UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 1 : THE PATH TO FURY : CHAPTER 3 : The word in the streets: ‘Burn, baby, burn.’

Nettie Lewis was relaxing in her apartment at 76th and Hoover streets when she heard the commotion outside. She could hear people shouting and running. She heard glass breaking.

Outside now, Lewis stood stunned. Around her, people were looting, burning, destroying. Just a block away, the White Front store was in flames. Transfixed by the blaze, she was trampled by a fleeing looter.

It was just past 8 p.m., August 11, 1965, a hot summer day. South-Central Los Angeles was on fire.

That afternoon, a Highway Patrolman named Lee Minikus had stopped a young black man named Marquette Frye for speeding and reckless driving at 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard.

The motorcycle officer radioed for a patrol car to carry Frye to jail. A crowd gathered. A scuffle broke out, and Frye’s brother and mother were arrested. The crowd grew angry. Rocks and bottles were thrown, and the riot was on.

For six long days, black residents in and outside of Watts burned, looted and battled with police, unleashing in one fierce, frightening explosion decades of pent-up anger and frustration. “Burn, baby, burn” became the neighborhood anthem as residents tried to pay back Los Angeles for all the years of abuse, of neglect, “of the dual justice in the system, of the lack of respect for everybody, of not following through on programs and promises that could have brought about something better,” Onamia Bryant explains 27 years later.

Bryant viewed the Watts rebellion from the porch of her family’s new house in the Athens district. She watched as looters pillaged a huge shopping center not far from her home. “We weren’t in the middle of it,” she recalls, “so, it wasn’t so frightening to us. But it was all around us.”

While stores burned on one side of her neighborhood, Nettie Lewis was able to walk in another direction to get milk and bread and other essentials for her family. The city and the nation looked on in horror. But Lewis, like Bryant, never felt danger. “Sometimes you feel safe when things are burning up around you,” she says. “That’s how it was during the Watts riot. I felt safer then than I do now.”

Thousands of National Guardsmen poured into the city to quell the disturbance. Bleary-eyed police, working round-the-clock, struggled desperately to regain order. Police Cadet Thomas Souza helped out by ferrying busloads of prisoners to jail for booking.

Eleven-year-old Nancy Silverton, tucked away in the quiet of her family’s Encino home, looked on in amazement. For her, the television images of urban upheaval were like a visit to someone else’s bad dream.

“I don’t remember much about the riot,” Silverton says. “I just remember it being very scary and that it was far away, that it was localized and I was safe where I was.”

The same was true for Mark Peel, and for so many whites and Latinos in the Southland. “I was in the fourth or fifth grade, living in Temple City,” he says. “To me, it was as remote as the Vietnam War.”

Not so for the people in Watts and the rest of South Los Angeles. By the time the rebellion had run its course, 34 people lay dead, 1,032 had been injured, 3,952 had been arrested, 200 buildings had been destroyed and 400 more had been burned and looted. In today’s dollars, the damage totaled a staggering $183 million.

After the flames had subsided and the guardsmen and the reporters had departed, the residents of Watts sifted through the rubble. Gone was the 55th Street Drug Store, a musicians’ haunt. Gone was the Avedon Ballroom, Little Harlem, the 54th Street Ballroom and the Safeway on Imperial Highway. Gone were the corner markets, the clothing stores, the shoe repair shops, the furniture marts. What had been 103rd Street was now known as “Charcoal Alley.”

“I didn’t agree with it,” Onamia Bryant says solemnly, “but I understood it.”

Jake Flukers, who had left Los Angeles to enter the Job Corps just before Watts exploded, saw only waste when he returned in the early ‘70s. “The only thing they got out of the Watts riots was the Watts Festival,” he says, referring to the summer celebration first held in August, 1966, one year after the riots. “And the vendors would come in and take the money right out of Watts. That’s all they got was a festival.”

Watts set the tone for Los Angeles and the nation for nearly a decade as America drifted into an era of defiance, militancy, impatience, disillusionment and re-evaluation.

On its heels came riots in Detroit; Newark and New Brunswick, N.J.; Washington, D.C.; New York and other urban centers, redefining the civil rights movement. No longer could Northerners derisively point fingers at the South about its “race problem.” “The long hot summer” became a phrase synonymous with urban unrest.

In California, then-Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown ordered a study of the Watts riots. Following the summer of 1967, President Johnson created a commission to look at the causes of urban unrest. America, the Kerner Commission reported, was two nations: one black, one white, separate and unequal.

Meanwhile, on college campuses and in cities throughout the nation, angry students and “yippies” took to the streets to demand the end of the Vietnam War and to protest social inequities. The Chicano movement swept across the West, demanding an end to unfair immigration policies, police brutality and discrimination.

As society’s norms withstood shock after shock, California’s frightened mainstream responded with Ronald Reagan, the retired movie actor who was elected governor in 1966. He pledged to restore law and order, hold the line against reinstituting the fair-housing laws, make greater use of capital punishment and root out the welfare cheaters.

These were years when the Los Angeles Police Department gloried in its image of toughness. As Thomas Souza remembers it, officers were taught, “When you go, you go all the way. You don’t go soft-handed. You don’t try and show signs of weakness. . . . Officer safety comes first. We don’t care about criminals. You are worth 10 of them.

“We had the fastest response and the strongest officers. When we hit the scene, people knew we meant business. There shouldn’t be a piece of that suspect left.” If you didn’t jump into the pile with your fellow officers, he knew, you were considered less of a partner, one not to be trusted.

Tom Reddin, replacing the late William Parker as police chief in 1967, tried to change the Storm Trooper look of his officers, to soften their image. He took the buckles off the Sam Browne gun belts and replaced them with Velcro-type fasteners. Officers derisively called them “Bruce Browne” belts. The officers still had shiny black shoes, but Reddin removed the gold buttons from their uniforms, replacing them with silver.

“He made us wear our name tags,” Souza recalls. “I remember that was a big bone of contention. ‘Why should criminals know our name?’ officers said.”

There were changes in more than LAPD attire. The department’s community relations unit was expanded from four people to 120. Community councils were established in each division, their members told to go out and meet with the community leaders and clubs.

Officers were instructed to fraternize with minority residents. Many were put back on foot patrol. And in a move applauded in poor black neighborhoods, officers were directed to hand out warnings instead of citations for minor mechanical violations of the vehicle code.

All this made for good public relations, Souza says, but in the minds of officers it did nothing to deter crime. And in the inner city, crime and political unrest intertwined.

Three years after Watts, Souza was a motorcycle cop, with orders to ride his Harley-Davidson four times a night past the Black Panther headquarters near Central and Vernon avenues.

“It was like wearing a bull’s-eye,” he says. There were “sandbags stacked up on the outside of the building up to about the windows. It looked like a machine-gun emplacement. There were no lights on inside. It had been in a few gun battles.” In fact, that same year, 1968, three Black Panther members were slain in a shootout with Los Angeles police.

The Panthers started from the premise that the police--an arm of the oppressive white Establishment in black neighborhoods--must be monitored by blacks. And, if necessary, engaged. Their philosophy had a growing following in black Los Angeles.

One day, Souza and a partner stopped a black student to write a ticket outside Jefferson High School, at 41st Street and Hooper Avenue. The youths who gathered around called them “pigs.”

“I tried to handle it like a gentleman,” Souza recalls. “I called the guy ‘sir’ this and ‘sir’ that. You know, like ‘I stopped you for this, sir.’ ” As Souza handed him the ticket to sign, the youth walked over to his car, pulled out a napkin--maybe it was a rag--came back and used it to hold the officer’s pen. He didn’t want his skin to touch an object that an LAPD cop had touched. Then he threw the pen on the ground.

You didn’t have to be a Panther to distrust the LAPD. Tim Howell Sr. didn’t trust the police. He didn’t trust them in Detroit, and he didn’t trust them when he left the Army after a three-year stint and returned to Los Angeles a week after the riots. They frightened him, they angered him, and several encounters with LAPD officers in the post-Watts era hardened those feelings even more.

Howell had moved his family to La Salle Avenue, near Normandie and Washington, one of the many neighborhoods abandoned by whites in the wake of Watts. Howell, back working at the VA hospital as a pharmacist’s assistant, and his wife, Joyce, a nurse, bought a seven-bedroom, two-story home and began to fill it with children. In the next 13 years they would have 10. Tim Jr. came in the middle.

Education was drummed into the Howell children. If the boys groused about going to school, they were ordered to accompany their father on his other job, as a gardener. They chose school. But even as Howell worked to ensure his children’s future, he worried that a split-second encounter with police could undo all that he had tried so hard to accomplish.

“I’m not going to see my sons shot down like dogs. Whatever the police throw at you, no matter how outrageous, do it,” he told the boys. “If they pull you out of the car, throw you up against it, tell you to put your hands on it, do it.”

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, thousands of Los Angeles men and women--of all races, but disproportionately blacks and Latinos--were fighting in Vietnam rather than on the city’s streets.

Jake Flukers saw his Army service as a job. Between combat pay, hardship pay and his regular salary, he made $700 a month. “That was a lot of money,” Jake remembers, enough money to send some back to his mother in Louisiana to help take care of his younger brothers and sisters.

“It was an economic thing then just like it is now,” Flukers says. “I had a friend who got killed going back to Vietnam for a second time just to get the combat pay.”

When Flukers left for the jungles of Vietnam in 1966, he was a young black man filled with hope--proud of his country, optimistic about its future. Like so many of his comrades, he came back disappointed and disillusioned:

“When I was in Vietnam, I felt the struggle was over with. We were going to accomplish something as a people. I thought, ‘No way will it ever go back to the way it was.’ At the end of it, I started thinking the same things were going on.”

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped calmly onto the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. A shot rang out, and the dreamer lay dead. Violence erupted in dozens of the nation’s cities. Fires burned not far from the Capitol in Washington. Sitting in Vietnam, Flukers read about it in “Stars and Stripes.” Nothing, it seemed, had changed.

Two months later, on the night of June 4, Nancy Silverton and her father, Lawrence, a lawyer and active Democrat, left the Ambassador Hotel near downtown Los Angeles, where an overflow party following the California Democratic presidential primary was still under way. The candidate had not arrived yet, but it was late, and Silverton wanted to get his 13-year-old daughter home.

They arrived in Encino at about 11:15 p.m. An hour later came the horrifying announcement. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had been shot. He died 24 hours later.

“I just had this helpless feeling,” Nancy says.

“That was the first time it wasn’t remote,” her future husband, Mark Peel, recalls. “I was wondering what was going on, what was going to happen. I was afraid of what was going to go on.”

The assassinations. The War. The Generation Gap. The Racial Gap. This was 1968, the year Marcus and Cletus were born.

It was not as if they were coming into a time of unremitting turmoil. Vietnam was good for the Southland’s defense industries, spurring economic expansion in both Los Angeles and Orange counties. Los Angeles’ black and Latino middle classes were slowly expanding as jobs and opportunities previously denied minorites began to open.

In 1969, the same year men landed on the moon, a black Los Angeles city councilman named Tom Bradley--a former UCLA track star, an ex-cop and an attorney--was drafted by the city’s moneyed Westside leaders, at the urging of a South-Central minister, to run for mayor. Smart, likable, steady and palatable to a white constituency, the Westsiders thought, Bradley could be the balm to heal the city, to finally put Watts and race behind it.

Mayor Sam Yorty responded to the challenge by conjuring up frightening racial scenarios. He warned that if Bradley were elected, white police officers would quit. If so, he implied, another Watts was bound to happen. Whites would not be safe from the black hordes. Bradley, he threw in, had ties to the Black Panthers and other black radicals.

Bradley lost. But even in his defeat, black residents saw hope.

“When Bradley came close, I said, ‘Any time a black man comes this close, he done won,’ ‘ recalls Art Washington, who had come to Los Angeles from Chicago following a fight with his wife two weeks after the Watts riots. “To me, the man had won, because we have to be twice as good as a white person to get a position like that.”

Four years later, Bradley ran again and won in a landslide. Los Angeles still was deeply divided on racial lines. Chicanos--long frustrated over education, jobs, housing, health and the police--had rioted in East Los Angeles in the summer of 1970. But this time, polls showed, Yorty’s racist rhetoric proved his undoing. Less than five years after Watts, Los Angeles, the nation’s third-largest city, had a black mayor.

Like so many black residents, Washington was overjoyed.

“Now things are going to change,” he thought. “He’s going to straighten out the Police Department. They won’t be mistreating us the way they’re doing. I found out later on it didn’t make any difference. Having a black mayor didn’t make any difference. Everything was the same. If it had been a white mayor, it would have been the same.”

The economic malaise of the inner city was unbroken. For three decades, the area’s economy had been dominated by industrial plants owned by such giant corporations as General Motors, Firestone, Bethlehem Steel and Goodyear. Along with government work, those factories--mostly unionized--let a growing black middle class accumulate savings, buy their own homes, educate their children and start businesses.

In the ‘70s, however, they began to close, usually to be replaced by smaller enterprises that paid lower wages and offered far less security.

Kerman Maddox’s father felt the change. While Maddox studied in college, his father operated several small stores. There was a Riteway Market in Long Beach. Another in Compton on Alondra Boulevard. And one at the corner of Vernon Avenue and San Pedro Street in South-Central Los Angeles.

His father had succeeded, Maddox recalls, “because he just worked his tail off and he had this tremendous will to succeed.”

But there were times when even his father knew that doing business in a white area had its advantages over owning a store in the black community.

“When my dad operated a store on 7th Street in Long Beach, insurance was no problem,” Maddox says. “My dad often told the story that when he was in Long Beach, Pepsi and 7-Up and Kool cigarettes and Marlboro would come and set up a special display in the store. And what they would do is they would give him free cases of the stuff to sell. And if you are a small businessman and someone gives you 10, 15, 20 cases of 7-Up or Pepsi--just to put a display in--and you get to keep the money, that’s a pretty good piece of change.

“When we decided to move back to South Los Angeles, my dad asked the delivery guy, ‘Hey, you know those specials I used to get in Long Beach?’ They said, ‘We don’t do that stuff down here.’ We got deals in Long Beach that we never got in Compton or South Central.”

There were symbols of resurgence, though, in and around South Central. One that stood out was Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital, the first in the community.

As the 394-bed facility opened its doors in 1972, among the staff was a young intern named Louis Simpson. Simpson believed in the system, and in causes. Bradley’s successes encouraged him. Good things were about to happen, he thought.

Three years later, Simpson was singing a different tune. King Hospital so quickly had become a symbol of governmental neglect. Interns and resident doctors struck the county facility on grounds that it was failing to meet the needs of people in the surrounding Watts and Compton areas.

For Simpson, his patient load served as a barometer of the well-being of the black community. The neglected and poorly nourished children reflected the poverty level. The influx of stabbing victims mirrored the tension and anger.

As president of the hospital’s house staff association, he was the strike leader. “As far as we are concerned,” he told reporters, “it’s an indefinite strike until our immediate demands are met.”

The King physicians presented long lists of grievances, most of which had to do with patient needs. After three days, nine young interns and residents were fired, the first mass dismissal of doctors in county history. The next day, 13 more were axed. But Simpson remained defiant. Some things were non-negotiable.

The county caved in. After seven tense days, the Board of Supervisors agreed to make $5.5 million in improvements and hire the doctors back.

As the years passed, Simpson saw more shootings. By the late 1970s, Los Angeles’ network of Crips and Bloods had taken form. Gangs in Los Angeles County were killing nearly 300 rivals and innocent bystanders each year, surpassing Chicago and New York for the first time.

Ironically, the Watts riots had quelled much of the city’s earlier black gang activity. Such black militant organizations as the Panthers began to siphon off many would-be gang members. And the LAPD--not the gangs--was the Panthers’ prime enemy.

But by 1978, most Panther leaders were dead or in jail. Other black militant organizations had vanished. The gangs proliferated. Officer-involved shootings climbed. Daryl F. Gates took charge of the LAPD, pledging to restore respect to the department.

Then 12 years old, Cletus was already a baby Crip.

“In a way, I was born into it,” he says with a smirk. “Not that somebody in my family was a gangbanger. But where I was raised, I was raised around it. Being raised around gangbangers, some get in and some don’t. I got in. I just started hanging out with the gangs.” He would graduate to dope dealing, armed robbery--even murder.

While the words Crip and Blood were setting families on edge in South Los Angeles during the late 1970s, in white neighborhoods the buzzword was busing.

As early as 1963, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People had filed a lawsuit to integrate Los Angeles schools. But not until Sept. 12, 1978, were Latino, black, Asian and white students scheduled to trade seats.

Though it affected only about 10% of all students in the school system, it was still one of the largest busing programs ever attempted: 1,200 buses transporting 64,000 fourth- to eighth-graders to 260 schools. Some white parents boycotted the schools in protest, keeping an estimated 10,000 children home the first day. In the San Fernando Valley--where, in the mid-’70s, Steve Frank had headed a campaign to secede from Los Angeles--thousands of parents placed their children in hastily arranged private schools and tutoring programs.

Sitting in one of the yellow buses as it chugged up to Sunny Brae Elementary School in Granada Hills was a fifth-grader named Marcus. “The first year we were bused, they protested us,” Marcus recalls. “There would be a big crowd outside the school and TV cameras. It was a big deal. . . .

“Nobody ever called me a nigger or anything like that, but you knew they didn’t want you out there.”

The Reasons Behind a Riot

Eight days after the Watts riots, John A. McCone, a former CIA director and presidential adviser, was named to head a commission formed to investigate the causes of the riots and try to ensure that such violence would never occur again. The commission, which had subpoena power, was made up of six whites and two blacks. One of its members was Warren Christopher, then a 39-year-old attorney, who in 1991 headed the panel that investigated the LAPD. Many of its findings, issued Dec. 2, 1965, are resonant almost 30 years later. The Fundamental Causes:

Unemployment: The jobless rate in the riot area ran two to three times the county average.

Poor schools: High dropout rates and a “dull, devastating spiral of failure” awaited children.

Police brutality: More than 70 cases of alleged brutality were brought to the panel’s attention.

Overcrowding: The report cited a surge in black population. As the county’s overall population tripled between 1940 and 1965, the report said, L.A.’s black population grew tenfold.

Living conditions: “While the Negro districts of Los Angeles are not urban gems, neither are they slums,” the commission said. But it found that two-thirds of the homes were owned by absentee landlords and housing conditions were in decline.

Poor public transportation: L.A.’s system was cited as too costly and the “least adequate network of public transportation in any major city in America.”

A delay in sending in the National Guard: The city called for the guard at 11 a.m. on a Friday, the second full day of the riot, but soldiers were not on the streets until midnight. The Recommendations

Jobs: Develop a program for employment and training, engaging the black community, government, employers and organized labor.

Education: Schools with low achievement should implement an “emergency program” involving class sizes of a maximum of 22 students. Preschool education should begin at age 3, with emphasis on language skills.

Police: Create a new system for handling citizen complaints, a stronger Board of Police Commissioners and expanded community relations programs.

Locater map:

Violence began during traffic stop at 116th and Avalon Excerpt on the plight of U.S. cities in 1965

The riots were each a symptom of a sickness in the center of our cities. In almost every major city, Negroes pressing ever more densely into the central city and occupying areas from which Caucasians have moved in their flight to the suburbs have developed an isolated existence with a feeling of separation from the community as a whole.

Many have moved to the city only in the last generation and are totally unprepared to meet the conditions of modern city life. At the core of the cities where they cluster, law and order have only a tenuous hold; the conditions of life itself are often marginal; idleness leads to despair and finally, mass violence supplies a momentary relief from the malaise.