the group at Oxy later invited us to a political discussion at Davis’s house in nearby Pasadena, where I first spoke with him and traded perspectives on the organizing tactics of Local 11 of the Hotel Restaurant and Employees Union (now Unite/HERE) in downtown LA.

 

My dad’s best friend from college, David Koff, happened to be the chief researcher, videographer and propaganda guru for Local 11, which is how I came to participate in its rallies on behalf of immigrant workers in Los Angeles, as well as those of Justice for Janitors, and later, in 1994, to work as a research analyst at the union. In early 1992, Koff produced a roughly thirty-minute documentary short for Local 11 that described the terrible social and economic conditions facing hotel workers in LA.

 

Koff titled the film City on the Edge and sent VHS copies of it to every possible organization that might be planning a convention in the city’s newly opened Convention Center, where Local 11 was also engaged in union organizing. The film featured footage of the Rodney King beating as well as the LAPD brutalizing union workers at protests. Koff also interviewed Davis, who argued that the militantly anti-union stance of hotel owners was contributing to LA’s unique circumstances of instability. If not properly addressed, he prophesied, the next point of social conflagration would inevitably produce civic unrest and riots.

 

“The average tourist in Los Angeles these days might as well be visiting white South Africa,” remarks Davis, who is seen speaking in front of a graffiti-decorated brick wall in Bunker Hill. “He or she will encounter approximately the same levels of security, fortification and paranoia. Hundreds of affluent communities are now protected by

gates, walls and private police, while on the other side, in the inner city, whole neighborhoods…have been barricaded off by the police and become narcotics enforcement zones. Everywhere public space is disappearing…the city just literally bristles with malice.”

 

We all know how things turned out just a few months later. I actually witnessed the first day of the LA Riots as the protests at LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters transformed into an uprising and columns of vandals roamed wildly downtown, burning palm trees, erecting barricades, toppling police cruisers and spray-painting anti-cop

slogans like “Kill Daryl Gates” on random edifices.

 

A decade later, and then a decade after that, I wrote about the experience for OC Weekly, reflecting with greater emotional and historical distance on the anniversary of the riots. Writing for the Weekly is how I really got to know Davis, after he ended up teaching at UC Irvine and immediately made himself available as a resource. I met him

on campus to learn about the research he was doing on the evolution of avian flu viruses for his aforementioned upcoming book and ended up writing a feature story about the university’s important work on understanding how the mutation of avian flu strains posed an apocalyptic threat to global health.

 

Again, when remembering Davis, it’s impossible not to highlight his persistently prescient prognostication. But there’s another side to Davis that I most powerfully recall, and which was crucial to my own evolution as a writer and journalist. It wasn’t just the mentorship that his published works provided to anyone curious and intelligent enough to gobble up for themselves, he was also, as an individual person, unfailingly generous and proactive in his support for the efforts of the younger cohorts of activists and likeminded writers who he cultivated.