A SHARED HISTORY BLACK COMMUNITY PROUD OF VALLEY HERITAGE.

Byline: Dana Bartholomew Staff Writer

Just two months after Ida Kinney moved to Van Nuys in 1940, the African-American woman had already racked up 16 traffic tickets driving the streets of the San Fernando Valley - citations she said she didn't deserve.

``Prejudice?'' asked Kinney, now 99 and living in San Fernando. ``Oh man, growing up in Santa Monica, I thought California was heaven until I moved to the San Fernando Valley.

``Here in the Valley, my, I could write a book about what I've fought against - and helped to win.''

So could many other African-Americans.

Sixty-four years after Kinney arrived, African-American Vals recall a vibrant history of hard-fought gains - and gradual community dissolution. From their origins in the tight-knit ``Negro ghetto in Pacoima'' to the scattered community of today, the Valley's African-Americans are celebrating Black History Month in churches, barbershops, universities and schools.

And nowhere is black pride greater than in Pacoima, once mostly black, now mostly Latino.

``You see this?'' said the Rev. Zedar Broadous, of Pacoima, gesturing toward a row of carnicerias, mariscos restaurants and Mexican money- changers that now dominate Van Nuys Boulevard, hub of the Pacoima business district. ``All this used to be African-American.''

For many holdouts and former residents, it still is.

At Styles Ville Barber Shop & Beauty Salon, three generations of Carters have offered precision fades, flattops and braids since 1958. Its customers now drive great distances for gossip and for gab.

``This is the place, this is the place, this is the barbershop - the cultural center of the black community,'' Broadous declared amid laughter as raucous as the chortling of chairs in ``Barbershop 2: Back in Business,'' featuring rapper Ice Cube's haircut emporium, which debuted Friday.

``It's not like Supercuts - in and out. You come in here, you're going to commune with each other.''

On one side of the shop, barber Gregory Carter listens to a customer railing about last weekend's Super Bowl halftime show. In an adjoining salon, Gregory's mother, Nella, presses a girl's hair as talk wanders from the loss of black Pacoima to the demise of Mom's Chicken Shack, once home to the tastiest fried chicken in the Valley.

``It's all gone, all gone. Most everybody moved out, sold out, many to Palmdale or Lancaster,'' said Ollie Carter, 72, of Northridge, who founded the shop with her late husband, Freddie, back when tumbleweeds rolled down Van Nuys Boulevard.

They talk of dirt roads ``you could swim across when it rained.'' Of African-Americans segregated by bankers, builders and real estate brokers once unwilling, or unable, to sell to them elsewhere in the Valley.

They talk of favorite schools and founding church ministers. Of Halloween dances at Pacoima Park. Of ``whuppins'' by unknown, but caring, moms. Of picnics at Val Verde, whose swimming pool welcomed blacks.

They speak of good jobs at defunct Lockheed and General Motors plants. Of buying new houses at Joe Louis Homes. Of leaving them unlocked by day and by night.

And they describe the fight to loosen real estate restrictions that in the 1960s allowed blacks to leave Pacoima for Lake View Terrace - from ZIP code 91331 to the more prestigious 91342 and a steep drop in insurance rates - and for Lancaster, Palmdale and the once-white neighborhoods of the San Fernando Valley.

``The Realtors wouldn't show you a house in Northridge and Canoga Park,'' said Ed Kussman, 93, of Pacoima, who helped found the Fair Housing Council of the San Fernando Valley to combat such practices.

``Real estate guys would say, 'Don't you want to live in Pacoima?'''

William Huling, a professor emeritus from California State University, Northridge, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on blacks in the Valley, also recalls being forced to live in Pacoima.

``I was at Cal State Northridge and couldn't even have lunch in Northridge, wasn't even welcome in the restaurants,'' said Huling, 70, of Canoga Park.

But change did come, if only gradually.

Kinney, who had rented her Van Nuys home with an option to buy it, recalls challenging her neighbor, a Ku Klux Klan member, at a community meeting.

``I'm buying this house property,'' she had declared. ``If there's any KKK here who wants a demonstration, our house is 170 feet from the gate, please come up on the lawn. He went up and sat down, like a suck-egg dog.''

Kinney, who was one of the first black ``Rosie the Riveters'' at Lockheed during World War II, had another challenge: joining a labor union off-limits to ``colored people.''

Why should she collect a paycheck, made possible by dues-paying white workers, while not being allowed to contribute, she had asked a union boss.

``I just kept a-steppin', and I'd step on ... (and) we organized and won it.''

Later, during the Civil Rights era, such preachers as the Rev. Hillery T. Broadous, Zedar's father and founder of Calvary Baptist Church, also worked to break down racial barriers.

In 1968, racial unrest boiled over at the mostly white San Fernando Valley State College, now Cal State Northridge, when 25 African-American student leaders took over the president's office and demanded a volunteer coach be fired for racism.

Their demands eventually led to the founding of the largest ethnic studies department in the nation at CSUN.

However, the demonstrators were prosecuted for kidnapping and false imprisonment. Three of them were sentenced to prison for up to 25 years for ``masterminding'' the demonstration, while eight others were sentenced to county jail.

``Before, CSUN was viewed as a white campus,'' said Barbara Rhodes, a onetime resident of Pacoima and professor emeritus of the Pan-African Studies Department.

``Now you have Black Studies and Chicano Studies departments.''

San Fernando Valley blacks also celebrate such Pacoima sons and daughters as Ronald Oden, current mayor of Palm Springs, former San Francisco Giants slugger Gary Matthews and Charles White, formerly of the University of Southern California Trojans and Los Angeles Rams.

But as the roughly 10,000 Valley blacks who lived in Pacoima grew to the 60,000 blacks who have integrated into communities from Woodland Hills to Glendale, many bemoan the loss of Pacoima as a thriving black hub.

``I can count the black families that are left,'' said Irving Ware, 49, straddling his bicycle on a Pacoima street corner. ``Back in the days, people would get together, get some meat, some bread, some beer, and you got you a barbecue. You don't see that no more.''

Dana Bartholomew, [phone]

dana.bartholomew(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, chart

Photo:

(1 -- color) As an African-American, Ida Kinney, has seen a lot of changes in the San Fernando Valley since moving here in 1940.

(2) Founder Ollie Carter, left, and her daughter, Lois Carter Coleman, talk about how Styles Ville has become a center of the African-American community.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer

(3) Tanisha Barns, 6, of Pacoima joins a protest against alcohol and drugs in society, in this November 1987 photograph.

Daily News file photo

Chart:

A HALF CENTURY OF GROWTH IN THE VALLEY:

SOURCE: Daily News research