By LIONEL ROLFE
Los Angeles is debating whether its new police administration building in downtown should bear the name of William Parker, the police chief from the '50s whose name has adorned the old building at 150 N. Los Angeles St. for more than half a century.One former police chief, Bernard Parks, asked to preserve Parker's name on the new building going up a couple of blocks or so away. A conservative black man who joined the department in the '60s, he rose through the ranks, like Tom Bradley, except Bradley became one of the city's great mayors. Over issues of corruption, a successor replaced Parks.
The man who replaced Parks, William Bratton, came to Los Angeles from back east, and was obviously a different sort of cat. Bratton, a white man, thinks Parker's name should not be used on the new building. He doesn't want to perpetuate the memory of those unpleasant times.
Parker was maybe the city's most famous and infamous police chief. A lot of his image came from the famed television cop serial, Dragnet.
Parker was an unabashed racist, a fact I learned personally when I was a student at Los Angeles City College in the '60s. I frequented the Xanadu, a coffeehouse on Melrose Avenue on the south side of the campus next to the Lithuanian Cultural Center. Folks like Jack Nicholson and Dorothy Parker came by. Something unthinkable was occurring at the Xanadu in those days. The black and white intellectuals of the period were hanging out together against a background that included some of the greatest blues musicians casually playing for their own pleasure. Political activists mixed with the writers and musicians and actors there and inevitably it attracted Parker's concern. It was becoming a central point for people going south to register blacks to vote as well as a hang for folks whose primary goal in life was to play chess.
It was a deadly combination as far as Parker was concerned.
In addition, the Los Angeles Free Press, or "Freep" as it was called, which had a significant impact on the circulation of the Los Angeles Times, was born out of discussions at the Xanadu. The "Freep" came to be the nation's first underground newspapers in the '60s, responsible for the creation of the so-called counterculture that spread across the nation.
Parker's contribution to all this was to make it impossible to walk out the front door of the Xanadu together with a person of the other color, and certainly not of the opposite sex. Parker's goons would be waiting to throw the Xanadu's patrons up against a wall or the radio car's fenders, or take them downtown to the "glass house," as Parker Center was known then.
Parker was an unabashed racist, a fact I learned personally when I was a student at Los Angeles City College in the '60s. I frequented the Xanadu, a coffeehouse on Melrose Avenue on the south side of the campus next to the Lithuanian Cultural Center. Folks like Jack Nicholson and Dorothy Parker came by. Something unthinkable was occurring at the Xanadu in those days. The black and white intellectuals of the period were hanging out together against a background that included some of the greatest blues musicians casually playing for their own pleasure. Political activists mixed with the writers and musicians and actors there and inevitably it attracted Parker's concern. It was becoming a central point for people going south to register blacks to vote as well as a hang for folks whose primary goal in life was to play chess.
It was a deadly combination as far as Parker was concerned.
In addition, the Los Angeles Free Press, or "Freep" as it was called, which had a significant impact on the circulation of the Los Angeles Times, was born out of discussions at the Xanadu. The "Freep" came to be the nation's first underground newspapers in the '60s, responsible for the creation of the so-called counterculture that spread across the nation.
Parker's contribution to all this was to make it impossible to walk out the front door of the Xanadu together with a person of the other color, and certainly not of the opposite sex. Parker's goons would be waiting to throw the Xanadu's patrons up against a wall or the radio car's fenders, or take them downtown to the "glass house," as Parker Center was known then.
