The Publisher, Teka-Lark Fleming

I often hear people talk about how Inglewood used to be nice. I’m always confused as to what they mean.

I was born in Inglewood in the 1970s. I had an idyllic childhood. My mother was a homemaker and my father worked for Worldway, the USPS division out of LAX. Our home was 12 minutes by car with no traffic from LAX. I would walk to St. Eugene’s Catholic school. After doing my homework, I would ride my bicycle along the streets of Morningside Park until the street lights came on.

During the summers, I went to day camp at Darby Park. On certain weekends, I went to Rogers Park for tennis lessons; on other weekends, I went to Centinela Park for swimming lessons.

Inglewood is huge. It’s filled with many communities, and some have more challenges than others.

Inglewood is as big as the Metro area of Los Angeles. The Metro area includes Koreatown, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake and Los Feliz.

Are all those neighborhoods the same? Does the beauty of Hollywood in the 1940s during the height of it being the epicenter of entertainment in the US take away from the modern-day bohemian Silver Lake or the eclectic Echo Park?

I know the old Inglewood wasn’t inclusive. Is that nice? I don’t think that’s nice. Do you want to go back to segregation and schools that swatted you if you dared to speak in a language other than English?

I don’t.

I live not too far from my old house. My niece walks to school just like I did. My niece also rides her bike with her best friend on the same streets as I did. I live in the same place, but it is a different neighborhood, a modern neighborhood, but it is still a nice neighborhood.

I now have neighbors that were born in places other than the southern U.S. I have neighbors from Mexico, Nigeria and New York.

Our wonderful neighborhood Catholic school, St. Eugene’s, was formerly run by the nuns of St. Joseph. It is now run by people from the community and a priest from Nigeria. St. Eugene’s mass, instead of being in English only, is now in English at 10:00 a.m. and then in Igbo at 12:00 p.m.

To me, that is good change.

The past is over. Inglewood is nice right now. Inglewood is full of life, culture, art and possibilities.

Join me in modern-day Inglewood, the City of Possibilities.