Watts Riot: A devastat-
ing 1965 race riot in
south Los Angeles that
disillusioned many whites
about the civil rights
movement.
When their anger could no longer be capped, blacks rioted in cities across
America in the worst period of unrest since the Civil War. In August 1965,
the squalid Los Angeles ghetto of Watts exploded in the wake of stories that
white policemen had savagely beaten a young pregnant woman. An esti-
mated 35,000 enraged blacks chanted, ‘burn, baby, burn!’ as they ransacked
white-owned stores that charged excessive prices. Far from being apologetic,
the rioters trumpeted their actions as a political statement, viewing the riot
as a black Bunker Hill. A teenager excoriated the law: ‘These fucking cops
have been pushin’ me ’round all my life.... Whitey ain’t no good. He talked
’bout law and order. It’s his law and his order, it ain’t mine.’ When Martin
Luther King arrived in the still-smoldering ghetto, teenagers heckled him as
an ‘Uncle Tom’ and told him to ‘go back where you came from.’ Order was
restored five days later after thousands of police and National Guardsmen
arrived. The riot’s toll stood at 34 deaths, 1,000 injured, 4,000 arrests, and
$40 million in property damage, not to mention the evaporating goodwill of
white liberals.
Although the Watts riotbewildered liberals and alienated the white mid-
dle class, it was not mindless mayhem. California’s general prosperity did not
trickle down to black neighborhoods. Median income in Watts was declin-
ing, in part because the male unemployment rate was a staggering 34 per
cent, six times that for the entire city. Overcrowding from a land give-away to
the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team forced blacks and Latinos to compete
for scarce jobs and housing. The sprawling metropolis had inadequate pub-
lic transportation, which limited access to better-paying jobs in suburbia. A
quarter of the residents were on welfare, but Sam Yorty, the conservative
mayor, blocked federal funds to depressed urban areas. White-owned busi-
nesses in Watts exploited blacks twice over, paying black workers low wages
and charging black customers inflated prices. Schools were inferior, and 13
per cent of the residents were illiterate. Garbage collection was irregular, and
the sewers stank in summer because there was not enough water pressure
to flush toilets. In an area where health was often precarious, there was no
hospital at all. The mostly white police force encouraged one another to
‘LSMFT,’ meaning ‘let’s shoot a motherfucker tonight.’ The police did exactly
that to sixty-five people in Los Angeles in thirty months before the riot. Watts
foreshadowed the racial violence that erupted every summer thereafter.
Between 1965 and 1968, a half million blacks participated in three hundred
similar street battles in northern cities like Detroit and Newark, resulting in
250 deaths (mostly blacks), 10,000 injured, 60,000 arrests, and billions of
dollars in property damage.
Authorities responded in different ways to the riots. President Johnson
appointed Illinois governor Otto Kerner to investigate the causes of the
disorders. The Kerner Commissiondelivered a scathing indictment of an128 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Kerner Commission: This
federal commission
blamed white racism for
the rioting of the 1960s
and urged massive fed-
eral funding to prevent
future riots.