“So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 7:12
Watts burned.
In 1964, the same year that The Diana Ross and the Supremes were at the top of the charts singing “Where Did Our Love Go”” and Roy Orbison was all over television singing “Oh, Pretty Woman” a white majority in California was overwhelmingly supporting an amendment to their state constitution guaranteeing their right to discriminate against Blacks and Latinos. So if Diana Ross, who at the time was a world renown superstar wanted to purchase a home in Los Angeles, regardless of how much property she could afford to buy, she had only two choices of where to live, Compton or Watts.
Decades of Black Americans being excluded from the high-paying jobs, being denied affordable housing, being shut out of the political process, and being mistreated by the Los Angeles Police Department all came to a head over a routine traffic stop.
America watched Watts burn on their televisions for six straight days.
And once Black America saw Watts burn, other American cities would burn. The underlying causes of the Watts Riots were in no way exclusive to just the city of Los Angeles. Black Americans in urban areas all over the United States could relate.
For example, when Martin Luther King was assassinated almost two years later in 1968, there were riots in 125 cities in April and May alone.
But did rioting create any lasting positive to change for Black Americans?
Nope.
What John Lennon said about violence is so true. “When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”
After Denmark Vesey’s attempt at organizing an uprising was suppressed, slave owners quickly passed laws limiting the freedom of free blacks to move from place to place. New laws were put into the books that said that if a free black were ever to leave the state of South Carolina, they couldn’t return. Laws were put in the books that required free blacks to carry papers on them at all times that had be signed by designated white “sponsors” vouching for their “character”. Failure to have those papers could have you tossed in jail.
When Nat Turner rebellion was suppressed, white supremacists again passed laws forbidding free blacks from owning firearms. They outlawed teaching blacks how to read or write, and even outlawed all blacks from preaching to their own congregations or congregating without having a white person present or risk being arrested.
Whenever there was a rebellion, white supremacists always responded by passing laws aimed to double down against those who rebelled against them, not lessen it. Using “the law” has always been their primary weapon against those who they aim to dominate. The law gives white supremacy an air of legitimacy.
Adolph Hitler used the law in his dealing with the problem of the Jews.
Let’s not forget that he passed LAWS that removed Jews from their jobs and prevented them from getting employment.
He then passed LAWS that segregated Jews from everyone else.
Then he passed LAWS prohibiting Jews from attending public schools; going to the movies, or even walking around in certain areas of German cities.
He passed LAWS that allowed the state to confiscate their property.
Eventually he passed laws to relocate them to what we now know were concentration camps to wait for their ultimate destruction.
My point is that when looking at how white supremacists responded to the Watts Riot, history tells us that we need to look closely at the types of laws that went into the books directly after the riots, and understand how those laws and how they were enforced affected Blacks Americans.
When white Conservatives in 1966 were asked what they thought were the causes of the Watts Riots, they predictably blamed, whom else?
The Communists.
But Communists didn’t make 95% of the housing in the city of Los Angeles off-limits to Blacks and Latinos. Then, when the Rumford Fair Housing Act changed that, it wasn’t Communists in California that voted overwhelmingly to pass an amendment to the California Constitution guaranteeing their right to discriminate against Blacks and Latinos.
Why are they blaming the communists?
Shibboleths.
Shibboleths are common sayings or beliefs that are accepted as true but are actually rooted in very little, if any, truth. Slave owners had a whole list of shibboleths that they shared amongst themselves that supported their belief that they were entitled to dominate blacks.
For example, one shibboleth that was often used when selling very young children from their parents was that, “It’s fortunate for Negros, that they don’t have strong parental feelings towards their offspring.”
And they were still saying this while watching an emotionally distraught mother being forcibly separated from her young child knowing that she will never lay eyes on them again.
But one of the most common and accepted shibboleths, and one that pertains to the Watts Riots, was one that advanced the idea that Blacks were content being shitted on. That is, until an “outsider” comes in and fills their heads with all sorts of non-sense like they deserve to be treated better.
This was something that went unquestioned by slave owners for centuries in the United States.
Remember this was PRECISELY the reason Milam, who at the time believed a 14 year old Emmett Till (from Chicago) hadn’t paid a white woman the proper respect, gave to why he decided to torture and kill Emmett Till, “’I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble.” – J. W. Milam, Look magazine, 1956
This is why slave owners went to such extremes to keep their slaves thoroughly uneducated, deliberately uninformed, isolated from strangers, always closely watched, and physically intimidated through violence or at the very least the threat of violence.
Blacks, they believed, were particularly susceptible to people giving them crazy ideas like they were human beings, and thus, entitled to as much life, liberty and freedom from tyranny as anyone else.
Imagine that?
In 1861, Florida Governor Richard K. Call was one such person who believed this crap.
He owned two plantations in Leon County, Florida, one of them covered several thousand acres. Although he owned more than 120 slaves, he was still just the third-largest slaveholder in the Leon County. Let me let him explain this belief in his own words. “The black man’s inferiority; physical, moral and mental, was designed by the Creator for slavery. And because his limited brain was simply unable to contemplate slavery as a degradation, he (blacks) are typically docile and humble both cheerful and contented.”
Essentially, he was saying that blacks are too puerile to grasp what white supremacists were doing to them.
Blacks are “unable to contemplate slavery as a degradation”.
This is, whether we like it or not, part of the ideological foundation that white and black race relations were built upon here in the United States. Once you understand this, I mean truly, not only American history but the events we see happening today begin to make sense.
So if you were a white American in 1966 and you’re seeing Blacks on television for six days turning over cars, tossing Molotov cocktails and rocks, chances are if you didn’t immediately assume someone must’ve had gotten into the ear of the black man you’re watching on television hurling a garage can through a storefront, then you knew some who did.
So it’s not surprising that so many white Americans were inclined to place the blame of blacks rioting on outside “agitators”. In fact, public opinion polls taken after the riots showed that just as many white Americans blamed Communist influences as white Americans that blamed “high unemployment” and “prejudice” for the Watts Riots.
So while half of white America blamed the Soviets, the other half of white America believed that if Blacks just had better paying jobs and could afford to move into better areas, somehow they would’ve felt better about having their civil rights routinely trampled upon by law enforcement and would’ve forgotten that they were living in communities surrounded by whites Americans who had amended their state constitution so that they could “legally” deny them housing.
I wonder if the white Americans they polled that year would’ve themselves traded being routinely and illegally detained and assaulted by law enforcement for 1800 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths and in a better zip code?
When Martin Luther King Jr. was asked about the riots just days after, he placed the blame squarely on white Californians passing a constitutional amendment repealing the Rumford Fair Housing Act.
Curiously, he made no mention of communists.
Rena Price, the woman who the police beat up that sparked the Watts riot never did get her 1955 Buick back after the police impounded it on that fateful night of August 11, 1966.
She said that the storage free exceeded the value of the car.