King Hospital and the Barely Visible Black Community of Los Angeles

by Tony Chavira

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

This week’s article is going to be filled with some hard and unforgiving truths about racism in Los Angeles and how planning efforts disproportionately favored wealthy white communities over poor black ones. It happened in Watts, it happened in Long Beach, it happened in the Adams District, and it happened in downtown L.A. For over 70 years, a disproportionate amount of federal, state and local money would go to projects focused on rehabilitating or revitalizing wealthy white communities, and the moment that there was an inkling that the black community might move nearby, white flight would take place again.

White cops would be given free reign to “accidently” choke hold black men to death, stating in their reports that it was due to a problem with the victim’s anatomy. Police were territorial in those days, even to the point of spray painting “LAPD Rules” and “punched and kicked” on walls in Watts in 1988. Even Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t know how to react after the 1965 Watts Riots when a protestor told him that rioting was a great success because “We made them pay attention to us!”

Until then, the only attention the community received was from the violent, racist police regime. The death of former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates marks an especially poignant landmark in race relations in Los Angeles and the strange closing of a chapter in the city’s history, when both the police and rioters felt justified in taking violent action to express feelings about the excessive state of inequality. Faced with the accusation that he used excessive force in the case of Rodney King (and despite all evidence to the contrary), Gates directly stated “that’s just is not true, that’s not true. We had a very small police department. We had lousy equipment. Proposition 13 had set in. We didn’t have any overtime. We had a tough time. But we produced more than any other police department in the country.”

Of course, his reasons justify the use of excessive force as much as they justify and choke-holding the Mayor to death for lack of adequate resources. But this was the attitude of those in positions of power across the board. When money was federally allocated to Los Angeles to redevelop South Central, it instead went to Bunker Hill. When increased transportation funding was required along the major corridors in South L.A., the community got buses. When it was needed from downtown L.A. to North Hollywood, they received a multi-billion dollar subway system. This has been the political nature of our city for 70 years: money always goes to the haves, as long as their neighborhoods don’t have any “minorities.” Because these neighborhoods didn’t receive any money for services, as far as many were concerned, they did not exist except when mentioned in offhand quips about how the police “produced” there.

I’m not going to give you a whole history of the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. The Los Angeles Times has articles that received Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage, so if you’re uninformed you should absolutely go there first. Instead, I want to make just one real point about the lowered level of visibility that the black (and increasingly Latino) community suffers at the hands of the traditional attitude toward the allocation of funds and resources in L.A.:

Something drastic always has to happen before things change in South L.A.

You can only push people so far and take away so many of their rights and opportunities before you evoke a reaction. Increasing racial tension with police, economic inequality, lack of jobs and the repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Act (when Proposition 14 passed without much thought) eventually led the onlooking Watts crowd to side with the Frye brothers and begin the riots in 1965. The 1992 Los Angeles riots may have been sparked by the acquittal of four LAPD officers who used excessive force against Rodney King, but a state special committee concluded that it was again due to a vicious combination of poverty, segregation, lack of education, lack of employment, the perception of police abuse, and, most interestingly, the concept of unequal consumer services. In the case of both sets of riots, stripping away equal access (housing in 1965 and consumer services in 1992) was the final catalyst that triggered large-scale violent reactions. After the official state report came out about the Watts Riots in 1965, Governor Pat Brown vowed to devotee greater attention to providing equal access to services and amenities to these needy communities. And yet, almost thirty years later, riots broke out for the same fundamental reasons.

However, Brown did instigate the development of the Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center as a direct response to the 1965 Watts Riots (which makes a ton of sense, seeing as there were no hospitals within a 10-mile radius of the area, and one would think that healthcare is an essential requirement for living equally). Years had passed, and despite the fact that the Medical Center was in use, I might be able to argue that, a là Ellison, the entire medical facility disappeared while Los Angeles employers spent their hard-earn money privatizing their medical services through HMO conglomerates like Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

But then something drastic happened: the Los Angeles Times discovered in 2003 that a combination of mismanagement and ineptitude led directly to several preventable deaths at what the community had dubbed “Killer King.” Suddenly, in 2004, the federal government determined that the facility didn’t even meet the minimum requirements for funding. Where the feds were during the 20 years it took the hospital to get to this point, who knows. But suddenly they did a report and the hospital went from over 200 beds to under 50. Then to zero. And despite the protests of Mayor Kenneth Hahn and U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, despite trying to shrink its size and services, and despite the attempt to change its name and management style, a mix of negative media portrayals of “government waste” and increased opposition from city officials at all levels closed down the only hospital with a 10-mile radius of South Los Angeles. Never mind the fact that citizens groups who tried to keep the hospital open actually used the space: they were poor souls who needed saving from inept and clearly corrupted hospital services.

We have not seen today’s degree of economic inequality since the 1930s. There are residents of Los Angeles living in substandard housing in substandard communities trying to make it day-to-day with only substandard services at their disposal. As for the substandard hospital, it was originally planned to reopen in 2009. But it was delayed further, just in time for the recession to get into full swing.

The question we as citizens of a diverse community should have asked ourselves is, what good did we do by closing King/Drew Medical Center? I can tell you this: we certainly surfed along a tidal wave of supposed opposition to completely disenfranchise an entire community of people who needed hospital services, without providing any alternatives to them. I guess that, in the fervor of the moment, our city politicians didn’t seem to see that anyone used the facility. Just like they never see anyone using the streets, schools or parks in South L.A. either.

But recently something drastic happened: to underwrite its reopening, pharmaceuticals billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong offered the hospital a $100-million guaranty. Then Bob Ross, President of the California Endowment, directly donated another $5 million. And in March, amidst seemingly endless negotiations with Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas and UCLA, the non-profit that will run the new hospital also received a donation of $500,000 from the L.A. Health Care Plan’s Community Health Investment Fund, which came right on the heels of the county’s promise to contribute $73 million annually to the non-profit and seek a $100 million letter of credit for it. Sure, this gives Supervisor Ridley-Thomas the ability to grandstand a bit more than I enjoy. But who cares, as long as a smart organizational infrastructure is developed to adequately serve and represent a needy community that never got a chance to compete on an equal playing field for government services and funds.

This surge of support in the past 2 years—despite the current economic situation—seems affirming for a community that’s spent so many years unseen and unheard. Finally, Angelenos are beginning to understand the interconnectedness of the city, and finally Los Angeles is beginning to acknowledge that people, no matter how invisible, all deserve to be treated with respect, whether by the local police in the streets or by a physician within emergency driving range of their home.

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