Watts: The Legacy

‘Watts. The very name has become almost synonymous in Los Angeles with the word ghetto and the negative things that it implies. Joblessness and poverty. Crime and violence. Anger and hopelessness.’

--Losd Angeles Times editorial, Sept. 1, 1980

It has been 20 years since Watts exploded in anger and frustration, yet the very name still conjures up visions of the bloodiest race riot in American history.

Thirty-four people died, more than a thousand were injured, 4,000 were arrested and $200 million in property went up in flames during six days and nights of rioting in South-Central Los Angeles.

Today, Watts bears few visible reminders of the violence that shocked Los Angeles and the nation. The physical scars are years gone, but the psychic wounds remain.

“You say Watts and what do people think of? Low-lifes. They think it’s nothing but low-lifes that live here,” complained a man who asked to be identified only as Stan, 34, as he watered the grass of his neat tract home a few doors from where the riot started when a drunk-driving arrest turned into a rock-throwing melee two decades ago today.

Watts was thrust into infamy that day, and long after the fires burned out, the vision forged during that hellish week remained.

For many Watts residents, that stigma is the legacy of the Watts riot.

Looters, including women and small children, ran wild throughout the day, grabbing everything in sight--clothes, liquor, drugs, appliances, weapons, shoes and food. Then they burned the empty stores. --Los Angeles Times,

Aug. 14, 1965

“We got whatever we could from the stores before they burned,” Alice Harris recalled. “When we got the word 103rd (Street) was going, whole families headed over there.

“We weren’t criminals. We were just family folk. We knew it was going to burn anyway, so why not get what we could?”

Harris, a welfare mother with seven children, joined the looters two days after the riot broke out at 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard. By then it had spread to Watts’ business district along 103rd Street, where rioters smashed store windows and set fire to buildings.

“I headed over to Libby’s (a clothing store), but I was too late,” Harris said. The racks of Watts’ most expensive shop had been picked clean of its fashionable dresses.

“They had the best clothes there, dresses made in Europe, the kind of things you’d buy at the May Co. if you could afford it,” Harris said. “I was gonna get me some of those dresses.”

Finding the dresses gone, Harris rummaged through the broken glass and scattered pieces of clothing for something of value. She saw an electric fan and unplugged it.

Then, from outside the store, a roving band of young men shouted at her to get out. “I didn’t know them; they were going from store to store, setting the places on fire. They told us, ‘We’ve got to burn.’ ”

Harris leaped back out through the broken front window--cutting her ankle on a piece of jagged glass--as a firebomb was hurled inside. While she lugged the fan home to her apartment in the Jordan Downs public housing project, Libby’s burned to the ground.

“Because of the riot, we had to stay inside the house in all the heat that summer,” she recalled. “I kept that fan going all the time; that was the only way I could stand to be inside.

“For years, it was all the fan I had. Now I keep it as a souvenir. That, and this,” she said, pointing to a two-inch scar on her ankle.

Like most of her neighbors, Harris never threw a rock or a bottle, never lit a match, never joined the gangs that tore Watts apart during the six days of rioting.

She was a looter, but that was less like stealing and more like reclaiming what was hers, she explained.

“The people were already mad at the stores in Watts. You’d bought this furniture for $2,000 that was worth $200, and it fell apart almost before you got it home, and you still had to keep making the payments. . . .

“We were always being taken advantage of and there was nothing we could do,” she said. “When we heard the stores were ‘open,’ we all went down to get what we could. I didn’t know nothing about no riot, I just wanted to help myself and my family.”

Many of the people who died in the riot were looters like Harris, shot by police and National Guardsmen. Others were hit by rocks or sniper fire; others were killed as they drove through police barricades. Twenty-nine of the 34 riot victims were black, Watts-area residents.

The Watts riot, Harris said, was something that happened to the people in Watts, not because of them. “It was a nightmare for us. It made us suffer.”

Recalling the 8 p.m. curfew, the refusal of buses and cabs to enter the riot zone, the closure of markets and pharmacies and schools in the Watts area, the barricaded streets that made Watts residents virtual prisoners in the community, Harris said, life that summer was “like being in a war zone.”

In the 20 years since the riot, a lot has changed for Harris and for Watts. She earned her high school diploma, got off welfare and with her husband and children--now numbering 11--bought a house near Jordan Downs, where she started one of the community’s most successful counseling programs for Watts teen-agers.

“There were a lot of (positive) changes after the riot,” Harris said. “The riot got us training programs, where people could be trained for jobs, and improvements in some (city) services.

“For once, people had to look at the needs of the community. That meant more opportunities for us.”

But when outsiders looked at Watts during its orgy of violence, many did not see the needs of the community. Instead, they saw an ugliness that could not be explained away by the grueling poverty, the frustration, the hopelessness of the residents there.

“People looked at the riot and said ‘Look at them, burning their community down.’ But it wasn’t us that did the burning,” Harris said. “We didn’t know we’d be blamed for what happened. We were as much victims as anything else.

“People felt we were bad, we would kill, we would steal. Nobody wanted to be around us. They’re still holding it against us.

... They all in the Watts district, or rather a substantial number of them, became animals. --Columnist William F. Buckley,

Los Angeles Times, Aug. 20, 1965

As ugly scenes of the riot’s escalating violence appeared in newspapers and on television sets around the country, Watts became synonymous with anarchy and its citizens symbols of lawlessness.

In the days after the riot the residents of Watts became inexorably linked with the violence that had unfolded in their community, and 20 years later, in the minds of many, that image endures.

“There’s people who come here on vacation who want to see Watts, like it’s some kind of tourist spot, like Disneyland or the zoo,” said Harvey, a sullen-faced young man who works as a busboy at a downtown restaurant.

“Yeah, and we’re the animals,” piped in his teen-age friend, with a humorless laugh.

Harvey was only a few months old when the riot occurred, and yet he feels that he is held as responsible as if he’d thrown the first rock. He refuses to give his last name because he doesn’t want his employer to know he lives in Watts.

“I give them my sister’s address, in Compton, because it sounds better,” he explained.

Harvey said he was fired from his last job as a stock clerk at an Orange County insurance agency after a theft from the storeroom that his co-workers blamed on him.

“I didn’t know nothing about it, but the next thing I know, the manager calls me in and tells me how he tried to give me a break, but I blew it. And how people in Watts all want something for nothing. I wanted to hit him, but I just walked away.”

Harvey is convinced that he would still have his job if he lived anywhere other than Watts. “People just think the worst of us,” he said. “My sister says that’ll never change.”

Indeed, the riot is all many people know of Watts, as if time stopped for the community during that tumultuous week 20 years ago.

“Wherever I go, even now, people want to ask me about (the riot),” said Grace Payne, one of Watts’ biggest boosters. A member of the city’s Harbor Commission, Payne has lived in Watts for 40 years and heads its largest social service agency.

She prefaces almost every speech she makes with a reminder--”Watts is a community, not a riot”--but, she says, the image of the riot is a difficult one to erase.

“There are people, I’m sure, who, if they came to Watts today, would expect to see it still burning.”

There are no words to express the shock, the sick horror that a civilized city feels at a moment like this.... Decent citizens everywhere, regardless of color, can only pray that this anarchy will soon end. --Los Angeles Times editorial,

Aug. 15, 1965

Although history records it darkly, as the most violent race riot in the nation’s history, it has taken on a different character in much of black Los Angeles, where community celebrations mark the anniversaries of what people call the “rebellion” or the “revolt.”

A study undertaken by UCLA soon after the riot showed that nearly one-third of Watts-area residents termed the riot a “revolt” to correct injustices suffered by blacks. Today, many blacks leaders publicly embrace its memory as a noble, albeit tragic, gesture of protest. Most avoid calling the violence a riot.

Mayor Tom Bradley, in a recent speech at the Watts Towers festival, pointedly referred to the “Watts revolution,” drawing cheers and applause from the mostly black crowd. A local organization of black journalists recently made the “Watts rebellion” a topic at its annual convention.

For some blacks--both in and outside of Watts--there is a sense of pride that bullets and rocks accomplished what marches and demonstrations could not, and for six long days and nights Watts was the center of attention in a city that had long ignored it.

Still, after 20 years, some nagging questions remain about whether it was worth it, whether the explosion of death and destruction lifted the community up, or dragged it further down.

“There are a lot of different feelings about the riot,” said Natalie Anderson, a black high school principal who also teaches Watts youths.

“For a lot of people (in Watts), it’s something to be ashamed of, like when you take your kids out and they act up,” she said. But for others, “I don’t think it meant a whole lot.”

Others feel that the lasting impact of the riot was basically good.

“I think the positives outweighed the negatives,” Watts activist Payne said. “For once, the city listened. It made them realize that the people here had the same desires and needs as anybody else.”

For certain, the riot turned a spotlight on Watts. In the aftermath, attention was lavished on Watts and government money poured into the area for job-training programs, medical facilities and social service agencies.

But soon, the money ran out and the programs went bust, and Watts receded from the nation’s social conscience. And life, for most of Watts’ residents, continued just as before.

“That so-called rebellion didn’t do nothing but put us back another 50 years trying to deal,” said J. R. Hill, 45. “It was ugly then, it’s still ugly.”

Hill has spent his life in the Watts area and today lives a block away from where the riot began.

The riot, he said, “wasn’t nothing but a bunch of freebies,” a chance for Watts residents to take revenge on storekeepers they felt had been taking advantage of them.

“You can blame a lot of the way things are now on that ‘rebellion,’ ” he said. “We don’t have nothing because that made people think we didn’t deserve nothing.”

The riot scared businesses away and branded Watts as an outlaw neighborhood, where outsiders--especially white outsiders--are unwelcome, Hill said.

“The riot scared (white people) and they’re still scared today,” he said. “But I don’t blame the white folks. If you don’t know what’s out here, it’s best you don’t come.”

Ask Tasha about the riot that started two years before she was born, two miles away from where she lives, and she responds with a blank look. “The riot? Oh, the Watts riot.”

The riot is something she knows little about, except that it belongs to Watts, just as she belongs to Watts. “I heard about it before, but I don’t really remember what,” she said, thoughtfully. “Just that it was a riot and a lot of people were killed and the stores were all burned down.”

Most high school history books give little attention to the Watts riot. “A lot of books don’t deal with it at all; it’s like something that’s swept under the rug,” said high school principal Anderson.

The children of Watts may know little about the riot, but it is clear even to them that they too must live with its crippling legacy.

“When I tell people at school I’m from Watts, I get this strange look, like ‘You’re from Watts?,’ ” said Reginna Greene, an 18-year-old student at California State University, San Bernardino.

“It’s like they expect me to get into fights or something. They’re surprised to find out that somebody from Watts studies and gets good grades, just like other people.

“I’m used to it now, but it still hurts my feelings. It’s as if people think we’re animals or something down here.

“I don’t say anything. I just work hard and do well and get good grades, so they won’t think that about Watts anymore.

“But sometimes I want to tell them, ‘Hey, you guys, we’re not throwing rocks anymore.’ ”