TIME Magazine

August 27, 1965

RACES

The Loneliest Crowd

      On the southeastern fringe of Los Angeles, the Negro ghetto of Watts was a smoldering ruin. Wisps of smoke still curled from the skeletons of charred buildings. Wrecked cars lay around the streets like swatter beetles. Sidewalks were buried under huge shards of glass and chunks of concrete that had filled the air at the riots' height. The glint of sunlight on thousands of brass cartridge casings gave the eerie look of an abandoned battlefield--which it was. "This is just a quietness," said a Negro minister. "The riot is not over."

That after-image haunted all Americans, in a week that brought successes for their nation almost everywhere save in the unilluminated corners of its own big cities. The U.S. could look proudly to the skies, where the Gemini 5 capsule whirled in orbit; to far-off Vietnam, where raw young marines scored the war's most notable victory against a well-entrenched, battle- seasoned Viet Cong force; to their own boundless farm lands, where record crops were ripening.

Against all this, the Negro's unbridled rage pulsed in a deeply disquieting counterpoint, drumming home the belated realization that while the black American's legal rights at last seem securely anchored in the law, his problems of identity as a citizen have only now begun to nudge the nation's conscience.

Telltale Signs. If the fires of hatred and frustration had subsided, they had not gone out in Watts. All week, scattered scenarios of violence unfolded in the ghetto's rubbled streets. A Negro woman tried to run a National Guard blockade and was riddled with .30-cal. machine-gun fire. An 18-year-old boy caught looting a fire-damaged furniture store was shot dead; near where he fell was a body so hideously charred that police were unable to determine its sex. Fifty police rushed to the Black Muslim mosque in Watts on a tip their arms were being laid in there, arrested 59 Negroes after a half-hour gunfight.

But--for the time being, at least--the volcanic fury had spent itself, and white officialdom slowly relaxed its tight vise on the area. By week's end only 1,000 National Guardsmen remained of the 14,000 who had been rushed in at the riots' peak.

The toll stood at 35 dead and 900 injured. [Detroit's race riot in 1943 claimed 25 dead, 700 injured. The 1919 race riots in East St. Louis, Ill, cost 47 lives.] Property damage was estimated at $46 million, with 744 buildings damaged or destroyed by fire, 457 picked bare by looters. Nearly 4,300 had been arrested, and the total kept on mounting as Negroes who sported telltale new clothes or possessions were hauled in on suspicion of receiving stolen goods. To avoid a similar fate, other looters began abandoning their booty. Police recovered more than 50,000 stolen articles: television sets, a score of sofas, hundreds of lamps, a truckload of beer. More than 3,000 of those arrested faced felony charges ranging from looting and armed burglary to arson and murder. To complicate things for the courts, some of the prisoners gave fake names like Richard Burton and Edward G. Robinson. According to a tongue-in-cheek theory making the rounds of white Los Angeles, the riots had not been halted by the National Guard; they simply petered out when all the rioters went home to see themselves on their looted TV sets.

Sense of Pride. Yet the mood in Watts last week smacked less of defeat than of victory and new power. "They have developed a feeling of potency," said Negro Psychiatrist J. Alfred Cannon. "They feel the whole world is watching now. And out of the violence, no matter how wrong the acts were, they have developed a sense of pride."

They have also discovered a convenient if desperate device to draw attention to their plight. Two weeks ago hardly anybody had heard of Watts. Now, a big-name, eight-man commission appointed by Governor Pat Brown and headed by former CIA chief John A. McCone, was looking into community problems that everyone else had ignored for years. Now, $1,770,000 was being rushed from Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity to hire up 2,000 local residents for the clean-up job. Now, after months of petty political bickering, $20 million in federal anti-poverty funds was on its way to Watts and the rest of Los Angeles' Black Channel.

And after all, as a 19-year-old Negro rioter pointed out, "What Watts needed was rebuildin'. Now we made sure they're gonna have to rebuild it. And it's gonna mean some jobs for Negroes here, like me and my old man."

Temper Tantrum. But if the people of Watts--and a good number of sympathetic Negroes elsewhere--took pride in their bloody outburst, there was far more reason to count it a tragic setback for the Negro and the nation.

"It bore no relation to the orderly struggle for civil rights that has ennobled the past decade," said President Johnson in unusually stern tones. "A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights and more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face. They are both lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of a free America. They must be exposed, and they must be dealt with."

To Martin Luther King, the Negro's chief apostle of nonviolence, it was a blind, misguided "lashing out" for attention, a kind of "temper tantrum" by those at the very brink of hopelessness.

"You with The Man." Though a favorite rallying cry of the mob was "Out Whitey!", most Negro leaders interpreted it as a class explosion, in which The Man--the white cop and shopkeeper, social worker and politician--was attacked more because he was a symbol of the Negro's deprivation than because his skin was white. The troublemakers in Watts could have claimed scores of white victims, if racial vengeance had been their aim. "This wasn't no race riot," said a Watts woman. "It was a riot between the unemployed and the employed. We are tired of being shelved and told we don't want to work."

In fact, the rioters' resentment was aimed at the successful, assimilated Negro as well as the white man. "The time is coming," said Negro Author Louis Lomax, "when some of us who look like middle-class success symbols will have to march to Watts in all humility, and we're going to have to show these people that we are just as willing to die right here in Los Angeles to help this man reidentify as we are willing to die in Selma." To illustrate the gulf that existed between the Negro "haves" and "have-nots," Negro State Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally recounted an exchange at the riots' height with a boy who was brandishing a Molotov cocktail:

Dymally: Cool it, man.

Youth: You with us?

Dymally: Yeah.

Youth: Well then, here, you throw it.

Dymally: No, I'm for peace.

Youth: Then you with The Man.

No Fathers. As happened in Harlem last summer, packs of youths took over the Watts riot, commanding the streets defying any body to challenge them. No Negro leader accepted the challenge. "They have rejected their elders," said New York's Bayard Rustin, who had helped organize the triumphant 1963 March on Washington. "These elders are not people of achievement. Their fathers are out of work. Their mothers are on relief. And the established civil rights leadership is out of touch with them. We've done plenty to get the vote in the South and seats in lunchrooms, but we've had no program, for these youngsters. They can't look to their fathers and they can't look to us."

The Negroes of Watts were less polished but no less forceful in condemning their leadership. "We've got enough big nigger preachers here, doing nothing but taking our money and talking for the white man," said a Watts housewife. "I figure I'm my own best leader," said another, "except for the President, and he better be white and black or he can burn too."

Ghetto to Suburb. The President was trying to be just that. In a speech to a White House Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, he spoke of his efforts to improve the lot of "Americans of every color." Said he: "In education, in housing, in health, in conservation, in poverty, in 20 fields or more, we have passed--and we will pass--far-reaching programs heretofore never enacted. Our cause is the liberation of all of our citizens through peaceful, non-violent change." He concluded, "I'm enlisted for the duration."

Surely the duration will extend beyond Lyndon Johnson's presidency and many more to come. Through legal action, the road from shantytown to voting booth has been cleared. Now Los Angeles has shown that the road from deprivation to decent schools, jobs and homes, may be even more tortuous and lonely. There are no short cuts, and in the aftermath of violence the people of Watts may begin to grasp that fact. Many did. "I don't want anyone to give me anything," said a Negro laborer. "All I want is a job."

Who's to Blame?

Amid the crossfire of conjecture, no one questioned that the Los Angeles riots were caused by Negro lawlessness. But who or what caused that? The most frequent, and most serious, charges were: 1) that Mayor Sam Yorty had ignored the legitimate needs of the city's Negroes, and 2) that the outburst was in large measure a protest against Police Chief William Parker's cops. It was too impassioned a time for final judgments, but Angelenos and others familiar with the Negro's private and public grievances against the city administration began last week to weigh the evidence on both sides.

The Mayor. In four years in office, Democrat Yorty, 55, a former state legislator (1936-40, 1949-50) and ex-Congressman (1951-54), has moved from ultra-liberal to dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He has run an efficient administration, put qualified professional in charge of big city departments, and reduced the discrimination in city hiring. Like most of his predecessors, however, Yorty expresses paternalistic interest in the city's Negro population but has made little effort to understand its problems or anticipate its difficulties. Though the city's 540,000 Negroes represent more than one-fifth of its population, Yorty has relied mostly on three Negro city councilmen and "a fine group of Negro ministers" to keep him in touch with the Black Channel--which regards Yorty's men as Uncle Toms. As a result, says a Los Angeles Negro psychiatrist, black Angelenos feel that they are victims of "disregard, hypocritical attitudes and paternalism."

"Deliberate Incitement." Outside attempts to help the city's Negroes have met with resistance from the mayor. In 1962, when the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sent an investigative team to the city, Yorty was downright hostile, warned it not to serve as "a sounding board for dissident elements and irresponsible charges." The mayor's relations with the Federal Government reached the breaking point over the city's anti-poverty program, which has been snarled from the start. Yorty rejected demands by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity that he accept representatives of "the poor" on his anti-poverty board, arguing that private citizens should not be deputed to spend public money--though virtually every other major U.S. city had adopted this approach. Yorty later retreated, consented to an expanded board, including some representatives of private groups. Yet, though OEO has pumped $17 million into the city for various programs, it has held up another $20 million for projects that would create desperately needed job opportunities for the city's unemployed Negroes.

OEO Director Sargent Shriver charged last week that while 523 towns and counties have organized effective anti-poverty programs, Los Angeles is the only major city in the U.S. that has not done so. Federal officials also claimed that Yorty was one of only two big-city mayors (the other: Chicago's Richard Daley) who spurned a secret offer of special federal aid earlier this year to help forestall summer riots--even though 34% of L.A.'s Negro youths were unemployed. In Harlem, by contrast, the Federal Government's $4,000,000 program to make jobs for 4,000 Negro youths is credited with averting a repetition of last year's riots.

In his defense, Yorty charges that the Federal Government's bears a major share of the responsibility for stirring the emotions of Los Angeles Negroes to fever pitch. In a telegram that he fired off to Washington last week, Yorty declared that "one of the riot-inciting factors was the deliberate and well- publicized cutting off of poverty funds to this city," demanded that Shriver "process our programs and release or funds while we reorganize." The mayor also accused California Governor Edmund G. Brown of trying to make political hay by appointing a commission to look into the riots' causes.

THE POLICE CHIEF

William Parker, a 63-year-od native of Lead, S. Dak., is a crusty cop who neither drinks nor smokes, is married to a former policewoman, and lives in a modest suburban home protected by a massive chain-link fence. He joined the L.A. police force 38 years ago, won law degree by studying nights and, though little liked by less austere fellow officers, rose rapidly. Parker was appointed chief in 1950. In a traditionally precarious post--the average tenure of his predecessors was 18 months--Parkers has lasted 15 years, and made the Los Angeles Police Department one of the nation's most efficient.

Despite Negro charges that his cops are mostly Southerners, the great majority are native to the West Coast. They must have an IQ of at least 110. Parker's force has one Ph.D., 15 officers with masters' degrees, 15 with law degrees, 208 B.A.s, 288 with two-year college certificates, 375 with police academy diplomas; more than 2,000 policemen are taking outside courses. Though it has the highest pay rates of any police force in the U.S., the department is seriously undermanned, has only 5,018 men to cover 458.2 sq. mi.--ten cops per sq. mi. v. 39 in the average U.S. community. Nonetheless, Parker has racked up an admirable record of arrests (of 268,567 offenders in 1964, his men apprehended 196,683 suspects) and has chased the Mafia all the way to Las Vegas.

"A Revolution Against Authority." In a way, Chief Parker is too successful. He is probably the most respected law- enforcement officer in the U.S. after J. Edgar Hoover. His published views on law enforcement, Parker on Police, are required reading for laymen all over the U.S. At home, the very fact that he has survived three city administrations--and helped them to survive--gives him enormous power and prestige. Moreover, unlike most cops who are content to tend their roses or go fishing in off hours, William Parker (few call him Bill) is a compulsive and all-too-articulate public speaker who tends to view contemporary history through the eyes of such moralists as Jeremiah and Sophocles and Swift.

Inevitably, Chief Parker's moralistic judgments make the newspapers. His favorite theme is that morality and respect for the law are the world's last hopes of survival in an era of ethical collapse that is leading only to socialism. As he puts it: "There has been a world-wide revolution against constituted authority. A police officer is the living, physical symbol of authority, and so it is against him that this resentment is frequently directed. It is hard for me to believe that our society can continue to violate all the fundamental rules of human conduct and expect to survive."

"Monkeys in a Zoo." Parker's running comments are blunt and impolitic, and he is often accused of shooting from the lip. He said that the riots started when "one person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks." And when the rioters were temporarily under control he boasted: "We are on the top and they are on the bottom."

Brutality is another story. Inevitably, Parker's men arrest a lot of Negroes. They commit a disproportionate number of the city's crimes and thus incur the cops' suspicion almost as a reflex reaction. Undoubtedly, Los Angeles policemen in ghetto districts do not go out of their way to cosset Negro suspects. Martin Luther King, after touring Los Angeles' Negro districts, declared: "There is a unanimous feeling that there has been police brutality." Yet no one--not even the 1962 Civil Rights Commission delegation--has been able to cite any specific evidence of flagrant physical brutality.

Remarkable Restraint. The most critical moment in Parker's career probably came during the early stages of the riots. With remarkable restraint, he bowed to the advice of Negro leaders and pulled his office out of the riot area--only to see the chaos worsen. When he sent his police back in, they came equipped with tear gas--and strict orders not to use it until authorized. Even then--though he had discussed calling out the National Guard with Mayor Yorty--Parker did not formally request the Guard until the next day. "Millions of dollars in damage would have been averted had the national Guard been called in sooner," says California Guard Commander Lieut. General Roderic Hill.

Not all Angelenos are denouncing Parker; by last week, more than 2,000 telegrams of congratulations had poured into his office. Perhaps the frankest Negro comment on the brutality charge came last week from a 19-year-old school dropout who rain with the rioters through all four days of the Watts uprising. "I wouldn't say that police brutality started it," he allowed, "but it was a good alibi." k
Copyright © 1994 Time Inc. Magazine Company and Compact Publishing, Inc.TIME: After Watts:The Loneliest Road