Erin Aubry Kaplan

People are dying because there is no water — no water in America!—Rep. Elijah Cummings I can't imagine New Orleans without Shirley. Shirley Washington and her family lived in New Orleans East in the 9th Ward in a handsome two-story house made of brick with plenty of room for company......

It's become an awfully familiar sight: a group of somewhat nervous-looking bureaucrats and assorted suits facing a roomful of angry South-Central citizens, chiefly black and Latino, who pepper them with questions about why an essential community institution is being dismantled without the community’s awareness or approval, to say nothing of......

Photo by Kevin Scanlon Tim Watkins is president and CEO of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee. He grew up steeped in the legacy of the Watts Riots; his father was Ted Watkins, the respected union organizer and community activist who founded the WLCAC in 1965 a few months before......

Photo by Ted SoquiFour years ago, Compton was in a fight for its life. Omar Bradley, the self-styled gangsta mayor of the ’90s whose public antics and penchant for hiring friends and relatives made the city a staple of local news and political theater, was running for re-election for the......

Dr. Johnetta Cole is not from Los Angeles. She never migrated here, doesn’t have a gig here, doesn’t visit once a week or commute from 50 miles away. Her deliberate way of talking, impeccable ensemble — really, not a hair out of place — and passionate but patrician air suggest......

Photos by Robert HaleEvery day, if the weather cooperates and my exercise conscientiousness holds, I go for a walk. I get in my car and drive about a mile north of my house, park on a sleepy side street off Manchester Boulevard and begin an elliptical, four-mile-plus loop around the......

A long-awaited project going up on Vermont Avenue that should be cause for celebration in the community is increasingly cause for concern, especially as it becomes clear that those supporting the project are putting their own interests — political, financial — above the objections of residents who say South-Central deserves......