with the communities themselves; and that, as educators, we need to be welcomed into community spaces and be mindful of not abusing our power when working with BIPOC communities. We seek to move the practice of documenting histories away from the university setting and into community spaces, to amplify and support marginalized voices that have not had the opportunity to tell their own stories. Historians like Howard Zinn, and scholars like Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Paulo Freire, and Tara Yosso, have issued critiques of historians, archivists, and educators who sustain the status quo, silence the past, and diminish and devalue the cultural wealth and stories of communities. Joining in the existing rich dialogue about public history and the community, we share our pedagogical framework with educators interested in utilizing digital methodologies and collaborative projects to strengthen community partnerships that have historically been damaged by academics and practitioners who have exploited their relationships with, and the cultural wealth of, BIPOC communities. We focus on shared space that denotes a power shift in the relationship between the academy and BIPOC communities. As educators, we place value in people who have been erased or devalued by an exclusionary practice that has power over which narratives are told and which stories remain hidden.

Emerging from the civil rights consciousness of the Vietnam War era, the term teach-in denoted a variant from of protest, related to the sit-in, that took place on a college or university campus as a means of providing lectures, debates, and discussions to raise awareness on social and political issues. The Watts Teach-In that we participated in brought scholars, activists, artists, and community members together in dialogue to plan an artivism mural project at a key local landmark, the Metro Blue Line’s 103rd Street/Watts Towers train station. Beginning in July 2022, community artists Angel Misteralek and Showzart will begin work on a mural, to extend nearly four blocks, that will feature a visual history of Watts developed by the community. Participants were asked what is missing from the story of Watts and suggested themes, like the area’s underground springs and the importance of shared cultural space, that could be included in the community mural. Other participants mentioned historical traumas, including the policing of Black and Brown bodies that led to the 1965 Watts Rebellion, “Charcoal Alley,” and environmental stressors. Several participants mentioned the problem of “outsider” interpretations of the history of Watts that did not honor the community. And many participants circled back to the importance of the railroad/train station as the “cultural crescent” of the Watts community.

Who is at the table to discuss the history of Watts? More importantly, though, who is not at this table, and what can educators do to ensure that our pedagogy and community work remain inclusive of BIPOC communities that have historically been silenced in the archives and the curriculum? These questions led to an oral history interview on July 6, 2022, with Daude and Wajeha to further engage community history, and to provide the Sherrills family an opportunity to digitally preserve Wajeha’s story in the college archives. In preparing for that interview, we found that the description of the Watts train station as the “cultural crescent” of the community was apt—it is undeniably a key feature of this community. Additionally, the Watts narrative is often male-focused and cis-gendered, and the community work of Black Muslim women tends to be excluded. By focusing on Wajeha’s oral history testimony and her role in preserving the historic Watts Station, the old station building next to the current Metro station, we are honoring the lived experience, a rich resource rooted in resistance to a white supremacist government in southern and western U.S. history.

The Watts Metro station is the home base of Build Plus Community Marketplace, Inc., a nonprofit operated by founder Wajeha along with her son Daude, to promote the general welfare and economic development of low-income people in Watts.³ Since 1989, mother and son have focused on community development in Watts for poor, working-class, and chronically unemployed residents in the Jordan Downs projects. In Wajeha’s words:

Historically, the railroad system in the United States connected states to the larger national markets. It has various meanings, including oppression and exploitation of the Chinese as well as the destruction of an indigenous landscape. However, for black folk, the railroad became a means of escape from an oppressive society with Jim Crow laws, a means of migrating to the West Coast. Wajeha indicated that escaping the South was highly traumatic. In her words: “We went through a lot of trauma just to get here and we couldn’t just hop on a commercial train freely. When we migrated, we couldn’t act like we were leaving even when we really were. We had to use the underground railroad called the Green train. There were no tunnels or underground, the train was the color green. This train brought us into Union Station Los Angeles on First Street and Alameda.”

Indeed, the train became a haven for many Black Americans escaping the South during the Jim Crow era. It represented the safety and protection of a community. But upon arriving at their destination, black folks encountered other harsh conditions in Los Angeles. In the 1940s, the Second Great Migration brought migrants, like Wajeha and her parents, from segregated states to California in search of better economic opportunities. World War II opened war industries for thousands, which led to the development of several large housing projects designed by renowned African American architect Paul Williams, starting with Pueblo del Rio and later including Hacienda Village, Nickerson Gardens, Jordan Downs, and Imperial Courts. In the case of Watts, Wajeha expressed the following:

Watts attracted Mexican and Mexican American traqueros (railroad workers) as well as Black male laborers who worked on the railroad, including as Pullman car porters. By the early 1960s, the Watts projects had become nearly 100 percent black, as “white flight” migrants relocated to new suburbs outside the central city. With industrial jobs eventually disappearing from Watts, and the projects housing more poor families, the widening poverty gap began to fester with a deeper historical trauma rooted in state violence, environmental racism, and heavy policing. These tensions erupted in the 1965 Watts Rebellion, resulting from the arrest of an African American man, Marquette Frye, by a white California Highway Patrol officer on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.

Whereas the Watts train station had symbolized access and hope for many African Americans leaving the South during World War II, from the 1970s to the 1990s, the train tracks became a marker that divided the community into gang territories between the Bloods and the Crips, until a Cease-Fire Peace Treaty was signed in 1994. Gang-violence prevention specialist Daude Sherrills was instrumental in both the Watts Rebellion and the Cease-Fire Peace Treaty and has dedicated his life to improving his community. In Daude’s words:

Daude also discussed his participation as a former Crip and his instrumental role in negotiating a Peace Treaty in 1992 among four influential gangs: Watts Circle City Piru Bloods, Bounty Hunter Watts Bloods, Grape Street Watts Crips, and PJ Watts Crips. During the mid-1970s, two boys in junior high school got into an altercation. One boy on the west side of the train tracks, considered to belong to the Bloods, stabbed a boy from the Crips, and this incident sparked retaliation that turned Watts into a site of territorial gang wars divided by the railroad tracks. Daude recounts:

After leaving the Crips in 1987 and briefly relocating to San Diego before moving back to Watts after six months, Daude refocused his energy by working with his brother, Aqeela, at California State University Northridge, where they began to organize for the Black Student Union. They began to partner with pro-Black organizations and organized a series of meetings with Louis Farrakhan and Jim Brown. Daude recalls: “Us and Twilight from the bloods started communicating that we called ourselves the Third Dynasty. As a group we read a lot about Egyptian culture and medicine. We also started researching our family history. We started learning about systems and reeducating ourselves about getting more tax money back and strategies to improve our communities.”

Following the 1992 South Central uprising, Daude recognized the importance of this moment to facilitate impactful change in Watts. He explains:

The gangs’ peace treaty emerged from Watts, as influencers found common ground in shared decision-making for the sake of their children. In Daude’s words:

Wajeha and Daude continue to work toward preserving the legacy of the historic Watts train station through various means, including outreach for the Watts Gang Task Force and partnering with nonprofits such as Global Day of Compassion and the Watts Life car club (lowrider enthusiasts who support the gang truce), with youth gang prevention as a platform for peace and unity in the neighborhoods. Daude mentioned that there are still challenges to preserving the original design of the Watts Cultural Crescent project. In his words:

Achieving the Watts Cultural Crescent project’s goals remains Wajeha and Daude’s priority, with a strong vision to formally institutionalize and memorialize the historic train station as the hub of the Watts community, where Build Plus is striving to maintain the art, culture, and history of the people.

We have highlighted Wajeha and Daude as two important Watts voices to demonstrate recent community actions and trends in Watts and the emergence of its historic train station as a beacon for Los Angeles with multiple promises, including access, hope, and renewal. This article also illustrates a continuing and growing need in our field: ensuring that when we teach the localized history of communities—in particular, those that have historically been glossed over and diminished—we keep the community at the forefront. The Watts Teach-In we attended was just one step, one conversation in an ongoing dialogue with this community that brings activist-led scholarship to the fore while creating art interventions against hate in all of its manifestations, to reclaim culture and heal from traumas that community members have experienced. Moreover, the teach-in clearly demonstrated that BIPOC communities can create stories without having an academic institution or its representative come in to rearrange the story. Therefore, our role as public historians is to work alongside the community to support “restorative histories” from the ground up, created by the people living there. We believe that the field of public history is a critical tool to provide a platform that amplifies Black women, like Wajeha, and their roles in preserving a community narrative while also reconnecting generations to their histories. The teach-in event clearly illuminated how Watts is a sacred space and cultural crescent that needs to be remembered and articulated.