TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/60s/60urban.002

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                                                                                August 27, 1965

RACES

The Loneliest Crowd


     On the southeastern fringe of Los Angeles, the Negro ghetto
of Watts was a smoldering ruin. Wisps of smoke still curled from
the skeletons of charred buildings. Wrecked cars lay around the
streets like swatter beetles. Sidewalks were buried under huge
shards of glass and chunks of concrete that had filled the air
at the riots' height. The glint of sunlight on thousands of
brass cartridge casings gave the eerie look of an abandoned
battlefield -- which it was. "This is just a quietness," said
a Negro minister. "The riot is not over."

     That after-image haunted all Americans, in a week that
brought successes for their nation almost everywhere save in the
unillumined corners of its own big cities. The U.S. could look
proudly to the skies, where the Gemini 5 capsule whirled in
orbit; to far-off Vietnam, where raw young marines scored the
war's most notable victory against a well-entrenched, battle-
seasoned Viet Cong force; to their own boundless farm lands,
where record crops were ripening.

     Against all this, the Negro's unbridled rage pulsed in a
deeply disquieting counterpoint, drumming home the belated
realization that while the black American's legal rights at last
seem securely anchored in the law, his problems of identity as
a citizen have only now begun to nudge the nation's conscience.

     Telltale Signs. If the fires of hatred and frustration had
subsided, they had not gone out in Watts. All week, scattered
scenarios of violence unfolded in the ghetto's rubbled streets. A
Negro woman tried to run a National Guard blockade and was
riddled with .30-cal. machine-gun fire. An 18-year-old boy
caught looting a fire-damaged furniture store was shot dead;
near where he fell was a body so hideously charred that police
were unable to determine its sex. Fifty police rushed to the
Black Muslim mosque in Watts on a tip their arms were being
laid in there, arrested 59 Negroes after a half-hour gunfight.

     But -- for the time being, at least -- the volcanic fury
had spent itself, and white officialdom slowly relaxed its
tight vise on the area. By week's end only 1,000 National
Guardsmen remained of the 14,000 who had been rushed in at the
riots' peak.

     The toll stood at 35 dead and 900 injured. [Detroit's race
riot in 1943 claimed 25 dead, 700 injured. The 1919 race riots
in East St. Louis, Ill, cost 47 lives.] Property damage was
estimated at $46 million, with 744 buildings damaged or
destroyed by fire, 457 picked bare by looters. Nearly 4,300 had
been arrested, and the total kept on mounting as Negroes who
sported telltale new clothes or possessions were hauled in on
suspicion of receiving stolen goods. To avoid a similar fate,
other looters began abandoning their booty. Police recovered
more than 50,000 stolen articles: television sets, a score of
sofas, hundreds of lamps, a truckload of beer. More than 3,000
of those arrested faced felony charges ranging from looting and
armed burglary to arson and murder. To complicate things for
the courts, some of the prisoners gave fake names like Richard
Burton and Edward G. Robinson. According to a tongue-in-cheek
theory making the rounds of white Los Angeles, the riots had
not been halted by the national Guard; they simply petered out
when all the rioters went home to see themselves on their looted
TV sets.

     Sense of Pride. Yet the mood in Watts last week smacked
less of defeat than of victory and new power. "They have
developed a feeling of potency," said Negro Psychiatrist J.
Alfred Cannon. "They feel the whole world is watching now. And
out of the violence, no matter how wrong the acts were, they
have developed a sense of pride."

     They have also discovered a convenient if desperate device
to draw attention to their plight. Two weeks ago hardly anybody
had heard of Watts. Now, a big-name, eight-man commission
appointed by Governor Pat Brown and headed by former CIA chief
John A. McCone, was looking into community problems that
everyone else had ignored for years. Now, $1,770,000 was being
rushed from Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity to
hire up 2,000 local residents for the clean-up job. Now, after
months of petty political bickering, $20 million in federal
anti-poverty funds was on its way to Watts and the rest of Los
Angeles' Black Channel.

     And after all, as a 19-year-old Negro rioter pointed out,
"What Watts needed was rebuildin'. Now we made sure they're
gonna have to rebuild it. And it's gonna mean some jobs for
Negroes here, like me and my old man."

     Temper Tantrum. But if the people of Watts -- and a good
number of sympathetic Negroes elsewhere -- took pride in their
bloody outburst, there was far more reason to count it a tragic
setback for the Negro and the nation.

     "It bore no relation to the orderly struggle for civil
rights that has ennobled the past decade," said President
Johnson in unusually stern tones. "A rioter with a Molotov
cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights and more
than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his
face. They are both lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional
rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of a free
America. They must be exposed, and they must be dealt with."

     To Martin Luther King, the Negro's chief apostle of
nonviolence, it was a blind, misguided "lashing out" for
attention, a kind of "temper tantrum" by those at the very brink
of hopelessness.

     "You with The Man."  Though a favorite rallying cry of the
mob was "Out Whitey!", most Negro leaders interpreted it as a
class explosion, in which The Man -- the white cop and
shopkeeper, social worker and politician -- was attacked more
because he was a symbol of the Negro's deprivation than because
his skin was white. The troublemakers in Watts could have
claimed scores of white victims, if racial vengeance had been
their aim. "This wasn't no race riot," said a Watts woman. "It
was a riot between the unemployed and the employed. We are
tired of being shelved and told we don't want to work."

     In fact, the rioters' resentment was aimed at the
successful, assimilated Negro as well as the white man. "The
time is coming," said Negro Author Louis Lomax, "when some of us
who look like middle-class success symbols will have to march to
Watts in all humility, and we're going to have to show these
people that we are just as willing to die right here in Los
Angeles to help this man reidentify as we are willing to die in
Selma." To illustrate the gulf that existed between the Negro
"haves" and "have-nots," Negro State Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally
recounted an exchange at the riots' height with a boy who was
brandishing a Molotov cocktail:

     Dymally: Cool it, man.

     Youth: You with us?

     Dymally: Yeah.

     Youth: Well then, here, you throw it.

     Dymally: No, I'm for peace.

     Youth: Then you with The Man.

     No Fathers. As happened in Harlem last summer, packs of
youths took over the Watts riot, commanding the streets defying
any body to challenge them. No Negro leader accepted the
challenge. "They have rejected their elders," said New York's
Bayard Rustin, who had helped organize the triumphant 1963
March on Washington. "These elders are not people of
achievement. Their fathers are out of work. Their mothers are
on relief. And the established civil rights leadership is out
of touch with them. We've done plenty to get the vote in the
South and seats in lunchrooms, but we've had no program, for
these youngsters. They can't look to their fathers and they
can't look to us."

     The Negroes of Watts were less polished but no less
forceful in condemning their leadership. "We've got enough big
nigger preachers here, doing nothing but taking our money and
talking gfor the white man," said a Watts housewife. "I figure
I'm my own best leader," said another, "except for the
President, and he better be white and black or he can burn too."

     Ghetto to Suburb. The President was trying to be just
that. In a speech to a White House Conference on Equal
Employment Opportunity, he spoke of his efforts to improve the
lot of "Americans of every color." Said he: "In education, in
housing, in health, in conservation, in poverty, in 20 fields
or more, we have passed -- and we will pass -- far-reaching
programs heretofore never enacted. Our cause is the liberation
of all of our citizens through peaceful, non-violent change."
He concluded, "I'm enlisted for the duration."

     SUrely the duration will extend beyond Lyndon Johnson's
presidency and many more to come. Through legal action, the road
from shantytown to voting booth has been cleared. Now Los
Angeles has shown that the road from deprivation to decent
schools, jobs and homes, may be even more tortuous and lonely.
There are no short cuts, and in the aftermath of violence the
people of Watts may begin to grasp that fact. Many did. "I
don't want anyone to give me anything," said a Negro laborer.
"All I want is a job."

_______________________________________________________________
Who's to Blame?

     Amid the crossfire of conjecture, no one questioned that
the Los Angeles riots were caused by Negro lawlessness. But who
or what caused that? The most frequent, and most serious,
charges were: 1) that Mayor Sam Yorty had ignored the
legitimate needs of the city's Negroes, and 2) that the outburst
was in large measure a protest against Police Chief William
Parker's cops. It was too impassioned a time for final
judgments, but Angelenos and others familiar with the Negro's
private and public grievances against the city administration
began last week to weigh the evidence on both sides.

     The Mayor. In four years in office, Democrat Yorty, 55, a
former state legislator (1936-40, 1949-50) and ex-Congressman
(1951-54), has moved from ultra-liberal to dyed-in-the-wool
conservative. He has run an efficient administration, put
qualified professional in charge of big city departments, and
reduced the discrimination in city hiring. Like most of his
predecessors, however, Yorty expresses paternalistic interest in
the city's Negro population but has made little effort to
understand its problems or anticipate its difficulties. Though
the city's 540,000 Negroes represent more than one-fifth of its
population, Yorty has relied mostly on three Negro city
councilmen and "a fine group of Negro ministers" to keep him in
touch with the Black Channel -- which regards Yorty's men as
Uncle Toms. As a result, says a Los Angeles Negro psychiatrist,
black Angelenos feel that they are victims of "disregard,
hypocritical attitudes and paternalism."

     "Deliberate Incitement."  Outside attempts to help the
city's Negroes have met with resistance from the mayor. In
1962, when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sent an
investigative team to the city, Yorty was downright hostile,
warned it not to serve as "a sounding board for dissident
elements and irresponsible charges." The mayor's relations with
the Federal Government reached the breaking point over the
city's anti-poverty program, which has been snarled from the
start. Yorty rejected demands by the U.S. Office of Economic
Opportunity that he accept representatives of "the poor" on his
anti-poverty board, arguing that private citizens should not be
deputed to spend public money -- though virtually every other
major U.S. city had adopted this approach. Yorty later
retreated, consented to an expanded board, including some
representatives of private groups. Yet, though OEO has pumped
$17 million into the city for various programs, it has held up
another $20 million for projects that would create desperately
needed job opportunities for the city's unemployed Negroes.

     OEO Director Sargent Shriver charged last week that while
523 towns and counties have organized effective anti-poverty
programs, Los Angeles is the only major city in the U.S. that
has not done so. Federal officials also claimed that Yorty was
one of only two big-city mayors (the other: Chicago's Richard
Daley) who spurned a secret offer of special federal aid
earlier this year to help forestall summer riots -- even though
34% of L.A.'s Negro youths were unemployed. In Harlem, by
contrast, the Federal Government's $4,000,000 program to make
jobs for 4,000 Negro youths is credited with averting a
repetition of last year's riots.

     In his defense, Yorty charges that the Federal Government's
bears a major share of the responsibility for stirring the
emotions of Los Angeles Negroes to fever pitch. In a telegram
that he fired off to Washington last week, Yorty declared that
"one of the riot-inciting factors was the deliberate and well-
publicized cutting off of poverty funds to this city," demanded
that Shriver "process our programs and release or funds while
we reorganize." The mayor also accused California Governor
Edmund G. Brown of trying to make political hay by appointing
a commission to look into the riots' causes.


THE POLICE CHIEF

     William Parker, a 63-year-od native of Lead, S. Dak., is a
crusty cop who neither drinks nor smokes, is married to a former
policewoman, and lives in a modest suburban home protected by
a massive chain-link fence. He joined the L.A. police force 38
years ago, won  law degree by studying nights and, though little
liked by less austere fellow officers, rose rapidly. Parker was
appointed chief in 1950. In a traditionally precarious post --
the average tenure of his predecessors was 18 months -- Parkers
has lasted 15 years, and made the Los Angeles Police Department
one of the nation's most efficient.

     Despite Negro charges that his cops are mostly Southerners,
the great majority are native to the West Coast. They must have
an IQ of at least 110. Parker's force has one Ph.D., 15 officers
with masters' degrees, 15 with law degrees, 208 B.A.s, 288 with
two-year college certificates, 375 with police academy diplomas;
more than 2,000 policemen are taking outside courses. Though it
has the highest pay rates of any police force in the U.S., the
department is seriously undermanned, has only 5,018 men to cover
458.2 sq. mi. -- ten cops per sq. mi. v. 39 in the average U.S.
community. Nonetheless, Parker has racked up an admirable record
of arrests (of 268,567 offenders in 1964, his men apprehended
196,683 suspects) and has chased the Mafia all the way to Las
Vegas.

     "A Revolution Against Authority." In a way, Chief Parker is
too successful. He is probably the most respected
law-enforcement officer in the U.S. after J. Edgar Hoover. His
published views on law enforcement, Parker on Police, are
required reading for laymen all over the U.S. At home, the very
fact that he has survived three city administrations -- and
helped them to survive -- gives him enormous power and prestige.
Moreover, unlike most cops who are content to tend their roses
or go fishing in off hours, William Parker (few call him Bill)
is a compulsive and all-too-articulate public speaker who tends
to view contemporary history through the eyes of such moralists
as Jeremiah and Sophocles and Swift.

     Inevitably, Chief Parker's moralistic judgments make the
newspapers. His favorite theme is that morality and respect for
the law are the world's last hopes of survival in an era of
ethical collapse that is leading only to socialism. As he puts
it: "There has been a world-wide revolution against constituted
authority. A police officer is the living, physical symbol of
authority, and so it is against him that this resentment is
frequently directed. It is hard for me to believe that our
society can continue to violate all the fundamental rules of
human conduct and expect to survive."

     "Monkeys in a Zoo."  Parker's running comments are blunt
and impolitic, and he is often accused of shooting from the
lip. He said that the riots started when "one person threw a
rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing
rocks." And when the rioters were temporarily under control he
boasted: "We are on the top and they are on the bottom."

     Brutality is another story. Inevitably, Parker's men arrest
a lot of Negroes. They commit a disproportionate number of the
city's crimes and thus incur the cops' suspicion almost as a
reflex reaction. Undoubtedly, Los Angeles policemen in ghetto
districts do not go out of their way to cosset Negro suspects.
Martin Luther King, after touring Los Angeles' Negro districts,
declared: "There is a unanimous feeling that there has been
police brutality." Yet no one -- not even the 1962 Civil Rights
Commission delegation -- has been able to cite any specific
evidence of flagrant physical brutality.

     Remarkable Restraint. The most critical moment in Parker's
career probably came during the early stages of the riots. With
remarkable restraint, he bowed to the advice of Negro leaders
and pulled his office out of the riot area -- only to see the
chaos worsen. When he sent his police back in, they came
equipped with tear gas -- and strict orders not to use it until
authorized. Even then -- though he had discussed calling out
the National Guard with Mayor Yorty -- Parker did not formally
request the Guard until the next day. "Millions of dollars in
damage would have been averted had the national Guard been
called in sooner," says California Guard Commander Lieut.
General Roderic Hill.

     Not all Angelenos are denouncing Parker; by last week, more
than 2,000 telegrams of congratulations had poured into his
office. Perhaps the frankest Negro comment on the brutality
charge came last week from a 19-year-old school dropout who rain
with the rioters through all four days of the Watts uprising.
"I wouldn't say that police brutality started it," he allowed,
"but it was a good alibi."