Recalling the Dead to Help Protect the Living

One by one, the teenagers slid unobtrusively into the empty seats at the back of the housing project gymnasium, beneath the black crepe streamers that drooped between basketball hoops.

When they were satisfied that no one was watching, they sneaked a look at the list they had been handed at the door--the names of the 230 Nickerson Gardens residents who have died from gang shootings and other violence over the past 25 years.

Most of the youngsters who slipped into the Service of the Golden Thread on Sunday didn’t stay long enough to hear the terrible roster read aloud, or to watch as 230 candles symbolizing each of the lost lives were blown out, one by one.

No matter, said Dr. Ernest Smith, who helped organize Sunday’s candlelight communion service for slain children--the 18th annual memorial service staged in the Watts area of Los Angeles.

“This is the way we do it. We teach people one person at a time that it’s wrong to kill,” Smith whispered from his vantage point near the back of the gymnasium as he watched the teenagers come and go.

“We started this because, with all the teaching about gang violence, nothing was happening. We wondered if anyone had ever told kids that it’s wrong to kill another person. This is not only about the death of children. It’s about the death of a community.”

The communion has been held at Nickerson Gardens for the past 11 years of its 18 years. When it moved there, in 1986, the names of 10 slain youngsters from the public housing complex were already listed.

After that, residents volunteered the names of others who had been killed. As the list grew, Nickerson Gardens officials allowed the names to be painted on the outside of the gymnasium in black Old English lettering.

These days, it’s hard for the painter to keep up.

One Nickerson Gardens resident was killed on Thanksgiving night in a gang shooting, said Smith, who is a pediatric cardiologist at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

The list read aloud Sunday also included names of 482 victims living in other housing projects: Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts, Avalon Gardens and Ujima Village.

Stephanie Morgan, 25, of Ujima Village came to make certain that the name of her cousin, Lee Butler, killed eight years ago, was on the list. It was.

“We know a lot of these people,” Morgan said with a shrug as she studied the list with a friend.

Eldridge Allison stayed for the whole service. He was there to honor the memory of his brother Donald, who was gunned down about eight years ago by “someone in a car that was trying to shoot the person who was with him,” said Allison, 41. “Every day I think of him lying on the ground. Every day when I look in the mirror I see his reflection.”

Smith said recent incidents--including the October slaying of 9-year-old schoolboy Selwyn Leflore Jr. by a stray bullet fired by gang members--prove that there is still work to be done.

No job, no amount of education, makes you bulletproof, Smith said. “You can still get killed,” he added.

Which is why they were there Sunday, trying to save lives, one at a time.