A single voice pushes for safety in South L.A. Tired of violence in her neighborhood, Marsha Bolden creates fliers and a video to raise awareness. But her call for change goes largely unheard.
In the din of a million voices clamoring for attention, it is occasionally the quiet persistence of a single idea that emerges from the pack.
I'm not sure that the efforts of Marsha Bolden, a disabled woman in South Los Angeles, will achieve what she has in mind, but I admire her willingness to try and her determination not to give up.
She wants to save God's children from the violence that bloodies the city's neighborhoods.
Not that she is alone in this effort. Organizations throughout the state, backed by money and celebrity, have been plugging away for years toward the same goal.
But Bolden is unique. She lives on the very streets where everyone is in peril and no powerhouse PR agency trumpets her cause. Gangs prowl neighborhoods where the wrong color shirt can bring sudden death. Gunfire is the drumbeat of South L.A., and the cries of the dying are the chorus.
I thought about this as I parked near Bolden's home in an area taut with suspicion. A man watched me from his front porch, a black pit bull observed me silently from a fenced yard, a young girl peeked out her doorway.
Bolden's street, like many others in this part of L.A., is a fortress of fences and barred windows. She's tired of living that way and tired of seeing children die in the crossfire of gang warfare. She's afraid for her three grown daughters and four grandchildren, all of whom live nearby.
One day she decided to do something about it by passing out computer-generated fliers she made that called for a united effort among her neighbors.
"Are you sick and tired of all the violence?" she asked. "Don't wait for tragedy to hit your family before taking a stand. Join the fight to save lives today!"
She has passed them out by the hundreds, leaving neat little piles in doctor's offices, grocery stores and wherever else neighbors might assemble. When the fliers brought only meager results, she created and videotaped a street corner "crime scene." It was complete with a chalked body outline, painted bloodstains, a cardboard knife, numbered evidence tags and a nearby memorial of candles and flowers.
Her voice-over says, "I'm not afraid of God. I'm not afraid of witches. This is what I'm afraid of."
The video is startlingly real. She has placed it on various public-oriented Internet sites, taken it in person to the school district office and local police station, and sent it off to talk show hosts across the nation.
"Babies can't play in their own frontyards," she said to me in a tone of mixed despair and indignation, seated at a computer that dominated the small living room of her neatly kept duplex. "No one is safe."
Getting around isn't easy. At 53, she has fought crippling arthritis most of her life. Nine surgeries have failed to help much. She is losing mobility in her right arm and wears support braces on her feet to help her walk. She once worked as a bank teller but now relies on state disability to survive.
"I hurt all over," she said, as she called up the crime scene video on her computer. "My arms, my hands, my neck, my feet, my knees, they all hurt, but usually not at the same time. God is giving me a break when my arms hurt but my feet don't."
An ice cream truck rolled by, its tinkling music playing, somehow inappropriately, "Pop Goes the Weasel." No one came running. The truck wandered off down the empty streets.
Bolden has no idea how much good she's doing to alleviate violence in her neighborhood, or anywhere else for that matter. No one from the school district or the LAPD has shown interest in her efforts.
"They don't answer my e-mails or my phone calls," she said. She points. "You're the only one who has."
I responded to her persistence, knowing that someone like Bolden won't deter the Crips and Bloods from warring, or dealers from selling their wares to adults and children alike. But if it doesn't begin with one person in a neighborhood at risk, how will it ever reach two?
"I don't have all the answers," she said, as I stood in the doorway to leave. "We don't know what to do, so we don't do anything. I would just like to stir things up, to start some kind of dialogue." She repeated her mantra: "Let's stop killing God's children." Then: "I'll never give up."
As I walked toward my car, school girls waited at a corner for the traffic light to change. They giggled and talked among themselves but never stopped looking around, alert to cars and pedestrians that passed. I couldn't help thinking of them as kids in a war zone, and I thought about it all the way home.
