‘Day of Dialogue’ Tries to Span Racial Gulf : Diversity: From Watts to Woodland Hills, Angelenos talk frankly--and listen.

With widespread agreement across Los Angeles that racial rifts are widening, this divided city set aside Tuesday to discuss the un-discussable: the fears and prejudices that have run rampant in the three weeks since the O.J. Simpson verdicts.

At nearly 100 sites across the city--churches and synagogues, schools and workplaces and public auditoriums from Watts to North Hollywood--Angelenos of all races and ethnicities gathered in small groups from early morning until late at night and, supervised by trained mediators, tried to abandon platitudes and talk frankly about race and how it has disfigured their lives and fragmented their city.

The Day of Dialogue on Race Relations, as the citywide talkathon was dubbed by its originator, Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, was a hastily assembled event. But it nevertheless managed to attract thousands of residents troubled by the fissures of race and ethnicity that have plagued the city for years but have widened in the wake of the Simpson verdicts and the subsequent “Million Man March” last week in Washington.

“If we don’t make it work here in L.A., we are in trouble,” said Father Pedro Villarroya, a Spanish-born official in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who turned out for bagels, coffee and strained conversation in the law library at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, one of the day’s host organizations. “I don’t know where World War III will start, but it may be because of race.”

Some of those who attended the discussion groups were liberal advocates or men and women involved in government and public policy, who acknowledged that they were preaching to the choir. But many of them said that even in their offices and social circles, the Simpson verdicts had unleashed racist remarks, flowing in all directions, rarely vocalized in progressive circles since the civil rights movement.

“The shock of the verdict caused a veneer to slip,” said Carolyn Webb de Macias, chief of staff to Ridley-Thomas. “People are saying things to each other that they wouldn’t have said three weeks ago.”

At the Kol Tikvah synagogue in Woodland Hills, Rev. Zedar Broadus, head of the San Fernando Valley chapter of the NAACP, said he wasn’t surprised that only two of the 60 events were being held in the Valley, calling it an example of how “we’re divided in so many different ways in this city. That’s the reason we’re having this type of gathering.”

Gerri Williams, one of the facilitators with the firm hired by the city to guide the workshops, said: “Usually it’s the people who don’t need things like this who come to things like this.”

Saying she wanted to stir the discussion, Kaye Lewis, 37, of North Hollywood, the sole African American at a table of whites, said: “I do have a problem. I understand the Holocaust was a horrible thing. I understand that slavery was a horrible thing. But I don’t like to hear about it every day.”

A Jewish woman asked Lewis about Farrakhan. “He’s just a media hound,” she replied, cautioning that Jews should not let him “push your buttons.”

“Yeah,” said one Jewish woman, “but that doesn’t help us when we hear what he says.” Several complained that Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism seems effective, citing the success of the Million Man March.

“But not all the people who marched feel that way,” Lewis said.

Capt. Val Paniccia of the LAPD’s West Valley Division acknowledged that the public eye was on his department, and those at the table agreed it would remain there while the media spotlighted individual racist officers.

“But as diversity grows in this department,” he said, “it’s going to be awful difficult for someone to say that this is being done to me because [of race].”

He cited the case of a white officer who stopped an African American pedestrian on Ventura Boulevard for questioning last week, shortly after a bank was held up by black robbers. The pedestrian complained to the officer that he was being singled out because of his race, but the officer’s partner, an African American, denied that, Paniccia recalled.

“When you can have a black officer talk to a black man,” Paniccia said, “a Hispanic officer talk to a Hispanic man, a white officer talk to a white man . . . that’s the solution, right there.”

Some participants in the day’s activities said that rather than racist talk, a heavier-than-usual curtain had fallen between the races in the wake of the verdicts. That was the consensus at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where 20 office workers spoke of the “uncomfortable silence’ that has reigned in the MTA lunchroom and in their neighborhoods in recent days.

“We were so afraid about what would happen to our personal relationships if we discussed those issues, because there are such deep feelings around them,” said Phyllis Tucker, an African American MTA administrator.

Some of Tuesday’s exchanges were heated, which was encouraged by the mediators, local men and women trained by a Connecticut-based foundation called the Study Circles Resource Center, which has organized such racial round-tables in many small cities around the country, but never in a place so huge, complicated or divided as Los Angeles.

At the ACLU breakfast, for instance, two of the whites in the group, Laurrie Garner, an elderly neighborhood resident, and Capt. Nick Salicos of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Division, seemed out of sync with the Latinos and African Americans as to whether race and ethnicity even matter.

Garner began the heated exchange by saying that she “loathed and despised” the need of some people to emphasize their ethnicity, to call themselves African Americans or Asian Americans. “That’s like saying, ‘We’re American, but . . . ‘ “ she said. “It’s all those classifications that are tearing us apart.”

She also blasted bilingual education and the tedium of translation from one language to another at various civic meetings: “If we don’t communicate in the same language, we can’t solve our problems.”

Salicos similarly complained about groups insisting on their own identity. “Within our organization, we’re all blue,” Salicos said. “I wish that were the view of people in L.A., because I see what happens when people clamor for their own racial identity. I don’t see why we have to get so hung up on background.”

The nonwhites in the group took quick and angry exception. Conrado Terraza, a field organizer for Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, noted that “my reality is that race does matter. You control the system. It’s your system. No matter how successful I am, no matter how much money I make, I am always a Latino.”

Then Sol Castro, a high school teacher, exploded. “Ma’am,” he said, directing his remarks at Garner, “I’ve seen some of our kids dye their hair blond to pass for white and wear tinted contact lenses to make their eyes blue. . . . When I was in the Army, they wouldn’t serve me in the Dallas Airport. Don’t tell us race doesn’t matter!”

The grievances of the various ethnic groups were consistent from one end of the city to the other. African Americans told tales of others shunning them, as if fearful that everyone of their race was a mortal danger. At a discussion at the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, Bernie Wilsdon complained that white women tuck their purses under their arms at the sight of him. Oscar Voner described white drivers seeing him at intersections and locking their doors. And Deona Tucker said that when she’s shopping, clerks follow her around the store.

In the Lankershim Arts Center in North Hollywood, about 20 people, mostly members of the center’s theater company, sat in a circle as jazz music drifted in from another room.

Clyde Jackson, an African American, asked the mostly white group: “When Rodney King was viciously beaten by 16 white cops who were later released, where were you?”

“I was in Simi Valley to demonstrate,” shot back Rusty Feuer of Northridge, who is white.

Some complained that Jackson was dividing the room between blacks and whites. Jackson answered: “Because it’s always been that way.”

“No it hasn’t,” they replied in unison.

Darleen Kegan, who is white, said: “I hear where you’re coming from about Rodney King. He by no means deserved what happened to him . . . It was also wrong what happened to Reginald Denny.”

Actor Lawrence Curtis said: “I have a fear as a white person that a group of black men will come and beat me . . . because I am white.”

But moods softened as the discussion progressed. At the end of the evening, Feuer and Jackson hugged.

Whites, for their part, dwelt on the injustices of affirmative action and the rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan, who led the “Million Man March.” Typical was Dave Rogers, a fireman who attended a discussion at a Downtown station house and said he had to wait three years to get hired while minorities found instant openings in the department.

Organizers of the day’s events seemed buoyed by the turnout and the candor. But no one was predicting that one day of talk would work miracles. “We won’t wake up Wednesday and say, ‘Hallelujah, it’s over,’ ” said Avis Ridley-Thomas, the councilman’s wife, who runs the Dispute Resolution Program in the city attorney’s office.

But miracles aside, there were small victories: One of the groups at the ACLU has scheduled a second gathering in a few weeks. One white man at a lunchtime discussion group at the city attorney’s office vowed to organize social events with people of other races, because his contact with them now is limited to work hours. And groups all over the city that were set to meet for an hour or two instead talked into the afternoon.

“I think people were ready,” said Councilman Ridley-Thomas. “And it’s long overdue, long overdue. Residents of this city don’t want to be stuck in this racial abyss.”

Times staff writers Tony Olivo, Erin Texeira and Miles Corwin contributed to this story.