1966,Watts, Los Angeles, California.
The Watts Riot of 1966 marks a significant turning point in American History because it was the first riot in America where Black Americans were the main participants.
In every riot involving black Americans prior to 1966, whites Americans were the primary participators and blacks were their primary targets.
The Watts Riot of 1966 differed from all previous riots in another way as well.
Previous race riots in the United States were attempts by whites at reinforcing white supremacy.
The riots that exploded all over the country after Jack Johnson’s victory were to teach blacks a lesson for acting “uppity” or believing themselves to be equal to whites.
The riots in Tulsa were fueled by animosity towards an affluent successful black community by whites who couldn’t tolerate blacks living better than they did.
In every case the rioters were trying to send a message. They were “putting blacks in their place” which is to say in so many words, to submit to, to recognize, or yield to that edict of white entitlement.
Well, personally, I think all riots are intended to send a message.
The Watts Riot of 1966 was an uprising, a rebellion if you will, against that very assumption of white entitlement.
Bayard Rustin, Civil rights activist, advocate for non-violence, and personal advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wrote after the 1966 riots that, “The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”
“…no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life.”
Well put Mr. Rustin. Please, remember that.
There were two great migrations of Blacks leaving the South to other parts of the country.
The first Great Migration (1900-1940) saw blacks primarily going north as they were being recruited to fill the demand for manufactory jobs. For the most part Blacks didn’t venture west.
It wasn’t until the second Great Migration (1941-1970) that blacks started to make their way out west as well as north, all the way to Los Angeles, California.
When Blacks did arrive in Los Angeles they weren’t greeted with “colored only” or “white only” signs on drinking fountains and whatnot, but there was segregation none the less.
The bitter taste of white supremacy was every bit as poignant in California, the land of sunshine, beaches and palm trees, as it was in Georgia. It’s just that white supremacists in California went about it differently.
Instead of “whites only” signs, whites in California would put the verbiage into their contracts citing that the property that they were selling or renting could not be sold or rented to Blacks or Latinos.
It was so bad that by 1945, 95% of all housing in Los Angeles was off-limits to Blacks and Latinos. So, as a result, Blacks and Latinos were restricted to living primarily in three places; East LA, Watts and Compton.
How this practice was busted was actually ingenious. Whoever thought of it simply used white’s own white supremacy against them and turned a healthy profit doing it.
It was called “BlockBusting” and this is how it worked. A real estate speculator would buy a home in an all-white neighborhood, but then he would rent it or sell it to a black family because he wouldn’t include the “white only” clause in his contract.
Whites would lose their minds one sunny morning when they woke up to get the morning paper off the porch and suddenly they were staring at a moving truck and a black family in the neighborhood moving their furniture in.
They would wait a day or two and then suddenly real-estate investors (most likely the person who rented/sold the home to the black family in the first place) would swoop in and buy the rest of the homes in the neighborhood from the surrounding white families at cut rate prices because the whites there would be so desperate to move.
That is how the “myth” began that “blacks” bring down your property values. Yes, people did lose money on their homes after blacks moved in, but the reason their property value dropped wasn’t because someone black moved in, it was because whites were so desperate to move away from blacks that they sold their homes at cut-rate prices.
The real-estate speculators made a killing doing this. Buying up tons of perfectly good housing on the cheap so that whites could buy a home in another all-white neighborhood.
In 1963, the Rumford Fair Housing Act was passed in California making it illegal to deny to sell a home to anyone because of their race, ethnicity, religion, sex, marital status, physical handicap, or familial status.
And everyone lived happily ever after.
Oops. Wrong story. I wish it was that easy.
It turns out that whites in California didn’t like desegregation any more than whites in Mississippi did, and to that point, whites in California went so far as to have an amendment added to the California state Constitution that returned the right to decide who they can or cannot sell their property to.
This new amendment nullified the Rumford Fair Housing Act, effectively giving the white supremacists a constitutional right to discriminate against non-whites. And sadly, this was supported by the overwhelming majority of whites in the state of California.
In Virginia, when they closed down an entire school district rather than integrate it, the state of Virginia quickly passed legislation offering financial assistance, BUT only to the white students in the district, so that they could attend white-only “private schools”.
The black students were left with no place to go to school, unless of course they moved.
“
You don’t like it? Move.”
Back to California.
Imagine if someone had passed legislation that made 95% of Los Angeles off-limits to whites?
They would lose their minds.
And rightfully so.
Yet white supremacists did this to non-whites and there is this “expectation” that non-whites are supposed to find a way to make peace with it, because, after all, whites are entitled to dominate non-whites.
This was 1966. We are not talking about “implicit racial bias” here.
In 1966, these whites knew exactly what they were doing.
No one had to sugar coat it.
But the belief in white entitlement to dominate non-whites didn’t just take the form of dictating where non-whites lived. It also took the form of strong arm enforcers whose aim was to keep non-whites in line.
By the 1950s there were so many Blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles that many whites had come to believe that the LAPD had to become a different type of police force to keep them “safe”.
In an effort to do this William H. Parker, Los Angeles Chief of Police, transformed the LAPD from a walking peace-force to a military-like police force.
The LAPD began looking and acting like it was a military peace keeping force.
The LAPD was now calling itself “the best police force in America” and all the while they were also gaining a nasty reputation for police brutality against Blacks and Latinos. Both blacks and Latinos were being routinely beaten by the LAPD and their complaints about abuse, mistreatment and violations of their civil rights fell on the deaf ears of white supremacists who didn’t want them in Los Angeles anyway.
“You don’t like it? Move.”
This transition of the LAPD into a military-like police force made William H. Parker not only a local celebrity, but one that had become nationally admired.
He even had a guest spot on the television program What’s My Line?
The white majority in Los Angeles voted repeatedly in favor of changing the Los Angeles city charter to give Parker and his military-like mobile response force more and more autonomy to operate apart from the rest of Los Angeles city government.
The result of this was that the Los Angeles Police Department was only accountable to themselves.
So again, you have Blacks and Latinos complaining about mistreatment from the police. The police are only accountable to themselves, so that’s not going anywhere.
And you have the white majority largely praising this man for the great work he is doing despite the complaints…
You can see where this is going, right?
The 1966 Watts Riot marked the first time in American history that Black Americans showed that they were no longer willing to submit to white supremacy quietly.
For six days, 31,000-35,000 adults took to the streets.
And until the LA riots of 1992, the Watts Riots were by far the worst in terms of loss of life and property damage in American History.
Most, if not all of the arsons and looting were largely confined to white-owned stores and businesses.
Again, this is no coincidence.
So how did it all begin? What was the spark this time?
A routine traffic stop.
An LAPD officer pulled over 21-year old Marquette Frye on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.
Marquette had been driving his mother’s 1955 Buick with his brother in the passenger seat.
When Marquette was being arrested his brother went to get their mother to let her know that her car was going to be impounded.
Marquette’s mother Rena Price returned to the scene along with Marquette’s brother. She began to chastise her son because her car was getting impounded because of his irresponsibility.
Somehow the arresting officers’ end up assaulting the mother, which then led Marquette and his brother to come to their mother’s defense. Additional officers were called to the scene, a crowd started to gather.
After the mother and her two sons were arrested the police tried to break up the crowd several times but where attacked by rocks. The police responded in self-defense and soon after Watts started to light up so bright that you could see it from space.
Over the next six days:
258 businesses and buildings were burned
192 stores were looted
267 businesses and buildings were completely destroyed.
2,300 National Guardsmen were called in. In addition to that there were 934 LAPD officers and another 718 from the LA Country Sheriff’s Department… trying to control 31,000.
Sergeant Ben Dunn of the LAPD told reporters on the 14th, 4 days into the riot, that “The streets of Watts resembled an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country; it bore no resemblance to the United States of America.”
To be continued…
