1965 — Aug 11-17, Watts Race Riots, Los Angeles, CA — 34

–34 California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots. Violence in the City. 1965.
–34 Flexner and Flexner. A Pessimist’s Guide to History. 2008, pp. 303-304.
–34 Hall, John G. “Los Angeles (California Riot of 1965,” p. 371 in Rucker/Upton (V1). 2007.

Narrative Information

California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots: “The rioting in Los Angeles in the late, hot summer of 1965 took six days to run its full grievous course. In hindsight, the tinder-igniting incident is seen to have been the arrest of a drunken Negro youth about whose dangerous driving another Negro had complained to the Caucasian motorcycle officer who made the arrest. The arrest occurred under rather ordinary circumstances, near but not in the district known as Watts, at seven o’clock on the evening of 11 August, a Wednesday. The crisis ended in the afternoon of 17 August, a Tuesday, on Governor Brown’s order to lift the curfew which had been imposed the Saturday before in an extensive area just south of the heart of the City.

“In the ugliest interval, which lasted from Thursday through Saturday, perhaps as many as 10,000 Negroes took to the streets in marauding bands. They looted stores, set fires, beat up white passersby whom they hauled from stopped cars, many of which were turned upside down and burned, exchanged shots with law enforcement officers, and stoned and shot at firemen. The rioters seemed to have been caught up in an insensate rage of destruction. By Friday, the disorder spread to adjoining areas, and ultimately…an area covering 46.5 square miles had to be controlled with the aid of military authority before public order was restored.

“The entire Negro population of Los Angeles County, about two thirds of whom live in this area, numbers more than 650,000. Observers estimate that only about two per cent were involved in the disorder. Nevertheless, this violent fraction, however minor, has given the face of community relations in Los Angeles a sinister cast.

“When the spasm passed, thirty-four persons were dead, and the wounded and hurt numbered 1,032 more. Property damage was about $40,000,000. Arrested for one crime or another were 3,952 persons, women as well as men, including over 500 youths under eighteen. The lawlessness in this one segment of the metropolitan area had terrified the entire county and its 6,000,000 citizens….

“These riots were each a symptom of a sickness in the center of our cities. In almost every major city, Negroes pressing ever more densely into the central city and occupying areas from which Caucasians have moved in their flight to the suburbs have developed an isolated existence with a feeling of separation from the community as a whole. Many have moved to the city only in the last generation and are totally unprepared to meet the conditions of modern city life. At the core of the cities where they cluster, law and order have only tenuous hold; the conditions of life itself are often marginal; idleness leads to despair and finally, mass violence supplies a momentary relief from the malaise….

“When the rioting came to Los Angeles, it was not a race riot in the usual sense. What happened was an explosion — a formless, quite senseless, all but hopeless violent protest – engaged in by a few but bringing great distress to all….

“In examining the sickness in the center of our city, what has depressed and stunned us most is the dull, devastating spiral of failure that awaits the average disadvantaged child in the urban core. His home life all too often fails to give him the incentive and the elementary experience with words and ideas which prepares most children for school. Unprepared and unready, he may not learn to read or write at all; and because he shares his problem with 30 or more in the same classroom, even the efforts of the most dedicated teachers are unavailing. Age, not achievement, passes him on to higher grades, but in most cases he is unable to cope with courses in the upper grades because they demand basic skills which he does not possess. (“Try,” a teacher said to us, “to teach history to a child who cannot read.”)

“Frustrated and disillusioned, the child becomes a discipline problem. Often he leaves school, sometimes before the end of junior high school. (About two-thirds of those who enter the three high schools in the center of the curfew area do not graduate.) He slips into the ranks of the permanent jobless, illiterate and untrained, unemployed and unemployable. All the talk about the millions which the government is spending to aid him raise his expectations but the benefits seldom reach him.

“Reflecting this spiral of failure, unemployment in the disadvantaged areas runs two to three times the county average, and the employment available is too often intermittent. A family whose breadwinner is chronically out of work is almost invariably a disintegrating family. Crime rates soar and welfare rolls increase, even faster than the population….

“Perhaps for the first time our report will bring into clear focus, for all the citizens to see, the economic and sociological conditions in our city that underlay the gathering anger which impelled the rioters to escalate the routine arrest of a drunken driver into six days of violence. Yet, however powerful their grievances, the rioters had no legal or moral justification for the wounds they inflicted. Many crimes, a great many felonies, were committed. Even more dismaying, as we studied the record, was the large number of brutal exhortations to violence which were uttered by some Negroes. Rather than making proposals, they laid down ultimatums with the alternative being violence. All this nullified the admirable efforts of hundreds, if not thousands, both Negro and white, to quiet the situation and restore order…. (CA Gov Commission 1965, “The Crisis – An Overview.”) (California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots. Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? Los Angeles: December 1965.)

Flexner and Flexner: “1965 Los Angeles Riots. It was a hut, muggy evening on August 11 when police stopped a black motorist in the Watts area of Los Angeles on suspicion of drunken driving. Racial tensions had been on the increase throughout the United States for some years by this time, and as the patrolmen questioned the motorist, a crowd began to gather.

“Soon onlookers were screaming insults at the police and hurling rocks, but the escalation of violence was not to stop there. Watts quickly erupted into full-scale riot as the violence spilled over into other sections of the neighborhood. Black residents began stoning city buses and looting local shops and businesses, while gangs of black youths fired shots at police and accused them of brutality. In one incident, angry rioters threw a Molotov cocktail into the car of a white motorist and then pulled him out onto the street, beating him savagely.

“More than four hundred policemen cordoned off a twenty-block section of the city to contain the rioting, but the violence continued until August 16. Thirty-four people were killed, many of them bystanders, and over forty-one hundred were arrested. Some two hundred buildings were completely destroyed, and over six hundred damaged, with property damage in the area totaling forty million dollars. Watts was one of many destructive race riots in inner-city ghettos that exploded in the United States during the 1960s. The rage within erupts.” (Flexner, Doris and Stuart Berg Flexner. A Pessimist’s Guide to History: An Irresistible Compendium of Catastrophes, Barbarities, Massacres, and Mayhem – From 14 Billion Years Ago to 2007. 2008, 303-304.)

Hall: “Also known as the Watts Riot or Watts Rebellion, the Los Angeles (California) Riot of 1965 was one of the major racially motivated urban insurrections of the 1960s. The riot lasted five days, 144 hours, from Wednesday August 11 to Sunday, August 15, 1965. When it was over and the final curfew was lifted, 34 people were dead, thousands were injured, and nearly 4,000 were arrested. Besides the human devastation, millions of dollars of property was damaged and hundreds of buildings were burned to the ground.” (Hall, John G. “Los Angeles, California Riot of 1965,” pp. 371-376 in: Rucker, Walter C. and James N. Upton (Eds.). Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (Vol. 1 of 2). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.)

Sources

California Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots. Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning? Los Angeles: December 1965. Accessed 1-8-2013 at: http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/cityinstress/mccone/contents.html

Flexner, Doris and Stuart Berg Flexner. A Pessimist’s Guide to History: An Irresistible Compendium of Catastrophes, Barbarities, Massacres, and Mayhem – From 14 Billion Years Ago to 2007. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. Partially digitized by Google at: http://books.google.com/books?id=tpeK8WZby0gC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rucker, Walter C. and James N. Upton (Eds.). Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (2 Vols.). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007. Partially Google digitized at: http://books.google.com/books?id=mQcrpqn0124C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false, and
http://books.google.com/books?id=mQcrpqn0124C