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Home  Community Voices It’s Bill Parker’s Time To Walk Off The Stage of History
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It’s Bill Parker’s Time To Walk Off The Stage of History |
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Written by Lionel Rolfe
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Friday, 17 April 2009 |
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. Parks was replaced over issues of corruption.
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. And it was becoming a central point for people going south to register blacks to vote as well as a hangout 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 counter culture 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.
If Sheriff Bull Connor was the essence of the brutal baton-wielding cop of the Old South, L.A.’s Bill Parker was strong competition. He was an unreconstructed enemy of civil rights and about as open a racist as they came.
Today, Parker’s “Glass House” has squatted in the shadow of Los Angeles City Hall for more than half a century and it has been badly diminished by time. Somehow no longer being shiny and new made it lose that sense of brutal power it had originally exuded.
But in Parker’s time, it was an imposing pile. No walls were visible, only darkened glass—meaning the public couldn’t see in, but the cops could see out. In its basement, a rogue cop or two hid purloined cocaine. Over the years, the cockroaches and rats took the building over as they boldly scurried around the premises. The air conditioning only worked when it was cold, and the heating when it was hot.
In recent years, there had been talk about tearing the whole place down. For one thing, it’s earthquake fodder waiting to happen. The way it was designed in the ‘50s makes it a death trap. It is unlikely to survive the next big trembler. Still, someone voted to preserve it rather than tear it down, which for many reasons would have been a much better idea.
Even in the early days of the Counterculture, most of the public’s perception of Parker was formed by the imagery of “Dragnet’s” `just the facts, mam’ and the local headlines about Parker “running the Mob out of town.” There was plenty of corruption in the old LAPD, but at least it wasn’t being run by Jewish and Italian muscle. The wops and kikes were regarded as better than the niggers, but not by much, in those old Parker days.
Parker saw anyone fighting for the rights of oppressed people as communists. That’s why his goons greeting you at the door of the Xanadu were never black, although a few black officers had been hired for the ghetto. Most of those at the Xanadu were towering white guys with blond hair and blue eyes who invariably seemed to come from Oklahoma or Orange County.
Still, Parker got his comeuppance one day in an elevator going to his executive office on the sixth floor. The unspoken but very real rule in those days was that blacks weren’t allowed above the second floor.
But one day a woman who had been assigned to the stenographer pool got assigned to the executive offices on the sixth floor. She got in the elevator with Parker. Parker himself leaned over to press the second floor stop to let her off at her appropriate floor. The elevator stopped, but she didn’t get off. Parker and his aides looked at each other, but said nothing. The woman ended up riding with Parker to the sixth floor and then got off and went to her new job.
It’s not clear if her promotion had been inadvertent or purposeful. But this is how the sixth floor ban on blacks ended. Of course, Parker Center was still loaded with racism even after the hiring of one stenographer. Racism didn’t end with the hiring of a few black and brown officers either—Police Chief Bernard Parks and Mayor Tom Bradley suggested this.
Another black cop hired in that period later became a detective, and when he recently retired he told me how his first assignment had been to frame Black Panthers for nefarious activities that actually belonged to the schemers on the upper floors of Parker Center.
The detective said that Panthers were hardly hardened criminal types, but mostly intellectuals and dreamers. Yet they were portrayed on the front pages as the greatest villains of the sixties. He said that a lot of the skewed coverage targeted white people, convincing them that their worst fears about sex-crazed angry “niggers” were true.
The truth, he said, was that the Panther’s so-called violent tendencies were mostly dreamed up by the diabolical brass. The detective understood what he was doing and sometimes felt regret and guilt over what he’d done during his career. He said that his superiors gave him “permission” to kill in carrying out his anti-Panther activities. He chose not to do this.
Yet somehow, the stenographer’s trip up the elevator was more than symbolical. It set the stage for real changes.
The department’s racism in the Parker era was only the culmination of a process that began with the department’s subservience to the proprietors of the Los Angeles Times, which in those days was the city’s most powerful single institution. The Times’ proprietors saw the Los Angeles Police Department primarily as its own army against labor organizers.
All of this is not a pretty picture. It’s a part of L.A.’s history that has strutted itself on stage, and now should take its bows and leave, forever. It might satisfy someone’s primeval urges to perpetuate Parker’s name in something other than infamy, but not on the entrance to a police building in the new Millennium.
Lionel Rolfe is the author of several books, including “Literary L.A.” and “The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather.” These, and others of his books, will soon be available on Amazon’s Kindle.
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