Trouble brewing in nearby Watts helped spur the settlement of middle-class blacks in Compton-which became known as "Hub City" because of its central location (today it sits amid five freeways and two ports). In the 1950s and early 1960s, the community was a magnet for migrants seeking suburban tranquility and blue-collar jobs. Kelvin Filer, a Compton Superior Court judge, grew up in the city, and remembers what it was like before the downhill slide. And that usually means crime." In other words, "Straight Outta Compton" is an album no one here seems all that eager to play again.
"But of course, if people can't eat, they're going to do what they need to survive. "Ninety-five percent of the people in Compton want to do the right thing," Compton's mayor, Eric J. And so Compton's leaders are pushing hard to stay one step ahead of forces they know could prove their undoing. But those residents know all too well that their hard-won gains could prove to be fleeting, given the howling winds of economic distress at the door. It's also a story of good, hardworking people, hungry to restore a sense of pride in their city.
And it involves excesses of violence so dramatic that the gang leaders themselves recoiled, and worked to calm things down. It's a tale of larger cultural trends, like the death of crack, and distinctly local initiatives, like gun buyback programs in grocery store parking lots. The story of Compton is not just what's changed, but how it's changed community policing opened a door, and community activists were well positioned to walk through it. "It's one of these communities that's really in the throes of change." "Compton is a fundamentally different place," says Stanford University historian Albert Camarillo, a Compton native who is working on an oral history of his hometown. Graduation rates are higher, and a recent canvassing effort counted more than 25 nonprofits targeted specifically toward youth, where a decade ago, there were few to none.Īnd that vacant lot off the freeway? Thanks in part to Compton's designation as an enterprise zone in 2006, it's been replaced by a $65 million suburban strip mall, whose palm trees and flower beds give it a look more reminiscent of Orange County than South Central. Residents walk dogs they go out at night. The change, say community members, is palpable. Along the way, blacks became a minority in Compton, which is 60 percent Latino today. Fridays, an outbreak of Starbucks and a natural-food store. Alongside the liquor stores and check-cashing stands are signs of middle-class aspiration: a T.G.I. There are fewer gunshots and more places for kids to go after school. But the number of homicides is at a 25-year low, slashed in half from 2005. The community is still poor, and unemployment is more than twice the national average. Two decades later, Compton has a new lease on life. The image of Compton as a defiantly violent ghetto was crystallized by the rap group N.W.A., whose 1988 album, "Straight Outta Compton," went multiplatinum, even though it was banned by many radio stations the record even attracted the attention of the FBI, which felt the group was inciting violence with its song, "F- tha Police." In 1989, a 2-year-old was gunned down in a drive-by as he wandered his front yard a 16-year-old was shot with a semiautomatic weapon as he rode his bike. murder capital, per capita, surpassing Washington with one homicide for every 1,000 residents-and the details were numbing. Drugs were rampant, and street-gang tensions had escalated into what historian Josh Sides describes as "a brutal guerilla war." The city became the U.S. It was prime real estate-except that, well, it wasn't.īy the 1990s, the mere mention of the name Compton had become so toxic that the nearby southern California suburbs had the city of 100,000 erased from their maps. Lampposts that once illuminated new cars and sale signs stood darkened, some tagged with gang graffiti. Surrounded by an eight-foot steel gate, the once-bustling auto dealership had become a haven for the homeless a place where people dumped trash, loitered, caused trouble. For nearly a decade, the entrance to the city of Compton, Calif., just off the 91 Freeway, was a huge, vacant lot, overgrown by weeds.
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