Watts riots
The Watts riots,
sometimes referred to as the Watts Rebellion, took place in the Watts neighborhood of Los
Angeles from August 11 to 16, 1965. On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, an African-American motorist on parole for robbery, was pulled over for reckless driving. A minor roadside argument broke out, and then escalated into a fight with police. Community members reported that the police had hurt a pregnant woman, and six days of civil unrest followed. Nearly 4,000 members of the California Army National Guard helped suppress the disturbance, which resulted in 34 deaths[4] and over $40 million in property damage. It was the city's worst unrest until the Rodney King riots of 1992.
Background
In the Great Migration of 1915-1940,
major populations of African Americans moved to Northeastern and Midwestern cities such as Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis,
Cincinnati,
Philadelphia,
Boston, and New
York City to pursue jobs in newly established manufacturing industries; to
cement better educational and social opportunities; and to flee racial segregation, Jim
Crow laws, violence and racial bigotry in the Southern states. This wave of migration
largely bypassed Los Angeles.
In the 1940s, in the Second Great Migration,
black workers and families migrated to the West Coast in large numbers, in
response to defense industry recruitment efforts at the start of World
War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 directing defense
contractors not to discriminate in hiring or promotions, opening up new
opportunities for minorities. The black population in Los Angeles dramatically
rose from approximately 63,700 in 1940 to about 350,000 in 1965, rising from 4%
of L.A.'s population to 14%.
Residential
segregation
Los Angeles had racially restrictive
covenants that prevented specific minorities from renting and buying
property in certain areas, even long after the courts ruled such practices illegal in
1948 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. At
the beginning of the 20th century, Los Angeles was geographically divided by
ethnicity, as demographics were being altered by the rapid migration from the
Philippines (then-U.S. unincorporated
territory at the time) and immigration from Mexico, Japan, Korea, and
Southern and Eastern Europe. In the 1910s, the city was already 80% covered by racially restrictive covenants in real estate.
By the 1940s, 95% of Los Angeles and southern California housing was off-limits
to certain minorities. Minorities who had served in World
War II or worked in L.A.'s defense industries returned to face increasing
patterns of discrimination in housing. In addition, they
found themselves excluded from the suburbs and restricted to housing in East or South
Los Angeles, which includes the Watts neighborhood and Compton. Such real-estate practices severely
restricted educational and economic opportunities available to the minority
community.
Following the U.S. entry into World
War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the federal
government removed and interned 70,000
Japanese-Americans from Los Angeles, leaving empty spaces in predominately
Japanese-owned areas. This further bolstered the migration of black residents
into the city during the Second Great Migration to occupy the vacated spaces,
such as Little Tokyo. As a result, housing in
South Los Angeles became increasingly scarce, overwhelming the already
established communities and providing opportunities for real estate developers.
Davenport Builders, for example, was a large developer who responded to the
demand, with an eye on undeveloped land in Compton. What was originally a
mostly white neighborhood in the 1940s increasingly became an African-American,
middle-class dream in which blue-collar laborers could enjoy suburbia away from
the slums.
In the post-World War II era,
suburbs in the Los Angeles area grew explosively as black residents also wanted
to live in peaceful white neighborhoods. In a thinly veiled attempt to sustain
their way of life and maintain the general peace and prosperity, most of these
suburbs barred black people, using a variety of methods. White middle-class
people in neighborhoods bordering black districts moved en masse to the suburbs,
where newer housing was available. The spread of African Americans throughout
urban Los Angeles was achieved in large part through blockbusting,
a technique whereby real estate speculators would buy a home on an all-white
street, sell or rent it to a black family, and then buy up the remaining homes
from Caucasians at cut-rate prices, then sell them to housing-hungry black
families at hefty profits.
The Rumford Fair Housing Act,
designed to remedy residential segregation, was overturned by Proposition 14, which was
sponsored by the California real estate industry, and supported by a majority
of white voters. Psychiatrist and civil rights activist Alvin
Poussaint considered Proposition 14 to be one of the root causes of black
rebellion in Watts.
Police
discrimination
Because of discrimination Los
Angeles' African American residents were excluded from the high-paying jobs,
affordable housing, and politics available to white residents; moreover, they
faced discrimination by the white-dominated Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).[
In 1950, William H. Parker was appointed
and sworn in as Los Angeles Chief of Police. After a major scandal called Bloody Christmas of 1951, Parker pushed for
more independence from political pressures that would enable him to create a
more professionalized police force. The public supported him and voted for
charter changes that isolated the police department from the rest of the city
government. In the 1960s, the LAPD was promoted as one of the best police
forces in the world.
Despite its reform and having a
professionalized, military-like police force, William Parker's LAPD faced
repeated criticism from the city's Latino and black residents for police
brutality—resulting from his recruiting of officers from the South with
strong anti-black and anti-Mexican attitudes. Chief Parker coined the term
"Thin Blue Line", representing the police
as holding down pervasive crime.
Resentment of such longstanding
racial injustices are cited as reasons why Watts' African-American population
exploded on August 11, 1965, in what would become the Watts Riots.
Inciting
incident
On the evening of Wednesday, August
11, 1965, 21-year-old Marquette Frye, an African-American man driving his mother's
1955 Buick, was
pulled over by California Highway Patrol motorcycle
officer Lee Minikus for alleged reckless driving . After administering a field
sobriety test, Minikus placed Frye under arrest and radioed for his vehicle to
be impounded. Marquette's brother, Ronald, a passenger in the vehicle, walked
to their house nearby, bringing their mother, Rena Price, back with him to the
scene of the arrest.
When Rena Price reached the intersection
of Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street that evening, she scolded Frye about
drinking and driving, as he recalled in a 1985 interview with the Orlando
Sentinel. But the situation quickly escalated: someone shoved Price,
Frye was struck, Price jumped an officer, and another officer pulled out a
shotgun. Backup police officers attempted to arrest Frye by using physical
force to subdue him. After community members reported that police had roughed
up Frye and kicked a pregnant woman, angry mobs formed. As the situation
intensified, growing crowds of local residents watching the exchange began
yelling and throwing objects at the police officers. Frye's mother and brother
fought with the officers and were eventually arrested along with Marquette
Frye.
After the arrests of Price and her
sons the Frye brothers, the crowd continued to grow along Avalon Boulevard.
Police came to the scene to break up the crowd several times that night, but
were attacked when people threw rocks and chunks of concrete. A 46-square-mile
(119 square kilometer) swath of Los Angeles was transformed into a combat zone
during the ensuing six days.
million in property damage. It
was the city's worst unrest until the Rodney King riots of 1992. After a night of increasing unrest, police and local black community leaders held a community meeting on Thursday, August 12, to discuss an action plan and to urge calm. The meeting failed. Later that day, Los Angeles police chief William H. Parker called for the assistance of the California Army National Guard. Chief Parker believed the riots resembled an insurgency, compared it to fighting the Viet Cong, and decreed a "paramilitary" response to the disorder. Governor Pat Brown declared that law enforcement was confronting "guerrillas fighting with gangsters".
The rioting intensified, and on Friday, August 13, about 2,300 National Guardsmen joined the police in trying to maintain order on the streets. Sergeant Ben Dunn said: "The streets of Watts resembled an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country, it bore no resemblance to the United States of America." By nightfall on Saturday, 16,000 law enforcement personnel had been mobilized and patrolled the city. Blockades were established, and warning signs were posted throughout the riot zones threatening the use of deadly force (one sign warned residents to "Turn left or get shot"). 23 of the 34 people killed during the riots were shot by law enforcement or National Guardsmen. Angered over the police response, residents of Watts engaged in a full-scale battle against the law enforcement personnel. Rioters tore up sidewalks and bricks to hurl at Guardsmen and police, and to smash their vehicles.
Those actively participating in the riots started physical fights with police, blocked Los Angeles Fire Department personnel from using fire hoses on protesters, or stopped and beat white motorists yelling racial slurs in the area. Arson and looting were largely confined to local white-owned stores and businesses that were said to have caused resentment in the neighborhood due to low wages and high prices for local workers.
To quell the riots, Chief Parker initiated a policy of mass arrest. Following the deployment of National Guardsmen, a curfew was declared for a vast region of South Central Los Angeles. In addition to the Guardsmen, 934 Los Angeles police officers and 718 officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department were deployed during the rioting. Watts and all black-majority areas in Los Angeles were put under the curfew. All residents outside of their homes in the affected areas after 8:00pm were subject to arrest. Eventually nearly 3,500 people were arrested, primarily for curfew violations. By the morning of Sunday, August 15, the riots had largely been quelled.
Over the course of six days, between 31,000 and 35,000 adults participated in the riots. Around 70,000 people were "sympathetic, but not active." Over the six days, there were 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, 3,438 arrests, and over $40 million in property damage. Many white Americans were fearful of the breakdown of social order in Watts, especially since white motorists were being pulled over by rioters in nearby areas and assaulted. Many in the black community, however, believed the rioters were taking part in an "uprising against an oppressive system." In a 1966 essay, black civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote:
The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.
Despite allegations that "criminal elements" were responsible for the riots, the vast majority of those arrested had no prior criminal record.
Parker publicly said that the people he saw rioting were acting like "monkeys in the zoo." Overall, an estimated $40 million in damage was caused ($320,000,000 in 2019 dollars), with almost 1,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. Homes were not attacked, although some caught fire due to proximity to other fires.
|
Businesses
and private buildings
|
Public
buildings
|
Total
|
|
Damaged/burned: 258
|
Damaged/burned: 14
|
Total: 272
|
|
Looted: 192
|
Total: 192
|
|
|
Both damaged/burned & looted:
288
|
Total: 288
|
|
|
Destroyed: 267
|
Destroyed: 1
|
Total: 268
|
|
Total:
977
|
||
After
the riots
Debate rose quickly over what had
taken place in Watts, as the area was known to be under a great deal of racial
and social tension. Reactions and reasoning about the riots greatly varied
based on the perspectives of those affected by and participating in the riots'
chaos.
National civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke two days after
the riots happened in Watts. The riots were partly a response to Proposition 14, a constitutional
amendment sponsored by the California Real Estate Association and passed that
had in effect repealed the Rumford Fair Housing Act. In 1966, the California Supreme Court reinstated the
Rumford Fair Housing Act in the Reitman
v. Mulkey case (a decision affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court the following year),
declaring the amendment to violate the US constitution and laws.
A variety of opinions and
explanations were published. Public opinion polls studied in the few years
after the riot showed that a majority believed the riots were linked to communist
groups who were active in the area protesting high unemployment rates and
racial discrimination. Those opinions concerning racism and discrimination were
expressed three years after hearings conducted by a committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
took place in Los Angeles to assess the condition of relations between the
police force and minorities. These hearings were also intended to make a ruling
on the discrimination case against the police for their alleged mistreatment of
members of the Nation of Islam. These different arguments and opinions
are often cited in continuing debates over the underlying causes of the Watts
riots.
McCone
Commission
A commission under Governor Pat Brown
investigated the riots, known as the McCone Commission, and headed by former CIA director John
A. McCone. It released a 101-
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