Countdown to Chaos? : 30 years after the Watts riots, two Angelenos look back and ask: Why did it happen--and will it happen again?

After five days the glow dimmed, but not the fury.

Jagged glass and charred husks of wood were swept from the streets, but the sharpest images--emphatic, newly emboldened--weren’t so easily brushed to the edges of memory. Aug. 11, 1965, is another date imbued with the unwieldy significance of historic moment or -- better-- cataclysmic event. What started a handful of blocks outside Watts that day was a shout of fire and fury that is still, all too often, seen only as just that--raw emotion.

Distance has done little to deepen understanding, and the story, for those who lived it, remains half told.

From the vantage of 30 years, Angelenos sift through the ashes for causes, lessons learned. Problem is, the past and present seem too closely tied. The deficiencies that plagued the 46.5-square-mile area known as Watts, and the surrounding southern tip of Los Angeles, remain largely unchanged--except there are more of them.

Upon visiting Los Angeles, Watts specifically, in 1972, writer James Baldwin committed these impressions to the page: “Watts doesn’t immediately look like a slum, if you come from New York: but it does if you drive from Beverly Hills. . . . Over it hangs a miasma of fury and frustration, a perceptible darkening, as of storm clouds, of rage and despair, and the girls move with a ruthless, defiant dignity, and the boys move against the traffic as though they are moving against the enemy. The enemy is not there, of course, but his soldiers are, in patrol cars.”

Sadly, Baldwin’s observations could be a sharp assessment of conditions in 1995. Or in April, 1992. The past and present blur distinctions, so for many who have watched incremental advances bog down in unemployment, a dearth of social services and sub-standard living conditions, the long-range future becomes not simply uncertain, but irrelevant.

Just what took hold of the streets on a hot summer evening 30 years ago--uprising, rebellion, insurrection, riot--was so amorphous that available descriptives felt inadequate, dishonest; mere words unable to contain it.

As August ’65 bleeds into the memories of April ‘92, as motorist Marquette Frye (whose traffic stop lit the short fuse) is eclipsed by motorist Rodney King, it becomes necessary to revisit history, no matter how dim or painful. To understand that the rage and fury are not abstract.

*

“It seemed that August, 1965, marked the point when L.A. blacks decided no longer to tolerate misery,” explains Gerald Horne in his new book, “Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s” (University Press of Virginia), adding his holistic diagnosis to 30 years of theories. The title gives a nod to one of Baldwin’s most resonant essays, “The Fire Next Time,” about the racial nightmare that has kept America from “achieving country.”

But it is what occurred at least a decade before Watts quite literally seared an impression on the public’s consciousness that sits center of Horne’s thesis. It is a link rarely considered: the collapse, in the aftermath of the ‘50s Red Scare, of interracial labor and social movements formed by the Left.

“There were many causes and reasons for the tumultuous events of August, 1965, in L.A. It should have come as a strange surprise only to those who were not paying attention,” writes Horne, who is currently a Fulbright Scholar in Zimbabwe and has been professor of history and chair of the Black Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. The incongruity of a paradise riddled with underside sores; besieged by remnants left for its working class to pick through, more precisely the working class of color.

The list unscrolled: intra-racial friction between middle- and lower-class blacks, year of arrival as status symbol, restrictive covenants that kept blacks from moving outside of prescribed areas.

Even the work set in place to attempt to turn the tide faced unceremonious dismantling. In the 1950s the political Left buckled with the mortal blow of the McCarthy-engineered Red Scare. And so, Horne believes, collapsed a core of the progressive movement--from newspapers like the California Eagle, published by a black woman, Charlotta Bass, to the foundations of trade and tenant unions.

“What happened to Charlotta Bass is a metaphor for what happened in L.A,” says Horne, a former lawyer and activist who has served as staff counsel for the Affirmative Action Coordinating Center and a member of SANE-FREEZE Campaign for Global Security. “In some sense she decided to align herself with the Left and progressive forces, and there was a concerted effort to subvert her newspaper.”

Highlighting this rarely considered link, Horne’s hope was to better understand some of the issues that were muffled in the tumult.

“I really don’t think you can tell the story of black L.A. apart from what was happening in other sectors, just like I think it does a disservice when historians talk about a civil rights movement and ignore that there was a Red Scare taking place at the same time,” Horne says. “And they didn’t even bother to ask how was it that civil rights were being expanded while civil liberties were being eroded. Obviously there was a big contradiction there somewhere, and in 1995 we are reaping the bitter fruits of that.”

Horne believes that if not for the Left being stunned in its path--its nascent efforts derailed--Aug. 11 would just be another date on the calendar, as would, quite probably, April 29.

L.A.’s complicated racial/cultural history, and its increasingly diverse and thus perplexing present, keeps the tenuous middle ground between unity and unrest at center focus.

But, Horne says, “The overriding issue . . . is the weakening of the unions. If you had a strong trade union movement it would have allowed for the development of other kinds of organizations. Because once it began to weaken that meant the class consciousness began to weaken, and that meant that a vacuum arose.”

Within that void a different center took hold.

“Various forms of nationalism: Some progressive, some not so,” Horne says. From the Nation of Islam, Cultural Nationalism and the Black Panther Party--whoever wanted to capture the imagination, quell some of the desperation, had to move quickly. Many black people were ready to take action, looking for the best amplification for their voice, even as the hard work and newly formed alliances began melting around them.

With forces weakened, mounting an effective defense proved almost impossible for the Left, as housing activist Frank Wilkinson quickly learned. An odyssey Horne notes briefly.

Currently the director of the L.A.-based National Committee Against Repressive Legislation, a civil liberties watchdog organization, Wilkinson watched an optimistic housing project he was squiring be systematically dismantled after he was labeled “Red.”

Wilkinson, who has since dedicated his life to advocating constitutional rights, recalls how his world was suddenly upended.

As assistant to the director of the city housing authority in the early ‘50s, his charge would have been difficult, but clear cut: finding sites for a $110-million, 10,000-unit housing project. One of the prime pieces of property was Chavez Ravine--where Dodger Stadium now stands.

Wilkinson went door to door, persuading people to give up their parcel of land for a piece of paper that would ensure them a place in the Richard Neutra-designed high-rises.

Above all it meant integration. “It meant bringing black people and brown people and Asian people out of ghettos of various kinds and have them living with Anglo people in Chavez Ravine.”

But during the eminent domain portion of the proceedings, Wilkinson was asked by the attorney for the opposition to state his affiliation with organizations--political or otherwise.

Upon refusing to answer, in one synchronized movement, all of Wilkinson’s work had disintegrated, along with his identity. Consequently, like a line of dominoes, Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who was linked to Wilkinson, lost the next election. And it was his successor, Norris Poulson, who quickly negotiated with the Brooklyn Dodgers for that patch of prime land.

It is what occurred after, Wilkinson says, that made a bad dream a nightmare.

Moving quickly, the Housing Authority began installing housing into pre-existing projects in the Watts area. “When they couldn’t get the right site, they should have fought for other sites out of the ghetto,” says Wilkinson, his voice still edged in anger. “But to take that money aimed at integration and jam it in there was inexcusable. Every time I read of drugs and the other problems in Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts, I just know this is made this way. We were going to take large numbers of people out of there. It wouldn’t have happened.”

Wilkinson readily admits that it is only one small part of what tipped the scales.

“I can’t take care of police brutality. I can’t take care of unemployment or a thousand other figures, but the story about the housing role here has to be shouted from the rooftops.”

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True. As Horne points out in his well-documented study, the deck was already stacked. Police brutality was an all-consuming issue on its own. So was a barren desert of job opportunities. And people of color found themselves locked out of one of L.A.’s most high-profile and lucrative industries.

“It was a disaster for blacks in the movie industry . . . once the Left lost influence it became very difficult for the screen image of blacks to improve. If you look at the employment patterns behind the scenes you can’t say that blacks benefited by the Red Scare.”

But would those unions really have delivered the long-range rewards they promised? There are those in-the-trenches activists who aren’t convinced that conditions and opportunities would have markedly improved from alliances built with the assistance of the Left.

The roots were too deep, the history of disillusion too long, the level of distrust too palpable.

“Start with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that weren’t worth the paper they were written on,” says Ron Wilkins, an activist, radio commentator and director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Patrice Lumumba Coalition, a Pan-African political organization. “Watts brought an end to the nonviolent era. It was one racist traffic stop too many. It was generations of exploitation. It was hot and people were tired.”

For recent black migrants with roots in Southern Jim Crow politics, accepting assistance from figures who for so long had been the opposing force was a leap of faith too mighty to make.

And, Wilkins contends, “Traditionally, in labor struggle and struggle around justice issues, the white Left has never accepted black leadership. They want to dismiss black activists as radical, Afrocentric--and that is true in many cases--but there are some of us that respect the radical white struggle, and those who have made their mark.

“But,” he stresses, “I will not acquiesce leadership of my people. The people who have benefited least by the system are the ones in the position to lead. The white Left has never accepted that. And our enemies, class enemies, have prospered as a result.”

*

Hamstrung, impatient, disillusioned about leadership--both black and white--those who felt most disenfranchised sought different channels through which to seek change.

“You see the explosion of nationalism. You see ethnic conflict,” Horne charts the movement. “And you see the rise of gangs . . . a direct response to the decline of working-class movements.”

This isn’t to say that some gains haven’t been made. Some community activists and organizers have endured--like “Sweet” Alice Harris, executive director of Parents of Watts. Or such organizations as the Watts Health Foundation, Watts Labor Community Action Committee and Kaiser Permanente Watts Counseling and Learning Center.

But surviving against all odds is not the same as thriving.

What whipped Los Angeles into another fiery exclamation point in 1992 was at root a list of familiar issues; those that instigated the same response in 1965. Same script, few different characters.

It let the air out of the late ‘80s optimism, squelched all-too-brief forays into coalition building.

“I guess some of our efforts ran aground,” Horne says. Looking at 1992 through the prism of 1965 reveals that much that should have been learned was somehow paged past, from police conduct to providing more complete social services.

“If neighborhoods are apparently deteriorating and wages are not climbing and unemployment is soaring and there are not tenant or trade unions,” Horne says, “I think inevitably the entire community will suffer. . . . And when there are not channels for people to express their grievances, then those grievances will be expressed outside of channels . . . oftentimes in rebellious, even anarchistic modes.”

Still, Horne holds hope that building a strong progressive base could happen, although he understands the skepticism.

“I don’t think it’s possible to build your own enclaves when the right wing has hegemony. Part of the problem with nationalism is that it inevitably begins to fragment. It carries the seeds of its own decomposition.”

The larger, more immediate issue, in Wilkins’ estimation, is building strong, grass-roots leadership that works . And that, says Wilkins, is still too far out of reach.

“The movement has to develop the kind of maturity where it can take responsibility for organizing and sustaining effective action. . . . Leadership has to be independent. It has to be accountable. It has to be ethical. We don’t have that in elective leadership, or in media-appointed leadership. It can’t come from that.”

In today’s climate, progressive thinkers have to fight drowning in defeatist thought. With the passage of Proposition 187 and the chipping away of affirmative action gains, it has become more than simply difficult to capture the imagination and enthusiasm of a younger generation, it has become close to impossible.

A progressive movement for this generation, in Horne’s estimation, would have to storm to the center of public consciousness, would have to reflect the diversity of the region.

“It has to have an aura of militancy to it.” Without, he cautions, “descending into some of those distorted forms of masculinity that too often characterized the movements that arose in the 1960s.”

Picking up a thread of Wilkins’ concern, Horne warns: “It can’t be as it has happened so often in the past--mostly Euro-organizers building something and coming into other communities and asking people to sign on to it. I don’t think that that model is viable.”

But what will make or break it is its ability to present a strong class perspective. Movements that encourage class identification give people another identity, another link with which they can join forces.

“Minorities in particular need that kind of movement because in the absence of that you get a sort of ethnic particularism . . . an ethnic chauvinism,” Horne explains.

The alternative: to wait.

“Another conflagration? Easily. Look what happened in Lincoln Heights. And in the absence of political organization another conflagration is virtually inevitable. Almost as if you are sitting here, counting down.”