The American Nation A History of the United States, Combined Volume (14th Edition)

778 Chapter 29 From Camelot to Watergate: 1961–1975

bottles and bricks and sometimes shot at,

while above the roar of the flames and the

hiss of steam rose the apocalyptic chant,

“Burn, baby, burn!”

The most frightening aspect of the riots

was their tendency to polarize society on

racial lines. Whites fled to the suburbs in

droves. Advocates of Black Power became

more determined to separate themselves

from white influence; they exasperated

white supporters of school desegregation by

demanding schools of their own. Extremists

formed the Black Panther party and col-

lected weapons to resist the police. “Shoot,

don’t loot,” the radical H. Rap Brown

advised all who would listen. “Violence is as

American as cherry pie,” he added.

Malcolm Xat

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Watts Riots 1967at

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Black Power 1967at

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From the “Beat Movement” to Student Radicalism

The increased militancy of many American

blacks paralleled the emergence of an

increasingly strident attitude among many

young people as the “conformist” decade of

the 1950s gave way to the “activist” 1960s.

This common characterization, how-

ever, is overdrawn. The roots of 1960s’ dis-

sent were firmly planted in the 1950s.

J. D. Salinger, perhaps the most popular

writer of the decade and the particular

favorite of college students—The Catcher

in the Rye (1951) sold nearly 2 million

copies—wrote about young people whose

self-absorption was a product of their alien-

ation from society. Allen Ginsberg’s dark,

desperateHowl, written in 1955, perhaps the most

widely read poem of the postwar era, underscored gen-

erational differences. “I saw the best minds of my gen-

eration destroyed by madness, starving hysterical

naked,” the poem begins; and it ends with an almost

frantic assault on that “sphinx of cement and alu-

minum,” the fire god Moloch, the devourer of chil-

dren. In On the Road(1957), Jack Kerouac, founder

of the beat(for “beatific”) school, described a manic,

drug-laced flight from traditional values and institu-

tions. In Catch-22(1955), Joseph Heller produced a

war novel at once farcical and an indignant denuncia-

tion of the stupidity and waste of warfare.

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EXPOSITION BLVD.

VERNON AVE.

SLAUSON AVE.

FLORENCE AVE.

MANCHESTER AVE.

IMPERIAL AVE.

CENTURY BLVD

VERMONT AVE.

ROSECRANS AVE.

CENTRAL AVE.

MAIN ST.

HARBORWAY FREEWAY

FIGUEROA AVE.

Watts

L.A. Civic

Center

Over 75 percent black

Private buildings damaged

or destroyed

Death

SANTA MONICA FREEWAY

Violence and Segregation in Watts, Los Angeles, August 11, 1965During the
race riots that began on this day, hundreds of buildings in the predominantly black
ghetto of Watts were destroyed, and some people were killed. Among the complaints
of residents was that two superhighways—the Santa Monica Freeway and the
Harborway Freeway—turned Watts into a prison for those who lacked automobiles.

James Earl Ray. Blacks in more than a hundred cities
unleashed their anger in outbursts of burning and
looting. The death of King appeared to destroy the
hope that his peaceful appeal to reason and right
could solve the problems of racism.
The victims of racism employed violence not so
much to force change as to obtain psychic release; it was
a way of getting rid of what they could not stomach, a
kind of vomiting. Thus the riots concentrated in the
ghettos themselves, smashing, Samson-like, the source
of degradation even when this meant self-destruction.
When fires broke out in black districts, the firefighters
who tried to extinguish them were often showered with