The Watts Rebellion in 1965 (Photo from the Socialist Worker, August 11, 2015)
It was an August evening so hot that you could smell the heat. A motorcycle police officer stopped a 1955 Buick for reckless driving in Watts, Los Angeles, a black enclave. The traffic stop ignited years of anger and frustration for six long days.
California Highway Patrol (CHP) Officer Lee Minikus, 31, arrested Marquette Frye, 21, when he failed sobriety tests. Frye's brother, Ronald, a passenger in the car walked a few blocks away to get their mother, Rena Price, the owner of the soon-to-be-impounded vehicle. Price scolded her son, and he blew up. Accounts vary on what set off the ensuing scuffle. A patrolman struck Frye on the head with a baton and Price jumped on Minikus' back. All three were arrested and taken to the substation, leaving behind a crowd of about 50, reported the Los Angeles Times (July 29, 2015) .
The crowd swelled as the situation heated up with the rumor of a pregnant woman being kicked by police. People began to yell and throw objects at the police.
The Watts Rebellion of 1965 took the lives of 34, injured 1,032 and incurred 3,592 arrests, most of the latter for breaking curfew.
"Burn, baby, burn" was the rallying cry.
Every time I hear U.S. President Donald Trump say, "Drill, baby, drill", I remember the Watts Uprising, in which stores selling rotten meat and produce for high prices were torched and most selling quality goods at fair prices were spared destruction.
Anger and distrust between Watts' residents, the police and city officials had been simmering for years, reported the Los Angeles Times. Most black people in Los Angeles County lived in Southeast L.A., which was home to failing schools and little or no access to public transportation.
Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker, who recruited heavily from the South still fighting the Civil War, said, "We're on top, and they're on the bottom." He decreed a paramilitary response to the uprising, which he compared to fighting the Viet Cong, the guerrilla force that the United States was fighting in Vietnam.
Nearly 14,000 members of the California Army National Guard; about 2,300 members of the National Guard; 934 Los Angeles Police Department officers, and 718 deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department were deployed during the rebellion.
The unrest had spread to other areas, including Long Beach, but it was minor compared to Watts.
Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote in Commentary (March 1966): "At a street-corner meeting in Watts when the riots were over, an unemployed youth of about twenty said to me, 'We won.' I asked him: 'How have you won? Homes have been destroyed, Negroes are lying dead in the streets, the store from which you buy food and clothes are destroyed, and people are bringing you relief.' His reply was significant: 'We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us. The police chief never came here before; the mayor always stayed uptown. We made them come.'"
What is Trump winning with his "Drill, baby, drill" executive order?
Trump's Insecurity
With regard to rescinding diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) efforts, Trump's victory is more complex.
In his book, Why Blacks Kill Blacks (1972), psychiatrist and civil rights activist Alvin Poussaint turned the theory of racial self-hatred on its head:
"(The theory of self-hatred) allows whites to feel that (blacks) are psychologically deranged while (whites are) posing as models of mental health. In fact, it must be whites who are insecure and filled with self-hatred, since they are the ones who need to oppress blacks in order to cope with life."
In the past, many have described Trump as a property developer from Queens, an outer borough of the five that compose New York City, who strove for acceptance into the society of Manhattan, the heart of the Big Apple, but never got it.
Central Park Five
In the Central Park Five (now also called the Exonerated Five) Case, Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old white woman, had been jogging in Central Park when she was raped and beaten badly in April 1989. Days after four blacks and one Latino teenager began to give up forced and false confessions, Trump ran full-page advertisements in all four of New York City's major newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty for murder. He said that he wanted "criminals of every age to be afraid". The ad said in part:
"Mayor (Ed) Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer. . . . Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. . . . How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their Civil Liberties End When an Attack On Our Safety Begins!"
The Central Park Five were Kevin Richardson, 14; Raymond Santana, 14; Antron McCray, 15; Yusef Salaam, 15, and 16-year-old Korey Wise, reported BBC (June 12, 2019). They were convicted wrongly and served seven to 13 years before a serial rapist and murderer confessed to the heinous crime. Their convictions were vacated in 2002.
Trump has never apologized for his ad, which did not name the five. In fact, he has continued to make claims that they were responsible for the attack. During the September 2024 presidential debate in Philadelphia, he said that the teenagers pled guilty and that they killed a person, neither of which is true. The five, including Salaam, who is now a New York City council member, are suing Trump for defamation, reported National Public Radio (October 21, 2024).
Rescinding DEI Efforts
In the newly inaugurated president's myriad of executive orders, Trump rescinded the federal government of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and he revoked his predecessors' executive orders of the past 50 years, which attempted to increase diversity and address discrimination. The latter order is entitled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. Yet, at age 25, Trump took the helm of his family's real estate empire from his father, who was a wheeler-dealer with the Brooklyn Democratic political machine while building his business, reported Frank Rich in New York magazine (April 40, 2018). In his January 20 inaugural speech, President Trump touched on his advocacy of meritocracy several times.
In 2021, the typical white household had 9.2 times as much wealth as the typical black household -- $250,400 compared to $27,100, reports Pew Research Center. Evidence points to the role of slavery and post-slavery practices, such as segregation which creates few opportunities for wealth accumulation.
Housing Segregation
House inheritance is a significant boost to family wealth.
I am a black American. Five months before the Watts Rebellion in 1965, my family moved from the Astoria housing projects, subsidized government housing, in Queens, New York. My father wanted to buy a particular house in Ozone Park, whose sales price was $14,500. The house, also in Queens, was convenient for my father's job, and the area had good schools. The realtor insisted that it already had been sold and was not available.
The house had not been sold to anyone else. We drove by it several times. My father asked about it repeatedly. It's For Sale sign still hung in the front yard.
However, the house was off-limits to blacks. Instead, we bought a home, 30 minutes away, for $17,000 in Hempstead, Long Island. Hempstead was undergoing blockbusting, a technique where real estate speculators would buy a home on an all-white street, sell or rent it to a black family and then buy up the remaining homes from whites at cut-rate prices, then sell them to black families, who were seeking upward mobility, at hefty profits.
Blockbusting became prominent after World War II in the United States. It was happening in L.A. at the time of the Watts Uprising.
In the 1940s, in the Second Great Migration, black workers and families migrated from the South to the West Coast in large numbers, in response to the defense industry's recruitment efforts at the start of World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8803 directing defense contractors not to discriminate in hiring or promotions. The black population in Los Angeles rose dramatically.
Psychiatrist and civil rights activist Alvin Poussaint considered California's Proposition 14 to be one of the causes of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Proposition 14 overturned the Rumford Fair Housing Act, designed to remedy residential segregation. It was sponsored by the California real estate industry and supported by a majority of voters. (California, 25 other states of the 50 and the District of Columbia allow citizen-initiated ballot measures that are submitted to the electorate.)
What Happened?
California Governor Edward P. Brown created a commission of prominent citizens to investigate the causes of the rebellion and to prescribe remedies against future outbreaks.
In a scathing critique of the McCone Commission's report on the Watts Rebellion, civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote in Commentary (March 1966):
"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."
Rustin said that looting accounted for a large number of the arrests:
"Most of these people were not habitual thieves; they were members of a deprived group who seized a chance to possess things that all the dinning affluence of Los Angeles had never given them.
"There were innumerable touching examples of this behavior. One married couple in their sixties was seen carrying a couch to their home, and when its weight became too much for them, they sat down and rested on it until they could pick it up again.
"(Poet) Langston Hughes tells of another woman who was dragging a sofa through the streets and who stopped at each intersection and waited for the traffic light to turn green."
"Drill, Baby, Drill"
In The Fire Next Time (1963), writer James Baldwin referenced fire in the context of race in the United States.
"If we -- and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others -- do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!"
Watts burned in the summer of 1965. The affluent Pacific Palisades burned this month.
The Santa Ana winds, a common Southland phenomenon, came at an unseasonable time to an unseasonably dry terrain. Atypical, characterized the meteorologists.
Atypical sums up the catastrophic fires, floods and other wild weather around the world.
With increased oil drilling and burning of fossil fuel, everyone -- no matter the race, ethnic group, religion or gender -- would get the same rotten deal.
The United States perpetuated a mythology by which it based its extraordinary economic development. Then, when slavery was abolished, it did not know what to do with freed blacks. It still does not know.
Perhaps, there will be no need for racial reckoning. Perhaps, environmental reckoning will decide everyone's fate.
"Drill, baby, drill" is the present administration's solution to energy.
In the end, we would all be equal in a meritocracy of environmental destruction.
f Watts during the 196
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