He thinks it’s much less likely that a police conflict today could spiral into the kind of violence Watts saw 50 years ago. Rumors spread that cops had roughed up an expectant black mother.
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Even though Detroit rioting in 1967 surpassed the death and damage toll in Los Angeles, Watts remains a common reference point when protests against police turn violent. The Watts riots broke out August 11, 1965, nearly 50 years ago and raged for most of a week.
“I was watching television. The police department is aware of the past”, said Gregory Williams, director of archives and special collections at California State University, Dominguez Hills. That short meeting began a long friendship between my father and her. I was honored to attend her 90th birthday party last year and thank her for what she did for my dad.
But while mistrust of law enforcement grows in the rest of the country, the reverse is slowly occurring in Watts, thanks to recent efforts on improving police-community relations.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson was six at the time and remembers being two blocks away from the riots on that first day. “It was transforming”.
Most of the businesses looted and torched were owned by whites.
“We got them to see us as a partner”, Dr. Crouch, who worked to broker a peace treaty between rival gangs and led efforts to get guns out of Watts, told NPR. “It was a sense of the first time of hitting back, striking back”. While there had been – and would later be – other race riots in the ’60s, the violence that happened in Watts was especially destructive and deadly.
The desegregation of the South was still fresh in people’s memories and the Voting Rights Act, which lifted barriers preventing many African Americans from voting, had just been signed days earlier.
But many underlying causes for the unrest have largely remained unaddressed. The project builds on thoughtful redevelopment plans already created, including many designed by Watts residents, and lays out a vision for practical, forward-looking solutions on local issues from jobs and social equity to public health and natural resource conservation.
“The deeper structural economic inequality, the police violence – these are hallmarks of the urban experience and we see these replicating”.
Holland went through each of the negatives and found one that said Watts on it.
In 1992, those hallmarks reignited Los Angeles tempers after the police officers who had beat up a young black man, Rodney King, were acquitted.
More than 1,000 people rioted that evening, according to the Times.
Jordan says the community has also transformed their relationship with the police.
But the frustrations that gave rise to past riots continue to simmer over.
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“There’s always something boiling”.
