High School Students Learn Some Facts of Minority Life : Workshop: Campus Black Student Union hosts discussions on social issues and careers, and offered a forum for concerns about L.A. riots and aftermath.

SANTA ANA —  High school freshman Maggie Lopez walked out of Officer Rufus Tanksley’s workshop on Saturday with a new perspective on the police. They aren’t so bad after all, she said.

Lopez was one of about 40 students who attended “A Time for Action,” a conference organized by the Black Student Union at Century High School. The campus event, which attracted students from around Orange County, featured workshops and panel discussions about social issues.

Other topics included preparation for college, charting a career path, and health issues such as AIDS. African-American and Latino speakers from all professions were featured.

The hosts of the conference said that Saturday’s event was the first organized forum that allowed minority students to express their concerns about the riots that racked Los Angeles last month.

Although the planning for the conference began in early April, coordinator Dwight Harvey said organizers scrambled to set up several workshops to address the disturbances that followed the not guilty verdicts of four police officers accused of beating Rodney G. King.

“We hope to give students a better knowledge of the situation and an understanding of how to change things peacefully,” said Harvey, a math teacher at Century High and a coordinator for the Black Student Union. “We want to give an understanding of how the system works.”

Participating were representatives of the judicial system and the Santa Ana Police Department. Milton Grimes, an Orange County defense attorney, was among the guests and took part in a panel discussion about the aftermath of the King verdict.

Grimes told students many of the same things he said to his 19-year-old son after the verdict was broadcast. “I tell him that he has to satisfy his own consciousness and feelings,” Grimes said, “but that he also has to look out for himself.”

Grimes also said people must respect each other equally if there is to be justice. He noted the history of inequities for minorities in the court system, including an early law that made it a capital offense for a black person to throw rocks at a white person.

“When you look at a people being that much less than you are . . . you can kind of understand what the problem is,” Grimes said. “As a people we should look at ourselves and get more assertive and aggressive.”

Another speaker, Anita Cole, talked about respect but her views were directed at a classroom full of young women who might face the possibility of date rape. “Historically, did you know that you were considered property?” said Cole, a counselor at a rape prevention center in Compton. “Society still has this mental block of women being less than men.”