Yvonne Burke's Crumbling Kingdom

“Most African-American politicians then were part of some state party machinery,” says political scientist Raphael Sonnenshein. “She’s a pretty big figure — a long-standing [one] who comes from a period when there weren’t many black figures, especially when it came to black women.”

“Part of what gives her star power,” says a person intimately familiar with the workings of the board, and who requested anonymity, “is that her constituents live through her. When I’ve seen glamorous Yvonne with little old black ladies, I can see they feel pride. I think they’re being that physical person up there.”

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More About

• Yvonne Burke
• Bill Burke
• Damien Goodmon
• Politics
• Local Politics

This longtime board employee finds the old-guard reaction of embracing Burke as a vicarious figure “very disturbing.”

Perle Yvonne Watson, as Burke was christened, had always been a well-spoken achiever. “Since we were kids in Foshay Junior High School, she had the ability to articulate, debate and make her point,” recalls childhood friend and sometime bitter political rival Diane Watson, who is no relation. “She’d win oratorical contests and I’d get the compliments. It happened so often, I would just say, ‘Thank you!’”

Burke, who graduated from USC’s Gould School of Law in 1956, was appointed a decade later by Governor Pat Brown to the McCone Commission investigating L.A.’s riots, and soon thereafter began accumulating a string of impressive career firsts. Burke became California’s first black assemblywoman in 1966, the West Coast’s first black congresswoman in 1972, the first congresswoman to give birth while serving in the House, the first black woman to head the Federal Reserve of San Francisco and the first black, female L.A. County Supervisor to take a seat in Room 381B at the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration.

Yet like the cycle of NASA firsts of that era (first American in space, first man on the moon, first man to swing a six iron on the moon), on the ground, Burke’s pioneering achievements were more symbolic than meaningful to her constituencies.

(Click to enlarge)

Rena Kosnett

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Asked to list Burke's accomplishments, Larry Aubry of the Los Angeles Sentinel said, "I don't know of any."

Rena Kosnett

(Click to enlarge)

Damien Goodmon predicts tragedies on the Burke-approved Expo Line.

“It’s really unfortunate that she came out of retirement,” says Najee Ali, executive director of the L.A.-based civil rights organization Project Islamic H.O.P.E., of her decision to return to politics in 1992. “Had she stayed retired, she would have gone down as a trailblazer for African-Americans and women. Instead, she hung on and became like Sugar Ray Leonard and Michael Jordan.”

Damien Goodmon, 26, has lived in Yvonne Burke’s district his entire life. Like many African-Americans in South Los Angeles, he had heard of her firsts and civil rights credentials and assumed she would be someone his community could turn to in a fight, only to learn otherwise: “This was a woman who’d done impressive things, but in her twilight years, she stopped being concerned about her legacy.”

Goodmon’s fight began in 2006, when he joined other organizers to get the Metropolitan Transit Authority (Metro) to improve so-called grade separations and underpasses for the Expo Line light rail, which will open its first stretch from downtown to Culver City in 2010.

This was a crucial if obscure issue in working-class South Los Angeles, where light-rail trains speed across streets shared by pedestrians and drivers, dozens of whom have been killed after ignoring blinking warning arms at grade crossings and driving their cars onto the tracks. Jefferson Park and Crenshaw district residents had been outraged to learn that the trains would run at street level — unlike the far safer underground tracks near USC and the overhead tracks in Culver City, built mostly with money from state bond Proposition 1B.

Culver City fought hard to reject an original plan of unsightly street-level tracks, whose crossings can be death traps. And now the war against street-level trains has grown intense in South Los Angeles, where residents claim Metro is planning no fewer than 26 street crossings east of La Brea Avenue for the Expo Line. One of those crossings is planned at the crowded intersection near Dorsey High School, not far from sidewalks that are jammed with kids on weekdays. Another is planned near the Foshay Learning Center, the scene of Burke’s youthful public-speaking triumphs. (A spokesman for the Exposition Metro Line Construction Authority says the number of crossings is still in flux while it finalizes plans.)

When this controversy first hit the fan, Burke was chairwoman of the Metro board, which was then selling the Expo Line to the public by comparing it to Pasadena’s Gold Line train. But that spin by Burke and her Metro colleagues was never true. Activists say the fitting analogy is the Blue Line, with its at-grade route cutting through the heart of congested, low-income neighborhoods.