WATTS (California): Forty years after one of the worst riots in US history, the black community remains divided over the significance and consequences of the violence that exploded in the Los Angeles suburb of Watts.
On August 13, 1965, the working class suburb southwest of Los Angeles descended into an orgy of rioting two days after a white policeman pulled over a 21-year-old black man, Marquette Frye, on suspicion of drunk driving.
Frye was stopped in front of his home on the border between the areas of Compton and Watts, poor suburbs of America’s sprawling and second largest city and two of his relatives were also arrested when they stepped into the fray.
Tempers rose. Two days later, all hell broke loose in Watts. Barricades were set up in the streets, while shops, warehouses and buses were set on fire and police were bombarded with Molotov cocktails and bricks.
The army was called in to quell the violence and imposed a curfew, but the rioting continued for six days, leaving 34 people dead, 1,100 injured and resulting 4,000 arrests and 100 million dollars in damage.
The images of the bloody urban warfare sent shockwaves across America that have survived more than a generation.
“To understand the circumstances, you have to go back to this period of time,” Joe Hicks, a former head of the Los Angeles City Human Relations Commission who lived in Watts in August 1965, told AFP.
At the time of the Watts riots, Martin Luther King’s non-violent campaign against racial segregation in the southern United States was battling and was being overtaken by more radical ideas, Hicks explained.
“There was a growing feeling that the civil rights group didn’t do anything for us, in Chicago, Detroit or Los Angeles” while the United States was enjoying a period of rapid economic growth and prosperity, he said.
In 1965, blacks were still barred by law from living in certain areas. The population of Watts was 80 per cent African-American and suffered from high levels of joblessness and constant discrimination.
Frustration was simmering in the community against law-enforcement authorities, Hicks said, recalling that Los Angeles’ police chief at the time would make openly racist comments.
“I don’t call that riots, for me it’s a political revolt,” said Tommy Jacquette, a friend of Frye, who died in 1986, who took part in the riots.
“This was the day when we lost fear of the white man,” said the 61-year-old who is now a community builder and founder of the Watts Summer Festival.
After Watts, after several more urban riots in large American cities, police forces began actively recruiting black officers and by the early 1970s laws outlawing racial discrimination in the workplace and over accommodation had been enacted.
But, Hicks insists, the Watts riots were “really nothing to celebrate.” The area was “completely obliterated,” he recalled.
“I don’t think there as a single supermarket standing after August of 1965,” Hicks said, adding that for months residents of the stricken suburb had to travel miles to but provisions as shaken shop-keepers stayed away.
And four decades later, racial tensions are still alive and well in Los Angeles, as in other large American cities.
In 1992 another major riot erupted following the beating of black motorist Rodney King by white policemen in Los Angeles, violence that left 54 dead and caused one billion dollars damage.
Watts and nearby Compton, which lie just 25 kilometres from the opulent mansions of movie stars in Beverly Hills, still suffer Los Angeles’ highest unemployment rates.—AFP
