LOS ANGELES — Standing at the bustling intersection of North Wilmington Avenue and El Segundo Boulevard in Compton on a recent Tuesday morning, Dr. Tyrone Howard was quickly overcome by nostalgia.
The prominent UCLA professor remembered the days when he wore a yellow vest and roamed the narrow corridors of Willowbrook Middle School as a proud member of the school’s honor society.
Forty-one years had passed since Howard graduated from the school, but his formative years as a student there radically transformed his life and set him on the path to becoming the world class scholar that he is today.
Dr. Tyrone HowardPhoto by Caylo Seals
Amid the deadly drug epidemic, urban disinvestment, and rise in gang warfare at the hands of the Bloods and the Crips, Compton was notoriously a tough place in the 1980s. But despite all that, Willowbrook Middle School — it has since been renamed Compton Early College High School — stood tall as a beacon of hope, a powerful symbol of what was possible if educators and policymakers made a serious investment in urban education.
In so many ways, the working class Compton neighborhood has dramatically remade itself over the past few decades. What was once a white enclave in the 1950s and 1960s saw an influx of Black families in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, the Latinx population hovers around 71%.
Those shifting demographics are broadly reflected in today’s student population. What has not changed, however, is the school’s fading façade — it includes a mural of an elderly Black man with a gray goatee and a cap — that greets those who pass by the busy thoroughfare. It’s a lasting remnant of the cultural vibrancy that has always defined this working class neighborhood, even through hard and challenging times.
