Enter Maxine Waters, first-term Democratic Congresswoman and patron saint of Watts, which is part of the district she represented for 14 years in the California Assembly. She doesn't believe in the conspiracy theories, but she does believe in hard work. The day after the riots broke out, she was on a plane from Washington. Now Waters, 53, is crisscrossing her district, identifying problems, getting help—and, in between, finding every opportunity to blast George Bush for failing to deal with urban decay.
She arrives at Nickerson Gardens on Friday afternoon and is welcomed with the kind of adulation normally reserved for rap stars and basketball players. She is no stranger to housing projects. The fifth of 13 children, she grew up in one in St. Louis. It was not until 1961, after she had married and had two children, that she and her family moved to Los Angeles. Now divorced, remarried and a grandmother, she seems, in this time of crisis, almost always in control.
Her first move is to find food, a problem exacerbated by the fact that many Nickerson Gardens residents are out of money. She and her stall go through their pockets and purses and come up with $250—enough to buy food for everyone, including milk substitutes for the many babies in residence. The next morning, after a 7:30 A.M. taping of the Evans and Novak show for CNN, she makes an unannounced stop at the Department of Water and Power. At first there is no one to see her. but after a flurry of angry phone calls (to, among others, the office of her friend Mayor Tom Bradley), an official takes heron a tour of the department's Electric Trouble Headquarters. Just a few hours later, as Waters is making her second tour of Nickerson Gardens in as many days, the lights go back on. A collective whoop of joy goes up; Waters is nearly hugged to death by grateful residents. "You know what?" she says. "All the government systems work the same: The squeaky wheel gets the oil."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
