Profile of a Riot

Since the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 a team of reporters and sociologists have been probing beneath the surface to find out what really happened and why and what to do in order to prevent similar outbreaks in other parts of the nation. Here is Stan Brooks to describe the slum town where the riots erupted the riots that shook Los Angeles swept over a 50 square mile area known as the black channel but the nation's horrors centered on a place called What's the poorest of all the negro slums in this lush land of make believe. At first glance you're impressed by the wide streets the palm trees that jut high in the sky and the rows of neat bungalows smothered with heavy foliage. But when you take a closer look as I did you can on a scape the misery that hangs over Watts like the smog hangs over Los Angeles Harlem with palm trees as the way sociologist Alex Rosen of NYU describes it. But he goes on. It really looks more like Tobacco Road and most of the people I spoke with the people who unlike most of the city have actually been to Watts and have seen the poverty agree that doctors may not appear to have a claim dilapidated a burden.

Another made the famed condition like a like a typical. Better my house is private dwelling and. It's not comparable to some of the slums that we you know. Yeah they really are not that much different and so having them up and not a very small area we've got them spread all over hell's half acre. The words of police Chief William Parker and Watts is indeed hell's half acre of black ghetto locked in ironically by the freeways that speed traffic across the sprawling city of angels. The crime rate is double the rest of the cities. Unemployment is high and still climbing. With one out of every three or four out of work. It's a land of broken homes and broken dreams. Yet each month a thousand or more negroes come up from the south seeking the land of milk and honey. If you find it. And so this port of entry the staging area turns into a trap a way station to nowhere where hate and hopelessness fester. The negro middle class forgot about

watts. The white community hardly ever knew it existed. We have one end of the spectrum success and opportunities begging for people and never the other people who are piling into this town bring with them no skills but a memory. And who on the whole I suspect are not even retrained noble and so the festering process began. And. Finally if there are no escape was developed. We have an explosion of gigantic peaks. Hopelessness of fury of anxiety of hate on the part of people who just saw no other way of expressing themselves. This is what's for Lorne forgotten festering. This is Stan Brooks. You have heard the first of a series of reports produced by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the New York University School of Social Work. A special hour long documentary at Los Angeles a profile of a riot will be broadcast by this and other Member

Stations of the national educational radio network. Since the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 a team of reporters and sociologists have been probing beneath the surface to find out what really happened why and what to do in order to prevent similar outbreaks in other parts of the nation. Here Alex Rosen dean of the New York University School of Social Work describes the atmosphere in Watts before the riots. On August 11th the negro's of a community known as Watts in Los Angeles erupted in riots leaving 35 dead hundreds wounded an engine 4000 jailed of whom 500 were teenagers and millions of dollars in damages. What were the conditions of these people. Ninety percent of Los Angeles half million negroes live in the Watts ghetto. Few are native Californians as most have emigrated from the south since World War 2. Most of the adults have less than a high school education and are unskilled. One child in three comes from a broken home where there's usually no father and a school

dropout rate for these children is twice that for white children. One family in four subsists on incomes below the poverty line. Perhaps most significant in understanding the causation of this right is the hopelessness and despair involved in the unemployment rate which is between 25 and 30 percent. The significance of this statistic becomes clear when we compare it with the unemployment rate in the depths of the worst depression our country ever had in the 1980s when the unemployment rate was only 25 percent. Economically therefore the Negro community in the Watts area of Los Angeles has been going through a depression more severe than any in American history. Those who do work are menials porters janitors maids unskilled. This is a community as well of overcrowded schools with overworked teachers and unprepared and unmotivated children. One may ask several questions about communities like Watts for instance how does a mother keep her teenage son off the streets if he is a school dropout unskilled

and with little realistic prospect for employment. How maintain family cohesion when the entire family must eat sleep and live in a single room or a room shared with other families. As we saw them in Watts when we visited and studied the community how maintain hope and confidence in a community where one sees so much despair and failure and how maintain respect for law enforcement when the police harus negroes and treat them in an insulting manner almost as a matter of course. The total situation here has produced a Negro community in which people can live out their lives without any meaningful contact on an equal status basis with white people. We have learned in our research that friendship and mutual understanding cannot develop in the absence of this kind of contact. These explosive passions we have just witnessed has shocked the American citizenry into an awareness of this infected pocket of misery unemployment and despair that prevailed in Watts and Los Angeles. This despair and disappointment of

the negro in the American Dream was perhaps best expressed by a bitter negro teenager who said this is a land of milk and honey but only if you've got the blue eyes you'll just heard Alex Rosen dean of New York University School of Social Work in another chapter in a series of reports produced by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company. A special hour long documentary A Los Angeles profile of a riot will be broadcast by this and other Member Stations of the national educational radio network. Since the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 a team of reporters and sociologists have been probing beneath the surface to find out what really happened why and what to do in order to prevent similar outbreaks in other parts of the nation. Here Dr. Bergen Evans professor of English at Northwestern University asks the question what is a slum.

The Watts area of Los Angeles in which the rioting took place was especially at first in news reports referred to as a slum. But eastern reporters arriving on the scene with preconceived ideas about slums were struck by how unlike Harlem or Chicago's South Side the area was there were wide streets small long and many not unattractive houses. They knew there was much unemployment and many people run relief but the place didn't seem what they had expected a slum to see. Well no one knows exactly what a slum is the word itself is a mystery word that rose out of the underworld in the early 19th century and then meant a room usually a small dingy room such as a member of the underworld would use. This is led some to assume that the word is a shortening of slumber. But there is no proof of this. At any rate it soon came to mean a collection of mean squalid rooms and then any area composed of such habitations and that's what it still means. So the question shifts to what is meanness and squalor that perhaps half the human race at this moment might regard the Watts area as a desirable place to live and envy its looted stores would still

not prevent its biggest slum. There is a squalor of the spirit as well as of the body a dreary hopelessness a numbness of slow frustration and a depressing sense of irrevocable exclusion from even the chance of the good life that would make a neighborhood a slum. Even though the streets were wide in the sunshine bright in the first slums the dreadful warrens of the great English cities in the early years of the Industrial Revolution gin tuberculosis and evangelical Christianity afforded a number of safety valves. But the people of watts apparently want something else. They have a place in the actual sun. They want a place in the metaphorical sun. Men cannot live by bread alone. Even if it's handed to him free from farm surpluses we may simply have to revise and enlarge the meaning of the word slum. You just heard Dr. Bergen Evans in another chapter in a series of reports produced by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the New York University School of Social Work. A special hour long documentary A Los Angeles profile of Iraq that will be broadcast by this

and other Member Stations of the national educational radio network. Since the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 a team of reporters and sociologists have been probing beneath the surface to find out what really happened why and what to do and how to prevent similar outbreaks in other parts of the nation. Here is how some of the people in Watts view with the arrest that triggered the riots. The bomb was here with a fuse that they matched that led to us this unfortunate incident which involved a another police agency arresting two young men the young men referred to by Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker where two brothers named Fry who later pleaded guilty but the holocaust their arrest set off was not so easily settled. This is Group W reporter Walter McGraw. Question Why did a simple drunken driving arrest set off a riot.

One answer from Mayor Sam Yorkie we've taken great but cautions to prevent any instant between the place and the negroes that might set off a riot. But in this climate came some state highway patrol officers who followed a suspected drunk or reckless driver into the area and they evidently did not receive the same kind of instruction as our police because we've handled instance in the Negro community hundreds and hundreds of them without ever setting off a riot. But these officers came in without the proper instruction and did things that our police department would not do. Conducting along so Brian to test out in the open with the mob forming if we have to arrest them they grow in that tense area. We arrest him put him in the car and take him away from there was the spark that set off the Los Angeles violence. Just an accident or just the result of inept handling and talking to group reporter George barber. Wesley R. Brazier executive director of the Urban League saw the

episode in a more sinister like action by state highway patrolmen. Driving in the attic mad and that he was drop the suit this individual had less than that about a game out was reprimanding her web and then she started asking the police the result of an accident in aptitude or a plot. The result was the same according to Chief Parker. This was actually the match that lit the fuse on the board and shoe bomb. Perhaps the officials have missed the geisha of the riot will clear up the mystery of its origins but on the night of Wednesday August 11th a hot night in Los Angeles. Nobody was in the mood to investigate and rumors about the frier arrest spread across the negro belt. This is Walter McGraw.

You have heard another in a series of reports produced by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the New York University School of Social Work. A special hour long documentary A Los Angeles profile of a riot will be broadcast by this and other Member Stations of the national educational radio network. Since the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 a team of reporters and sociologists have been probing beneath the surface to find out what really happened why and what to do in order to prevent similar outbreaks in other parts of the nation. Stan Brooks describes the police version of the arrest that triggered the riots. What makes a quiet community explode. How can a seemingly routine drunk driving arrest touched off the kind of bloody rioting that rocked Los Angeles. There are many reasons. Together they tell the story. There was the heat 95 was the high on that fateful Wednesday and Watts was steaming. There was the frustration the

federal poverty program was bogged down in political bickering and the poor people of the slum saw their dreams crumble. There was the smoldering hatred of the police justified or not. And as day turned into night there was the arrest of a negro Marquette Frye for drunk driving. It happens every day in arrests like this. But on August 11th it triggered a bloodbath. Fry himself blames the California Highway Patrol for antagonizing the crowd by making nasty remarks and brandishing a shotgun. There is still some confusion over just what happened but the rumors that spread through the slums that night gave only one side. They told me the police had been giving the boy a ticket and when the boy drew back they jumped him. Is the way one negro heard it. They told me the boy's mother came there then and that she was pregnant and he goes on the police hit or kicked her anyway and then he adds the telling words. That's what they told me. I don't know if it was true on that night in Los Angeles in that climate of hate and hopelessness. It didn't really matter whether it were true or not. The festering frustration

needed an outlet and this was it. And so the people fired up by the rumors rioted a white police officer in Watts told me I don't know if I was a negro and I heard all my life. Worst Enemy I had a police officer. I'm standing on a street corner. He was 95. I've been sweating all day and somebody runs up to me. There was a police officer around the corner killing a colored woman with a baby. I want to be excited because I want to be my own rooms you know what you know. And a negro in Watts told me the same thing. I've heard conflicting stories that man was handcuffed in the woman with handcuffs behind her back and they put up on rumors and riots. A classic pattern as Alex Rosen dean of the School of Social Work at New York University explains a sociological study of previous racial riots reveals that it often begins with the stimulus often of a trivial nature. A crowd gathers and

rumors fly the crowd Mills about the mutual stimulation. There is a communication of excitement and then anonymity seems to absolve the individual from responsibility for destructive actions and brutal emotions then arise which are given sanctioned by the very existence of the mob. The riots in Watts substantially followed this pattern. A hot night in August a routine arrest rumors and resentment all the preface to a riot. This is Stan Brooks. You have heard another in a series of reports produced by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the New York University School of Social Work. A special hour long documentary A Los Angeles profile of a riot will be broadcast by this and other Member Stations of the National Education or radio network. Since the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 a team of reporters and sociologists have been probing beneath the surface to find out what really happened why and what to

do in order to prevent similar outbreaks in other parts of the nation. Dr. Bergen Evans professor of English at Northwestern University discusses the meaning of the word hoodlums. The violence in Los Angeles Chicago Springfield New York and almost everywhere else that it occurs is certain to be attributed to hoodlums and teenagers. NO ONE exactly knows why young rowdies are called hoodlums except as a general extension of the name of some youthful gangsters in San Francisco in the 70s. But why they were called hoodlums is uncertain. Some think it was a twisting of the Irish Muldoon. Others with better justification think it's the Bavarian dialect word Khoda Lum which means exactly what hoodlums means for the barbarians had been to 100 years ago and every city has had them. The astonishing thing about modern city life is not how dangerous it is but comparatively how safe it is. We forget that up to 150 years ago a woman never went out alone never at night certainly and rarely by day and that men went out at night only in groups and armed

in the late 17th and early 18th century London was terrorized by Ruffins variously called mun scours Hector's knickers hock about some Mohawks. There was no modern police to restrain them and they were dangerous indeed and they had their riot at the garden riot in London in 1780 did far more damage than any of our so-called race riots of yet done. Most rioters and looters by the way have always been young people people with lots of undirected energy and no stake in the established order. An elderly man goes to bed at night he doesn't go out and loot something throws a spark into an explosive social situation and a great deal of pent up resentment finds release. The Romans bought them off with bread and circuses. The middle ages usually had a plague and prevent things getting too bad if there wasn't a plague at hand there was always a crusade or a war. Henry the Eighth tried to exterminate them by hanging. It's been estimated that some 60000 of his subjects were hanged during his reign and almost all young men what we would call teenagers. But it didn't seem to do any good for there were just as many in the next

range the 18th century had the press being the 19th century had cotton mills in India but none of it as we say worked. Young men kept on being born and those that were restless and frustrated and idle got into trouble. The word hoodlum doesn't bother me as much as the more common teenager. That's an expression that annoys me. It's vastly vague. There's all the difference in life between 13 and 19 and it's offensively patronizing. It assumes that the spirit of Booth Tarkington Penrod that young people are cute or amusing or absurd or dangerous they're usually called hoodlums or punks if they're dangerous teenagers when they're being condescended to whereas they are simply human beings young human beings each one an individual troubled desperate tortured by pressures they don't understand resentful of authority and at the same time frightened of it. What to do about their problems I don't know. Social Order of course must be maintained by force if necessary. But we won't begin to solve these problems until we accept people as people black or white young or old.

You've just heard Dr. Bergen Evans in another chapter in a series of reports produced by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the New York University School of Social Work. A special hour long documentary A Los Angeles profile of a riot will be broadcast by this and other Member Stations of the national educational radio network. Since the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 a team of reporters and sociologists have been probing beneath the surface to find out what really happened why and what to do in order to prevent similar outbreaks in other parts of the nation. Globe w reporter Walter McGraw investigates some of the reasons for the riots what caused the riots in Los Angeles. Many of the answers given they don't think it was the negro person you know and they think it was Mom's Brownian from the eastern states to start the riots with the colored people. These riots are very similar to the riots which broke out in Rochester New York.

Philadelphia Farnum and several other cities. Obviously it was caused by so nice an organization that really come with behind the whole thing. What caused the riots. One school of thought blames outside organizations though there is little agreement on the political coloration of the alleged organizing forces or on the amount of participation of any one of the groups for instance Urban League director Wesley R. Brazier's says. I think that like most of the players can make or let me try it at a meeting in which he stated he could have stopped it immediately and I bet making the most of them had their little fingers and it certainly levels to the pale Ian. But I think I mean it always come in at the Knight bow and you know but I think people are

watching when and if you're probing for logically. You may want to dig at this point. The gang who cooperated to keep the thing going a gang ordinarily fight each other in the street. Writer Louis Lomax as you've just heard gives less importance to the influence of Communists than does Mayor Sam Yorkie who says they at the very least set up the atmosphere for the riots while police chief William Parker does not disagree with you already. He does add this thought it is not the case and I think it's always present ever this trouble. You know they move around all of these things you compromise on them much frankly as much as I am an icon in this notoriously show. I'm Mark of sun. The behavior of the American people because I think if the American people I let into the situation got a responsibility to live with the people who found it. Well a few of us would disagree that in a democracy the final responsibility for any political action rests with the people. It's this tendency to

oversimplify that perhaps makes Chief Parker most vulnerable to the critics who demand his ouster harder. More detailed reasons for the riot are needed. These will be explored in the next few segments of this report on a profile of a riot you have heard another in a series of reports produced by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the New York University School of Social Work. A special hour long documentary A Los Angeles profile of a riot will be broadcast by this and other Member Stations of the national educational radio network. Since the riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 a team of reporters and sociologists have been probing beneath the surface to find out what really happened why and what to do in order to prevent similar outbreaks in other parts of the nation. I thought the man picked up a 5 0 1 and put it on the air and took it home and came back and got the matching tear.

That was writer Louis Lomax an interested observer of the Los Angeles riots and this is Walter McGraw. Many are the reasons advanced for the riots outside influences police brutality and perhaps most often lack of communication between the citizens of what is now simply called Watts and the rest of Los Angeles. Louis Lomax says the looting and the bloodshed and most of all the burning was an attempt to communicate. You've got an expression from people who for whatever reason have no stake in this society. This was the genius of the phrase Burn baby burn. But that phrase really means it didn't belong my daddy it doesn't belong to me. It won't belong to my jodel. So burn the damned thing. Now you can have it either. They are also people who are convinced that this society offers them no honest way out I think in the third book of the republic. Plato says that poverty consists not so much in the absence of goods but in the overabundance of

desire. The other side of the same coin comes from the official point of view was expressed by one police spokesman. People were going in and out of the stores and tearing things out at this time of the children. And young adults and middle aged people. And they were amazed that they were put under duress. I cannot help but think personally that the civil rights demonstrations made a lax attitude with regard to crime. And other regions. I frankly think that there has been an affective program pointing out to the negro that he has been discriminated against. And that he has had problems and somebody along the line a sort of job to some of the. People because they have been deprived. They have the right to riot that they have a right to and I have the right to burn communication or just plain lawlessness. Here is Dean Alex Rosen of The New York University's School of Social Work.

Among the several tragedies of the Watts community in Los Angeles is that the civil rights organizations did not reach the masses of negroes had they done so the Negro community would have been able to express their feelings in more benign more acceptable ways and street demonstrations marches on city hall and so on. It was the very absence of such safety valves that made the explosion inevitable. More about the causes of riots on a profile of a riot. Yet to Come. This is Walter McGraw. You have heard another in a series of reports produced by the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company in cooperation with the New York University School of Social Work. A special hour long documentary A Los Angeles profile of a riot will be broadcast by this and other Member Stations of the national educational radio network.