The LA Watts riots - 22 August 1965

By the grace of God that, I am afraid by hardly any other agency, that gutted suburb of Los Angeles is shaking itself out of the stupor of fear and hate, that overtook it and once the fires were out, and the 10,000 troops of the national guard moved in.

It’s an awful lot of troops for a suburb that is no bigger than what is it, 70, 80, 110 suburbs of that vast, brash, crackling and most modern city.

I heard, and can well believe, that there was a hair-raising moment, on the Sunday or Monday night when it occurred to somebody in the governor’s office, or the state attorney general’s office, that if what had sparked another riot of this dimension elsewhere, or two others, of half the size, California would have had no more troops left.

The mere rumour that this was so could have triggered pandemonium in every Negro section that had its share – and which does not – of tough guys on the loose. There is no question that such people started it. But the commission that the president has appointed has to try and find out why they were able to rouse within a few hours, teenagers and middle-aged and old people into a three-day frenzy of beating and looting and burning.

The scale of the violence at Watts bears no relation whatsoever to the social condition of the suburb, it’s a place that most slum dwellers in any old city on the earth would gladly settle for. The houses are small bungalows, mostly, on their own little lots with lawns and backyards, at least one bathroom, two and three bedrooms, garages, though nobody who built these house in the 1930s figured on the doubling and tripling of the automobile population, or the human population either, so that the streets bulge with motor cars, a good many, you can be sure, stolen and re-plated.

Southern California, has done better than most states in revamping bad neighbourhoods and pouring money into negro welfare. It has never had a poll tax, it never had predominantly Negro sections until the second war, though it's long had Mexican sections in the south and Chinese sections in the northern towns.

Its schools were integrated long ago, though it did last year pass a law which legalises segregated housing. But you could go on and on listing reasons why nothing of this sort should have happened in or around Los Angeles.

And I don’t think that any of us should make a finger-wagging point of the fact asserted and denied, that the federal government had warned California to expect trouble from the Negros in the Los Angeles suburbs.

Just about the safest bet you could make today, except in the rural midwest and in Vermont, which has practically no Negros, is that you can expect violence almost any day, any week any month, in any northern city you care to put your finger on.

Northern was not a slip of the tongue. We are just beginning to realise that the chances of open violence are greater where the Negro has more legal and social equality, but still doesn’t have the money or the jobs or the housing he’d like.

A sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania puts his finger on the irony that hurts. Doctor Seymour Leventman says the history of revolution shows that when conditions get better, people become more openly dissatisfied. The disparity between their lot and that of others becomes more evident. It is not accidental that rioting is occurring after the civil rights legislation, not before.

Well this, as you can imagine, is the puzzling part to most people and the wounding part, to President Johnson and to the civil rights leaders, and the young crusading students who go south to join the marches, and to the former attorney general Robert Kennedy and his successor Nicholas Katzenbach, who did so much to start the historic landslide of civil rights legislation that funded through the Congress this year.

Of course, every Negro isn’t going to get the vote this year, or next, or share a white school teacher, good or bad. Or have brand new housing or be given a white-collar job. Vast numbers of whites by the way, are not going to get these things either.

The simplest but the most excruciating mistake that runs wildfire through much testy criticism of the United States is to believe that the Negro is if not in chains, everywhere subjected to a special and shameful code of legal humiliations not shared by white people at the same level of society.

In the south until lately, this was mainly true. Now, in the south, the energy and determination of the federal government sending in registrars and marshals and FBI agents, and many brave anonymous clerks, into the mean, last ditches of segregation, is something to see.

So while the Negros of the south are beginning to acquire the common but vital privileges of citizenship, the ballot, the right to sit on juries, the right to a friend in court, the north – which had had most of these things for generations – explodes in an ecstasy of protest against what, against law, property, civil order, and its guardians.

It happened and it was much the same story last week in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Springfield, Mass. But, the Los Angeles rioters, unlike the mobs in the seven rioting cities of last summer, took their protest a stage beyond the first great orgy of looting, which to people rattling around in the same, smelly rooms with the same jobless friends, must seem like an intoxicating whiff of freedom.

The Los Angeles riot, by the third night, gave us sure warning of the next stage in the disintegration of protest of the cities. It turned into a race riot. A hard thing to define and something that the department of justice very usefully pointed out last year, did not describe the summer riots in those seven cities.

It should be said, though, that these things always seem to start the same way. A white policeman arrests a Negro and – having looked into several thousand pages of the records – I dare to fly in the face of advance opinion and say usually arrested for just cause. The Los Angeles rioters, having taken their fill of liquor and television sets and groceries and furniture and cameras and cash registers and automobiles, turned then to the people of whom these luxuries are the symbols, the owner.

Not literally the owners, though I believe there was plenty of resentment and plenty of damage, against absenteeism landlords. I mean, the property owners' surrogate, the white man, they roamed after white men and they beat up light-skinned Negros by mistake.

And the fact that they also maimed and beat white people as poor or shiftless as themselves is not an accident but an inevitable incident, of what had become a symbolic act of rage, against the white men. Let us be fairly clear about the kind of people we are talking about, we – as distinct from Pravda and the African radio, and I regret to say quite a few otherwise intelligent liberals – are not talking about decent Negros hungry for a decent house and a place in society.

We are not talking about people who want to vote or a seat on the jury, but people who want a television set, a case of bourbon, a girl a snazzy car, and a wad of folding money. There are, living in Watts, the rather appalling number of over 500 criminals out on parole and it would be a relief to tie up this discussion with the clincher that they started and lead the riots.

I am sure they were in there and they must, at all times, form a ghastly elite corps for the young unemployed. Twice the white rate, the bastards, one in four, the artful dodgers by the thousand, who thus have 500 Fagans to instruct them in everything from petty thievery to drug addiction to the manufacture of Molotov cocktails.

But we have to remember that something very like the Watts explosion happened in Rochester, New York last year, and in Springfield, Massachusetts last week, to the bewilderment of its sober citizens.

I believe that the seed of these upheavals. the seed, if you like of anarchy. is in the poor Negro's envy not of the white man’s vote or his education, but of the white man’s fancied wealth and the baubles it buys.

Whatever Watts lacks, it does not lack television aerials and I suppose if you sit in a mean room all through the day with a litter of listless children and a worn-down mother, the chances of their being a father in residence are only three in four. And you keep seeing the svelte girls in the automobile ads, and the young white Apollos and the glowing families and the house in the pines secured by a mortgage, from a silvery-haired saint in the friendly bank.

I suppose you come to believe that this is the way the whites live. They have everything – not only the vote, and the clean jobs and the mathematics if you are interested, but all the goodies and the money and the golden girls. It’s a kind of idiot version of the persistent European belief that all Americans are rich.

I saw a poor young student a few months ago trying to cross Germany, an American boy, on about $10, and pretty empty-bellied most of the time. In one place the woman suggested that he take a ferry up the Rhine, he mentioned he couldn’t afford it, she almost fell down in a faint. She went off instead in a huff. "Imagine," she said, "an American without money."

Last year, I saw some of the looting in Harlem and the signs were unmistakable in Watts and Chicago and Springfield. The envy, satisfied in the moment of seizing sometimes useless luxuries, but luxuries which are the short cut to the good life which is not coming soon, a truth which all the trumpets about civil rights only mock.

I said earlier we could list forever reasons why this should not have happened in Watts. The sociologist and psychologists, and police and politicians, have rushed in with all the reasons why it should happen. The negro birth-rate is half again as high as the whites. Illegitimacy four times, unemployment, twice as bad. School dropouts, three times.

Therefore, two or three times as many people to a room, therefore, crime rates four or five times that of the most comparable white neighbourhood. A steadily growing population of young, idle and corrupt Negros, already beyond the reach of appeals to citizenship, and beyond much interest in liberty or education, but only in the more dazzling fruits.

I don’t know if it will help much to have isolated this tragic strain of envy, a twisted form of ambition or to have mentioned the pimping role of television with its tantalising exposure of the white man’s dainties for sale, or perhaps for looting at your nearest grocer, or department store.

But these things don’t get mentioned by the city fathers who either moan about morals or say the rioters of Watts must be given a new high school or more federal funds.

What they need at the moment is a full-time birth control programme, the sane return of some of those parolees to jail, a couple of churches, a public works project, six playing fields, and an army of coloured men on the police force.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.