Watts Riots

The Watts riots (August 11–17, 1965) began with the arrest of an African American man, Marquette Frye, by California Highway Patrol officers for drunk driving. Most accounts now concur that Frye resisted arrest, but it remains unclear whether police used undue force to subdue him. Although named for the small, Los Angeles inner city community of Watts, the riots actually affected many sections of what is now called South Central Los Angeles. In six nights of rioting, 34 people were killed, 1,032 injured, and $40 million worth of property was destroyed. Many of the most vivid images of the Watts riots depict the massive fires set by the rioters. Hundreds of buildings, whole city blocks, were burned to the ground. Firefighters were unable to work because police could not protect them from the rioters.

Public officials and the news media offered conflicting depictions of the Watts riots in their immediate aftermath. Conservatives and many city officials blamed the riots on African American tendencies toward lawless behavior, pointing to the large number of minority men living in the inner city who had criminal records and to the influx of “outsiders” from the South. They observed that looters took far more goods from stores than they could possibly find useful and that it was irrational to burn down one's “own” neighborhood. Some suggested that the riots were an insurrection fostered by urban gangs or by the Black Muslims, at that time considered by the mainstream press as a radical cult. Others suggested that police-community relations in South Central Los Angeles had long been uneasy and that those tensions had exploded into rioting. At the time of the Watts riots, Americans had been exposed to police brutality toward African American civil rights demonstrators, particularly during the then-recent Selma to Montgomery march which was violently dispersed by local police in Alabama. However, the civil rights movement was still primarily associated with struggles for voting rights and an end to legal segregation in the South, so the riots were not clearly associated with the larger movement for civil rights. Finally, many federal officials and some reporters explained the Watts riots as a violent protest against the poverty and hopelessness of life in the inner city. They described the challenges of joblessness and the lack of basic services such as health care in South Central Los Angeles. This interpretation of the riots dovetailed effectively with the federal government's War on Poverty programs just then being rolled out in cities across the country. The War on Poverty seemed to be a response to the Watts riots, and the riots seemed to demonstrate the need for the War on Poverty programs.

Despite this apparent synergy, South Central Los Angeles was slow to come back from the damage done during the riots. In later years, some media reports would suggest that the Watts riots had blighted the area rather than that the community's poverty, and lack of infrastructure had long predated the riots. Nevertheless, today, the Watts riots are most typically represented as the community's angry response to deprivation and neglect, and they remain a vivid collective memory, particularly in Los Angeles, but also nationally.

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