PBS News Hour

AMNA NAWAZ: In Judy Woodruff's previous report, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam said that strengthening the country's democracy would begin in places far from Washington, with grassroots efforts by people stepping up in their own communities.

Now she visits a down, but not out community in California that's fighting for a comeback one round at a time.

It's part of her ongoing series, America at a Crossroads.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just over 60 miles east of Los Angeles lies California's Inland Empire, where 20-year old Terry Washington is attempting to beat the odds.

TERRY WASHINGTON, Professional Boxer: I will definitely be a world champion, definitely be a world champion.

It's going to definitely happen.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Some very high aspirations, despite growing up in one of the most dangerous cities in the country.

TERRY WASHINGTON: I have seen a lot of stuff.

I have lost a lot of friends, more than five friends, while I was boxing.

Lost a lot of family members in this city all over.

And it's tough.

JAMES FALLOWS, Co-Author, "Our Towns": This was a bustling downtown.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Journalist Jim Fallows grew up near San Bernardino, a place that in 1977 won the award for All-America City.

But in the years since, its fortunes flipped.

I met up with him and his wife, Deborah, for a tour of the city that they have reported on in depth for years.

JAMES FALLOWS: This is just a few miles from where I grew up in the neighboring city of Redlands.

So it's a story I have known my whole life.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Blocks of vacant buildings and homeless camps now dot the city that was once home to the bustling Norton Air Force Base that closed in 1994.

That followed the shuttering of a nearby steel mill a decade earlier.

Together, the closures gutted the economy.

In the years after the 2008 financial crisis, the city declared bankruptcy, along with many others.

JAMES FALLOWS: Places that have depended on a couple of big industries have generally had a harder time to -- adapting to the inevitable transformation of the U.S. economy.

You see that with steel mills in the Midwest.

You see at the textile mills.

You see it here in San Bernardino.

And the question is how -- whether the community can respond and recover.

JUDY WOODRUFF: President Trump won San Bernardino County in November, the first Republican to do so in 20 years.

And researchers say the question of whether it can recover is not just driving the future of this place, but of the country more broadly, as it wrestles with growing polarization, inequality, gridlock in Washington, and the devastation of local news.

JAMES FALLOWS: We asked people to tell us the story of your town.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Communities like this sparked the Fallows' interest in starting a five-year, 100,000-mile reporting project in 2012 that became their book and an HBO documentary, "Our Towns," chronicling their journey across the country in their single-engine propeller plane.

We met up recently at Alice's Restaurant here in San Bernardino to talk about what they learned.

JAMES FALLOWS: When we started doing this 10-plus years ago, our main reaction was surprise at all the things we didn't know about.

We felt like people who followed the U.S. media knew all about New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco and D.C., but not necessarily about Duluth or about Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or about Columbus, Mississippi.

DEBORAH FALLOWS, Co-Author, "Our Towns": One of the strongest impressions that we got were that the people who lived in the towns knew the towns best.

They knew that they knew their strengths.

They knew their problems.

People knew if their schools weren't working quite right, or they knew if they needed to improve the infrastructure of their library, or they knew if they needed new town leadership.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you think you were able to learn and to report to the American people?

JAMES FALLOWS: By the time we'd finished several years of this, we thought that the view Americans had of their country was imbalanced in a negative way, that most people felt better about where they lived, the part of America they knew about firsthand, than the part of America they only heard about.

JUDY WOODRUFF: For boxer Terry Washington, his life began to change at just age 8, when he met his coach, Ian Franklin.

TERRY WASHINGTON: I was a fighter.

You know, one of the days he passed by, he said he saw me fighting in the front premises of our apartments.

IAN FRANKLIN, Founder and President, Project Fighting Chance: As a person, he's a champion.

I see the influence he has on kids.

I see how he handles the youth in here.

He works for us.

He's one of our boxing coaches, and kids gravitate toward him.

He has a God-given ability to influence kids in the right way.

It's been so long.

Nice to see you again.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Franklin's nonprofit, Project Fighting Chance, has worked for 26 years to put kids on the right path.

Between 30 and 60 students show up here every day after school for a meal, a tutoring session, a game of chess, and, of course, boxing.

IAN FRANKLIN: What we say we do is, we reduce childhood violence, aggression, and trauma.

It's about people that want something to change.

But if they're not doing something, I think everybody has to look in the mirror and say, OK, if I don't like the environment that I'm in, what can I do?

MICHAEL SEGURA, San Bernardino Generation Now: I feel like it's been in the hands of the community since you were here 10 years ago, right?

JUDY WOODRUFF: The Fallows also introduced me to Michael Segura, who has worked to make social change through public art and engagement.

MICHAEL SEGURA: There's always going to be struggles, right?

And with the city, it's still done grassroots.

I don't think there's really a lot of support from the actual city of San Bernardino.

It's nonprofits,it's community members that are taking on that movement of doing the public art, creating these beautiful spaces.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Part of his work now focuses on new education programs.

MICHAEL SEGURA: We're looking at the purposeful pathways, which is, how do we work within the school district to ensure that the pathways are leading to careers that make sense in industries that make sense and not just logistics?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Over the past two decades, citrus groves have slowly given way to warehouses.

The relatively cheap flat land around San Bernardino fueled the logistics, transportation, and distribution economy that's now the primary source of jobs in the county.

The Fallows found that high schools were adjusting to take advantage of the new economy.

DEBORAH FALLOWS: It's a very realistic approach to both keeping kids in school, supporting the kind of work that is necessary in that community, and kind of uplifting the whole scene.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Jim, it made things better than they might have been without this kind of training and education, but it wasn't enough to completely turn around.

JAMES FALLOWS: There's a category of cities that have real fundamental challenges, the same kind of industrial dislocation, the same kind of impoverishment, the same kind of governing problem.

So the challenge is being simultaneously aware of all the realistic obstacles that the community faces and noticing the people who are trying to work around them, work against them, work for some better way.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But there's one topic the Fallows try to avoid in these local communities national politics.

JAMES FALLOWS: It sort of immediately ends the conversation.

People are either in one camp or the other.

If you ask them, what's the story of this town, are kids moving in or moving away, what's happening with the port, what's happening with the water supply, they are the experts and you can learn from them.

DEBORAH FALLOWS: And people know so much about their hometowns.

I think they're there in a comfort zone talking about where they live in a way that national responses are a bit separate from you, a bit abstract from your everyday, busy life.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Since the Fallows first met Ian Franklin, Project Fighting Chance moved into a new gym and has expanded to 10 school sites, with plans to spread into neighboring districts.

IAN FRANKLIN: I have had 16 national champions.

And the one thing I do tell all these youth, in order to achieve, you first have to believe, because, if you don't believe, you're not going to achieve it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And that's something the Fallows have witnessed in recent years, a new dawn of community, local stories they also continue to track on their Our Towns Civic Foundation's Web site.

JAMES FALLOWS: We hope and now believe that the history of the 2020s will be of all the problems we know at the national level and this emerging diaspora of people across the country figuring out solutions for the future.

JUDY WOODRUFF: For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Judy Woodruff in San Bernardino, California.