After the 1965 Voting Rights Act
Watts Riot
For the Freedom Movement, SCLC, and Dr. King, the year 1965 begins
in triumph. For many, the Selma Voting Rights Campaign, March to
Montgomery, and passage of the historic Voting Rights Act are the
Movement's crowning achievements.
But
just days after the Act is signed into law on August 6th, the Watts
ghetto in California explodes in a massive uprising that dwarfs the
Harlem revolt of the previous year. For six days, Watts is a tornado
of arson, violence, and looting that leave in its wake 34 dead, 4,000
arrested, and $40,000,000 in property damage (equal to $300 million
in 2014) (After 1).
It
was Aug. 11, 1965, that Los Angeles police officer Lee Minikus tried
to arrest Marquette Frye for driving drunk in the city’s Watts
neighborhood—an event that led to one of the most infamous race
riots in American history. By the time the week was over, nearly
three dozen people were dead. TIME’s coverage from those incendiary
days offers insight into why Watts erupted–and lessons for the
current charged moment in America.
Fifty
years ago, Watts was a potent combination of segregation,
unemployment and racial tension. Though legally integrated, 99% of
students at the high school that served Watts were black, and the
school—like many of the services available to the neighborhood—was
not serving them well. “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,” TIME noted in a cover story about the riots. “Only
13% of the homes have been built since 1939—the rest are decaying
and dilapidated.”
Jobs,
meanwhile, were scarce. The federal government’s Office of Economic
Opportunity, run by John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent
Shriver, called out Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty for running the only
major city in the United States without an anti-poverty program, and
for being one of only two big city mayors to refuse a confidential
offer of federal money meant for job programs. TIME credited a
federal program that created 4,000 jobs for helping keep Harlem calm
that summer, despite unrest the year before. Yorty, in turn, accused
Shriver’s agency of withholding funds.
Nor
were tensions calmed by police, as TIME’s piece a week later
—headlined “Who’s to Blame?”—made clear. L.A. police chief
William Parker was a divisive figure who compared Watts rioters to
“monkeys in a zoo.” Martin Luther King Jr. was quoted as saying
that in Watts “[there] is a unanimous feeling that there has been
police brutality” despite the fact that a 1962 Civil Rights
Commission investigation was unable to pin down specific instances.
Seeking
to explain the underlying causes of the riots as they were happening,
TIME surveyed leading civil rights figures of the day. The magazine
found most shared a common sentiment—one that may be familiar to
current readers. “I think the real cause is that Negro
youth—jobless, hopeless—does not feel a part of American
society,” said movement leader Bayard Rustin. “The major job we
have is to find them work, decent housing, education, training, so
they can feel a part of the structure. People who feel a part of the
structure do not attack it” (Rothman 1-2).
Let
us delve into the specifics of the riot.
On
Aug. 11, 1965, California Highway Patrol Officer Lee Minikus
responded to a report of a reckless driver in the Watts section of
Los Angeles. Shortly after 7 p.m., he pulled over 21-year-old
Marquette Frye near 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard. Frye failed
sobriety tests as a crowd of about 50 people began to gather nearby.
Police
were going to tow Frye’s car, so his older stepbrother, Ronald [who
had been in the car with Frye and who had left it to walk home two
blocks away], brought their mother, Rena, to the scene to claim
the vehicle. When she got there, Rena Frye began berating her son for
drinking and driving, according to police and witness accounts.
Marquette Frye had been talking and laughing with Minikus and
other officers who had reported to the scene, but after his mother’s
arrival he began “cursing and shouting that they would have to kill
him to take him to jail,” according to a report later issued by a
state panel.
With
tensions rising, the CHP officers attempted to handcuff Marquette
Frye, but he resisted. His mother jumped onto an officer’s back.
An
officer swung his baton at Marquette Frye’s shoulder, according to
the state report, but missed and struck him in the head.
Frye
was bleeding. Witnesses told others in the crowd that police had
abused Rena Frye (who later told The Times that was not true).
The crowd soon swelled to nearly 1,000, as Marquette, Ronald and Rena
Frye were all taken away in handcuffs (Queally 1-2).
Forty
years later The Times interviewed nine eye-witnesses.
Arresting California Highway Patrolman Lee W. Minikus recalled:
It
was at Avalon and El Segundo when I saw the suspect make a wide turn.
A black gentleman pulled up [to my motorcycle] and said the guy was
drunk. So I went after him. I pulled [Marquette Frye] over at 116th
and Avalon.
It was his mother who actually caused the problem. She got upset
with the son because he was drunk. He blew up. And then we had to
take him into custody. After we handcuffed him, his mom jumped on my
back, and his brother was hitting me. Of course they were all
arrested.
…
Everything was going fine with the arrest until his mama got
there. He was saying, "Oh, I'm drunk." It was like this was
an everyday affair.
Interviewed, Rena Frye Price, (Marquette’s mother) said this:
Marquette and Ronnie were coming home from seeing friends. The
police pulled them over. One of the neighbors came and got me. I went
out to see what was going on. They took us down. They handcuffed us
and took us to the station.
…
[The arresting officers] lied. They said he was drunk driving, but
he wasn't drunk driving.
Nobody would hire me after the arrest. Before that I was a
domestic. I kept kids and I worked in a lot of homes. But because of
the riots, nobody would hire me. We survived because my husband
worked at a paper factory. He died about 22 years ago now.
It affected Marquette a lot. It took a lot out of him. He was a
nice guy, very smart, good at making things with his hands. I did my
best to educate him.
There's a whole lot of worse things going on now. Like killing
kids for no reason. It's terrible (Reitman 2-3).
After the Fryes were detained, police arrested a man and a woman
in the crowd on allegations that they had incited violence. A rumor
quickly spread that the woman was pregnant and had been abused by the
arresting officers.
That claim was untrue, according to the 101-page McCone Commission
report, issued months later. But on that hot summer night, the crowd
was furious.
People began throwing rocks at police cruisers, and the crowd
broke off into smaller groups. White motorists in the area were
pulled out of cars and beaten. Store windows were smashed open
(Queally 3).
The following morning, there
was a community meeting helmed by Watts leaders, including
representatives from churches, local government and the NAACP,
with police in attendance, designed to bring calm to the situation.
Rena also attended, imploring the crowds to calm down. She, Marquette
and Ronald had all been released on bail that morning.
The meeting became a barrage
of complaints about the police and government treatment of black
citizens in recent history. Immediately following the statement by
Rena, a teenager grabbed the microphone and proclaimed that rioters
planned to move into the white sections of Los Angeles (Watts
History 5-6).
A second round of riots erupted on the night of Aug. 12, as 7,000
people took to the streets and spread chaos in Watts and surrounding
South L.A. neighborhoods. About 75 people, including 13 police
officers, were injured and dozens of buildings were burned along
Avalon Boulevard.
Reports surfaced that rioters were stealing machetes and rifles
from pawnshops. Firefighters attempting to douse blazes throughout
the neighborhood were forced to take cover.
Some rioters had begun shooting at them.
Anger and distrust between Watts’ residents, the police and city
officials had been simmering for years.
Between 1940 and 1965, Los Angeles County’s black population had
grown from 75,000 to 650,000. Most black people in the county lived
in Southeast L.A., a section of the city that was home to failing
schools and little or no access to public transportation.
…
… witnesses to the arrest of the Fryes said they had heard
officers using racial slurs as they clashed with residents. Many said
the arrests highlighted the type of police misconduct they considered
rampant in the area.
“My husband and I saw 10 cops beating one man. My husband told
the officers, ‘You’ve got him handcuffed,’” one woman, who
said she witnessed the Fryes’ arrest, told The Times. “One
of the officers answered ‘Get out of here, [expletive]. Get out of
here all you [expletives]’” (Queally 3-5).
With riots escalating, Los Angeles police chief William H. Parker
asked for assistance from the California National Guard and compared
the situation to fighting the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. On August
13, about 2,300 National Guardsmen arrived in Watts, and, by
nightfall, nearly 16,000 total law enforcement personnel had been
deployed to maintain order. Blockades were established within the
riot zone, with signage indicating that law enforcement would use
deadly force. Sergeant Ben Dunn, one of the National Guardsmen
deployed in Watts, 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,” furthering the comparison of the
riots to an act of war, which was a common view held by white people
at the time, and often how riots like these are remembered in the
public collective memory. A curfew was declared for all
black-majority neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and a policy of mass
arrest was enacted. Nearly 3,500 people were arrested solely for
curfew violations.
In addition to looting and arson, participants in the riots
engaged in physical confrontations with law enforcement, with some
hurling bricks and pieces of pavement at Guardsmen, police, and their
vehicles, and others participating as snipers and targeting officers
from rooftops. Rioters also beat white bystanders and motorists and
prevented firefighters from performing their duties, as well as
targeted white-owned businesses for the acts of arson and looting.
The riots had died down by August 15. Approximately 35,000 adults had
participated in the rioting, while about 70,000 people had been
“sympathetic, but not active.” When all was said and done, 34
people had been killed, 1,032 people had been injured, 3,438 people
had been arrested and an estimated $40 million in property damage had
been sustained (Case 3-5).
Interviewed forty years later Tommy Jacquette commented:
I actually participated in the revolt of '65, not as an onlooker
but as a participant. I grew up with Marquette Frye, and I heard
about what happened.
After they took Marquette away, the crowd began to gather and the
police came in and tried to disband the crowd. The crowd would
retreat, but then when the police left, they could come back again.
About the second or third time they came back, bottles and bricks
began to fly.
At that point, it sort of like turned into a full-fledged
confrontation with the police. A police car was left at Imperial and
Avalon, and it was set on fire. The rest was history.
…
…
I was throwing as many bricks, bottles and rocks as anybody. My
focus was not on burning buildings and looting. My focus was on the
police.
I was arrested, but I was released the same night with a promise
to get off the street. [Instead,] I rejoined the struggle. The Police
Department was at that time supposedly considered one of the finest
police departments in the world. I know it was one of the most racist
and most brutal departments.
People keep calling it a riot, but we call it a revolt because it
had a legitimate purpose. It was a response to police brutality and
social exploitation of a community and of a people, and we would no
more call this a riot than Jewish people would call the extermination
of the Jewish people 'relocation.' A riot is a drunken brawl at USC
because they lost a football game.
People said that we burned down our community. No, we didn't. We
had a revolt in our community against those people who were in here
trying to exploit and oppress us.
We did not own this community. We did not own the businesses in
this community. We did not own the majority of the housing in this
community.
Some people want to know if I think it was really worth it. I
think any time people stand up for their rights, it's worth it.
Lacine Holland had witnessed the start of the riots. She had gone to
pick up her children from her mother’s house on her way home from
work.
I went to the corner to see what was going on and saw a large
crowd.
The police were there. They were making an arrest of a young man.
I remember that they took him and threw him in the car like a bag of
laundry and kicked his feet in and slammed the door.
We have a lot of officers in my family. I'm not against [police],
but at that time I thought it could have been handled better than it
was.
We were standing there, and a policeman walked by and someone spit
at him. The crowd got very upset. When the person spat, the policeman
grabbed a woman so strong that her hair rollers fell out. She looked
pregnant because of the smock, but I think she was actually a barber.
She wasn't the one who spit on them. I got in my car and left the
scene. [Soon after,] the rioting started.
At Shoprite, where my husband used to work, they burned the
market. You could hear people shooting, you'd witness people running
with furniture, food, liquor, anything they could grab. It was just
horrific.
One of my neighbor's friends was killed. They had the Guards up,
and blocked off streets. They told her to halt, and they opened fire
and she was killed.
My children were frightened. They were 7, 10 and 12 then. Of
course, we had to explain what was going on. We watched the news.
After it was all over, it looked like a war zone
Betty
Pleasant, a student at Freemont High School, was working part-time
and during the summer as youth editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel,
then the major paper serving the city's black community. This is
what she told The Times years later.
I
was in the newsroom when people began calling us. We were the voice
of the black community, and if anything happened, people would call
us. Most of the editorial staff was at the print shop because we came
out the next day. So Brad [Pye Jr., the sports editor,] decided that
he was going to go check it out, and I said, I'm going with you.
We
drove down Central Avenue. At some point a bottle was thrown at us,
and it sailed across the hood of the car. It didn't strike us, but it
woke us up to the fact that something was happening.
The
farther south we got, the more people we saw massing on the street
and throwing things at white motorists. Some black people got caught
in the crossfire.
At
103rd Street, we came upon a real bad situation involving Nat
Diamond's furniture store, which was being attacked. A guy walked out
with a sofa on his shoulder. They ultimately burned it, with screams
of "Burn, Baby, Burn!" Then they progressed east on 103rd
Street and burned everything in their wake.
The
crowd got bigger and more frenzied as it progressed, until it got to
the department store. You know, in those days there were a lot of
stores. The problem, as far as the residents were concerned, is that
they were white-owned stores, selling substandard stuff for high
prices.
The
mob progressed to about Compton Avenue, [to] the one department store
in the neighborhood, and they attacked it. They busted out all the
windows and walked in and started throwing merchandise out of the
broken windows.
A
guy threw me a blouse. He said, "Here, little sister, this is
for you." I was just standing there with my mouth open. So he
threw me this really cute, peach colored blouse, which I looked at
and immediately dropped to the ground, because I couldn't very well
cover the story and follow the group while holding loot in my hand.
Then they threw a Molotov cocktail and burned it to the ground. I
asked one of the guys who was throwing the Molotov cocktails why he
was doing it, and he said it was to get back at whitey. And I said,
"I can dig it."
They
moved to the big supermarket on 103rd street that was notorious for
selling awful food. Several months before, I covered a demonstration
there where people were trying to get them to sell better meat,
better baked goods, better produce. They burned it to a
fare-thee-well. Burned it down. I don't think they even bothered to
loot that sucker.
On
the corner of 92nd and Wilmington, was a very small, tiny grocery
store owned by an elderly black couple. Their store was untouched,
because word went around not to touch this one because it was
black-owned.
There
were no cops on Day 1. I don't think there were many on Day 2. It was
unbelievable. There was nothing to restrain anybody. No attempts to
quell anything. Nobody to put the fires out, so it was just raging.
On
what must have been Day 3, because everything was in ruins by now, I
understood that they were getting ready to do something else on
103rd, so I went over there to check it out — and got caught in the
middle of a shootout between the residents and the cops.
That
was the first and only time I was afraid. I was caught behind a
boulder, which had been a building, but had been reduced to a piece
of [rubble]. There was a cop a few yards away from me. He started
moving toward me. I said, "Get away from me! Don't come near me!
They're shooting at you, and I don't want them to miss you and shoot
me."
He
told me I had to get down on my hands and knees and scoot along the
ground behind what was left of this building. He said he'd cover me.
But I was too scared to move. I started crying. I just lost it. He
was trying to get me to pay attention. Finally he screamed at me,
"Go! Go! Go!" And I did what he said. I got away. I cried
for the rest of the day. After that, the bullets didn't scare me.
I
hated [the National Guard] like dogs, and I still do. I wanted to
interview them, so a photographer and I came upon this massive
barricade. I felt something whiz past my ear, and I said to the
photographer, "What was that?" It was a bullet. By this
time I'm used to it, I said, "Oh, that old thing."
We
walked on up to the guy who was shooting at us, and I asked him if it
was his policy to shoot first and ask questions later. And he said,
"Yeah," and for us to get our black asses away from there.
I said, "But we're with the press." And he said, "I
don't give a damn if you're press or no press." So I've hated
the National Guard ever since.
I
didn't like the cops either, because being a child of the '60s, you
don't like the cops. But I didn't hate them. They didn't call me
names. They didn't shoot at me. And one of them did save my life. But
the National Guard were surly, nasty, ugly and mean, and I was surly,
nasty, ugly and mean right back (Reitman 4-10).
On
17 August 1965, Martin Luther King arrived in Los Angeles in the
aftermath of the riots. His experiences over the next several days
reinforced his growing conviction that the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC) should move north and lead a movement to
address the growing problems facing black people in the nation’s
urban areas.
By
the time King arrived on Tuesday, having cut short his stay in Puerto
Rico, the riots were largely over and the curfew was lifted. Fueling
residual anger, however, police stormed a Nation of Islam mosque the
next night, firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the building
and wounding 19 men.
While
deploring the riots and their use of violence, King was quick to
point out that the problems that led to the violence were
“environmental and not racial. The economic deprivation, social
isolation, inadequate housing, and general despair of thousands of
Negroes teeming in Northern and Western ghettos are the ready seeds
which give birth to tragic expressions of violence.” Although
California Governor Edmund Brown hoped King would not go to Watts,
King went to support those living in the ghetto who, he claimed,
would be pushed further into “despair and hopelessness” by the
riot. He also hoped to bolster the frayed alliance between blacks and
whites favoring civil rights reform. He offered to mediate between
local people and government officials, and pushed for systematic
solutions to the economic and social problems plaguing Watts and
other black ghettos.
King
told reporters that the Watts riots were “the beginning of a
stirring of those people in our society who have been by passed by
the progress of the past decade.” Struggles in the North, King
believed, were really about “dignity and work,” rather than
rights, which had been the main goal of black activism in the South.
During his discussions with local people, King met black residents
who argued for armed insurrection, and others who claimed that “the
only way we can ever get anybody to listen to us is to start a riot.”
These expressions concerned King, and before he left Los Angeles he
spoke on the phone with President Lyndon B. Johnson about what could
be done to ease the situation. King recommended that Johnson roll out
a federal anti-poverty program in Los Angeles immediately. Johnson
agreed with the suggestion, telling King: “You did a good job going
out there.”
Later
that fall, King wrote an article for The Saturday Review
in which he argued that Los Angeles could have anticipated rioting
“when its officials tied up federal aid in political manipulation;
when the rate of Negro unemployment soared above the depression
levels of the 1930s; when the population density of Watts became the
worst in the nation,” and when the state of California repealed a
law that prevented discrimination in housing. (Watts Rebellion
1-4).
Throughout
the crisis, public officials advanced the argument that the riot was
the work outside agitators; however, an official investigation,
prompted by Governor Pat Brown, found that the riot was a result of
the Watts community's longstanding grievances and growing
discontentment with high unemployment rates, substandard housing, and
inadequate schools. Despite the reported findings of the
gubernatorial commission, following the riot, city leaders and state
officials failed to implement measures to improve the social and
economic conditions of African Americans living in the Watts
neighborhood (Watts Digital 1).
Marquette
Frye’s arrest was not the principal cause of the Watts Riots, but
rather the spark that set the fire on already poured gasoline. In
addition to previous riots inspiring unrest, such as the Harlem Riots
in 1964, the Watts district of Los Angeles was a deeply impoverished
predominately black neighborhood. African American citizens were
growing embittered due to a lack of opportunity in the job market,
substandard and segregated housing, inadequate schooling, and the
prevalence of police brutality, all of which had led to a low
standard of living. Impoverished black people felt constant
frustration, because they saw the civil rights acts being passed and
heard the promises for a good future coming from politicians, but
they were still living in inferior conditions when compared to their
white counterparts.
The
riots also stemmed from the Second Great Migration, in which African
Americans from the South moved northward and westward from 1941 to
1970 in an attempt to escape oppressive Jim Crow laws. The influx of
African Americans to the cities, such as Los Angeles, pushed whites
to the suburbs in what was coined “white flight,” draining cities
of vital resources and taxes. Urban areas, such as the Watts
district, became nearly the same as the South, as African Americans
were being denied jobs by white employers, housing became strictly
segregated and scarce, and police brutality skyrocketed out of white
fear. African Americans uprooted their lives to escape systemic
racism only to fall even deeper into poverty and still experience
institutional racism on the same scale as they had in the South. When
black people began to speak out about the injustices they faced
during the Civil Rights Movement, white Americans living in these
areas were horrified by what they thought they saw, and what they saw
was the work of a lawless black mob incited to riot by the war on
poverty that had been initiated by President Johnson. This mindset
gave way to a resurgent politics of race, which pushed the falsehood
that most people living in poverty were people of color, as well as
the ideology of zero sum gain, which was the belief that when black
people gain, everyone loses, especially working class whites. These
frustrations culminated in riots, much like the Watts Riots, in
predominately black neighborhoods across the country. The resurgent
politics of race that emerged from this era has continued today,
bringing to light the fact that memories of the past can influence
the modern political landscape (Case 6-7).
Works
cited:
“After
Watts.” Chicago Freedom Movement & the War Against Slums.
Civil Rights Movement History 1966 (July-December). Web.
https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim66b.htm#1966chi_watts
“The
Case for Civil Unrest: The Watts Riots and Institutional Racism.”
Black Power in American Memory. Web.
http://blackpower.web.unc.edu/2017/04/the-case-for-civil-unrest-the-watts-riots-and-institutional-racism/
Reitman,
Valerie and Landsberg, Mitchell. “Watts Riots, 40 Years Later.”
Los Angeles Times. August 11, 2005. Web.
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-watts-riots-40-years-later-20050811-htmlstory.html
Queally,
James. “Watts Riots: Traffic Stop Was the Spark that
Ignited Days of Destruction in L.A.” Los Angeles Times. July
29, 2015. Web.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-watts-riots-explainer-20150715-htmlstory.html
Rothman,
Lily. “50 Years after Watts: The Causes of a
Riot.” Time. Web.
http://time.com/3974595/watts-riot-1965-history/
“Watts
Rebellion (Los Angeles).” Stanford: The
Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/watts-rebellion-los-angeles
