'I was close to being killed so many times'

On the tough streets of Compton in the late 1980s, a crowd of school children looked on as an imposing middle-aged man berated two young black girls. The city, in Los Angeles County, was riven with internecine gang warfare at the time, and verbal conflict could quickly escalate to violence. Yet the man doing the shouting, and the girls on the receiving end of his invective, were not acting out one of Compton's then common tragic scenes. For a start, the schoolkids had been bused in specifically to witness the event at the local tennis courts.