WATTS
White Flight
Race riots more violent than any in the history of the United States shocked Americans during the decade; in every region of the country major cities threatened to go up in flames. Since the years immediately following World War II, middle-class white Americans had been leaving the city for nearby suburbs, and businesses that had once provided jobs and a tax base for the city soon followed. Increasingly, downtown—the inner city—was home to lower-income minorities, many of them southern blacks who came in large numbers to the North to find work. The decay of the inner cities perpetuated itself: economically disadvantaged Americans had to live in the low-rent housing such areas offered, which in turn caused more white flight to the
suburbs for the Americans that could afford it and the businesses they patronized.
Powderkegs
As the decade progressed, African-Americans saw growing numbers of their race suffering from poverty and the health and social problems that go with it—all at a time when great gains toward the goal of racial equality had supposedly been made. Unemployment among African-Americans was well above the national average, and one-half of all black Americans lived below the poverty line (as opposed to one-fifth of whites). Not surprisingly, then, particularly during the hot months of summer, tensions ran high in black communities across the nation. On many occasions, provoked often by instances of brutality by white police against blacks, these tensions exploded into violence. In 1964 riots broke out in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. In 1967 alone there were eight major out-breaks, thirty-three "serious but not major" episodes, and more than a hundred minor incidents, resulting in eighty-three deaths and hundreds of injuries, mostly African-American civilians.
A Fateful Confrontation
But probably the most notorious uprising of the 1960s occurred in Los Angeles for a week in August 1965. The violence began on 11 Au-gust, a hot afternoon, in the mostly black South Central section of the city. White policemen had to use force to restrain a young black man arrested for driving under the influence. A crowd gathered at the scene, many of whom arrived too late to know what had started the confrontation. The mood was tense but nonviolent until one of the officers on the scene tried to arrest a woman he mistakenly thought had spit on him. The crowd lashed out in anger, pelting nearby cars and buses with rocks and bottles. Police reinforcements arrived, and they squared off against the angry crowd well into the night. Disturbances spread from South Central to Watts, a neighborhood several miles away. The demonstrators threw rocks; the police responded with riot sticks. Television news reporters were on the scene as well, and some of them encouraged the rioters to further violence so that they could get more exciting news footage.
Burn, Baby, Burn!
At around midnight the police decided that their presence was antagonizing the crowd, and they withdrew from the scene. The mob was triumphant and had no intention of dispersing. Newsmen who stayed behind after the police left were attacked, and rioters overturned the mobile television-news vans. By this time local store owners were feeling the wrath of the crowd's anger, too: rioters smashed shop windows and made off with the merchandise they found inside. The hostility they felt for the oppressive environment in which they lived fueled their anger. "Burn, baby, burn," which was the trademark phrase for a disc jockey of one of Los Angeles's black-music stations, became the motto for the rioters over the course of the uprising. As their rage grew, they attacked blacks as well as whites: as a black automobile worker reported, he was on his way home from work when "a man ran up to the car and struck me through the windshield with a two-by-four and ran."
The Guard Arrives
Violence continued over the next several days, encouraged by confused reports of police brutality among the black community and by leaflets distributed by the radical Black Muslims in the neighbor-hood. By 3:30 A.M. on Friday, 13 August, seventy-five stores in the area had been burned. African-American store owners began putting signs in their shop windows telling the rioters that they were "blood brothers"; in many cases the signs were ignored. Black leaders, including members of CORE and stand-up comedian Dick Gregory, appealed to the crowds to go home, but with little success. Gregory actually received a minor gunshot wound for his efforts. Later that day the Los Angeles Police Department decided that further support was necessary, and the California National Guard was called to help restore order. The fifteen hundred guardsmen who arrived at the scene on Friday evening clearly were too few in number, however, considering that at the height of the violence nearly ten thousand African-Americans had taken to the streets. By Saturday morning another two thousand troops had been deployed. Before the uprising was over, more than thirteen thousand guardsmen would be involved.
On the Bottom
The rioting continued for three more days. With the presence of the heavily armed guardsmen, the violence began to subside. Martial law was imposed, a curfew was established, and no one was allowed on the street without a good reason. An area of nearly fifty square miles of the city was put under military control. When the smoke finally cleared, the loss of life and property stunned Los Angeles. Thirty-four were dead, most of them participants in the riot, and more than a thou-sand were injured. Six hundred buildings were damaged, a third of them totally destroyed. Property damage was estimated at $40 million. When order was restored the police chief of Los Angeles, William H. Parker, was reported to say, "We're on top and they are on the bottom"; but, as Roy Wilkins, director of the NAACP, responded, "the philosophy behind the 'we're on top' expression was the tinder under the Watts explosion," The rioting in Los Angeles and throughout the country during those violent years was a dramatic demonstration that the complex relationship between black and white Americans was still far from being understood.
Sources:
Jerry Cohen and William S. Murphy, Burn, Baby, Burn!: The Los Angeles Race Riot, August, 1965 (New York: Dutton, 1966);
Robert E. Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (New York: Bantam, 1967).
