Prometheus 6

"My fear is that my people are not sufficiently dissatisfied to behave differently," he says. "If you don't have your act together, you can't collaborate effectively with anyone. And that's what we need to do. We need to have an agenda, not a monolithic agenda, but a black agenda."

And if Aubry were to write that agenda?

"No. 1, I'd like to see us free of fear," he begins, speaking slowly now. "No. 2, I'd like to see an education system whose true goal, whose real goal, is excellence in education, not closing the achievement gap, which is bull. And frankly, right near the top would be my folks working in a sustained way with each other to improve conditions."

Realist with passion
Through the decades, the prominent columnist has faced up to the challenges of L.A.'s African Americans.
By Jim Newton
August 19, 2007

The evolving place of African Americans in Los Angeles culture and politics is a topic much discussed in the corridors of city influence, but rarely is it broached publicly or candidly. Many Los Angeles blacks fear that their political influence is waning, giving way to the rising Latino population in the southern and eastern reaches of the city and region. For their part, many Latinos view their black representatives warily, as artifacts of an earlier period in Southern California history.

Important though they are, those topics are tough to discuss because they are fraught with the potential for racial generalization.

Larry Aubry is an exception to that reticence. Deep in experience, both thoughtful and outspoken, he is a wise and energetic activist who has lived the travails and triumphs of African Americans and yet is able to see those experiences objectively.

Aubry came to Los Angeles, as so many blacks did, as part of the migration from the South to take work in Southern California's wartime defense industries. That was during the 1940s, when Central Avenue was lifting off as a center of jazz but when whole parts of the city were explicitly reserved for whites. He went to Fremont High School, where, in 1947, blacks were hung in effigy. Posted signs proclaimed "No niggers," and, later, blacks were barred from residing in -- even entering -- Inglewood. Aubry today lives in Inglewood, which now is heavily Latino.

He was a social service worker -- probation, mostly -- through two riots, the explosive Watts conflagration of 1965 and the wider, more depressing social breakdown in 1992, when rioters set stores afire and looted their way across parts of the city in protest over the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney G. King.

All of that was discouraging to witness, but it did not break Aubry's spirit. He passed his 70th birthday a few years back and has seen more than enough to be circumspect, but he remains optimistic and resistant to cynicism. He is a respected columnist who has held a spot at the Los Angeles Sentinel for more than 20 years; he's a father of five, proud to have raised them in an environment better than that of his youth but unsentimental about the obstacles they too face. The result: Aubry is a rarity in a city in which discussions of ethnic politics are too-often guarded or hedged. He is a passionate realist.