Watts Riots: Six Nights of Anger and Ashes

Brown vs. Board of Education. The Birmingham bus boycott. The march on Washington. Sit-ins and demonstrations in Southern cities large and small.

In the mid-1950s and early ‘60s, the civil rights movement raised the aspirations and expectations of black America. But white America was slow to respond, and by 1964--a year after writer James Baldwin warned of “The Fire Next Time”--the riots began.

To many, the riots seemed the tragic, if inevitable, response to the question asked more than a decade earlier by another black writer, poet Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? . . . or does it explode?”

The first explosions came, not surprisingly, in the hot, muggy, crowded cites of the East, cities whose black populations lived in dilapidated tenements, deprived of education, employment and health care and subjected to de facto segregation and police repression. The early riots were relatively small--one death in New York and four in Rochester, N.Y., eight injuries in Paterson and 46 in Jersey City, N.J. But by the end of the summer of ‘64, the violence was escalating: More than 200 stores were damaged, more than 300 people were injured and more than 700 were arrested in three days of rioting in Philadelphia.

Then came the even hotter summer of 1965. And Watts.

California was supposed to be the land of promise, the land of milk and honey--for everyone. Watts was not Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant. Many Watts residents lived in single-family homes with private yards. This was a ghetto? Yes, this was a ghetto--a neglected corner of Los Angeles, a place where the California promise had been broken, the milk had curdled and the honey had crystallized. Unemployment was high, poverty was widespread, schools were falling apart, mass transportation was scarce and police were often brutally racist.

On Aug. 11, 1965, Watts exploded.

Shortly after 7 o’clock that evening, California Highway Patrolman Lee Minikus was riding his motorcycle near Avalon Boulevard and 122nd Street in South-Central Los Angeles when a man in a pickup truck told him he’d seen a “reckless driver.” Minikus gave chase, and six blocks later, he pulled over 21-year-old Marquette Frye. When Frye failed a sobriety test, Minikus arrested him. Frye’s brother Ronald, 22, a passenger in the car, went to get their mother while Minikus waited for a tow truck and a police car.

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It was a warm night, and many neighborhood residents were outside, and before long, the crowd of curious onlookers had swelled to almost 300. When Mrs. Frye arrived and scolded her son for drinking, he began cursing, threatening and shouting at the officers who had arrived to take him to jail. They tried to handcuff him. He resisted. The crowd grew--and grew hostile. More police were summoned. Before long there was bedlam.

Community leaders and city officials urged calm the next day, but rumors spread and long-festering resentments boiled over. By 7:15 p.m., more than 1,000 people had gathered at the site of the previous night’s arrest. Fires broke out; firemen were hit with stones. Stores were looted, cars overturned. Shortly before midnight, the violence began to spread. Still, by sunrise, police thought they had the situation under control.

They were wrong.

Friday night, Aug. 13, was the worst night of what would turn out to be six nights of rioting. Burning and looting spread further. Snipers took aim at firemen and policemen alike. The National Guard was called out. The next day, a curfew was imposed. No “unauthorized” persons would be allowed on the streets of a 46.5-square-mile area of the city after 8 p.m. Saturday. Meanwhile, news reports of the rioting triggered outbursts of violence in several communities throughout Southern California, from San Diego north to Pacoima and east to Monrovia.

By the time order was finally restored, 34 people lay dead, 1,032 had been injured and 4,000 were arrested. Property damage was estimated at $40 million. There would be other riots after Watts--the worst of them coming in Detroit, in 1967, with 43 people killed and 2,000 injured.

A special commission, appointed by the governor to look into the causes of the Watts riot, began its analysis by describing “a deep and long-standing schism between a substantial portion of the Negro community and the Police Department.” Nearly thirty years later, that deep schism would still exist, and another confrontation between law enforcement and a black motorist--this one named Rodney King--would lead to more street violence.