No major miracles unfolded Sunday in the small park on the corner of Firestone Boulevard and Maie Avenue. None of the rival gangs battling for control of the surrounding South Los Angeles streets came forward to pledge peace. No one offered an easy solution to the poverty and crime that defines so much of life on those streets.
But for Pastor Chris Le Grande, Sunday wasn't about big miracles. It was about the small ones, the subtle ones.
"In the name of Jesus! En el nombre de Jesus! We got all kind of folk up here today!" Le Grande, pastor of Great Hope Fellowship in Faith, preached to a few dozen worshipers in the parking lot. "When I see Hispanics here and blacks, I realize that we are of the right mind-set.
"There can be no color lines!" he said. "I don't care whether you are black, whether you are Hispanic. . . . We need to have a mind-set of oneness."
For the second year, Le Grande, who is black, and volunteers from his and other churches left their pews and altars and set up for the day in Washington Park -- a small, rare strip of green in a blighted, urban area that has undergone an enormous, tumultuous shift in the last two decades from nearly all black to heavily Latino. With race an undeniable factor in the ever-simmering tensions and frictions here, Le Grande's charity event was a small but powerful anecdote.
At nearby picnic tables covered in donated clothes, black and Latino men and women milled about, taking needed T-shirts, pants and dresses.
"Excuse me, lady, you can have more than just one pair of shoes," Delores Cotledge, a member of Great Hope, said to a Latina mother who was walking away with only one box.
"You sure?" she asked, glancing back at the table.
"Of course!" Cotledge said.
It would have been an unremarkable exchange were it not for the history of those streets.
Last month, after a lengthy undercover investigation, federal prosecutors indicted more than 60 members of Florencia 13, a Latino street gang, for crimes committed during a violent campaign to drive African American rivals out of the area, authorities said. The turf battle is thought to have led to at least 20 killings in the last three years.
Much of the violence occurred in the park's Florence-Firestone neighborhood, a working-class, unincorporated community of 60,000 north of Watts. After the dramatic influx of Mexican immigrants to the area that began in the 1980s, officials said, Latino gang leaders in recent years have sought to drive the remaining black gangs and their supporters from the neighborhood and had repeatedly ordered members to attack black gang members.
