Sixty years after the Watts rebellion erupted in August 1965, its ash and ember still smolder in the streets and courts of Los Angeles and beyond. What began as a collective uprising against everyday racial degradation, police brutality, and political marginalization became, as Raya Dunayevskaya argued, a moment of mass self-discovery. Yet that discovery did not end after the fires were put out. The largest nationwide protests against police violence in 2020 after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the more recent mass resistance to ICE raids in the Los Angeles area, testify to the persistence of the same structures that birthed Watts and to the recurring capacity of oppressed people to act collectively.

The Watts Rebellion erupted in Los Angeles on August 11, 1965, after a traffic stop on Black motorist Marquette Frye escalated into a violent confrontation that quickly spilled into the streets. Over the next six days over 30,000 residents in the Watts neighborhood and adjacent areas mobilized against police and city authorities. People hurled bricks at police vehicles, ambushed officers in alleys, shot at helicopters, looted local stores, and burned hundreds of buildings. Authorities compared the action on the streets to that of guerrilla warfare seen overseas in Vietnam. Local law enforcement and eventually the National Guard were deployed to restore order. By the time law enforcement quelled the unrest, 34 people were dead, over 1,000 injured, 3,400 arrested, and roughly $40 million in property had been destroyed. However, this was no isolated flare-up, as years of entrenched racism, police abuse, housing discrimination, and grinding poverty had primed the community for revolt.

The facts show that Watts was a massive, community-wide rejection of the racial capitalist system, not a brief “riot” triggered by a single incident. What made Watts more than a short-lived disturbance was the depth and breadth of grievances behind the outbreak: concentrated poverty and unemployment, persistent racial segregation and housing discrimination that confined Black families to under-resourced neighborhoods, routine police harassment and brutality, and a wider sense of political marginalization in which conventional channels of redress felt ineffective or irrelevant to everyday life. These structural conditions created a tinderbox in which a single incident such as a traffic stop ignited a much broader uprising.

The LAPD under Chief William Parker dismissed the rebellion as criminal anarchy, with Parker infamously comparing Watts residents to “monkeys in a zoo.” His remarks inflamed outrage, reinforcing the perception that the police were openly racist and unwilling to reform. President Lyndon Johnson and most mainstream politicians framed Watts as a breakdown of law and order. They were alarmed at the scale of destruction and loss of life, portraying the rebellion as senseless violence rather than rooted in systemic injustice. Much of the press at the time echoed official lines, focusing heavily on rioting, looting, and burning rather than the structural grievances behind the uprising. This shaped public perception, especially among white audiences, as a story of disorder rather than protest.

Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Watts shortly after and acknowledged the anger behind the rebellion, calling it the “beginning of a stirring of those people in our society who have been by passed by the progress of the past decade.”  But he also warned against violence as self-defeating, urging nonviolent protest and deeper federal action on poverty and racism. The NAACP and Urban League tended to stress reforms and economic programs rather than justifying the revolt.

Raya Dunayevskaya’s analysis of Watts in 1965 (from report to New and Letters Committees “Toward a Unity of Thought and Action”) stresses what journalists and policymakers missed: the revolt was an act of collective self-activity and self-discovery by the Black masses, not merely chaotic lawlessness or the product of outside agitators. She also notably emphasized that the uprising welded race and class together and that attempts to reduce it to “class, not race” (or the reverse) misunderstood what the events had actually fused. She highlighted the political significance of the participants’ newly discovered confidence and generalizations about power.

While others talked about how Watts was isolated, she argued that it was the white power structure that stood isolated and Watts’s Black residents gained strength by acting collectively and with discipline, targeting symbols of oppression (the police, not white civilians) as a unified force. In acting as a unified force against the police they also differentiated themselves from all others, including absentee landlords, exploitative shopkeepers, and even the Black middle-class leaders.

The rebels themselves expressed a new self-confidence such that they could proclaim “we know where Whitey hurts” as they looted the businesses that gave low wages to black workers. Dunayevskaya noted this as a first step toward new theory: the people were already making universal claims (e.g., “We got the power”) out of their experience

However, Dunayevskaya warned that with such spontaneous uprisings, theory must “elicit from the masses their wishes, to make explicit what is implicit in their acts”. The rebels in Watts had already generalized their experience, but this had to be developed in philosophy and theory to show that it was not just a fleeting experience but a new stage in self-consciousness.

Without making explicit what was implicit in their activity, there comes the risk of the experience being taken over by forces ready to “stop the mass search for new beginnings in leadership, in action, in theory.” Both bourgeois ideologues (“class, not race”) and established Black leaders saw an opportunity to channel the revolt back into old grooves. As she put it, many are eager to lead or mislead the masses, a role that, if unchallenged, would simply make the people “at the disposal of ‘the party’” in the same way as workers are at the disposal of capital. In her view, the real leap of Watts would be if there could form new beginnings in theory turning the Watts rebels experience into a clear vision of universal freedom.

Sixty years later, the same structural injustices echo in today’s uprisings. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd and earlier, Breonna Taylor, ignited massive protests across the U.S.  The summer 2020 demonstrations involved millions nationwide making them the largest racial-justice mobilization in U.S. history. Crucially, participants overwhelmingly protested because of entrenched racism and police violence. These protests had no single charismatic leader or organization at the head which made them broadly inclusive bringing forth different groups to protest police brutality. This reflected the inseparability of race, class, and other forms of oppression. Black workers and youth were central, but the movement broadened to include multiracial, working-class solidarity. The oppressed themselves demonstrated mass creativity and agency, not waiting for leaders to direct them as many took to the streets for the first time in their lives.

In both cases, a single incident of police brutality ignited long-simmering grievances rooted in racism and state repression. Black communities faced entrenched racial inequality, mass incarceration, militarized policing, and the compounded crisis of COVID-19 disproportionately killing and impoverishing them. Both uprisings were not isolated incidents but the boiling over of structural oppression. Watts and the 2020 protests share the same DNA, state violence as the spark, systemic racism and poverty as the fuel, mass collective action as the force, and the emergence of a broader vision of freedom as the legacy. Both moments demonstrate the necessity of uniting theory and practice so that these uprisings don’t dissipate into reforms but push them toward revolutionary transformation.

Just five years later, in the summer of 2025, sweeping immigration enforcement actions in Los Angeles and nationwide sparked new street uprisings. The anti-ICE protests likewise emerged from long-term vulnerabilities: precarious work, fear of deportation, racialized policing and state targeting of immigrant communities, conditions that made communities quick to mobilize when raids occurred. Thousands protested downtown Los Angeles, shutting down raids on immigrant workplaces. Videos showed demonstrators blocking major freeways, occupying federal buildings, and clashing with police and ICE who responded with tear gas and flash-bangs. Many groups showed support during these protests especially the youth staging school walkouts along with sharing information about ICE activity on social media. Significantly, President Donald Trump sent federal troops (including 2,000 National Guard troops) to Los Angeles, the first time since 1965 (when President Johnson deployed troops to Selma) that a president federalized a state’s Guard without the governor’s consent.

In each case I have discussed here, ordinary people improvised tactics to disrupt state operations. These events echo Watts in spirit: racialized communities now largely Latinx and immigrant are rising up against a powerful state force to demand dignity. In this sense, the Watts Revolt’s legacy lives on. Modern movements draw on the same well of anger at a system that polices race and class.

Taken together, the 1965 Watts Rebellion and these modern movements reveal common patterns, the eruption of collective anger by oppressed people, the fusion of racial and economic grievances, and the emergence of new self-consciousness. Each uprising is a step in the people’s “quest for universality”, a push toward total freedom. But these events also show the warning Dunayevskaya gave that without conscious theory and organization, the old power structure will reassert itself in the new forms and the deep injustices will remain.

So, what now? Here again we can quote Dunayevskaya at length:

The point at issue now is not so much what next in activity, but what is next in thought. Without being able to make what philosophers call a category out of their experience, that is to say, to be able to conclude that it is not just an experience, but a stage in cognition, in Ideas, the experience Itself will not become part of an emerging revolution either in fact or in thought.

Sixty years after Watts, the same system that produced the rebellion persists and the fires of rebellion continue to burn in new forms. The uprising of 1965 showed that the most marginalized could act collectively with discipline, that race and class oppression were inseparable, and that through struggle the masses could begin to articulate universal truths about freedom. While politicians denounced the rebellion and social scientists reduced it to class, Dunayevskaya reminded us that these moments are not just explosions of anger but first steps toward theory and toward the creation of a new society.

The Black Lives Matter movement, ignited by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the recent immigrant uprisings against ICE raids in Los Angeles, stand in direct continuity with Watts. They reveal once again that the state polices both race and class, that the oppressed continue to discover their own creativity in the streets, and that their struggle reaches beyond reforms to the very heart of the social order.

But as Dunayevskaya warned, such mass self-activity will always face attempts at co-optation from liberal politicians, NGOs, and would-be vanguards who seek to channel revolutionary energy back into the old structures. The task before us is to ensure that these uprisings are not dissipated but deepened.

This means refusing to reduce today’s struggles to either race or class, and instead grasping them as moments of universality, as the fight for the abolition of racism, capitalism, borders, and the state’s repressive apparatus. It means cultivating the theory that already exists within the practice of the masses and making explicit what is implicit in their acts: that another world is possible, born from their own self-activity.

If Watts was a first stride toward such universality, then the uprisings of today can be the next leap forward provided we do not let the old reabsorb the new. Sixty years on, the challenge remains the same: to turn revolt into revolution, to fuse thought with action, and to make the struggle for freedom indivisible, total, and human.