What can we learn from France’s Gilets Jaunes protests? p. 6 LB Playhouse’s new, fun and faithful take on A Christmas Carol p. 9 Recipes for two drinking custards p. 11
1968: The Year that Changed America Fifty years later, America still struggles with the truth and 40 years of indy news By James Preston Allen, Publisher
By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
Motivations for 40 years at the Masthead of RLNews
December 20, 2018 - January 9, 2019
[See Needy, p. 2]
Tony Fernandez was an aspiring journalist when he began to appreciate the power in names and words But only since founding A Needy Wilmington, the Banning High Schoolbased non profit, has he come to more fully understand it. In other words, the name didn’t sit too well with lots of the people who reside in the Heart of the Harbor. They are a community searching for an identity that will recognize them as more than a Los Angeles afterthought, and “needy” is not the image they want to conjure. A Needy Wilmington is the spearhead of an effort to support Phineas Banning High School students and their families who are struggling to make ends meet. These families aren’t necessarily homeless but the struggle to survive and keep the family unit intact is just as real. “A lot of times, kids come to school unshowered … they don’t have toothpaste ... things we take for granted everyday. So twice a year we give away backpacks, school supplies, hygiene products and other toiletries. Everything they need so they can’t say ‘I can’t come to school today because I don’t feel good about myself.’” Fernandez knows intimately the stigma attached to homelessness and the pervasive belief that people who are homeless are more invaders than neighbors without shelter.
Real News, Real People, Really Effective
A Needy Wilmington co-founders Tony Fernandez and Catherine Rodriguez. Photo a courtesy of A Needy Wilmington
We are approaching the end of 2018, a largely troubled year, whose dwindling days perhaps fittingly conclude the 50th anniversary of the year that changed this country — 1968 — a time not unlike today with its darkening 2019 marks sense of disenfranchisement, the 40th year resistance and political of publishing demonstrations. Random Lengths It was also a time of News. This is the violence, racial injustice and first of many an enlightening awareness articles that will for a young generation whose commemorate ideals and values were not this milestone in represented by their national the coming year. leaders. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement were the bookends of this chapter, while the bullets of political assassination became as important to the course of a national election as the ballot box. The pages of the hundreds of books, articles and films that have attempted to explain the impacts of 1968 are far too many to cite here, but their reverberations continue to make our path unsteady, even for those who too young to remember who were not yet born.
I was just 17 in the beginning of 1968. Over the past 40 years as publisher of this newspaper I have often been asked, “What has most motivated you in doing what you do?” Much of it started there in the beginning of 1968. I cannot say for certain that one particular moment struck a match in me, as there was a calamity of events in 1968 that coincided with my coming of age. On Jan. 15, at age 87, Jeannette Rankin, who as a congresswoman from Montana voted against U.S. participation in both world wars, led some 5,000 women on a
[See Change, p. 4]
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