Straight outta Compton

In the late eighties and early nineties, Compton, a community of nearly two million people in Los Angeles County, California, had a bad reputation. The two best-known gangs in the United States, the Crips and the Bloods, both called it home. N.W.A.'s hometown ode, "Straight Outta Compton," shaped the city's image.\nBut the media overlooked the real story.\nStanford University professor of history Albert Camarillo lectured on Compton's history Tuesday afternoon as part of the History Department's Paul V. McNutt lecture series. \nCamarillo believes that the relations between the city's African-Americans and its growing Latino population foreshadows 21st century American racial politics.\nHistorically, Camarillo said, race relations have been "white and black." \n"You've got to take 'white' out of the equation," Camarillo said in a telephone interview. New patterns of immigration mean that race relations will be between different minority groups.\nCompton is an excellent example.\nWhen Camarillo was growing up in Compton, he lived in the city's only non-white area, a neighborhood of about a thousand Latinos, mainly Mexicans. But between his childhood and his research on the city's history, Compton changed from being almost entirely white to having a population with fewer than one percent Anglos. \nWhat triggered the change? Camarillo points to the devastating 1965 riots in Watts, just north of Compton, which left 34 dead and more than a thousand injured. This led to what he terms a "white exodus" from Compton. \nAs whites left, blacks moved in, seeing Compton as more desirable than L.A.'s traditionally black areas. Soon, the city had the only municipal government west of the Mississippi entirely run by black elected and appointed officials. \nYet by the early eighties, racial tensions were rising in Compton. The city was attracting waves of Latinos, who found themselves locked out of Compton's politics and society. Calls for greater integration grew louder as the city's Hispanic population increased, reaching two-thirds of the city's residents by 2000. But, until recently, the city's government remained entirely black.\nThis is Camarillo's new racial frontier. The dilemma for cities like Compton, Camarillo said, is simple: "Can these new minority-majorities establish coalitions that will allow them to live together and work together peacefully? Or will they repeat the same problems, issues and conflicts that have been characteristic of race relations historically?"\nCamarillo is cautiously optimistic. He points to the success of Compton's religious leaders in building bridges between the community's ethnic groups, and the city's new government has appointed a Latino as superintendent of the city's schools.\nBut other areas will face similar challenges. In Indiana, for example, the percentage of the state's population identifying themselves as "Hispanic" on census forms nearly doubled between 1990 and 2000, from 1.8 percent to 3.5 percent.\nMost of the growth in the state's Hispanic communities is taking place in the centers of the state's larger cities. Within a generation, Camarillo said, Hispanics could equal or outnumber blacks in Indianapolis. This raises a question: "What will be the relationship between new Hispanic immigrants and the more established African-American population?"\nThat's a question that nobody can answer yet.\nBut it's clear that Indiana's experience won't be exactly like Compton's. As IU Professor Jorge Chapa, director of the Latino Studies Program, said, "Hispanics aren't taking African-American positions of power in Indianapolis. [Blacks] aren't in control in Indianapolis the way they were in Compton."\nAnd, Indiana being Indiana, you can't take "white" out of our racial equation.\nCompton's civic leaders are struggling to tame the new racial frontier. The city is making progress with a situation unprecedented in American history.\nThe rest of the country will have to follow Compton's lead shortly.\nAnd the solutions to 21st century questions of racial politics won't be as simple as black and white.