In August 1965, 30,000-35,000 Black Angelenos in the Greater South Central area engaged in a week of insurrection, angered by brutal police and deplorable segregation. 32 Black civilians were killed largely by police. The center of the rebellion was in Watts, but the uprising actually took place throughout the 46-square-mile area of Greater South Central, where Blacks were forced to live. 75% of LA’s Black population lived in this area. 250,000 Angelenos were put under curfew.

These 46 miles were put under curfew and patrolled by 14,000 White National Guardsmen. Almost 4000 Black people were arrested, mainly for minor offenses like curfew violations. 45 million dollars’ worth of property was destroyed. Largely White-owned businesses were ransacked and burned down in Watts.

Black civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, 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.”

Why the riots occurred

To understand the uprising, you must understand the years of segregation and brutal oppression that Black Angelenos faced in the years before. Los Angeles was little different from the South in its treatment of Blacks. 1% of new housing in LA in the 1950s went to non-Whites. Glendale, Burbank, and Culver City were all White sundown towns. Torrance was all White. Civil rights activists picketed in Torrance for over 1 year in 1963 to demand that Black people be allowed to buy homes in the new housing there.

75% of Black Angelenos lived in the Greater South Central area because they were forced to live there by discrimination in housing. 90% of housing had illegal covenant contracts that said Black people couldn’t buy there. In 1965, Alameda Blvd was the dividing Eastern line between the eastern White suburbs of Huntington Park and South Gate. White supremacist gangs beat Black people they saw East of Alameda after dark.

(By comparison, Boyle Heights had previously been a mixed neighborhood with a large Jewish population in the first half of the 20th century; by 1960, most of the Jewish people there had left for the Westside when other Whites finally allowed them to live there.)

Public swimming pools in LA were segregated through the 1950s. Beaches were also de facto segregated. There were extremely high levels of unemployment for Black people in LA despite a booming economy. 20% unemployment in South Central and 30% male unemployment in Watts.

Blacks were in overcrowded schools at the same time that there were underenrolled schools in West LA. Almost all attempts to allow Black students to go to White schools were thwarted. The LA School board claimed they didn’t keep track of student races because they were “colorblind”. They just didn’t want people to know how extremely racially segregated LA schools were. The French currently take a similar approach.

In the 1940s, in 1941 and 1947, hundreds of White students at Fremont High School in South LA burned effigies of Black students, angry that a handful of Black students were enrolled. This was not a situation of a few bad apples but widespread support for White supremacy and segregation in Los Angeles.

Timeline of the riots

The catalyst for the beginning of the Watts Rebellion in August 1965 was a large crowd witnessing White police brutalize young Black men being arrested. After the driver resisted arrest, a cop called for backup, and *26* different police cars or motorcycles showed up. The crowd, who initially had just been bystanders, began to resist and fight the police after they saw them manhandle the young men’s mother and saw a CHP cop put another woman in a chokehold. One witness complained about seeing police beat a man, and a cop told him, “Get out of here, n word, get out of her all you n words.” That first night, 1000 people scuffled with the cops. Importantly, many of these cops were White southerners. The police chief had actively recruited White southerners to the LAPD.

Notably, 5 weeks before the Watts Uprising, a Black 22-year-old woman, Beverly Tate, was arrested and taken away in a car to an empty area. 1 cop raped her in the patrol car while the other cop was a lookout outside. The cop was fired but never tried. This was something the community had been well aware of and was angry about.

On the 2nd day of the rebellion, the morning had started normally, but by 6 PM, thousands of people were back on the streets of Watts and had damaged 103 cop cars. Looting only really started on the 3rd day at lunchtime. That Friday night, a resident witnessed cops beat a young child in the face with a shotgun for having carried a stolen lamp.

That night, the National Guard came in with the first unit coming in from Glendale, arguably the most racist town in LA. They and the police killed 10 people on Friday night.

On the 4th day, a curfew was declared, and unsubstantiated rumors that Blacks were going to attack White neighborhoods had been spread on the TV news. National Guard tanks guarded USC, and the National Guard had loaded machine guns.

The police made no pretense that they weren’t racist. The LAPD police chief compared rioters to the Viet Cong and Zoo animals. In fact, a guardsman said he had been told the Viet Cong were behind the Watts rebellion. Despite many rumors, the only cops and military personnel who were killed during the uprising were 2 cops killed by other cops. While White civilians driving through Watts to East of Alameda were beaten during the riots, local community members and activists rescued these civilians. Mexicans were largely left alone.

Cops and military shot into people’s homes and killed at least one father in his home. One SNCC organizer said that while sitting on his porch listening to the radio, a cop told him, “Get your Black ass back in your house,” and a National Guard jeep drove back and shot 3 rounds at his door as he was entering his house, but luckily, he was uninjured. Another man was shot by 15 cops from outside the house, who shot *into* his house while he was inside by the front door. He was killed.

By the 5th day, Watts was under nearly total military and police occupation. On the 6th day, the police turned back but did not arrest multiple White vigilantes who were trying to go into Watts armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. By this day, 4000 arrestees were in jail with unaffordable bail.

On the 7th day of the riots, the curfew had been lifted. MLK came and spoke to people in Watts. He also spoke for 3 hours with the mayor, Sam Yorty, and LAPD chief William Parker. The LAPD chief berated him and said that his visit was a “disservice to the people of Los Angeles”.

After the riots had ended after a week, at 2 AM on Wednesday, August 18th, 100 LAPD and sheriffs shot up a Nation of Islam Mosque and arrested 19 men inside. Then the cops set the building on fire. And then they arrested 40 Muslims who had come to witness the mosque being attacked. In addition to the police chief blaming Muslims, the powers that be tried to blame communist agitators and civil rights activists for causing the riots.

Back to why this Rebellion occurred

The mayor of LA, Yorty, was super racist. The LA Mayor switched parties and became a Republican in 1973. The police chief, William Parker, was openly racist. Even the archbishop of the Catholic Church in LA was super racist. William Dubay, a priest at Compton Catholic church, sent a telegram to the Pope telling the Pope that the archbishop was very racist.

Black Angelenos were hardly taking oppression lightly and were very engaged in the struggle for civil rights. There was a great deal of grassroots protests and direct action, far too much to summarize in this piece. When the DNC came to LA in 1960, 5000 Black Angelenos marched to the Sports Arena demanding civil rights. In 1961, 28,000 people showed up to hear MLK speak. Civil Rights Activists worked hard to get the California Fair Housing Act passed in 1963, which outlawed racial discrimination in housing. (It actually excluded most single-family housing, though, which was most of the housing in LA.)

In 1963, at a solidarity rally with civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, 40,000 people came to hear MLK speak in LA. MLK said in this speech, “You asked me what Los Angeles can do to help us in Birmingham. The most important thing you can do is to set Los Angeles free because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.”

Unfortunately, the White majority in California in the 1960s was committed to White supremacy. In 1964, over ⅔ of White voters in LA passed Proposition 14, which rescinded the racial anti-discrimination law in housing. This law was supported by the real estate industry. This pro segregation law was endorsed by the LA Times! Martin Luther King came to California multiple times to campaign against Prop 14. Proposition 14 was passed 4 months after President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. LBJ cut off all housing funds to California as a response to Prop 14. In 1966, the law was struck down by the courts.

(Even many liberal LA White politicians were still racist. Liberal county supervisor Kenneth Hahn argued that Black men receiving government assistance should be required to do farmwork. The obvious fact that descendants of enslaved people who were forced to do farmwork would not willingly go labor in the fields involuntarily for other people eluded him.)

White flight after the Rebellion resulted in Southeast LA opening up to Blacks and non-Whites, and now cities like South Gate are largely Latino. While White flight certainly wasn’t the hope, the Watts Uprising ended the illusion that racial segregation was merely a problem in the South.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, unfortunately. We are in the midst of a fascist White supremacist backlash with an openly racist president. While we have certainly made substantial progress in integration, my elementary school was all Latino and Black. And the vast majority of my middle school was too, with a handful of Asian students, but I had no White classmates.

A major change, however, now is that when the White supremacist president sent the National Guard to menace people of color and liberals in LA, the National Guard was racially representative of LA and far less eager to beat the crap out of us. The police, regardless of color, are still eager to do that, unfortunately, as I personally witnessed and ran away from them, teargassing and shooting rubber bullets this summer at anti-ICE protests.

We have made a lot of progress in higher education and in employment compared to the past, but residential and educational segregation remains highly stubborn and has only been gradually chipped away at over the decades.

We have far too much segregation in Los Angeles to this day but remember all the integration and opportunities Black people and other people of color have in LA were earned through intense collective struggle. Blacks and Latinos can live outside of South Central and East LA because the Black masses fought intensely for freedom of movement. We are continuing the struggles of those who came before us and fighting to defend freedoms that were hard-won.

Further reading:

Book: Mike Davis and Jon Wiener – “Set The Night on Fire LA in the Sixties”

Jeanne Theoharis,  “Chapter 1: “Alabama on Avalon” Rethinking the Watts Uprising and the Character of Black Protest in Los Angeles”. In Joseph, Peniel E. (ed.). The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era. Routledge.