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Profile of a riot, side 1.
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- speakerLos Angeles has many tourist attractions. The movie studios in Hollywood, the
- speakermansions of Beverly Hills. And a strange edifice nestled in the Negro section
- speakerof town in the area called Watts. Because of their being out of the way,
- speakernot too many tourists have visited the Watts Towers. But they are interesting
- speakerespecially when described by a man like Judson Powell.
- speakerThe Watts Towers is a product of the efforts of one man
- speakerSimon Rodia. He worked thirty three years constructing the towers.
- speakerThey were built with bits of tile, pieces of steel
- speakercement. He worked as a tile setter. And each evening he would come
- speakerhome and work on the towers. He came from Italy originally. He lived here
- speakeruntil the nineteen fifty seven. He left only because his home caught a
- speakerfire and he was burned out. He went to live with one of his sons in San Francisco.
- speakerAnd he lived in San Francisco from nine hundred fifty seven into a few months ago
- speakerwhen he passed away. The only explanation that he ever gave for constructing the towers. And he
- speakerwas often asked, was that there are nice people here in America.
- speakerAnd he wanted to do something for the nice people
- speakerRight now we have a group of approximately two thousand to
- speakertwenty-five hundred people
- speakeron 103rd Street between Compton and Grande. There has been some looting.
- speakerOn a hot day in nineteen sixty five some of the nice people of the
- speakerWatts area participated in race riots that resulted in thirty five deaths
- speakeralmost one thousand casualties and millions of dollars in damages.
- speakerAs a white person what kind of excuse do you have? I hold nothing against you. But what do you have to
- speakerWhat really happened in Los Angeles? And why did that happen. And how can similar
- speakeroutbreaks be prevented in other parts of the nation? To find out, the Group W Stations of the
- speakerWestinghouse Broadcasting Company, in cooperation with the New York University School of Social
- speakerWork, Alec Rosen, Dean, sent a team of reporters and sociologists to Los
- speakerAngeles. This is a summary of their findings and answer to these
- speakerquestions asked by Dean Rosen.
- speakerWhat is the meaning of the Los Angeles riots? Were they merely accidental actions by
- speakerirresponsible criminal elements, needing only increased political action to curb them?
- speakerOr were they acts of collective violence that were symptoms of more serious social conditions
- speakerand therefore requiring deep rooted political and economic changes.
- speakerThis is Los Angeles profile of a riot.
- speakerYour reporter, Walter McGraw. Group W reporter Stan Brooks was
- speakerassigned the job of talking to many white Los Angelinos about the riots and the
- speakerNegro community. He began his assignment in the cab that drove him from the
- speakerairport to a Sunset Strip hotel. Said his driver,
- speaker"I did not believe it would happen in here in Los Angeles, where Negroes have such high
- speakerstandards of living. New cars, new houses, high wages. There's
- speakerno reason for this to happen here in Los Angeles."
- speaker"The Negroes out here we had integrated prefectly. The Negro out here has never been as
- speakerbold or as ornery as I've seen in the Middle West. And
- speakercertainly the Watts area is not a ghetto.It's a long way from it. And they all had
- speakertelevision sets. Well now this isn't poverty." Have you been to the Watts area? No, I never have.
- speakerIf we were to allow ourselves an early generalization in this report. It would
- speakerbe that many of the Los Angelinos who spoke of the Watts area and the Negro
- speakercommunities surrounding it with the greatest of assurance had never
- speakeror, at best seldom, been there. Among these must be counted
- speakerLos Angeles mayor Sam Yorty.
- speaker"The Negro citizens of Los Angeles are shown by all of the tests made
- speakernationally to be better off than those in any other part of the country.
- speakerAnd of course relations between the races here are excellent. But city
- speakeris limited in what it can do for a great deluge of newcomers like
- speakerthis. For many of these people have come to the city unequipped for urban life.They're
- speakerundereducated, through no fault of the citizens of Los Angles.
- speakerA less casual observer of Negro migration is William White
- speakerJr of the Los Angeles Office of Economic Opportunity.
- speakerHere in Southern California was the rural southern Negro, who is trying
- speakerto escape the conditions, the horrible conditions, in which he lived in the rural
- speakerSouth. And there's the urban negro who comes from such places like Chicago,
- speakerNew York, Philadelphia and Detroit and so on where the conditions are just
- speakeras bad in terms of economic depression as they are for the rural southern Negro.
- speakerWhen people arrive here in Southern California, people are looking
- speakerfor opportunities to advance themselves, to move ahead.
- speakerBut according to John Buggs, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Human Relations
- speakerCommission. This is what the Negro finds when it comes to the promised
- speakerland.
- speakerThis is not an open city in terms of the ability of people to move without
- speakerrestriction. So that about ninety percent of the Negro population in the city of
- speakerLos Angeles lived in about nine of
- speakerthe four hundred and fifty two square miles that is Los
- speakerAngeles. Rarely has a week passed in the last five years in
- speakerwhich some incident of tension developing out of the Negroes' attempt to
- speakermove into several parts of this community has not only come to
- speakerour attention, but we've had to have staff people out there working on it.
- speakerHousing opportunities for the Negro are limited. What about jobs?
- speakerI work for a large employment agency downtown, and I know what we did with the applications of
- speakerNegroes. We shunted them aside because we knew it was very little use sending
- speakera Negro out to a job where he was not likely to be accepted.
- speakerDespite this, according to William White Jr. , some few migrating Negro
- speakerdo make good.
- speakerA person arrives in Los Angeles and settles in a particular community,
- speakerAnd maybe he's there for six months or a year. But he sees an opportunity to get a
- speakerbetter job. And so he moves. Now, I am speaking, for the moment, about the guy who may have
- speakersome training some skill and some potential. for employment and
- speakerthese very often are the same people who can provide leadership in the community but by this
- speakertime he has removed himself from the quote "ghetto," and he no
- speakerlonger really speaks their language. His thinking is perhaps more closely
- speakeraligned to the thinking of members of the power structure.
- speakerAdds John Buggs,
- speaker"I think to some extent the doors are wide open for Negroes who have
- speakerthe skills that are being sought by industry these days. There are many Negroes who are
- speakermaking ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars a year, working for large
- speakerindustrial organizations in this community. But the Negro who is
- speakeruntrained, who has an eighth grade or ninth grade education, who has no skill,
- speakerhas not really felt anything that approaches progress
- speakerin terms of job opportunities. One out of every one hundred white
- speakerpersons in this county was receiving welfare. One out of twenty-
- speakerseven Mexican-Americans was receiving that aid. One out of every ten
- speakerNegroes in the county was receiving that aid. Here is ten percent of the
- speakerpopulation, that I doubt very seriously has felt any impact
- speakerof the economic progress that a few negroes have made.
- speakerWhile the name Watts became associated with the word "riot" in the headlines, the
- speakerWatts area is only a rather small section of the Los Angeles Negro community.
- speakerFor Group W, Dean Alex Rosen of The New York University School of Social work.
- speakerstudied all of these nine thickly populated square miles. In his
- speakerfindings.
- speakerNinety percent of Los Angeles' half million Negroes live in the Watts ghetto. Few are native
- speakerCalifornians. Most of the adults have less than a high school education and are unskilled.
- speakerOne child in three comes from a broken home, where there's usually no father and the school dropout
- speakerrate for these children is twice that for white children. One family in four
- speakersubsists on incomes below the poverty line. Perhaps more significant because the
- speakerhopelessness and despair involved in the unemployment rate which is between twenty five and
- speakerthirty percent. The significance of this statistic becomes clear when we compare
- speakerit with the unemployment rate in the depths of the worst depression our country ever had, in the nineteen
- speakerthirty's, when the unemployment rate was only twenty five percent. Economically
- speakertherefore the Negro community in the Watts area of Los Angeles has been going through a
- speakerdepression more severe than any in American history. Those who do work on
- speakermenials--porters, janitors, maids, unskilled. This is a community as
- speakerwell of overcrowded schools with overworked teachers and unprepared and unmotivated
- speakerchildren. One may ask several questions about communities like Watts. For
- speakerinstance, how does a mother keep her teenage son off the streets if he is a school dropout,
- speakerunskilled or with little realistic prospect for employment? How maintain family cohesion
- speakerwhen the entire family must eat sleep and live in a single room or in rooms shared with other
- speakerfamilies as we saw them in Watts when we visited and studied the community? How
- speakermaintain hope and confidence in a community where one sees so much despair and failure?
- speakerThis despair and disappointment of the Negro in the American dream was perhaps best expressed by
- speakera bitter Negro teenager, who said, "This is a land of milk and honey
- speakerbut only if you got the blue eyes."
- speakerAnd what happens if you lack both blue eyes and occupational
- speakerskills? William White Jr.
- speakerThe people who do not have the skills, who do not have economic
- speakersecurity, begin to lose all hope for any
- speakerpossibilities of advancement or improvement. And so the festering
- speakerprocess begins.
- speakerThe potential was here, let's say the bomb was here, with a fuse.
- speakerBut the match that lit that fuse was this unfortunate incident, which involved the California Highway
- speakerPatrol in arresting two Negro young men.
- speakerThe two young men mentioned by Los Angeles police chief William Parker where the
- speakerbrothers Frye, who later pleaded guilty to drunk driving and assault. And still
- speakerlater changed their pleas to not guilty. Also on trial, at least in the
- speakerpublic mind, as a result of that arrest action are the police authorities
- speakerof both Los Angeles and of the state of California. Both Chief Parker [Parker, William H.] and Mayor
- speakerYorty [Yorty, Same] discussed this arrest with Group W reporter Stan Brooks.
- speakerThe Highway Patrol is basically a traffic enforcment operation. Those men
- speakerare neither trained or experienced in handling this explosive
- speakerNegro problem, as our men are.
- speakerWe've handled instance in the Negro community. Hundreds of hundred of them without ever setting off a
- speakerriot. But these officers came in without the proper instruction. And did
- speakerthings that our police department would not do. Conducting a long sobriety test
- speakerout in the open with a mob forming. If we have to arrest a Negro in that tense area,
- speakerwe arrest him, put him in the car, and take him away from there. We don't stay there and wait until a mob forms.
- speakerBut the Highway Patrol persisted in staying on the scene even though advised and cautioned by
- speakerour men to leave there. They did not heed the advice.
- speakerThis was actually the match that lit the fuse that loaded the potential bomb.
- speakerWas the spark that set off the Los Angeles violence just an accident or
- speakerjust the result of inept handling? Talking to Group W reporter George
- speakerBarber, Wesley R. Brazier, Executive Director of the Urban League, saw
- speakerthe episode in a more sinister light.
- speakerThe led police brutality was not by accident, it was by design. A Negro
- speakerstopped the state highway patrolman and informed them of a Negro
- speakerdriving in an erratic manner and that he was drunk.
- speakerNow the officers pursued this individual.It was then that the mother came out
- speakerand was reprimanding her son until a larger crowd grew up.
- speakerAnd then she started lambasting the police.
- speakerStill undetermined. The true story of what happened. No matter rest.
- speakerPerhaps the official investigation of the riot will clear up the mystery of its origin. But
- speakeron the night of August eleventh,. nobody was in the mood to investigate. And rumors
- speakerabout the Frye arrest began to spread across the Negro belt. One policeman stationed in
- speakerthe area told us.
- speakerI know if I was a Negro, and I heard all my life that the
- speakerworst enemy I had is a police officer, and I' m standing on a street corner
- speakerthe heat is 95. I've been sweating all day. Somebody runs up to me
- speakerAnd says there's a police officer around the corner killing a colored woman with a baby
- speakerI would tend to be excited. One of these minor things is floating around.
- speakerThere were many such rumors. What should have been a minor, everyday incident became
- speakerwithin minutes of a major explosion. And here is Dean Rosen. [Rosen, Alex]
- speakersociological study of previous racial riots reveals that. It often begins with the
- speakerstimulus. Often of a trivial nature. A crowd gathers and rumors fly.
- speakerThe crowd Mills about the mutual stimulation.There's a communication of excitement. And
- speakerthen mob anonymity seems to absolve the individual from responsibility for destructive
- speakeractions. Brutal emotions that then arise which are given sanction by the very
- speakerexistence of the mob. The riots in Watts. Substantially followed this pattern.
- speaker"I'd say the mood was pretty ugly."
- speakerThat comment by a cop was recorded on the first night of the rioting.
- speakerWhenever we moved up and down the street, we were continually bombarded with rocks
- speakerand bottles, anything they could throw. There were three or four officers, myself included in the group.
- speakerSomebody stabbed me.
- speakerThe physical violence was accompanied by looting. The victims' stores were often owned by
- speakerwhites.
- speakerThey feel that the merchants are taking the money out of the community. They feel that the
- speakermerchants are out there to get all they can get.
- speakerAs a Negro, writer Louis Lomax [Lomax, Louis E.] could walk through the riot areas in comparative safety.
- speakerI saw a man pick up a five-seat sofa and put it on his head,
- speakertook it home and came back and got the matching chair.
- speakerWe got an expression from people who, for whatever reason, have no stakes in this society
- speakerThis was the genius of the phrase "Burn, baby, burn." What that phrase really means is
- speaker"It didn't belong to my daddy. It doesn't belong to me. It won't belong to my children. So, burn the damn thing down!"
- speaker"You can't have it either!" There are also people who are convinced
- speakerthat society offers them no honest way out.
- speakerAdded a police official,
- speakerPeople were going in and out of the stores, carrying things out. And at this time, there were children
- speakerthe young adults and middle-aged people. And they were amazed that they were put
- speakerunder arrest.
- speakerMeanwhile hundreds of teenagers and young men began throwing rocks at passing cars.
- speakerThey were indiscriminate about whose cars they threw it through
- speakerIt didn't make no difference who it was, they were just fighting back at the power structure of Los Angeles.
- speakerIn the comparative safety of a police station, this paper goods salesman didn't feel
- speakermuch like part of the power structure of anything. As he told a story in
- speakerthe middle of the riots.
- speakerWhat happened was I was traveling east on Imperial and a rock
- speakercame through the window and hit me. I don't know where. Then another came through andhit me in the leg.
- speakerAnd then out of nowhere came about twenty of them. They jumped all over the car and tried to grab the
- speakerwheel. And I tried to get out of there. I put my foot on the accelerator and just wove around cars.
- speakerand then rocks and everything started flying. And one of the kids who was grabbing on the car
- speakerhad a knife, and I swung the corner. He fell off
- speakerAnd I drove until another rock hit me. And I must have, I don't know, temporarily lost consciousness.
- speakerThe car smashed, I guess, into a pole. I staggered out, and these
- speakerMexicans pulled me into their building. And I stayed there until the police came in
- speakerwhen I came out, the car fire department was there. I think the car is on
- speakerfire. It must have been turned upside down. And was demolished.
- speakerWhat did his attackers say to this man they tried to kill?
- speakerNot a word. They just screamed. They just screamed. Not a word I could understand.
- speakerBesides the rock throwers. The looters and burners. There were on the streets thousands of what
- speakercould be called observers.
- speakerAbout twenty five percent who have a sort of carnival picnic atmosphere about
- speakerit and who were either vocally egging the kids on or
- speakerwhose very demeanor indicated that they were enjoying the
- speakerspectacle. There was another twenty five percent who unquestionably were not
- speakeronly concerned but actively and vocally opposed to what was going on and
- speakeryou could hear them. But about half of the group were just there
- speakerlooking in a sort of somber mood and one couldn't really tell what
- speakerthey were thinking whether they were for it or whether they were against it. I think it was a great deal of
- speakerambivalence on their part.
- speakerTo John Buggs' [Bugg, John Allen] breakdown, Dean Rosen adds,
- speaker"When normal outlets for emotion and feeling are absent; when the very folkways
- speakerof our society advocate activity, doing something about one's condition; when the
- speakermass media of communication--TV, radio, newspapers--stimulate rising
- speakerexpectations for material consumption. When one feels outside the mainstream of
- speakeraffluence, of the good life, of the great society, then something will happen,
- speakerand it did in Los Angeles. Those who allegedly incited the riots
- speakerwho encouraged by example the participation of others, who usually were law biding
- speakercitizens, could not have done so had not these feelings of alienation of
- speakerprotest already existed in the minds and hearts of these people."
- speakersaid the rioter, "It was a beautiful job, if you can understand beauty within chaos."
- speakerAfter that first, if not beautiful, at least chaotic hot night of rioting,
- speakerThere was a breather and already questions were being asked. Question One:
- speakerWas this unexpected? Not according to Louis Lomax.
- speakerJohn Buggs went in to Chief Parker [Parker, William H.] five years ago with a blueprint
- speakerand he missed it by a block and a half in terms of where it was going to happen. With a whole blueprint on what you do to stop it.
- speakerHe got thrown out, which is much more frightening. On the first day of the riot we had it
- speakerquelled and got thrown out again. John Buggs had it in his hand. He had it quelled Thursday
- speakerafternoon.
- speakerWe had the kids that were raising hell. We got commitment from them.
- speakerNow, you can do this. But do know the problems you make
- speakerAnd the three conditions, interestingly enough, that those kids set up
- speakerOne get the white policemen out of here. Give us Negro cops. Two get the television camermen down here.
- speakerThird, the police allow them to have a party in the middle of Allentown for two hours, from nine to eleven. And they would go home.
- speakerJohn Buggs' version. I think anyone who feels that he can go down into a
- speakersituation like that and call people off is deluding himself. The only thing that could
- speakerhave been done was to find the responsible people in Watts. And the responsible people were
- speakernot the businessmen. They were not the quote "good people" endquote. They were the
- speakerkids. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-year-old kids who could turn it
- speakeron or turn it off. They were the responsible people in that situation.
- speakerAnd they were willing to do something about it under certain conditions, and those conditions were
- speakernot met.
- speakerNo, that's not quite right. I don't think that there were any teen groups that had any control there.
- speakerMayor Sam Yorty. There was a meeting called on Thursday by some
- speakerpoliticians and power seekers. And this resulted in a very inflammatory
- speakersituation where one young Negro was allowed to stand up before this crowd and then
- speakerwith television cameras grinding and tell how they would get Whitey and they were going to
- speakerburn that night and so forth. And there's no question in mind at least of Chief
- speakerParker that this was a very inflammatory episode.
- speaker[Parker, William H. speaking] This meeting was held without any consultation with law enforcement whatsoever. They have no way of knowing whether the
- speakerpeople they
- speakermet with were or were not involved in the riot situation. Fortunately these people can't seem to meet unless there is a television camera
- speakerpresent. And I believe that this meeting magnified the problem and added to our difficulties.
- speakerBut the statement was made by some of these people that if the police department would just stay
- speakerout of the area that the mob would dissipate and that there wouldn't be this
- speakertension. So we actually tried that. And we kept our police out on
- speakerthe perimeter. And instead of that helping, it made it worse because the mob formed and
- speakerthen was free to do as they please without anyone to break it up. And this tactic failed.
- speakerAnd, again, it indicates the fallacy of people coming in who are not expert in the field. Or who have no
- speakerresponsibility for meeting the problem and then still attempt to superimpose their
- speakeropinions on you. Then if they don't work, why, of course, they don't have to take responsibility
- speakerfor the failure.
- speakerCould John Buggs and the other Negro leaders have brought peace on that hot Thursday?
- speakerThey feel they should at least have been allowed to try it. However Negro councilman
- speakerBilly Mills says this,
- speaker"You had a situation in town which could possibly have burned down the whole city if it
- speakerhad not been contained. Now I'm not one of those who would say that you should sit down with
- speakera bunch of rioting kids find out what their demands are; withdraw the
- speakerkind of law enforcement that they do not approve of; and send in the kind of law
- speakerenforcement that they approve of; on the hope that this is going to quell a riot. I
- speakerthink that would be total abandon. I think that you would have found that the riot would have gone on
- speakeranyway.
- speakerAt any rate, the riot went on. And Chief Parker's nerves wore thin as heard in this
- speakerpress conference recorded at that time.
- speakerWe live differently in Los Angeles. We are spread over four hundred and fifty-seven square miles. Now, if we were up against this in New York
- speakerthey would be throwing bricks at us from five story buildings.
- speakerBut we don't have five story buildings. Instead of having them up and concentrated in a
- speakersmall area, we've got them spread all over Hell's haf acre.
- speakerThe difficulty riot in Hell's half acre went on through Thursday Friday and Saturday.
- speakerPredictions were that it would spread to other cities. But sparks from the burnings in
- speakerWatts fell on only two other cities. Why is this happening?
- speakerasked whites from coast to coast. Civil rights laws have been passed. Integration is
- speakermoving. The Negro was getting his way. Why is he still dissatisfied? What does
- speakerhe want? Why riots in nine hundred sixty five? Dean
- speakerRosen.
- speaker[Rosen, Alec] This apparent paradox can be explained by the concept of relative deprivation. By
- speakerthat, I mean that we have found in a considerable number of research projects in the
- speakerarea of social work and sociology that the closer a man comes to a goal,
- speakerthe more distressed he is psychologically the distance between him and the goal. We have found in
- speakerresearch in prisons, that a man beginning a prison sentence is less likely to try to
- speakerescape, than the man at the end of a prison sentence, who already psychologically is beginning to
- speakerfeel like a free man. The American Negro community is much better in its status than it
- speakerwas, let's say, at the turn of the century. There are more Negroes making over five thousand dollars a year. There are more
- speakerNegroes in political life or there are more Negroes who are in the professions, who are schoolteachers
- speakersocial workers working for the government and so on. But this is referring to absolute
- speakernumbers. Relatively the Negro has not made as great progress as the
- speakerwhite person. And it is this relative deprivation, this awareness
- speakerthat he sees the good life all about him and his painful awareness
- speakerthat that he is not sharing in this good life explains this apparent paradox.
- speakerLos Angeles Profile of a Riot will continue in just a moment.
