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That figure rises to about 85 percent when discussing members of the various Compton street gangs – which, incidentally, says something about the six thousand annual threats of bodily injury leveled at inner-city teachers and thus the “high-risk” status of the Compton instructor. Not so easily measurable, but just as integral to the problem, is what community leaders further describe as a rock-bottom despair – the fact that a significant proportion of Compton youth cannot fill out an employment application and the life expectancy of an inner-city “warrior” is but twenty-five years...unless, of course, he is removed from the streets to serve a double-digit prison term.
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It was into this dead end of Western education, then, that two local Baptist clergymen, with material support from the Association for Better Living and Education, founded the Compton Literacy Project. The aim, simply stated, was the intellectual salvation of youth-at-risk, and particularly those from notoriously violent neighborhood gangs. As a further word, and a vital one, project founder Reverend Alfreddie Johnson describes the program as “the fundamental of all fundamentals,” which is to say that one may glibly speak of economic or political reform within disadvantaged Black communities, “but let’s first teach them to read.” To that end, and in addition to LRH Study Technology, Compton instructors were armed with
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To date, some five hundred Compton youths have learned to read through the Compton Literacy Project, generally averaging two academic years for every twenty hours of instruction with LRH tools. More to the point, however, are the longer term statistics. For example, given any random selection of five hundred Compton youth, one can expect fifteen to thirty murdered through the course of a year while at least another hundred enter prisons or probation departments. In comparison, of the five hundred completing the Compton project, only three were later arrested and not a single graduate has fallen to street warfare.
Individual stories are just as compelling. Once seriously vicious members of gangs were soon tutoring those from rival factions, who, in turn, signed on as tutors themselves. A once wholly illiterate drug dealer was writing, “Between heaven and earth there is a place where spiritual wholeness can be embraced,” while a formerly incorrigible “warrior” told instructors, “I now know why you want us to do this course. You want us to do this course because words are power. And if you know the words, you don’t need to use guns.” Also through the first months of the Compton Literacy Project came the case of a previously homeless and illiterate cocaine addict who landed his first steady job, rented his first apartment and, in something of a landmark decision, recovered custody of his daughter from a foster home, with college-level reading skills.
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