Peaceful Perceptions

Lorenzo Gunn’s connection with his roots is a post office box and a barber. He picks up his mail at 29th and Logan, and he gets a haircut in one of San Diego’s most diverse neighborhoods. “It takes me back,” he says. “All those people helped me be who I am today. I learned a lot from them. I don’t want to lose touch with that.”

And then Gunn goes home to El Cajon. To his big house on Shadow Knolls Court, where he can count on one hand the number of other African-Americans in the neighborhood.

Barely 3 percent of El Cajon’s population of 95,000 is African-American. When the professional photographer moved his family there in the mid-1980s, there were even fewer. But Gunn didn’t care then, and he doesn’t care now.

“We looked for something that was cost-effective and had good schools,” he says of the decision to leave a home in East San Diego because of the crime. Not that it was an easy decision. He concedes he was worried there’d be a repeat of the cross-burning on his lawn that occurred when he lived in El Cajon briefly in the ’60s. But that happened so long ago, he figured, he just couldn’t work up much too anxiety about what might happen when he moved into a mostly white community.

Besides, it was in the racially diverse Southeast San Diego where, in the early ’70s, he was stopped by two white police detectives simply because he was a black man driving a Porsche, he says.

For the most part, Gunn’s optimism about the El Cajon move has been warranted. His Mexican-American wife, Olga, his two children from his first marriage and her two from hers (to a white man) have provided El Cajon with a multiracial picture of the all-American family.

Gunn doesn’t regard himself as a militant on race relations. “If I had to label myself, I’d say I’m like Martin Luther King Jr. People relax because of who I am, without my having to carry a big stick. Anybody can stand on a table and shout and curse. It’s the person who doesn’t have an agenda who can have the most impact.”

About the only time he recalls getting even slightly aggravated about anything race-related in El Cajon was when he found a shortage of African-American haircare products at the local grocery stores. He even wrote letters to the stores’ corporate offices a decade ago. The shelves were promptly stocked—but with sadly dated products, he says. “The huge rack had things like Dixie Peach and all these other Afro gels that are passé. It was a nice gesture, but I think the way they handled it was disappointing.”

Still, not enough to rile Gunn.

He attributes his mellow, even-tempered demeanor to a mother who got her kids out of segregated Pensacola, Florida in the early ’50s. She moved her two sons to San Diego—to 28th Street and National Avenue, where she lives to this day in what is now Barrio Logan, a heavily Hispanic neighborhood. Why does she stay, even though her 56-year-old son has long since moved? It’s never been a topic of conversation, Gunn says, declining to speculate about what keeps her there. But, he says, “There’s quite a mixture of people there now, and that’s nice to see the change to more diverse neighborhoods.”

Gunn acknowledges the contributions of minority activists who demand change and push institutions to provide opportunities. “Time won’t cure all the problems,” he says. And what of the racially motivated incidents that sometimes grab headlines? He believes people who commit racist acts are a reflection of their upbringing. Parents, he says, are the ones who must instill tolerance and respect for diversity in their children.

Gunn says he and Olga believe in countering racial bias on a one-to-one basis. “I feel very comfortable about who I am,” he says. “I don’t have an ax to grind. I don’t take any B.S. from anybody—but as long as I carry myself in a professional manner and treat someone as they want to be treated, I’m not going to have a problem.”

—Cathy Clark

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »