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FAT MAN ON THE LEFT X - BOYD LEWIS
"He was a member of a white gang and 'we used to go down a block and throw rocks at black kids. They would come into the white neighborhood and throw rocks at the white kids. One day I went diddy-boppin' down Taylor Street, and turned right on Marengo, right into a gang of black kids with sticks and baseball bats. They proceeded to flail at me. I fell back into some heavy bushes and shrubbery and bushes, but it was at that point I started asking myself if racism was really such a good idea.'”
by Lionel Rolfe
COPYRIGHT © 2003, 3 A.M. MAGAZINE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Boyd Lewis joyfully celebrated his First Annual Old South Barbecue in his Altadena home on Marengo Street with a few good friends recently.
The event marked his 57th birthday and more importantly, the end of his journalism career and his becoming a full fledged English teacher.
The event was also an audio and photographic salon as well.
These are the materials he's going to be teaching English with in his new job with the Los Angeles Unified School District.
When Boyd and his wife Deborah moved to Pasadena from Atlanta in the fall of 1997, Boyd was at "the top of his game." He was a writer and editor at CNN, and perhaps more importantly, he had become the "Voice of the South" on National Public Radio, the result of a series of radio programs that came out of more than three decades of covering and being involved in the great civil rights struggles there.
The one thing Boyd carried away from his experiences was a belief in "struggle and creative conflict."
His photographs are populated by men such as Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, Julian Bond, John Lewis, Tyrone Brooks, Jesse Jackson and Joseph Lowry and he took them from 1969 to 1975 while working as a photographer for a couple of different black owned newspapers in Atlanta.
You'll also see among his collection Ku Klux Klaners in full regalia, carrying rifles, or a scared black child in the streets. He teaches his students to weave narratives from the photographs.
He also uses excerpts from his Southwind series that were played not only on southern stations, but regularly on National Public Radio for years.
He admits he's a "professional Southerner," who was born in Boston but grew up in New Orleans where his family had been based for generations.
He started out in country weeklies in the Appalachian mountains and graduated to big city journalism later.
He also was a columnist for underground and alternative newspapers out of Atlanta, such as the Great Speckled Bird and Creative Loafing, which still survives.
He also was the caretaker of Margaret Mitchell's apartment in a derelict old mansion on Peachtree Street.
Oddly enough it his first epiphany about racism came when he was 11 years old on Marengo Street in New Orleans. Marengo Street in Altadena in Altadena where he now lives reminds him of the one in New Orleans, he says.
He was a member of a white gang and "we used to go down a block and throw rocks at black kids. They would come into the white neighborhood and throw rocks at the white kids. One day I went diddy-boppin' down Taylor Street, and turned right on Marengo, right into a gang of black kids with sticks and baseball bats. They proceeded to flail at me. I fell back into some heavy bushes and shrubbery and bushes, but it was at that point I started asking myself if racism was really such a good idea."
The couple left Atlanta to come to California when Deborah got a chance of a lifetime to run a foundation concerned with disabilities and the arts.
About that time Time Warner was taking over CNN, and the handwriting on the wall was not good -- not for someone who had worked with and admired Ted Turner.
Boyd can rant for hours about how to explain the decline of CNN.
"All of them -- CNN, MSNBC, Fox -- they've reduced journalism to a bunch of painted monkeys dancing on the screen, keeping us amused and ignorant," he says.
"I don't think the American media today is capable of serious discussion anymore."
He quotes H.L. Mencken -- I said I thought it was Mark Twain -- who said that the "purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Now the tables are reversed. Journalism comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted."
For Boyd, the final nail in the coffin came in 1998 and 1999 when he worked as a copyeditor on the Pasadena Star News.
"It was mind-numbing, nitpicking, meaningless scutt work for a soulless right-wing chain. Whatever little idealism about journalism I had was totally rubbed out by the experience and I decide to put my idealism into education, and teach kids how to communicate based on my three decades as a journalist."
Boyd just got his California credential, but he has already been working with an emergency credential -- first at Jefferson High School and now in the eighth grade at Sun Valley.
"I won't say it's exactly God's calling -- God or whatever -- but I never had as much fun in my life as teaching kids how to think, how to read and understand, how to write and be eloquent and how to think and be clear. That's what journalism does. Like journalism, education's job is to make order out of chaos, only it's much rewarding to teach a child than to inform people what Lacy Peterson's husband did last Thursday night."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lionel Rolfe is the author of Literary L.A., Death and Redemption in L.A., and Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground. His new book, My Yaltah: The Story of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather will be published next year.
Photo by Boyd Lewis
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