[Los Angeles] The Watts Rebellion, Sixty Years Later
Hyrbrid Meeting, Sunday, August 24, 2025, 5-6:30 PM, Los Angeles Time
[In first few minutes we’ll hear brief reports/analysis of current issues like the struggle against ICE, new developments in Trumpist fascism, etc.]
Speakers:
Lyndon Porter is a Black educator and writer
Rocio Lopez is a Socialist Feminist who grew up in South Central LA and has lived in Latin America and Japan
Art Share
Classroom 1
801 East Fourth Place (Arts District)
Los Ángeles 90013
OR
Remotely on zoom
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84069882267?pwd=TrKoSRsKWi5K3yivKGtRlduf0CCQHE.1
(more zoom details below)
The August 1965 Watts Rebellion was the first large Black urban insurrection of the 1960s, sparked by racist police brutality. It was part of a chain of uprisings stretching from the 1960s through the even more massive LA Rebellion of 1992. These uprisings targeted white police impunity, and behind that, the entire power structure of US racialized capitalism. In 1965, when the events in Watts burst into the national consciousness, the dominant political and media institutions wondered aloud if “communist” agitators from abroad had sparked the rebellion. The government duly launched a full-scale investigation that eventually proved such ideas to be ludicrous. Mainstream Civil Rights groups and white social scientists grasped that real social oppression was at the uprising’s roots, but the former condemned it as futile and destructive while the latter attempted to reduce its causes to class and poverty, tip-toeing around its racial dimensions.
As Raya Dunayevskaya wrote at the time: “The new stage is far more fundamental than a question of violence vs. non-violence as a method of struggle. The genuine leap was not in the tactics of struggle but in the achievement of consciousness of self, of being able to make generalizations like ‘we know now where Whitey hurts’ and thus to take the first step in the construction of universals about a new society. But it is a first step only, and, though a gigantic stride, it is not the end but a beginning.”
The issues that gave birth to Watts 1965 remain around us today. This has been seen not only in the ICE raids in the LA area, but also in Louisville. In that city in July, Trump’s federal prosecutors called for letting one of the police killers of Breonna Taylor in 2020 – an incident that helped spark the Black Lives Matter uprising that year — off the hook with a one-day prison sentence.
Suggested readings:
Keith Claybrook, “Remembering, Rethinking, and Renaming the Watts Rebellion” (2021)
https://www.aaihs.org/remembering-rethinking-and-renaming-the-watts-rebellion/
King Institute, Stanford University, “Watts Rebellion (Los Angeles)” (nd) https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/watts-rebellion-los-angeles
Raya Dunayevskaya, “Ramifications of Watts revolt” (1965) https://www.connexions.org/CxArchive/NewsandLetters/www.newsandletters.org/issues/2001/May/1.05_fta-2.htm
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