Watts Remembrance: 40 Years After the Riots
Wave Newspapers, News Report, Kevin Herrera, Posted: Aug 11, 2005
WATTS — The intersection at 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard is often referred to as the flash point or epicenter of the 1965 Watts riot, but for Tommy Jacquette, it was simply a place to “kick it.”
Forty years ago today, at an apartment complex seemingly untouched by time, Jacquette was hanging out with the other “young bloods” of the block playing Bid Whiz and drinking beer on a blistering summer evening in August. It was an hour or so after the frenetic arrest of 21-year-old Marquette Frye, and the neighborhood was enraged.
“There was a lot of people in the street talking about what they had seen and there was definitely some anger and frustration with the police because people were just sick of being abused,” Jacquette said.
Frye had been pulled over by LAPD officers for allegedly driving under the influence. He parked his car on Avalon Boulevard, just a few yards from his mother’s home at the time.
“Back in those days you drove to someplace you knew so that if anything happened with police, you’d have some witnesses,” Jacquette said. “That’s what Marquette must have done.”
According to eye witness accounts, Frye was roughed up, and when his mother Rena and her other son Ronald tried to intervene, they were hit with batons and arrested too.
“People were really upset with how (the police) treated his mother and sister. All you could hear was, ‘How could they do her like that?’ People were really upset over how the officers treated the women,” Jacquette said. “But that was how the police was, how the white boys do it, as a matter of business, like routine activity. They mistreated and abused everyone they stopped back then in Watts.”
With the 40th anniversary of the riot (uprising, revolt or rebellion depending on whom you talk to), and controversial police shootings once again in the news, many, including Jacquette, are asking the questions: Has anything changed? Has progress been made?
Standing at the famous street corner last week, several elders who know of life before the riot, said the answer is yes and no.
“All of the same depressed economic conditions — unemployment, lack of affordable housing, lack of income — still exist today along with issues of police abuse and a lack of city services such as clean streets, lighting, security, along with other negative things like crime, gangs and drugs. It’s like we have been frozen in time,” in Watts, said author Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who vividly remembers the oppressive smell of burning liquor stores and the taunts from white National Guard members when he was a 16, living a mile and a half North of the riot’s epicenter.
“But time doesn’t completely stand a still,” he added. “In the 40 years that have passed, we don’t have legal segregation, with blacks having many more opportunities than they did back in 1965. We have made big gains in the black middle class, with more black professionals than ever before, more black elected officials … and we have changed the face of government, education and the police force.”
The complexion of the LAPD has changed. Roughly 13 percent of the force is African American, while 32 percent is Latino. This has had a significant effect on improving community relations, said Senior Lead Officer Philip Thompson.
“We’re our here walking the street every day building relationships with the community,” he said. “Twenty years ago you really didn’t see that and I’m sure 40 years ago it didn’t exist.”
However, there is still a legacy of brutality that hovers over minority communities, said Rabbi Allen I. Freehling, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, formed as a result of the riot and the subsequent McCone Commission report, which called for greater communication between the police and residents.
“When you think back to the militarism and obvious segregation of the LAPD and look at the force now, it is remarkable the amount of change that has taken place in the last 40 years,” he said. “But there are definitely still residents in Watts and elsewhere who feel deprived and are skeptical of the police and that is why we must take every opportunity, including this anniversary to address these issues.”
Seasoned reporter Brad Pye said he and Betty Pleasant were the only black journalist to cover the riot because major newspapers had no black reporters and were afraid to send white writers to a “war zone, where people were waiting on rooftops ready to stone any car that was driven by a white person.”
“After that,” Pye said, “(major newspapers) began to hire more blacks because they knew they couldn’t miss out on any more stories.”
While some of those achievements are undoubtedly due to the civil rights movement, Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, D-Compton, said the five-day riot here introduced the majority of Americans to the harsh conditions of the inner city, changing the face of the civil rights movement from just images of the rural South. Locally, the riot helped create the Dr. Martin Luther King/Charles R. Drew Medical Center and its teaching affiliate.
“The hospital was built because the uprising captured the attention of federal officials who studied the area, finding that we lacked some of the basic, but critical services that other areas of the city had,” Dymally said. “Without the revolt I don’t know if King would be standing here today.”
Dymally said it is “tragic that on anniversary of the revolt, we are witnessing the dismantling of King/Drew hospital by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and The Los Angeles Times.”
The hospital has been under fire for more than a year for lapses in patient care that have led to several deaths. The Times won a Pulitzer Prize in public service for a series of reports that exposed serious mismanagement at the hospital.
Dymally said the newspapers has focused unfairly on King/Drew because it serves mostly minority patients.
Other positive effects of the riot, elders said, were the elimination of the word Negro, the formation of the black is beautiful movement, and the creation of Kwanzaa, said Ayuko Babu, founder of the Pan African Film Festival.
“I think the riot here and those elsewhere, along with the civil rights movement, helped give us a sense of empowerment, of self worth, that we had a voice and could make change,” Babu said.
However, Sister Herron of Mothers on the March, said the popularity of the “N-word” and the emergence of gang violence had eroded some of the gains made and have worked to destroy the essence of community, where neighbors knew each other and helped raise each other’s children.
“I think the situation has gotten worse for youth today,” she said. “Kids seem to have less respect for human life, which means they are more willing to take a life and in the process, give up theirs as well.”
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