By  Dianne Anderson

Long before the notion of Green jobs, sustainable communities and clean energy, there was Frances Grice and the push for equal education through Operation

Second Chance.

Coming to the Westside of San Bernardino from Michigan, Grice recalls the high segregation that was ripping opportunity from the Black community. She followed her heart, and felt she could make a difference.

At her first job as secretary for the Precinct Reporter newspaper, she recalls the hopelessness of joblessness for Black kids right outside the front window, and the support from the paper's founder, Art Townsend, to try to fix the problem.

She and other mothers took up the good fight.

Banding together, they set out as the League of Mothers in the mid-60s to end de facto segregation at San Bernardino city schools.

It became a dangerous fight of personal sacrifice. As protests heated up, Ms. Grice, Valerie Pope Ludlam and Bonnie Johnson were shot at following a school board meeting to desegregate San Bernardino city schools. There were threats of hanging, cross burnings; they came up against the Klan. Ms. Johnson’s house was bombed. It was a bizarre time for a small town.

The original League of Mothers also started the area’s Freedom Schools, along with some strong men like Richard Cole, J.D. Greenwood, Bob Parker and several others who joined hands. Many of the mothers, Grice remembers, were nervous about the lawsuit filed against the San Bernardino Unified School District, which named Grice's daughter Darlene, now deceased, as one of the plaintiffs.

A decade-long fight ensued, gaining national attention, and eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court. And they won. Black kids no longer had to walk miles to school from the Westside in the rain watching white kids riding by, smiling out the school bus windows.

“We had Freedom Schools, we had Congress of Racial Equality, all of the civil rights folks, we had Abernathy [from the SCLC] down here. People came from all over to help us,” she said.

Fire and fervor for education later drove Grice toward community and economic development, where she developed her post secondary education training center, Operation Second Chance. Thousands of local young people could now learn a trade, and local Black businesses became stronger.

Grice recalls how they were all involved in a Westside factory that made dashikis. They landed a good contract making diapers for the local hospital. They ventured off into the first solar venture in the nation, Solar One, where Grice provided work for 2,000 males through a Barstow demonstration project that was backed by Edison.

Hope was in the air.

“Valerie [Ludlam] did it too. Valerie created the first solar [program]. They called her the sun lady,” Ms. Grice said.  “She went into housing and development; she trained a lot of subcontractors.”

Operation Second Chance also grew up the first generation of African Americans in environmental and social sustainability projects. Through Operation Second Chance, she channeled the first group of students from the community, over 80 Westside teens, toward UCR job training.

“It was solar, it was economic development,” she said. “We had the first waste water treatment training program. We started our own businesses because there were no businesses that would hire us.”

From the ground up, Ms. Grice worked with local architects, developers, hand picked minority contractors at each phase of blueprinting and construction of Operation Second Chance. To this day, she can name each participant, from the plumber to the painter, right down to who hung the drapes, who purchased and placed all of the oak furniture, the electrician, the gardener who worked at her school.

“And that’s why the place has never been tagged. Their children in the community are from families that built that building. It’s a prideful thing,” she said.

Back then, Black business was bustling on the Westside with various projects spun off from the early training school. But she counts Solar One as the great success because it produced the most jobs for Blacks at a time of heavy job discrimination.

That effort created a clearinghouse for the Federal government, and secured jobs for contractors with Edison during the huge solar project in Barstow.

“To be able to say you were involved with the first solar project, the demonstration project, one of the first in the country, 2,000 men in the middle of the desert in Barstow. We had minority contractors building them,” she said, adding that they also handled photovoltaic projects.

Under the kind of social pressure that would make most people lose heart, Ms. Grice fought through an even harsher level of personal loss, the death of both of her children. But, she never stumbled or accepted society’s definition of where Blacks should attend school, where they should or should not do business, why they could not achieve, or where they could not work.

Forward thinking, Ms. Grice has not given up on jobs in the Black community. A few months ago, she brought out hundreds of minority and disadvantaged contractors to meet face to face with representatives from several national and international big business.

Getting ready for her second outreach set tentatively for mid-April, she plans to hold another state procurement workshop, bringing local contractors together to learn better strategies and make the right connections to compete for money at the state level.

Despite the economy, she said there is money to be had in transportation contracts and the Public Utilities Commission.

That is, if businesses will learn and understand the way to get in the door.

“We started on this next program the day after we finished [the last workshop], getting all the names of the people,” she said.  “Everybody said that the last workshop was excellent, it was matchmaking between the businesses. This is a new concept.”

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