Civil Rights Events

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