UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 1 : THE PATH TO FURY : ESSAY : The Challenge to Us All

We’ll have to do this job ourselves.

No political or economic messiah is going to deliver Los Angeles from the human, physical, fiscal and spiritual destruction of the past days.

Nor should we count on Washington for much help, or Sacramento. As the last census showed, political power in the nation and in California has shifted to the suburbs, whose residents moved there to escape the city.

They aren’t about to pay more taxes to help L.A. out of its troubles.

And don’t count on a mythical peace dividend, billions of dollars in unneeded arms spending, suddenly shifted to a vague “Marshall plan” to restore Los Angeles and other cities. That would mean the sudden shutdown of the war machine and the closing of a huge number of manufacturing plants, big and small--and another increase in unemployment. Even if lawmakers wanted to risk it, they are never willing to spend as much on urban problems as they gladly put into war.

Private business, supported by everyday citizens, is going to have to take charge of reconstruction. It’s going to have to happen in the big downtown corporate office buildings and the banks, the looted department stores and markets. It’s going to have to happen in the tiny, dimly lighted neighborhood grocery stores where Korean-American owners and black and Latino customers face each other with deep suspicion.

The banks, the big corporations, the drug store and retail chains will have to start it off. Angelenos won’t believe in revival until they see a burned drug store or market rebuilt in the fire zone. That accomplishment is the prelude to something bigger--the creation of new enterprises and new jobs.

Only then will we be able to view Los Angeles again as a place of bright promise.

This may sound inconceivable, with burned buildings lining the streets from South L.A. to Hollywood. With politicians wandering around without purpose. With poverty and unemployment high, the police department under fire and shopowners arming themselves.

All that resembles L.A. just after the Watts riots, actually worse. The rhetoric sounds the same, too. Just as now, people in 1965 began giving speeches about opportunity rising from the ruins. It would be a new start. Black and white together.

Writers came down from Hollywood and began the famed Watts writers’ group. The then-powerful United Auto Workers union helped community leader Ted Watkins build inexpensive housing and a market and start other enterprises. Lockheed built a plant to manufacture parts for its then-new L-1011 passenger jet.

It sounded good, but in the long run it didn’t work. The city was too divided, too overheated by inflammatory rhetoric.

Right-wing commentators held forth on television news shows, hammering away at ghetto and barrio militants and student rebels. Tough-talking Latino and black community leaders broadcast daily demands, scaring white suburbanites.

Walking through the fire every day, waving figurative sticks of dynamite, were Mayor Sam Yorty and the blustering chief of police, Bill Parker, who had said of the Watts riots, “One person throws a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.”

Part of the solution to Watts’ problems was supposed to be the War on Poverty. But Mayor Sam hated the War. It had been conceived by Kennedy Administration veterans, and Yorty despised the Kennedys. His constant sniping and administrative roadblocks succeeded in slowing the flow of federal anti-poverty funds to Los Angeles.

Watts recovered enough to offer at least surface calm. But it wasn’t long before trouble broke out in the Eastside barrio.

Three years after Watts, a young teacher, Sal Castro, led a Latino student walkout in protest against the teaching policies of the white-dominated Los Angeles school system.

Then, in 1970, the Chicano Moratorium--a peaceful protest against the Vietnam War--ended in a Sheriff’s Department assault on 20,000 demonstrators in East Los Angeles. Three men were killed and 250 people were arrested. Four months later, another Eastside protest against the war--and police brutality--ended in a riot. A Latino man was killed, 50 others were injured and 88 were arrested.

Not until 1973, when Tom Bradley was elected mayor, did the job of healing the city begin.

First of all, Bradley united the city’s races. He was put into office by a coalition of South L.A. blacks and Westside and San Fernando Valley Jews, led by men and women who had come together in the civil rights movement. Joining them were Latinos from East L.A.

Second, he attempted to harness the wealth of local business to help poor areas. Bradley did this through the Community Redevelopment Agency, which took over vast amounts of downtown land and sold it to high-rise developers. The theory was that the construction would provide jobs for the inner-city poor, while the additional property tax revenue would finance CRA-assisted low-cost housing.

Today, you can see the low-cost housing scattered through South and East L.A. In Watts, the CRA built the Martin Luther King Jr. shopping center at 103rd Street and Compton Boulevard, along the old “Charcoal Alley” destroyed by the fires of 1965.

But the coalition broke up as race relations became more complex. No longer could a few Jewish and black leaders settle disputes behind closed doors at the Urban League or the Jewish Federation. Differences over affirmative action and other issues made the gulf too deep.

Tensions increased between blacks and Latinos. Asians became the fastest growing minority, claiming their share of power.

And the CRA didn’t work out as Bradley hoped. Too much of the money went to business. Not enough trickled down to the poor. By 1992, the bright hopes of ’73 had been forgotten by all but a few.

So the political consensus of 1973 has vanished. The mayor is a weakened old pol, now in his fifth term, no longer with the power to push his agenda through the City Council. Council members pretty much go their own way, with fingers in the wind, on the alert for any shift in constituent sentiment. Class and race divide the council, as they do the city--a division evident in every vote over spending money from a city treasury that faces a $183-million deficit in the coming fiscal year.

It may be that the shell-shocked, nearly paralyzed government will improve in the near future. A new police chief, Willie L. Williams, is on the way, and he has a chance to rejuvenate a department shattered by the Rodney King beating and its performance during the riot.

Next year, there will be elections for mayor and city council. Bradley, if he runs, and the other members of the municipal team will have to defend their performances as they campaign through the city.

That’s the future.

For the present, with City Hall weak and broke and Sacramento and Washington unable or unwilling to help, Bradley had to reach outside for help, enlisting Peter V. Ueberroth to head the reconstruction effort. Ueberroth is supposed to be the man to help L.A. help itself.

In the successful 1984 Olympic Games, Ueberroth showed great ability to win the support of both big corporations and the thousands of unknown men, women and young people who just wanted to help out. He brought in the corporations by offering them the hope of profit. He got the others to work by giving them something useful to do.

That was easy. Everyone loved the Olympics. This will be misery. If Ueberroth can navigate through the entrenched, parochial interests at City Hall, he’ll indeed be a miracle worker.

This will be more like being baseball commissioner, another post Ueberroth held. There he had to deal with the huge egos of owners and players, with the bottom-line mentality that dominates the game. Now, he is contending with the huge egos of politicians and the bottom-lines of corporate America.

He’s got a chance to succeed.

In the past decade, Thrifty Drug, Sav-on, K-Mart and the supermarket chains have found that there is money to be made in South and East L.A. And, unlike after Watts, the city--and the nation--have many black and Latino entrepreneurs ready to invest in their communities.

The spontaneous outpouring of cleanup volunteers on the third day of the riot was evidence of a sense of civic pride and obligation. Nobody asked the people to come out. They just picked up their brooms and headed into the fire zone. Some of them had never been there before.

That was the first sign that L.A. can come back. As this riot showed, it didn’t happen after Watts. Recovery was on the surface. Inside, the city remained sick. As Ueberroth told the City Council, “We have to make it work this time.”