After a five hour journey in a stifling Greyhound Bus I arrived in Los Angeles. Another hour and I was standing in the Capuchin Church of St. Laurence of Brindisi, in the middle of Watts. It was really a very large black ghetto and we were almost the only white people in the whole area.
Sensing my awkwardness Fr. Peter suggested we take a walk. So in the early evening, after he had changed into the Franciscan habit we walked through their parish in Watts. He introduced me to people. They welcomed me to Watts as if it was the grandest of resorts, and I began to feel at home.
This was only a year or two after Watts had been torn apart by racial riots. Much of it had been burnt down and the white residents had fled for their lives, sometimes hiding under trash in trucks. Yet for two months I walked the streets of Watts in perfect safety. It had all to do with my being introduced to Watts by Fr Peter in his Franciscan habit. He had pointedly put me under the protection of the Capuchin Friars.
The people were almost unfailingly friendly even in that place which experienced so much violence, poverty, unemployment, poor housing, poor transportation, and endemic corruption. Like the morning I was taking the twenty minute walk to the hospital dressed in black and wearing a Roman collar. Already it was very hot and I opened my collar. Soon I was stopped by a ten-year-old boy, who wanted to know if I was a policeman. Now, they shoot policemen. While I hastily replaced my roman collar, I hurried to deny I was a policeman. Why had he thought I was a policeman? Well apparently all policemen were white and they dressed in black. To reassure him I told him I was a priest. That puzzled him. ‘What is a priest?’ While I struggled with the theological problem of explaining what a priest was, he suddenly smiled and said, ‘You mean you are a preacher. We like preachers.’ We left it at that.
There was only one white couple left in that parish in Watts. Their family, long grown up, urged them to move elsewhere but they were adamant they would never move. How could they move, they asked, when all during the riots, when the homes of the whites were burnt, their home remained safe? It was safe because their black neighbours stood day and night, one in front of the house and another behind it, to protect them and their home. God, they knew, was with them in Watts.
John Looby, SJ
Editor