On Aug. 11, 1965, a community — which some say had been besieged by police and poor economic and social conditions, and frustrated by what seemed to be growing unequal rights — ignited into five days of rebellion that heightened a struggle for self-determination, self-policing, and economic development.
The direct incident that caused the 1965 Watts Rebellion came when a California Highway Patrol officer stopped Marquette Frye and his brother for allegedly speeding.
According to oral and documented reports, a crowd gathered as Frye resisted arrest — and his mother tried to calm him down. Police officers called for back up, and eventually made three arrests.
Shortly after, Watts was burning.
According to many residents and historians, the community burned because people were fed up with being brutalized in police stations and sent home on foot.
"I feel like what caused the rebellion was the complete exhaustion of people's patience with being suppressed and contained by very, very aggressive enforcement tactics by the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department)," said Timothy Watkins, president and CEO of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC). "People were so suppressed and oppressed in their condition of poverty that it just got to the point of overflow. They couldn't take it anymore."
Timothy's father, Ted Watkins, founded the WLCAC after the rebellion with a goal of improving the quality of life for people in Watts district and surrounding communities.
Dick Gregory, the prominent comedian and civil rights activist, recently recalled one night of the rebellion, specifically when he was shot in the leg. He had hit the streets after working outside of L.A. with the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughn.
"I got off from work and I went out there with some Black leaders, and when we got there it was a housing project where they were shooting at the cops and the cops were regrouping. and we stood there," Gregory said. "The cops said, 'Ni**er, get out of here!' I looked and said, 'Man this could be a blood bath.' Now I don't have a problem if I'm shooting at you. You have a right to shoot back at me and we can talk about racism later ... but they were going to wipe them all out."
The National Guard had been called in to patrol the streets by then. Gregory said that when he saw the shooting coming out of the housing projects, he ran ahead of the cops because they weren't ready to move, Gregory said.
"I put my back to the cops and my front to [the crowd], Gregory said. "I said, 'Ya'll get out of here. Run. Get out of here! All of ya'll are going to get wiped out!' And then, pow! ... they shot me."
Gregory said he was in Watts to study the rebellion because he did not understand it. He added that he eventually realized he was witnessing a revolution that had reached a boiling point.
"Every rebellion ... (was) tipped off by a police action and a ghetto dweller, and it just all boiled off to, 'No more of this,' and that's what you saw in Watts and Detroit and Chicago," Gregory said, referring to other uprisings in that era," Gregory said.
According to Watkins, social conditions in Watts, for the most part, are worse now than before the rebellion.
"What has happened is that the group that is in power, which is a predominantly Anglo group, has figured out that they don't have to keep the lid on the pressure cooker so tight," Watkins said. "They can loosen it a little bit, and even though the contents of poverty are just boiling, it won't blow."
Instead, Watkins said, people are now daily witnesses to ongoing death, pain, crimes of desperation, and resistance to unlawful practices by law enforcement. All of this is going on in 2010.
"Things are much worse now (than) before the '65 Rebellion," he said. "Because we've got a Black president that somehow suggests that we've arrived when nothing could be farther from the truth. Because following (Hurricane) Katrina — and on top of poor housing policy, poor school policy — Black folks in America have been scattered to the winds."
Watkins said conditions are also worse, in part, because many of the economic, educational, health and cultural institutions that grew out of the Watts Rebellion are under assault. He cited the following examples:
The Watts Health Foundation, which began as a nonprofit in 1987 to provide healthcare services to low-income residents in South Los Angeles, is now a corporation, he said.
Charles R. Drew University is under siege by financial institutions and people who feel it should serve a different interest than what it was founded for.
Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, the crown jewel of Watts, is closed, for the most part, Watkins argued.
The Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center and Southwest College are struggling, he said.
Watkins said the people of Watts continue to have hope. But he added that a place that has been neglected and stymied in its growth by so many factors needs sufficient help to achieve adequacy and pull itself out of poverty. Instead, he said, elected officials talk about the equitable distribution of resources.
Amen Rah, a professor emeritus at California State University of Long Beach and consultant for Stop the Violence Increase the Peace Foundation, said the story told to future generations about the 1965 Watts Rebellion must include the history of institutions.
Those institutions include the Brotherhood Crusade (founded in 1968 to provide funding, programs, and services to the community); The Organization Us (founded in 1965); and the Watts Summer Festival.
The festival began as a celebration in 1966 as a tribute to people who died during the rebellion.
Rah said the commemoration that comes with the festival also needs to be kept alive for scholarly research on the historical significance of the local area, which includes the creation of the Sons of Watts and the Daughters of Watts, the WLCAC, the Watts Community Alert, and other self-help, protecting organizations.
The rebellion also changed policing in the community, said Rah, who was arrested during the rebellion while he was riding in a car with several other men.
After the riots, law enforcement marked the rooftops of homes with numbers to track their areas, began driving with helmets, and began driving with two officers in a police car, he said.
"This all came after the rebellion, not riots," Rah said. "Black-conscious scholars began to call it a rebellion because it was more than some of the spontaneous, episodic behavior, and that's why it lasted so long. Some viewed it as an opportunity to make a statement."
He said the term riots diminishes the political and social value that grew out of the rebellion.
"That's why the European doesn't mention the (King) hospital," he said. "He wants to keep most rebellions as just a spontaneous, episodic behavior, and not as one with any political significance. He can have the Tea Party and Boston Tea activities and put them in political relevancy, but he didn't want to put the Watts Rebellion in politically empowering terminology, so there's a fight between White writers and Black-conscious scholars of that time to say, 'No, this was a rebellion, not a riot.'"
Despite its challenges before the rebellion, Watts managed to be a flourishing community, according to Edna Aliewine, creator of the Watts-Willowbrook Christmas Parade.
She argued that a lot of money and programs were put into Watts after the uprising, but there's nothing to show for it today.
"I'm real upset with Watts, and I've been in Watts since 1925, and I know it as it was," Aliewine said. "We had stores on 103rd Street, not houses. We had two shoe stores, Carl's on one side and Kirby's across the street. We had E.F. Smith Market here, a big Goodwill store, and two theaters. We had everything."
Charlene Muhammad is a writer for the L.A. Watts Times.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
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