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I lived in, I live in Inglewood, which is uh not too far from here. I, when my wife and I came back from Africa, uh we moved to Duplex in Inglewood about on Third Avenue, Sixth Avenue. And a year later we bought a house on Eighth

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Avenue and uh been there 51 years. So we've been in that neighborhood for a while. The neighborhood has gone through uh quite a few changes in the last 50 years. Uh to describe the neighborhood that I live in, actually, we called it East Inglewood. But uh

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when you relate that to Los Angeles at that time, we called it South Central, uh Los Angeles. And uh then later on because of politics and the way in which people view South Central, uh that central name dropped. So it's South Los Angeles. Well, to me,

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I still, I live in South Los Angeles. Uh I didn't care at all for South Central because it categorized us as being in this particular segment of Los Angeles to where it really wasn't that way because there was a uh uh all different cultures lived in

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South Los Angeles. I went to college at first uh to study speech. Then I switched to theology and then uh graduated from Southwester Christian in T Texas. And then I transferred to Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas changed my major again and I became a speech

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and language therapist. So I graduated from there in 1964. I told you how old I am. I was asked to go to Africa as a missionary to work with the deaf educational program. So when I went to Africa, we uh we started uh and took over

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a deaf education program for the country and that's how I kind of got off uh on, on track in, in speech and language therapy. Six years later, we moved back to uh Los Angeles and that's in 1970 I became a therapist in the school district. Well,

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I was in Long Beach for one year uh at the Myrtle Avenue Church. I stayed one year but I taught in the school district for 10 years. And then I re uh resigned from that and became full time at the Christ church. But I got just

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about ready to graduate from Abilene Christian. Uh I was uh offered a job in a place called Galveston, Texas uh to be a street the in the uh school district. But the week later I got a letter from the uptown church of Christ in San Francisco

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who had found out that I was young and black and getting married that they were looking for someone to uh to send to Africa to take charge of this special education program working with the deaf March April May June in 1964. Uh I graduated from Abilene

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Christian. Got married, got on an airplane, flew to San Francisco, July 1st. We got married in March July 1st. We were in Africa, technically as missionaries, but my job was to handle the deaf education program. Uh Deaf education at that time was a uh it was

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more like uh something is wrong with the people who could not speak if you're deaf. They had guttural sounds and they thought they were persisted. Emperor heard about it. The emperor's granddaughter gave us the land to build a school. Uh and we named the school after

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them ahaa uh school for the dead. So he came uh to the school and I had a chance to work with him, the Emperor Al L IC in 1967. So that opened up the door for me to get involved with other government agencies. And so I,

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I got to be a part of that infrastructure uh by becoming a part of uh the educational program for the country as opposed to just a little segment. It got to be a very interesting uh phenomenon of what a young black 20 something year old uh

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being in the company of people like this. Uh It, it was exciting and uh challenging as well. I didn't realize how different I was. When I came back, I had developed an accent. I had a British accent. I was talking like someone from England over there.

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We didn't have the type of racism that you had here. So I, I didn't, I didn't know what to do. I just walk up to anybody. I go into the back. I want to see the president. You go to the city of God and say, I'd

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like to see an officer or something if you want. I didn't, I just walked right into what I did. And then the kinds of people that we faced when I lived in Africa was different from the people that I faced. When I came back here over

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there, we dealt with hunger. We dealt with a lack of education. We dealt with people who uh have homes, you just did all the things differently. So when I came back, I was confronted with a whole cultural change. And people that I associated with saw that

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as a marvel, I looked at things from, not from an American perspective, but I looked at it from a global perspective. I looked at the church as not being an American church. I, I went to church in Rome. I met the Pope and I had essentially,

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I forgot which one it was back in the sixties, had an audience with, with, with the Pope. I went to a, a conference in Rome. I met the prime Minister and all of that. So it was a lot of uh things that I just basically took

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for granted that other people thought was really excited. So whatever I wanted to do I did it and everybody would look at me and said, why you do that goes like, let me do one of the things that I grew up in legal segregation. So I

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was born in racism. I was born uh and time where everything was legally segregated. So there was no, I didn't encounter segregation. I was uh born into it. And so we just grew up where there was a separation of the races. My father was a sharecropper.

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We owned our own land, but we were, it was a totally segregated area where we lived about five families, all black, we had our own farms, we had our own homes and all of that, I went to an all black elementary school. Uh I went to

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a two room schoolhouse for six years, had two teachers, one teacher for 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade. Uh another teacher for 4th, 5th and 6th. And then I was bused to the city at all black junior high school and all black high school. We could not

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go to the theaters, we could not go to any of the restaurants or anything like that. And that was just a part of our culture. I was not able to deal with that type. So I'm kind of glad I left. But then I wind up as

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Southwester uh which was an all black junior college and then graduated from there and went to an all white university which is Abilene Christian. And having been the first black student, there was a milestone within itself. I wasn't help but I wasn't hindered. Uh You are

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like every other student without treat you like that. They never sat down and talked to me about how we're gonna treat you. So I had to act like I was just one of the other students except I could not stay on campus. They would not allow

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me to stay in the dorm. So I stayed at AAA house about a mile away. So I had to walk back and forth. We had a three bedroom, uh not a three bedroom, we had a two room house. Uh and my parents had 12 Children. I

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grew up with the second half, which was six. I grew up with the second half, the first half was gone. Grown and left. My parents instilled one thing in me even though they were not highly educated, they uh they gave me a choice. Uh You can

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go here and work in the fields or you can go to school. So I said, well, I'm going to school but when I got a chance to go to college that just made them so proud that that boy is going to college. Crenshaw is a church.

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Came out of the old pep campus. So when they started the church, there, most of those people were even, even uh the preacher at the time was the provost of Pepper nine named Doctor Jack Scott. The population made up black and white. Uh The uh the

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preacher was white. Two of the deacons were white, two were black, two of the elders were black, two of the elders were white and they didn't have a black preacher. So they called me and uh so I became the black preacher of the church. And the

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year after that, when Pepperdine L A campus closed, everybody moved to uh Malibu and we went into a tailspin on that. We had debt. We had a lot of things and so we talked for about a month or so. Where shall we go? What shall we

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do? And the decision or one of the decision was to shut down and uh just, you know, close up the church and I said, no, why don't we just start all over, set up a ministry uh and just keep going and adopt a whole different way

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of doing ministry. We started going and uh we were able to uh maintain the building and it got to the point of where it, it overflowed. We went to two services that was too small. We put in closed circuit tvs in all classrooms and had people

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to go there that got too small. We knocked out a wall that became too small. So it just, it was just one of those uh those things. And so most of the people who left us because after I moved a lot of them who went to

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other congregations in the city, uh came back, it had to do with the uh the future of Pepperdine could not be ID, uh could not be related to the black community. It had to go and create a uh a sense of its own. And going to

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Malibu was was that had they stayed in uh South L A A probably would not have had the prestige as they call it. We didn't have too much interaction with uh with Pepperdine at the time except a lot of the, a lot of the professors and

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a lot of the staff came to our church uh even though there was a church on campus and they were doing very well, but a lot of them came over to Crenshaw at the time. There was a lot of anger uh had been building up in,

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in Los Angeles. There was a, a major problem that really invaded South Los Angeles. There was the introduction of crack it, it just wiped out uh South Los Angeles. It was so addictive, so quickly addictive. Then there was the uh the growth of games. Uh And

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even though I live in Inglewood, uh there were gangs in Inglewood, they were all over the city. People made statements about when the riots took place. I was right in the middle. I, I'm driving down the street and I see the people just burning, uh, up

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businesses. Uh, the thing that really bothered me a lot as I, I stood and watched as they were burning up, uh, stores, I watched them with the guns coming out. I, I was, I could drive down the street right in the middle of all of this

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and had no fear. And so the stink man, they are buring down their own homes that they were not, they were burning down homes that belonged to people that lived in Beverly Hills who had big mortgages on their property. So we, we were not burning down

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uh, their property at all. They were not destroying their neighborhoods. They were destroying a neighborhood that, that was owned by Beverly Hills. I think one of the real problems was they didn't have, uh a, a grasp of the, uh who, what was really happening in South

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Los Angeles and the gangs actually was take, took over and then the policemen, they were gangs in and of themselves. They, they were actually thugs and they went after people to kill them and they were doing it. If I had any choice in the matter, I

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would rotate policemen all the time because they can get so bitter because all they see is crime, crime, crime. They never get to see the good people, the good things that happen. And so every time they see a person, they look at a person as being

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from a negative perspective, the police department is a lot more open. Uh, I think that the laws are especially to body cameras. Uh, the fact that you can follow through on the complaints, that's, I've seen a major change in the way in which the police department

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is operating. But the thing that really got me, that hurt me to my heart and, uh was when the National Guard came in, I'm standing here watching these soldiers with guns walk and patrol the streets. That was like, oh, man, I lived in Africa, that's where

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the military always take over and they always kill people. You know, I was in Nigeria when they were through the government. Uh, and I happened to get out the same night that they killed the president of Nigeria. And, uh I got on the airplane as soon

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as we got out of the, uh, uh, the airspace of Nigeria, the pilot announced that they had just overthrown the government and they shut the country down and had I not got on that plane, I would have been stuck in Nigeria. And so Doug brought back

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those flashbacks when I saw the soldiers walking and marching down Crenshaw and, uh, down King Boulevard and all of that and, uh, with their rifles and bats and all of that. Why did I stay? Uh, I wasn't that interested in leaving but there was no other

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place to go. I didn't want to go to Beverly Hills. I didn't want to go to a white neighborhood in the world where I lived where we didn't have any great fear. As soon as we crossed Van Ness, it became a, uh, a real problem and

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we have a problem now but it's not related to gangs. It's related to poverty, but my community now is relatively safe. Uh, uh Let me tell you what I don't like now that they built Sofi Stadium, I'm only 10 minutes from Sofi Stadium. I can walk

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uh to the football game, but the traffic has closed down my neighborhood every time there's an event. Uh I, 80 to 90 people are, are on my front fence waiting for Uber to come and pick them up. Traffic is horrible. Uh I can't go west. I

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can only go east and they block off every street. So it's, it's, we're captured when they built the stadium. Uh, a lot of those uh restaurants like Eminem, which is a soul fruit place. Uh They had, they, uh they had to go out of business because

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uh the owners of the property wanted to, uh take over so they could build their own Starbucks or some of the things that we did after I became the minister is that we grew in America. But at the same time, we were able to keep the

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mission we're going in Africa. So we, we, we adopted 40 preachers. So we support for the last 20 year, 40 years, we supported, we are supporting preachers in Ethiopia. Also, we started uh when the gang epidemic became a big deal, there was a lot of killings.

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We also became uh a sanctuary if he could come to and get inside the building of the Crenshaw Church. You were safe. We would have the Mexican mafia, we would have the bloods and the crypts could walk in to our building. They would not hang out

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with each other. They would sit in different spots, but they would never bother each other at all. The bloods and the crypts and the other team members. And they were very, very respectful until they walked outside. The moment they got outside of the building, they pulled

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out their, their whiskey bottles and started, uh doing what they did, but only outside. So we became a, a model, almost proud of what we did for the community. We became known as the survey church. Uh I remember driving down 39th street to Crenshaw and every

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morning that I drive down there, there's a man sitting in his garage, that's all he did. He would sit in his garage drive by and finally I would wave at him. He'd wave back, never stopped and talked to him. But he, he would recognize me. I'd

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recognize him. And one day somebody walked in a church building and he said, uh Paro, do you remember a man sitting in the garage and you drive by and wave at him and he wave at you. Oh, yeah, I remember him. Well, he passed, we women

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know can conduct his funeral at your building. You know, chat. We let people walk into our building and said we have checked all over the place. We want to have a wedding and we can't pay $1,000,000 for rent. What could you help us out? Can we

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use your building for wedding? I said, surely you can, what would you charge? I said, I'll tell you what we're gonna do. I want $100 for the use of our building and you don't pay me, you're gonna pay the custodian to clean up after you leave.

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That's what we got charge. Second thing is we want you to come to our service one time. That's all we got to do is come visit us once. So we are a sanctuary. We reach out to the community, we help people regardless of what that background

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is like. Uh.