Writer to share story of resistance at Fallbrook Library event

Ron Dowell grew up in Watts and Compton, earned degrees in accounting, business and criminal justice, and went on to work for Los Angeles County for 40 years. As he observed his personal and professional surroundings, he noticed both discrimination and erasure, and was compelled to go after them in his next life chapter — as a writer.

In the early 2000s, he began writing fiction and poetry, sharpening his creative writing skills through the UCLA Extension Writing program. In 2018, he was a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, mentored by authors including Tananarive Due, Angela Morales and Douglas Manuel. Since submitting his work to the feminist literary collective, Writers Resist, he’s been invited by the group to share his work from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Friday at the Fallbrook Library.

Dowell, 72, is a full-time writer and will share his fiction work, “Crooked Out of Compton,” and his poetry collection, “Watts Uprise” at Friday’s event. He took some time to talk about using his writing to address issues like community policing, resistance, and his belief that progress will prevail over the current pushback. (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version of this conversation, visit sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-lisa-deaderickstaff.html.) Q: Your poetry collection, “Watts Uprise,” has been called both a love letter and a fair critique to the city that helped shape you. What was the inspiration for this collection?

A: The inspiration is that I feel that I have some experiences that are being erased, literally being erased. I lived in the Jordan Downs Housing Project and my first recollection was at about 4 or 5 years old, of living in those projects. Then, we moved to another housing project called Palm Lane, which is probably a mile and a half south of Jordan Downs. I noticed that Jordan Downs is being torn down and it’s being replaced with [apartments and] single family housing, and the whole area is being remade, so at some point there will be no more Jordan Downs.

When we moved to the Palm Lane Housing Project, I was in kindergarten; by the time I got to the 10th grade, we were asked to move again, in 1966 right after the Watts Rebellion in order for them to build Martin Luther King [Jr./ Drew Medical Center] hospital there. Both places have disappeared [the hospital closed in 2007 due to alleged incompetence and errors, reopening in 2015 as a new private nonprofit Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital] and I started doing some research on Palm Lane and there was very little written about it anywhere. Part of my motivation was to mitigate the erasure I was seeing. Hundreds of lives, people who grew up in these places, now they don’t exist, there’s no history, there’s no one talking about them.

I was 14 when the [Watts] rebellion started, and I was into baseball. I remember, which I write about in the book, in a poem that talks about my friend and I. We were playing on a backstop in the Palm Lane Housing Project in August, watching the flames that surrounded the housing project because we could see all the way around Watts and we were surrounded by fire. I felt the need to capture these moments. There’s a stereotype that all we did was participate in the riots and that we looted and stuff like that, but that is pure [expletive]. At 14, I was scared to death watching all of this stuff happening. I felt the need to kind of capture those situations and the fact that the places and locations of my formative years have been erased. So, I make it a point to talk about these experiences and those locations.

Q:

In 2010, you turned your master’s thesis into a published book, “Compton4cops: Community-based Crime Fighting in Disadvantaged Racially and Ethnically Diverse Urban Communities,” based on your experience working in the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department. Calls for police reform aren’t new, but they did gain renewed attention during the early days of the pandemic and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. What’s your perspective on ideas like defunding the police to redirect money to expanding social programs? When you imagine other public safety alternatives, ways for communities to take greater control of public safety, what do you see?

A: I think it starts with having community control and to have police do what the community wants. That’s what it is, for me. That was one of the main reasons why I wrote “Compton4cops” because I wanted people to think and consider that there were other options, but the main thing is to come up with your own. What I found is, the biggest challenge was to get people to try to reimagine policing. This is extremely difficult. It’s hard to think of what would be an option to what we’ve had for 400 years. When you talk about reimagining, my take is to get rid of it and to start all over, from scratch. At least, for my community. It’s been very difficult to get people to reimagine something different; that’s why I just concluded that if we had to start from scratch, what would you do? What would you envision for public safety? It’s an ongoing thing and there is no clearcut example. It’s something you have to invent that meets your needs, and that means you have to first identify your needs. When we start to do that, we see that there are other things that have to come into place, like education, health care, unemployment — all of these things have an impact on what police are doing in our community.

You mentioned defunding police? To me, it’s just a shift in resources, at least until you can get more stability. We need to figure out what we need and what works for us, and then pursue that. That’s my take on it.

Q: On your blog, you mention the idea of resistance; what do you find yourself resisting at this place in your life, and how does that show up in your writing?

A: I resist conformity. It was the same thing in the sheriff ’s department, for me. I could have gone along, strictly, with the program, raised no waves. I was promoted quite well, once I figured out the game; I could’ve been promoted, probably, quicker had I played the game. You come to a point where there’s like a line in the sand where you can go along with the program and be personally successful, or you can step across that line and take a risk for the benefit of the whole. By the “whole,” I mean my communities of Watts and Compton, and I crossed that line. I decided, I don’t give a [expletive]. I see what’s going on here, I was raised in segregated areas and we were trapped, so I’m just going to go forward and I’m going to criticize whoever needs to be criticized in order to move that along. I’m still doing that.

Ron Dowell