An Ameliorant Looks at Bushandas

How do today's high school seniors compare with those of a decade ago?

One way to find out is to return to your own school, as TIME Reporter Johnie Scott did. His account:

Jordan High School in Los Angeles is virtually a ghetto within a ghetto. Located on 103rd Street, it is bounded on one side by the Jordan Downs housing projects--two-story, ash gray buildings that contain 2,200 families, most of them on welfare. To the east is Alameda Street, the border of Watts, and there are railroad tracks on Alameda, so that when you cross them you know you are entering a different world. In back of Jordan and extending around it in an L-shape is the steel factory. It has been there for 20 years, the smoke billowing out day and night. I grew up in those same Jordan Downs projects, and I played next to that factory many a time.

In the end, I attended Jordan High.

The senior "plot" is a walkway that contains a plaque from each graduating class. In the 1950s, the students called themselves the Athenians, Socratians, Olympians. In the 1960s there came Les Savants and Les Cherchers (I was one of Les Ameliorants). Then, starting in 1971, there is Upenda Weus, Swahili for "beautiful black ones." And now the Bushandas, the class of '73, their Swahili name meaning "the everlasting ones."

My class song was based on The Days of Wine and Roses. The Bushandas' song, We're a Winner, is by Curtis Mayfield of Superfly.

The Bushandas are not particularly militant or radical. Young blacks are in many ways just as square and conservative as their white counterparts, if not more so. The point is that We're a Winner stresses black pride, and as Watts has grown worse over the years, these students do need a sense of pride. In my day, it was a rare bird who sported an Afro; now Afros are conservative, and the new style is crocheted caps with tassels, some in the liberation colors of red, green and black.

When we Ameliorants graduated from Jordan, our class had average grades of only 1.6 on a 4.0 scale. That situation has improved some, to 2.25, but last month Jordan still ranked lowest of all Los Angeles schools in achievement tests. Some officials say these tests are unfair, but others see a difference in the students. "These kids come to school believing that academic education is not going to solve many of their problems," says one. "They are more quiet now because they're searching deeper for answers."

When I was a kid, we identified with the Muslims, then later with the Black Panthers. I remember how we refused to salute the flag and how we balked at saying "with liberty and justice for all." The year after I graduated, the Watts riot broke out. At Jordan there was little demonstrating, but the students organized to make things better. There was a student committee that painted old houses, cleaned up streets and repaired broken fences. A black student union was formed, and it demanded and got a black basketball coach.

But the end of the 1960s marked a decline in that kind of activism. The Panthers' offices in Watts were shut down and boarded up. Gradually 103rd Street was leveled, the result of urban renewal working in small bits at a time. Business pulled out of the community. Unemployment, which stood at 35% before the Watts riots, now hovers at 45%. The black student union died away (although the coach remained). Instead, the street gangs have become strong, and the five-year-old science building is now covered with graffiti. Says one: "Watts is my station/ Love is my vocation./ Heaven is my destination/ To hell with education."

Just the same, these kids are smarter than we were, on the whole, and more serious. While some seek answers in street gangs, others concentrate on vocational classes, and they all talk a lot about making it--meaning making money. After all, growing up in one of the poorest sectors of Los Angeles implants a desire to have, not necessarily to reform things. As it stands, they are walled in, and they are trying in their own ways to get out.

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