Tim, voice-over: We acquired MudTown Farms back in 2005.
MudTown Farms back in 2005.
What it started out as was a dream to create a beautiful urban farm park where people could find solace and respite, and we'd be growing what people need within a food desert.
[Speaks Spanish] OK, let's go check it out.
Tim, voice-over: The reason that MudTown Farms is so important to me is because when I agreed to take this job 22 years ago, it was with the determination that I was gonna extend my father's legacy.
When WLCAC started in 1965, one of the first things that he did, he started growing food.
MudTown Farms became alive in my mind, that here's an opportunity to extend that part of the legacy.
MudTown promises to be one of our greatest achievements; at the same time, one of our most worrisome undertakings.
The project has been plagued with cost overruns, time delays.
There's a lot of work to getting it complete.
When we have the grand opening, we hope that the neighborhood will come and they'll see a beautiful, safe space that has a sort of spiritual veil over it, like nothing happens in that space but peace.
Can't give me enough money, can't give me enough of anything else but fulfillment, knowing that I've actually made a difference, but also as an extension of my father's work, of the work of WLCAC, that it becomes part of our shared legacies.
Man: Where--where are you gonna take the mayor?
Ted Watkins: Uh, we're gonna take him on a tour around Watts.
We're building a senior citizens park on 104th and Ram.
We've got the growing grounds, we've got the credit union, we got the consumer action program, and we've got the best pocket parks that we've built.
Mayor Sam Yorty: And your training program for the hardcore unemployed, I think, is just great.
Ted: Thank you.
Tina Watkins-Quaye: My grandpa, Ted Watkins Sr., was born in Mississippi in the 1920s.
He was going to be lynched, and so his mother put him on a train and sent him here to Los Angeles alone, as either a 12- or 13-year-old boy, to figure out how to survive.
Ted: When I was living in the projects, I was a tenant council organizer and organized tenants.
When I was in the shop in the Ford Motor Company, I was organizing the workers, and when I came out here and started working in the community, I started organizing people in the community.
And that's what the Watts Labor Community Action Committee came out of, was that organizing effort.
Tina: He was instrumental in not only building the local county hospital here, but in helping to have the 105 Freeway built.
The individual single-family homes he's built here, the generational wealth that creates, it's just farther-reaching than I think I can wrap my mind around.
Ted: All of my peers--the doctors, lawyers, and merchant chiefs--felt that we were crazy to buy land in this decrepit and run-down community.
In about 7 years, we were putting houses on that land.
Tina: He passed away when I was about 13 years old.
I have fond memories of his character, his spirit.
He was a very imposing figure.
Of course, I can't profess to know exactly what compelled him to build the way that he did, but the more I learned, the more it seems like he was building a family.
Women: ♪ We're from Watts We're from Watts Mighty, mighty Watts Mighty, mighty Watts We're from Watts We're from Watts... ♪