Voices in Our Heads
Terelle Jerricks Will Not Sway from Telling the Truth
Terelle Jerricks is the Managing Editor of Random Lengths News in San Pedro, California. Random Lengths has been the independent, progressive newspaper of the Los Angeles/ Long Beach Harbor Area since 1979. They publish every other Thursday in the Harbor Area cities of San Pedro, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Wilmington, Carson, Lomita, Harbor City. 
Terelle Jerricks is a native-born Angeleno
…raised in the mid-city area near Los Angeles High School which happens to be the oldest public high school in the Southern California Region and in the Los Angeles Unified School District (A little history lesson here).
“We grew up in an area that was…I don’t know if we knew then it was going to become gentrified the way it has now. But, it was a nice working class middle class neighborhood. Racially mixed…White, African American, Latinos with Latinos probably in a majority even at that time.”
It was a special time for Terelle Jerricks. He got to see some of LA’s history from there at a young age; from the Rodney King beating to the LA Riots which he remembers as his earliest memories of “civic disruption” as he calls it.
“I’ve never been anywhere else although I’ve tried to escape and it wasn’t until I graduated from high school that I started to develop a love for my city.”
He may not have escaped Los Angeles but he sure did see a lot of it. Jerricks’s father is a gardener and he would go to work with him especially during the summer months when he was young.
“We would travel all parts of…his clientele [was] all-city wide basically. We’ll go as far south as, you know, Imperial and Denker. We didn’t go too far on the eastside much but we might go as far west as say the westside around Rimpau.”
See a Google map. For someone young growing up in the metropolis that is Los Angeles, that was a big world. Even back then.
Terelle Remembers
…that through the cutting grass, raking up leaves, and pushing debris off the sidewalk, there were the talks with his father. Well, it’s more like from his father. But, it wasn’t until later that he fully appreciated those talks. His father wasn’t his only. influence. There were the books that he loved to read and other family members.
“There are key people in my family though that sort of helped cultivate that curiosity in me. That includes my great grandmother we lovingly call Mother Dear.”
Mother Dear was born on a Mississippi farm back in the early teens of the early twentieth century. As a teenager, she moved with the rest of her siblings to Chicago.
“She had this strong entrepreneurial spirit and this can-do spirit but also…she developed this philosophy of using knowledge to advance economically and financially her family. More importantly herself because it was all about her money.”
There was nothing that the great grandmother of Terelle Jerricks could not learn whether it was property ownership or the legal mechanisms to make sure it couldn’t be taken from her.
“…I like to call it a hustling spirit but using education or knowledge as a way to further your efforts.”
That knowledge was passed down to Jerricks’s grandmother who loved to read and study and was a forever student even into her senior years.
“When I was born and would spend time with Mother Dear, she would make it a point to teach us, me and my first cousin Jeffrey, various skills, whether it’s typing or the value of money. She would have us read the newspaper when she would pick us up and go eat at McDonald and we would take turns reading stuff.”
That newspaper reading was at the height of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and Mother Dear had the children learning about Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela.
“It sort of helped transform my consciousness because my Mother Dear was making sure she was teaching us to read and pay attention to what was happening in the world today.”
Terelle Jerricks obviously idolizes Mother Dear. According to him, she was one of the first black car saleswoman in Los Angeles, she sold pianos, was a property owner, she visited Cuba before and after the Revolution. She must have been one hellava woman. Then, there was the uncle who taught him about living Afrocentric.
“That was the base that I came from…where I’m learning about black culture, my history, and looking at who I am…and what role I should be playing in it.”
Fast Forward to University of California, Los Angeles
A long list of teachers at Alexander Hamilton Humanities Magnet High School prepared him for college and journalism. At UCLA, Jerricks became the editor of Nommo Magazine. The magazine had a legacy going back to 1968 shaped by the Black Student Union and the Black Panther Party.
“It’s not like I had any experience in Journalism. It’s not like I worked on the High School newspaper. I didn’t…So when I came in, I was starting from nothing…And Nommo allowed me to branch out in different ways of writing, whether you’re talking profiles or straight up news stories or interviews and I got to do some interesting stuff.”
There were other skills he had to acquire that would come in handy today. Those three years at Nommo taught him how to prepare a business plan, sell advertising, do graphic design, photography, and learn how to write different ways.
The one lesson he couldn’t learn at UCLA
…was how to make a small business and publication survive. This last lesson he’s learned in the fourteen years he’s been at Random Lengths News. As a former resident of San Pedro and a past and current reader of the newspaper, I can testify that Random Lengths News is no ordinary newspaper. It is a newspaper with a progressive slant.
“You cannot look at the paper without looking at the Publisher [James Preston Allen] and in many respects…it’s almost like a love-hate relationship. With the Publisher James Preston Allen, you either love him or you don’t. And in many respects that sort of the same attitude…San Pedro has had with the paper. Whether you love or hate either the paper or the Publisher, you respected him.”
The newspaper’s Managing Editor, Terelle Jerricks, will proudly tell you that they don’t sway from their perspective.
“We own up that we’re a progressive publication. We don’t sit up there and start talking about objectivity when in fact there is none.”
The newspaper, says Jerricks, doesn’t hide behind objectivity to stop them from telling “the truth.” That resolve is one of the things that attracted him to Random Lengths News. That position, however, comes with a price and a challenge.
“Covering every aspect of our community is a challenge even in the face of those who would try to attack us by attacking our advertisers. Changing marketplace…fighting against the idea that print advertising has no place in today’s marketplace.”
The work ahead for Random Lengths News
…and its Publisher, Managing Editor, and the rest of the staff is to educate advertisers that print is not dead and that online is not the only way to reach an audience. They must be doing something right. They’re been reporting the news and serving their readers for thirty-eight years. To subscribe to Random Lengths News and find out more about their coverage, visit www.randomlengthsnews.com. You can reach Terelle Jerricks at Editor@RandomLengthsNews.com.
