TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/60s/60urban.02a

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                                                                                August 20, 1965

RACES

Trigger of Hate


     Far out at sea, mariners puzzled over a molten glow in the
eastern sky. Over the roar of the freeway, motorists heard the
unmistakable crack of rifle fire, the chilling stutter of
machine guns. Above city hall, billowing smoke from 1,000 fires
hung like a cerement. From the air, whole sections of the
sprawling city looked as if they had been blitzed.

     The atmosphere reminded soldiers of embattled Saigon. Yet
this, last week, was Los Angeles -- the City of Angels, the
"safe city," as its boosters like to call it, the city that has
always taken pride in its history of harmonious racial
relations.

     Savagery replaced harmony with nightmarish suddenness. One
evening white Angelenos had nothing to worry about but the
humidity. The next -- and for four nights after that --
marauding mobs in the Negro suburb of Watts pillaged, burned and
killed, while 500 policemen and 5,000 National Guardsmen
struggled vainly to contain their fury. Hour after hour, the
toll mounted: 27 dead at week's end, nearly 600 injured, 1,700
arrested, property damage well over $100 million. Minute by
minute, police radios logged a Wellsian catalogue of carnage:
"Manchester and Broadway, a mob of 1,000...Shots at Avalon and
Imperial...Vernon and Central, looting...Yellow cab
overturned...Man pulled from car on Imperial Highway...88th and
Broadway, gun battle...Officer in trouble."

     The riot was the worst in the city's history, one of the
worst ever in the U.S. To help quell it, California's Governor
Pat Brown broke off a vacation in Greece and hurried home.
"From here it is awfully hard to direct a war," said Brown.
"That's what this is."

     Black Channel. The war's major battleground was a
20-sq.-mi. ghetto. Watts is the kind of community that cries out
for urban renewal, poverty programs, job training. Almost
anything would help. Two-thirds of its residents have less than
a high school education; one-eighth of them are technically
illiterate. Only 13% of the homes have been built since 1939 --
the rest are decaying and dilapidated. Nearly 30% of the
children are from broken homes; their drop-out rate is 2.2 times
the city's average, and prison parolees, prostitutes, narcotics
addicts and drunks live among them. Over a recent three-month
period, cops reported 96 felonious crimes, including murders,
rapes and assaults. The David Starr Jordan High School, which
serves Watts, is not legally segregated; yet its student body
is 99% Negro.

     Watts is a slum -- but not in the Eastern sense. There are
no rows of multiple-story tenements or concrete canyons. Its
streets are generally broad, occasionally tree-lined and
bordered by dusty lawns. Its dwellings are mostly one-and
two-story frame and stucco houses. But in the small rented
houses and apartments, money-short Negroes often crowd four and
five families; children are left alone while parents work, and
youths roam the streets seeking relief from the monotony of
daily life.

     Watts is part of the Black Channel, a 72-square-mile area
that houses 90% of Los Angeles County's 600,000 Negroes. It is
the "hard," unchanging ghetto, a traditional portal for Negroes
migrating to Los Angeles. Few of its people are native
Californians. Of the 1.5 million Negroes who have fled the
South in the past decade, one out of four went to California;
thousands settled in Watts. There they were trapped among their
own kind, smothered in their own ignorance of a new way of life,
drowned in their frustration. "What they know about sheriffs and
police is Bull Connor and Jim Clark," says Los Angeles Municipal
Judge Loren Miller, a Negro. "The people distrust the police and
the police distrust the people. They move in a constant
atmosphere of hate."

     This was the atmosphere, largely unsuspected by most
Angelenos, in which last week's fury erupted. The chronology:

     WEDNESDAY

     At 7:45 p.m., two white California highway patrol officers
spotted a car weaving recklessly around the southeast Los
Angeles slum districts. After a six-block chase, the troopers
halted the car in Watts -- and arrested its Negro driver,
Marquette Frye, 21. Out of Frye's nearby home came his mother,
scolding her son for being drunk. In front of some 25 other
Negroes standing near by, Frye started to struggle with the
patrolmen. "You're not going to take me to jail," Officer Lee
Minikus quoted him as saying. "You're going to have to take me
the hard way."

     As the crowd grew, Minikus' partner radioed for help and
Minikus drew his revolver. Frye jumped in front of him and
shouted, "Go ahead, kill me!" A backup patrolman arrived and,
with shotgun at the ready, held the crowd at bay while Minikus
and his partner hustled Frye, a brother and their mother off to
the station. Frye later pleaded guilty to drunken driving; his
brother pleaded guilty to battery and interfering with
officers, but their mother pleaded not guilty to a charge of
interfering with an officer.

     "I Got Mad." Back in Watts, the crowd had gone wild.
Negroes insisted that the officers had beaten and kicked Frye
into the squad car. Said Richard Brice, who operates a corner
grocery: "This officer had this man handcuffed in the car and
the man was trying to fight. The officer took his club and kept
jamming it into his stomach. When that happened, all the people
standing around got mad. And I got mad. It's just too bad the
officer couldn't have driven away and then struck the man. His
action was breeding violence."

     Police denied that there was any brutality. But as word of
the arrest spread, the crowd quickly grew, and became steadily
angrier, egged on by Negro hoodlums. Soon it numbered some
1,500, and Negro youths started throwing rocks at stores and
passing cars in an eight-square-block area. Motorists were
bombarded with empty bottles, slabs of concrete, rocks, bricks,
nuts, bolts, boards and chunks of asphalt torn from the
pavement. More than 100 helmeted police poured into the area;
under orders not to use tear gas on the rioters, they chased
them with billy clubs. The police, nearly all white, only
infuriated the mob. Said one Negro girl: "There was one Negro
officer there. He was trying to talk to us. He got us calmed
down. Then all these white cops came. They pulled out their
shotguns and clubs and the whole thing started again." Some
Negroes charged that the police seemed eager to stir resentment.
Said Bobby Daniels, 23, who was returning from a fishing trip:
"We got out of the car and these 15 officers ran up to us. They
jabbed us in the back with clubs and told us to get off the
street. They pushed us down and jumped on us, laughing about
it."

     In retaliation, gangs of Negroes overturned, burned or
damaged 50 vehicles, including two fire trucks. Not until dawn
did the crowd disperse. The first night's toll: 19 policemen
and 16 civilians injured, 34 persons arrested.

     THURSDAY

     Most undamaged stores opened for business as usual.
Throughout the day, knots of young Negroes clustered on street
corners discussing the previous night's excitement, speculating
about the night to come. Boasted one teen-age boy: "Anyone with
any sense will stay out of here tonight. We're really going to
show those cops." They did just that. By midnight, some 7,000
rioters were swarming through the streets, smashing anything
they could find in an area that had spread to 20 square blocks
of Watts and environs. By now, 900 city policemen, deputy
sheriffs and state highway patrolmen were on duty, but again
they were overrun; though they had been given long-range
tear-gas guns, they were told again not to use them until
ordered to.

     Anarchy on Avalon. During the day the rioters had
apparently prepared stockpiles of Molotov cocktails, which they
hurled on any inviting target. Fires blazed in liquor stores,
in a church, in overturned cars, in piles of debris along Avalon
Boulevard, a major highway. Fire trucks and ambulances delayed
entering the area for fear of flying missiles -- while false
alarms from rioters tried to lure more of them in as targets.
White drivers were dragged from their cars and beaten. After
looting pawnshops, hardware and war surplus stores for weapons,
the Negroes brandished thousands of rifles, shotguns, pistols
and machetes. When fire trucks came to extinguish three burning
cars at Avalon and Imperial Highway, they were driven back by
gunfire. Later, when a grocery store at the same intersection
was set ablaze, the firemen could not get through until 50 armed
policemen cleared a corridor.

     Robert Richardson, a Negro advertising salesman who spent
hours in the riot area that night, marveled that "anyone with
a white skin got out of there alive. Every time a car with
whites in it entered the area, word spread like lightning down
the street: `Here comes Whitey -- get him!' The older people
would stand in the background, egging on the teenagers and the
people in their early 20s. Then young men and women would rush
in and pull white people from their cars and beat them and try
to set fire to their cars."

     When two white men were attacked, one was so badly beaten
that an eyeball was hanging out of its socket. "Some Negro
ministers carried both men into an apartment building and
called an ambulance," said Richardson. "The crowd called the
ministers hypocrites. They cussed them and spit on them."

     "He's Blood." Whenever rioters attacked whites, Richardson
wrote, bystanders shouted, "Kill! Kill!" Even light-skinned
Negroes occasionally found themselves targets until someone
would shout, "Lay off, he's blood." Negro shop owners posted
signs pleading: "This is a Negro-owned business" or "Blood
Brother" -- but many of these also were pillaged by the mobs.
After the looting began, Richardson reported, "everybody started
drinking, even little kids eight or nine years old. The rioters
knew they had the upper hand. They seemed to sense that neither
the police nor anyone else could stop them." One who tried was
Negro Comedian Dick Gregory, an ardent leader of Southern civil
rights demonstrations. Dropping by the riot area after an
evening's nightclub performance in nearby Ontario, Gregory asked
if he could have a try at quieting the mobs. Police took him to
a hot spot, handed him a bullhorn. Gregory had uttered only a
few words when a bullet ploughed into his leg.

     All through the second night, the mob rampaged through a
vastly expanded area, barricading the streets with ripped-up,
cement-anchored bus benches.

     FRIDAY

     From early morning, rioters surged through the streets
screaming imprecations at "Whitey," "blue-eyed-devils,"
"Okies," and "Crackers." Before picking up a rock and smashing
a passing white man on the head, one Negro youth explained to
two Negro newsmen: "This is just what the police wanted --
always messin' with niggers. We'll show 'em. I'm ready to die
if I have to."

     Even in daylight, Negroes congregated on all four corners
of intersections waiting for whites. As they attacked, many
cried, "This is for Selma" or "This is for Bogalusa." Young
Negroes in late-model convertibles took command of the streets,
screaming "Burn, baby, burn!", a hipster term popularized
locally by "the Magnificent Montague," a Negro disk jockey. Ring
leaders identified themselves by holding up three fingers on the
right hand signifying that they were true "to the cause of the
black brotherhood."

     Radios & Rugs. Suddenly the mob turned its energies to
looting. Even women, children and grandparents joined the orgy
of rapine. As soon as any store was bare, it was set afire. At
103rd Street and Compton Avenue, a mob methodically sacked a
whole row of shops. The plunderers carted off radios, TV sets,
clothing, lamps, air conditioners, rugs, musical instruments.
A little boy of eight or nine sat sobbing his heart out on a
pawnshop shelf. Every time he took a radio, he whimpered,
somebody bigger snatched it away from him. Reported Negro
Photographer Jimmy Thompson: "They don't even know why they're
doing it any more. They're taking stuff they don't even need."
But one rallying cry never failed: "We're paying Whitey back!"

     A shirtless youth boasted: "Man, I got clothes for days,
I'm gonna be clean." He added breathlessly: "Tonight they're
gonna git a furniture store on Manchester and Broadway, and you
know I'm gonna be there." "Safeway's open!" someone shouted as
the crowd ripped off huge sheets of plywood that had been
hurriedly installed over the plate glass windows of a nearby
supermarket. Looters swarmed into the store like ants, hauling
out case after case until the shelves were bare. Then the huge,
block-long structure was engulfed by flames.

     The looters took anything they could move and destroyed
anything that they couldn't. One booty-laden youth said
defiantly: "That don't look like stealing to me. That's just
picking up what you need and going." Gesturing at a fashionable
hilltop area where many well-to-do Negroes live, he said: "Them
living up in View Park don't need it. But we down here, we do
need it." One of the riot leaders, a biochemistry graduate, was
carting out cases of vodka from a liquor store when he was
approached by a Negro newsman. Said he: "I'm a fanatic for
riots; I just love them. I've participated in two in Detroit,
but they were far, far better than this one. In Detroit, blood
flowed in the streets." Gazing fondly back at flames billowing
from a nearby supermarket, he marveled: "Oh man, look at that
! Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it pretty? Oh man, just look at it!"

     Though the city's authorities later indicted state
officials for help, they too at first seemed curiously
unperturbed by the mounting casualty lists. Not until Friday did
Mayor Sam Yorty take to the radio to address the rioters, and
then his appeal was an irrelevant plea to parents -- if any were
listening -- to "know and supervise the whereabouts of your
children."

     Only at 11 a.m. Friday did Yorty approve Police Chief
William Parker's request, made the previous day, to summon the
California National Guard. But Democratic Governor Pat Brown
was vacationing in Greece, and Lieutenant Governor Glenn M.
Anderson cautiously insisted from Sacramento that he would have
to size up the situation at firsthand before sending in troops.
Finally it was Brown, reached in Athens, who called out the
Guard and ordered an 8 p.m. curfew.

     The decision to call in troops came too late to stop an
orgy of destruction that throbbed higher than ever. The rioting
spread over 150 square blocks, and the roving mobs multiplied
so fast that police quit trying to estimate their numbers.
Molotov cocktails kindled 70 new fires. Police and news
helicopters were fired upon. Miraculously, there had been no
deaths so far, but shortly before 9 p.m. Deputy Sheriff Ronald
Ernest Ludlow, 27, was shot in the stomach by looters, and died
on his way to the hospital. For the first time the Los Angeles
police opened fire on their assailants.

     A 20-year-old Negro died of a bullet wound in a hospital
in the area as a rampaging mob outside blocked an
anesthesiologist from reaching him. On South Central Avenue,
many miles from the original riot scene, police shot and killed
a Negro looter. Said a National Guard officer: "It's going to
be like Vietnam."

     Machine Guns & Bayonets. That night, 2,000 helmeted
National Guardsmen from the 40th Armored Division rolled into
the riot zone in convoys led by Jeeps with mounted machine guns.
Officers set up a command post at Rijs High School, while
infantrymen, advancing with bayonets at the ready, fanned out
through the littered streets and assembled .50-cal. machine guns
on tripods at intersections. Their first challenge came from an
unlighted car that barreled down on a line of troops, hitting
and seriously injuring one man. Nearby county marshals halted
the vehicle with crackling rifle fire and the Negro driver was
killed. After being fired on by pistols and a rifle, one Guard
unit opened up for ten minutes with a machine gun on a band of
rioters, sent them fleeing.

     SATURDAY

     By midday, the number of Guardsmen patrolling the area had
swelled to 4,000 and 700 more were being flown in from Fresno.
They set about "sweeping" three separate zones totaling 40
blocks; the largest was a section of Watts bounded by Century
Boulevard, Central Avenue, Compton Avenue, and 103rd and 104th
Streets. Forming a skirmish line that extended across a street
from sidewalk to sidewalk, and carrying M-1 and M-14 rifles
with drawn bayonets, the Guardsmen stalked abreast down the
street while police and deputy sheriffs followed them arresting
anyone on the street.

     Guardsmen killed a second Negro whom they found looting a
store. Another of the Negro victims killed had incredibly taken
up a post on a rooftop overlooking Watts' 77th Street precinct
station. As he directed sniper fire at police and soldiers
below, a Guardsman wheeled, drilled him cleanly through the head
with a rifle bullet.

     But the war-weary police were still doing most of the
yeomen work. They shot four looters dead in stores they were
sacking, fought a pitched gun battle with several others holed
up in a garage; the rioters emerged carrying a wounded woman and
waving a white flag. Gradually hemmed in, the rioters attempted
to regroup elsewhere, started appearing in widely separated
areas of Los Angeles County as far as 10 miles from the original
battleground.

     Threatening bands of Negroes roamed as far west as La Brea
Avenue, little more than a mile from hallowed Beverly Hills.
Panic seeped through the whole vast city. From Van Nuys to Long
Beach, nervous housewives traded rumors of new eruptions. Most
citizens stayed home, and the thrumming, garish metropolis
seemed unnervingly still. In neighborhoods surrounding the riot
center, frightened whites -- and some Negroes -- were queuing
up at sporting-goods stores to buy guns. At an Inglewood store,
Owner Bob Ketcham reported selling 75 shotguns and rifles in one
day, added: "They're buying every kind of weapon -- guns,
knives, bows and arrows, even slingshots."

     Though they now risked being shot, gangs of looters were
still burning stores and houses. The Fire Department announced
that 1,000 fires had been set, 300 of them major. At least 200
stores had been burned to the ground; along one four-block
stretch not a shop remained standing.

     From his Texas ranch, the President branded the disorders
"tragic and shocking." Said Lyndon Johnson: "I urge every
person in a position of leadership to make every effort to
restore order in Los Angeles." As Pat Brown hurried home,
Johnson dispatched LeRoy Collins, former director of the Federal
Government's Community Relations Service, and White House
Assistant Lee White to confer with the Governor on his arrival
in New York, and offer federal cooperation in any additional
measures that might be needed to restore peace to the City of
Angels.

     At week's end the Federal Government agreed to transport
up to 6,000 additional Guardsmen from northern California. By
Sunday night, officials planned to have at least 10,000 troops
on the scene. In addition, the Pentagon ordered into Los Angeles
an 840-man U.S. Marine Reserve detachment. The marines were
equipped with 40,000 rounds of ammunition.

     Like bubbles in hot asphalt, violence popped up elsewhere
across the land. The next serious outburst erupted in Chicago.
It, too, started with an incident that might have passed
unnoticed in a less volatile time. Answering what turned out to
be a false alarm in Garfield Park, a Negro neighborhood about
five miles west of the Loop, a speeding hook-and-ladder truck
knocked down a sign pole, killing Dessie Mae Williams, 23, a
Negro. It was a bad setting for such an accident. Only a month
earlier, a militant civil rights group called ACT had led 60
marchers to the West Garfield firehouse to demand that the all-
white company hire Negroes. After Dessie Williams' death last
week, some 200 Negroes gathered around the firehouse, shouting,
jeering and throwing rocks. They taunted the firemen by setting
small piles of debris ablaze, hurled a Molotov cocktail onto
the roof of a mobile classroom across the street. Heaving
missiles and assaulting whites, the crowd spread over a
twelve-block area before it was dispersed. Seven persons were
injured, among them four policemen hit by bricks and bottles.

     Not Satisfied. Next morning the Fire Department suspended
the fire-truck driver and the company's captain and shifted a
predominantly Negro company to the firehouse. But the disorders
flared even higher that day, possibly fanned by a leaflet
distributed by ACT that proclaimed: "DRUNKEN WHITE FIREMAN KILLS
BLACK WOMAN" -- prefaced in minute type: "Allegedly."

     The second-day riot lasted for nine hours; 18 policemen
and 42 civilians were hospitalized, 105 persons jailed. The FBI
was investigating the origin of another, anonymous leaflet
distributed in the area. "After years of frame-ups, brutality
and intimidation," it said, "the black people are throwing off
the control of the same rulers who are making war on working
people throughout the world -- in Vietnam, the Dominican
Republic and the Congo." At week's end Chicago -- where civil
rights groups have long campaigned against Mayor Richard Daley
and School Superintendent Benjamin Willis -- was quiet. But
Governor Otto Kerner, at the request of Chicago police, ordered
2,000 Illinois National Guardsmen into the city to stand by in
armories in case of further trouble.

     Then Springfield. Violence then leap-frogged east to the
rifle manufacturing city of Springfield, Mass. Trouble had been
brewing since last month, when police arrested 17 Negroes during
a disturbance outside a nightclub. A crowd of 300 accused the
officers of brutality and attacked them with bottles and rocks.
Last week 23 persons, 18 Negroes and five whites, including a
46-year-old white lawyer's wife, began a 24-hour-a-day sit-in
at city hall, ostensibly to protest the fact that the cops had
not been transferred to another area pending an investigation.

     After four days, police hauled the demonstrators off to
jail. That night two youths hurled gasoline bombs into two
white-owned stores, wreaking damage estimated at $30,000. At
week's end, amid mounting tension, 250 singing, clapping
demonstrators held a CORE-sponsored rally in the Negro section's
Winchester Square. Afterward, 25 were arrested when they
adjourned to another square for a sit-in. Vowed Mayor Charles
Ryan: "There is still a government in this city. It's the
government that's going to decide when rules and regulations,
reasonable at all times, are going to be imposed."

     Lack of Communication. Public officials across the U.S.
could doubtless sympathize with Mayor Ryan's words. Most
responsible Negro leaders also fear that insensate outbursts of
anarchy can only discredit the Negro's legitimate struggle for
civil rights.

     What caused the disorders? There were as many explanations
as there were points of view. In Los Angeles, "the long, hot
summer" was blamed -- as it was in Harlem last year -- and not
without reason: the rioting broke out on the fourth day of an
unusual heat wave in which Angelenos sweltered in humid
90-to-100 degree temperatures night and day. A deeper source of
irritation for urban Negroes is their isolation and poverty in
a land of conspicuous plenty. Undeniably, also, there is a "lack
of communication" between whites and blacks, between
responsible Negroes and the predominantly white police force.

     Watts only too plainly lacks Negro leadership -- except
for the hotheads who could whip up last week's passions. Yet the
Los Angeles Negro is incomparably better off that his cousin
back home in the South. The biggest single cause for his rage
and frustration lies probably in the very fact of his migration
to an alien and fiercely competitive urban world in which the
Negro's past miseries and future expectations have been
callously exploited.

     Police Chief Parker squarely blames civil rights leaders
for honing the Negro's sense of oppression. Says he: "Terrible
conflicts are building up within these people. You can't keep
telling them that the Liberty Bell isn't ringing for them and
not expect them to believe it. You cannot tell people to disobey
the law and not expect them to have a disrespect for the law.
You cannot keep telling them that they are being abused and
mistreated without expecting them to react." Riots such as
those in Los Angeles have no real object -- and therein lies the
pity and the danger.

_______________________________________________________________
December 17, 1965 The Why's of Watts

     A week after the savage Watts riots last August,
California's Governor Pat Brown appointed a commission to find
the reasons for the six-day uprising. The commission, headed by
tough-minded John McCone, 63, former boss of the Central
Intelligence Agency, spent 100 days at its task, interviewed
hundreds of people ranging all the way from the Negro whose
arrest for drunken driving touched off the holocaust to Brown
himself. Last week the commission released its findings and no-
nonsense recommendations with a sober warning that unless
immediate action is taken, the August riots "may seem by
comparison to be only a curtain raiser for what could blow up
one day in the future." [In contrast to a Washington idea
conference on Negro problems, which last week came out with such
far-out solutions as a federal Department of Decolonization and
enclaves reserved exclusively for Negroes in the South.]
Highlights:

      --  To erase the appalling gap between the educational
levels of whites and Negroes in Los Angeles schools, it urged
a one-third reduction of class size in Negro schools, a
permanent pre-school teaching program to include all children
from age three. Cost: at least $50 million, or roughly one-tenth
of the city's total school budget.

      --  To reduce Negro unemployment, it asked for
establishment of job training and placement centers in all Negro
neighborhoods, state legislation to force big employers to
report how many Negroes they have on the payroll.

      --  To meet persistent Negro charges of police oppression,
it recommended strengthening the Los Angeles' figure-head Board
of Police Commissioners and creation of an inspector general's
office to investigate citizens' complaints.

     Even before the commission finished its report, Chairman
McCone predicted that it would anger as many people as it
pleased. It did. Civil rights leaders accused it of
superficiality, said it skirted around the question of police
brutality, and almost entirely ducked the problem of
discrimination in housing. "A mouse-size solution to lion-size
problems," cried the United Auto Workers Union. The commission
staff itself was split. Some thought it should tell
Californians what should be done as well as what could be done.
But a more pragmatic majority, led by McCone, insisted that it
should deal factually with existing causes and conditions.

     "There was a complete obsession with facts rather than
insights," maintained one disappointed staff member. "I felt
that what we needed was some perspective on where we were going.
There was nothing offensive about the report -- maybe that was
the problem."

     McCone, a bluntly honest man with a lifetime of practical
experience in business and government, disagreed. "We wanted to
work with real problems," he said, "not broad philosophical
questions. We wanted to do something, not get bogged down in
sociological speculation. We wanted immediate solutions, not
theories."