Riots Are Violent Reruns for the Veterans of Watts : Survivors: They felt their past come full circle. But many acted far differently this time.

Lost among the roiling crowds of rioters who seized control of South Los Angeles over the past five days were a generation of African-Americans caught in a time warp, struggling to come to grips with last week’s violence even as they were overwhelmed by memories of the fire last time.

They are the veterans of the Watts revolt, men and women who endured in the bloody August, 1965, uprising that until last week was considered the defining symbol of American black anger and militancy. The six days of rage that tore at Los Angeles 27 years ago--resulting in 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries and $40 million in property damage--was vastly outstripped by last week’s carnage, which left 51 dead, injured 2,328 and cost the city at least $717 million. In the 36-hour binge of destruction that followed last week’s verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case, the survivors of Watts felt their past had come full circle.

Old heads became youngbloods again, swept by an inner fury they had not experienced in nearly three decades. Some leaped at second chances they never expected to have, determined that this time, they would act differently. And other Watts survivors recoiled in depression, convinced there was little hope of averting other riots.

Within an hour of the first outbreak of violence last week, Tommy Jaquette, a Watts rioter who in 1965 hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at “any white man I could find,” drove to the South Los Angeles corner where the disturbances had just started--as he had done during the first hours of the Watts rebellion. As he stood and watched youths haul motorists out of cars at Normandie and Florence avenues, Jaquette felt an old urge to riot. But his Watts memories also reminded him of his age, and how far he had come since then.

Beverly Blake, who had fled in fear to her parents’ house in 1965, defiantly strode out of her South Los Angeles home late last Wednesday night to help neighbors hose down a community center threatened by flame. “This time, I was so much less afraid,” she says. “As terrible as it was, I had been there before. I could act.”

And the Rev. Frank J. Higgins, who pleaded with Watts rioters in 1965 to heed his anguished calls for peace, could not bare to see his neighborhood consumed all over again. He holed up in his Watts home and spent hours alone in front of his television set, grieving over the devastation.

Yet as they and others watched Los Angeles burn last week, the black survivors of the Watts revolt concluded that the crucial lessons of the 1965 riots--the need for fundamental changes in American race relations and for vast social programs to cure the ills of the poor--had gone unheeded and would have to be learned all over again.

“The lessons are the same,” says “Father” Amde Hamilton, a member of the Watts Prophets, a trio of grizzled performance artists who gathered over the weekend to recite angry poems in a cramped living room not far from the smoking ruins of Vermont Avenue. “But are they listening?”

Hobbled by a sprained back, Tommy Jaquette lay in the living room of his apartment at 51st Street and Normandie Avenue late last Wednesday afternoon, watching television in the first hours after the King verdict. A tall, slightly stooped figure whose knotty black beard has begun to sprout gray, Jaquette, 49, is an organizer of the Watts festival, an annual remembrance of the defiance of 27 years ago.

Jaquette wondered where the first spasm of violence would break out. And he wondered whether he would be able to get there in time--if at all.

“Once they announced the verdict, it was just a matter of time,” he said. “It was just a matter of waiting. Somebody, somewhere, was going to set it off.”

About 7 p.m., he watched, transfixed, as a helicopter news camera focused on the figure of a white man lying in the center of the intersection at Florence and Normandie. It was Reginald Denny, the gravel truck driver who was dragged from his cab by a mob of angry black men and suffered the first blows of the King riots.

Jaquette reached for the telephone and called a friend, Ramala Rousel. There was no way he could drive. But maybe she could take him? Rousel agreed, and within minutes, she was knocking at his door.

The sun was still visible on the horizon, the last time it would be seen unfiltered by smoke until the weekend. As they drove toward Normandie and Florence, Jaquette saw a neighborhood on the verge of an explosion--youths gesturing angrily on sidewalks, motorists blaring horns and screaming out their car windows, the first looters tinkering with metal grates on shuttered store windows.

“You could feel it, man,” Jaquette recalls. “Everyone could. It was contagious.”

It infected him too, the kind of electric surge that sports fans feel after their teams win a championship, the gust of invincibility that some people seek in a lighter crammed with cocaine rocks.

Normandie and Florence was a hive of danger. Yelling and flailing their arms, teen-agers danced into the street, trying to stop cars without being run over. Homeless men who washed windows for spare change at a nearby Unocal were now looting a liquor store. They came out toting six-packs of beer and bags of potato chips. There was no sign of police.

Teen-age girls shrieked at each other. One girl carrying a cardboard peace sign argued with others who scorned her with laughter. The air was thick with chants from rap anthems.

“No justice, no peace!”

“F--- the police!”

They taunted their victims with epithets. A panic-stricken Asian woman who was chased down Normandie was “that zipperhead” and “tight eye.” Reginald Denny, pounded into a bloody pulp near his truck, was a “white boy” and a “devil.”

Jaquette heard two young black men talking about Denny, who, still alive, had been taken away by four rescuers only minutes before. One of the youths said: “Hey, man, you missed us beating up a white man.” His companion replied: “Don’t worry, another one will come along.”

As Jaquette narrated his memories of the scene with dispassion, it was clear that he empathized with the crowd’s short-lived anarchic outburst.

As he stood at the corner of Florence and Normandie last week, he recalled later, Jaquette remembered his first riot, a sticky August night in 1965 when he leaped out of a car at 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard minutes after the start of the Watts revolt. That night, a crowd of angry black men began pelting California Highway Patrol officers with rocks and bottles as they scuffled with 21-year-old Marquette Frye, stopped on suspicion of drunk driving.

For nearly five days that August, Jaquette roamed the streets, searching for weapons to use against the hated Los Angeles police. He pitched flaming bottles filled with gasoline and chunks of brick and rock at officers and white passersby. He was among a mob who stole a box of flares from the trunk of a television news car, then flung them at frightened motorists. He heaved bricks through car windows at Avalon and Imperial Highway. He stood and whooped as a tire factory at Central Avenue and 114th Street went up in flames.

“I was in it from the first fire to the last fire,” he says. “It felt real good.”

Last Wednesday night, as he stood at the edge of the chanting mob at Normandie and Florence, Jaquette watched the young rioters and found himself anticipating their moves. From his own time in the street, he knew that the teen-agers clustered in front of the stores were discussing how they would break in.

He only saw their lips move, but Jaquette could guess their repartee: “It’s like, ‘Should we pull out the metal grates? Or should we go in from the back? Should we try another building and see if there’s a common door?’ It was real heated, man. They weren’t sitting at no table with yellow legal pads and fountain pens.”

Yet as he stood there, watching, Jaquette suddenly felt his initial surge of excitement pass.

“I don’t know, maybe it was just age,” he says. “Maybe I’m too mellow now. I stood there and realized I’m not really needed. I knew what those kids were going through, I felt the same way they did. . . . I knew the Establishment would have the upper hand at the end, that we would burn and sputter out. I just wanted to be out there to see it, to be a part of it.”

He went back to Rousel’s car and returned with a video camera. All he had from his days of rage in Watts were memories. This time, he would have mementos.

Long into the night last Wednesday, Beverly Blake listened to the sirens and shouts echoing around her neighborhood on 53rd Street, just off Vermont Avenue. For the first few hours, she stayed inside with her mother and her sister, just as she had done in August, 1965, when she was a pregnant young wife, scared senseless.

But when neighbors began pounding on her door with news that a blaze in an auto repair yard was threatening the red-brick African American Community Unity Center just a half-block away, Beverly Blake instinctively took action.

“You just do it, you don’t think,” she says. “I’m a different person than I was back then. And this time, they were threatening my livelihood.”

Blake, 48, is deputy director at the center, an arm of the Brotherhood Crusade. Until last week’s riot, she worked as “resource liaison,” linking community-based organizations with larger groups that have the ability to fund and coordinate services. Over the past five days, she has performed a similar task, supervising a food giveaway to pregnant women, young children and elderly South Los Angeles residents unable to buy or store food since the riots.

Yet for three hours Wednesday night, Blake became a firefighter, her face stained with soot and her hair sprayed with water as she helped two dozen neighbors aim a patchwork line of garden hoses at flames that licked the center’s south wall.

In those three hours, Blake forgot the fears that had paralyzed her during the Watts riots, emboldened by the camaraderie of her neighbors, black and Latino families who live around the center.

“In Watts, I was simply afraid,” she says. “I reached out for the security of my family. We stayed inside and watched it on TV. This time, my friends helped me feel stronger. I felt secure with them. We all came forward on our own. And we felt strong enough to work together. When it was over, I just wanted to stand back and be proud.”

It was shortly after 10 p.m., three hours after the riots had begun, that Blake and the others joined in their fire line. Two young neighbors, Richard Flagg and Alex Drake, ran from door to door down 53rd Street, alerting residents and rounding them up to save the center.

Neighbors brought garden hoses and screwed them together, creating two long hoses out of six shorter lengths. Snaking the hoses into an entrance, Blake and the others took up lengths of the hoses, holding them aloft as flames shot inches away from the center’s south wall. The heat was so intense that it peeled paint off the wall. Glass popped from the windows above them, raining shards on their heads.

Finally, after midnight, several fire engines pulled up and took over. The neighbors watched until the hot spots were doused. When Blake left, the auto yard was a pile of smoking embers. Several cars parked in its lot were burnt to the metal. Blackened chunks of wood lay in piles with twisted piping.

In the days since the fire, Blake has been back at work in the center, supervising relief efforts and joined by a cadre of volunteers gathering packages of diapers, cans of soup and fruit, bags of soup beans and bread for those without food.

She ushers visitors out to the south wall, where she proudly looks over the ruins of the auto yard and narrates the tale of how the center was saved--and how she became unafraid.

The Rev. Frank J. Higgins peered out a window from his Watts church toward the smoldering remains of a storefront two blocks away. “That verdict rattled the bones of our mothers and fathers in the grave,” he intoned in a pained voice.

Pastor of Trueway Baptist Church for 31 years, Higgins, 62, has served as the conscience for three generations of the black community’s poor. He was there in August, 1965, when the city exploded around him.

On the night the Watts riots erupted, he was driving home from church when another minister honked his horn and asked him to stop. Soon the pair were standing on a dirt lot at the corner of Imperial Highway and 118th Street, a few blocks from where youths had begun attacking motorists.

“The LAPD had set up a command post at that corner and people from the neighborhood were starting to gather,” Higgins said. “The police were standing four abreast, slapping their batons in their hands in the hope of instilling fear.

“I asked the officer in charge for a bullhorn thinking maybe I could help disperse the crowd, but he just placed his hand on my stomach and said, ‘We can handle it.’ I knew right then that it was going to be bad.”

Within minutes, he said, people started throwing rocks and bottles, and the police at the corner were forced to break and run. For the young black minister, it was the beginning of a sort of spiritual triage. Over the course of the next several days and nights, he tried to persuade anyone who would listen that violence was not the way.

In the 27 years since Watts, Higgins has continued to preach against violence, but his memories of the revolt left him with the knowledge that men of peace are helpless to stop such a spasm, that only after the fury of the streets is spent can they do any good.

Last Wednesday, an hour before the jury in Simi Valley came back into the courtroom with a verdict, an older, more realistic Higgins again drove away from his church after admonishing the volunteers who operate the homeless shelter there to stay inside.

Convinced that a suburban jury would not find the police defendants guilty, and certain there would be violence, he went home, got into bed and turned on the television.

Throughout Watts, the streets were strangely quiet that afternoon. The trial “was like the World Series and Super Bowl rolled into one,” Higgins said. “People were glued to their television sets.”

Afterward, when those angered by the outcome recoiled in anger, the pastor’s voice was absent from those beseeching calm in the community. Instead, he waited for the riots to end, and the days of recovery to come, when he might again play a role.

“The years of neglect directed at blacks have taught me something: I no longer fantasize in the dark,” he said. “Even the Scriptures speak of a Jubilee Year when the slaves must be set free.”

On Saturday afternoon, a steady breeze began to blow away the stench of smoke from the streets of South Los Angeles. Inside the living room of a stucco bungalow on West 64th Street, the Watts Prophets were deep into a performance resonant with memory and loss.

There were three of them--”Father” Amde Hamilton, Richard Dedeaux and Otis Solomon, performance artists who roamed the streets of Watts in 1965, flush with a sense of power. Now they were middle-aged and recalling that time for a small audience of black community activists and residents.

If the ribald, street-wise brew of poetry they uttered seemed to speak longingly of the elemental pulse of black power that came from the riot, it also spoke of a wistful nostalgia that all old radicals seem to share for the revolution that inevitably passes them by.

Their voices grew faster and more furious as they launched into “I Remember Watts,” a prose poem that might easily be written 30 years from now about the chaos of the last five days.

” . . . To light up Chicago, Detroit and New York, it takes billions and billions or watts,” recited Dedeaux. “To light up Los Angeles, it took only one . . . “

The three men joined in unison.

” . . . and we remember Watts . . . “