LAT: Watts Riots, 40 Years Later

[DeepModem Mom]

Watts Riots, 40 Years Later
Nine people who were in the midst of the turmoil recall how six days of violence changed lives -- and L.A. itself.

By Valerie Reitman and Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writers


The divisions are still there, 40 years later.

To many, the events that began in Watts on Aug. 11, 1965, remain a riot, pure and simple — a social breakdown into mob rule and criminality. To others, they were a revolt, a rebellion, an uprising — a violent but justified leap into a future of black self-empowerment.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the riots, The Times asked nine people, all of whom witnessed the events firsthand, to recount their memories of six days that changed their lives and the course of the city. They include a rioter, a business owner, a Highway Patrol officer, a National Guardsman, ordinary residents and a newspaper reporter.

The riots that summer were sparked by the arrest of a black motorist, Marquette Frye, for drunk driving. When Frye's mother intervened, a crowd gathered and the arrest became a flashpoint for anger against police. The deeper causes, as documented by the McCone Commission, which investigated the riots, were poverty, inequality, racial discrimination and the passage, in November 1964, of Proposition 14 on the California ballot. That initiative had overturned the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which established equality of opportunity for black home buyers.

After nearly a week of rioting, 34 people, 25 of them black, were dead and more than 1,000 were injured. More than 600 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Thriving business districts, their stores mostly white-owned, were burned to the ground. Eventually, the National Guard put a cordon around a vast region of South Los Angeles that ranged as far east as Alameda Street, as far west as Crenshaw Boulevard, and from just south of the Santa Monica Freeway to about Rosecrans Avenue....


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-watts11aug11,0,7619426.story?coll=la-home-local

[getmeouttahere]

1. I was in my Mom's womb...

she lived in Gardena and had to drive through Watts on the way to work at the telephone company in downtown LA. She really felt bad for her friends at work who lived in Watts and had to go back after work. Of course, if you know anything about LA, you'll know that Gardena isn't far from the south end of the National Guard's cordon.

Folks, things haven't changed much in Watts in 40 years. Except that there is a large latino population there now.