Voices of Black Los Angeles: At 75, he believes in himself and ideas

This story originally ran in 1982 as part of the “Black L.A.: Looking at Diversity” series. We have preserved the original text in order to provide an accurate account of the work in print.

Fred Cannon, 75, is a retired sign painter, a “motivator, public talker, self-taught,” according to one of his many business cards. He printed the cards in his print shop in Watts, where he has trained two generations of neighborhood children in the trade.

Childless himself, Cannon never went past the fifth grade in Cannon Colored School in the small rural town of Nestor, La., but “the world is my university,” he said. His bookshelves are lined with the works of authors ranging from black intellectual W.E.B Dubois to Karl Marx to television commentator Bill Moyers.

From his slight 5-foot, 5-inch frame comes a raspy voice that sounds like a bad telephone connection. But there is a spirit in his voice that is anything but worn, the spirit of a man who insists, “My height is from my shoulders up” and who chuckles about a 1930s song in which the singer Roly Poly crooned, “Why should I be tall? I get the same thing a tall man gets...”

In a reflective mood, he observes: “Too many people don’t know history. I was pointing out to my wife when I was looking at the registration of voters in El Salvador. And I stopped and looked and my wife and said, ‘Now look how interested America is in that registration and look how we have to struggle down in Alabama and Louisiana trying to keep the Voting Rights Act.’

New class developing

“Now I can see a great opportunity for our people with the avenues we are opening. But I can also see a class developing. I can see the people who know the system and understand the system. I can see those people becoming a class.

“And I can see a lot of lost people, people with nobody out there to struggle for them, nobody to fight the way for them. When I go down the street and I see one of these youngsters coming down the street, I get so mad because I look at his life and him on the street and it burns me up when I think about the people who fought and died to try to make better conditions for him. And he’s walking down the block with that music box.

“I’ve seen them look so hungry they look like they couldn’t carry the box, little skinny youngsters.

“And I don’t feel sorry for him, I get mad. I get mad at the whole system. You can only do what you can believe you can do. And I think the vast majority of our people don’t believe they can change the system. They believe some outsider, some divine something is going to change it one of these days.

“It’s like the guy who went to the post office to get a job. He got an application and the man told him, ‘Fill it out.’

“He said, ‘I can’t write.’

“The man said, ‘You can’t write! Well, we can’t hire you here!’

“The guy said, ‘But I can do what I see them doing back there.’

“And the man said, ‘But you got to write.’

California

The Times’ 1982 series ‘Black L.A.: Looking at diversity’

In the summer of 1982, The Times published a series on Southern California’s Black community called “Black L.A.: Looking at Diversity.”

Oct. 4, 2021

Starts collecting junk

“So he went out and got him a pushcart and started collecting junk, bottles and clothes and things. He started making a little money and pretty soon he got himself a horse and wagon, then a truck. Soon he started running a junk factory and he started taking money to the bank.

“One day the banker said, ‘I want to talk to you. I see you have better than $500,000 in the bank here. I want to show you how to invest it. I’ll draw up the papers and everything.

“Couple of weeks later the banker says, ‘OK, now you have to sign this.’

“So where the papers had the “X” mark, the guy marked his “X” right behind it, and said, ‘I can’t write.’

“The banker said “You can’t write, can’t read, and you’ve got nearly $600,000? What would you be if you could read and write?’

“And the guy said, ‘I’d be a postman.’

“If you use this (pointing to his head) and these (holding out his hands), no power on Earth can hold you back,” Cannon says, “I hear people talking Reagan this and Reagan that and what he did to me and I say, ‘Man what are you doing to change it?’ I don’t like it either, but I do something about it—if it ain’t no more than $5 to Common Cause. ‘Cause I believe that things can change if people don’t just sit around and talk about what’s gonna happen.”