By Charlene Muhammad | LA Sentinel
Easily accessible to millions of residents, Kenneth Hahn Park is a lot more than a place to unwind for Camille Samuels, a fellow of Environmental Justice with Black Women for Wellness, a South Los Angeles-based education, empowerment and advocacy organization. “It’s a classroom, a healing ground and a battlefield for environmental justice,” said the 26-year-old Ph. D candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.
Kenneth Hahn Park, which is close to both downtown Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, is surrounded by over 30 different communities and is where Samuels, who recently moved from the East Coast to California, began having picnics with friends and creating personal memories. “Especially when I was waiting out traffic to go back down to O.C. (Orange County), or just wanted to kill time or it was a pretty day and I just didn’t want the day to end quite yet, before going back, I would spend a lot of time hanging out in the park,” she stated.
Since then, Samuels has moved to L.A. and lives right down the street. “The park is in my neighborhood, my backyard, and it continues to be a place where I bring visitors, when friends visit, family from out of town,” she stated.
“I always make a stop here for myself, just picnics, walks, hikes, things like that. And that’s really transformed in this past couple months, working at Black Women for Wellness,” said Samuels. Since starting that job, she has learned a lot about the ongoing campaign against neighborhood oil drilling in South L.A. and was educated to the fact that she lives next to the largest urban oil field in the entire country, she said.
“This park used to be a part of the oil field, I learned. There’s a lot of environmental justice history tied into this park. The bowl was formerly a dam that collapsed and flooded,” she stated. That compelled her to focus on Kenneth Hahn Park when the opportunity arose for her to become an environmental justice fellow at Black Women for Wellness. Her aim was to learn more about the history and tell it through an environmental justice lens, center Black residents who live near the park, seen the space transform, and how it impacts them, according to Samuels.
Most recently, she’s hosted community engagement events at the park, such as for Earth Day, April 22. “That was really lovely. It was a yoga class. We had a wonderful instructor come lead us in some stretching and meditation, mindfulness,” said Samuels.
The event also featured a workshop and presentation on some of its history, learned through her research, she stated. She found that most of the attendees lived within 2 miles of the park and a little less than half hailed from multi-generational L.A. families.
“Everyone left saying they learned something new. So that was really cool. That event was really lovely,” stated Samuels.
She hosted the workshop near the pond toward the front of Kenneth Hahn Park. Right behind her guests, on yoga mats with snacks nearby, one could see open grass and trees, but just behind them were the oil derricks, Samuels pointed out.
“The pictures from the event are insane … You have women stretching. Everyone’s having fun, having a great time, and that’s the reality of living where we live, the environment that we call home here in South LA,” she stated.
Continued Samuels, “We don’t give up our fun and our joy, but at the same time, the reality is that there’s oil drilling going on around us. There’s the airport, the freeways, there’s all these things that are impacting our ability to live as healthy as we as we can be. … Personally, I love spending time in the park. For my birthday this year, one of my friends and I did a picnic in the park, and it was just really sweet!”
Her most memorable moments in Kenneth Hahn Park are times when she’s there with her friends.
“I think the balance between being able to have those big events and those just really small, intimate moments make the park one of my favorite places, for sure,” she added.
This story was produced by American Community Media in collaboration with the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at UCLA as part of the Greening American Cities initiative supported by the Bezos Earth Fund. Read more stories like this by visiting the Greening Communities homepage.
