Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness, by Robert Conot

...Robert Conot's book, an exhaustive description of the origins and development of the Watts riots, helps a good deal in understanding the causes of the outbreak...

...It is but natural that a "paranoid" view develops in a world in which truant officers and rent collectors, welfare bureaucrats and police officials continually harass the population and hover over them in what can only seem a perpetual conspiracy to oppress and degrade them...

...She runs to a nearby house and calls the police, who, refusing to believe her, arrest her instead...

...He has used all the official reports and documents on the riots...

...When she subsequently registers a complaint against the officers this is dismissed and she is arrested again, this time for registering a false complaint .. . A man, attempting to act with foresight and responsibility, acquires a secondhand car in anticipation of hav ing to drive his pregnant wife to the hospital for delivery—public transportation is practically unavailable...

...Conot has followed the development of the riots, hour by hour, and he has been able to trace the life history of a number of key participants in con siderable detail...

...The true paranoid thinks that he is being persecuted, the Watts Negro is...

...Beyond all the finely documented minutiae of life histories and private tragedies, this book leaves the reader with one overwhelming impression: there will be riots on the American scene as long as an affluent society tolerates enclaves in its midst in wh'ch black men are robbed of their dignity, their sense of manhood, their feeling of autonomy and control...

...Conot has wisely resisted the temptation to lay the blame for the riots on particular individuals...

...But over and beyond all these stark facts ghetto dwellers have a sense that they are living in occupied territory, that they have no control over their own turf, that they are being treated like natives on a reservation...

...The author manages to convey a vivid sense of what it means to live in an urban ghetto, and especially what it means for people who, in their majority, grew up in a Southern rural environment and lack full comprehension of the ways of urban civilization...

...There are a variety of other causes: high unemployment...

...The author followed the ensuing developments from the initial, almost playful throwing of rocks at passing automobiles, to the frantic outbursts of hatred against policemen and firemen, to the burning of stores and looting...

...This pithy statement seems to sum up the deepest reason for the recent outbreaks of riots in a number of American cities...

...They attacked the stores that had gouged them and the representatives of the official white world that had harassed and humiliated and belittled them all their lives...

...The ineptness, fear, and diffuse racial prejudice of the police soon led to the spreading of rumors of police brutality, to the milling of indignant crowds, and to the emergence of Negro youngsters who released some of their pent-up frustrations...

...It is but too easy to understand why an officer having been called a mother-fucker once too often finally reacts with a brutality fanned by uncontrolled hatred...

...When the hour comes and he drives her to the hospital he is stopped for driving with a faulty muffler, and when arguing with the police officer he is arrested for resisting an officer of the law...

...How can self-esteem survive in a world where one is perpetually afraid of being stopped in the street, spread-eagled against a wall or a car and frisked, where armies of alien social workers and police officials pry into your private life and probe into your marital and sexual attachments...

...He saw certain records of the Police Department and supplemented them by interviews with leading police officials...

...It would, moreover, be erroneous to explain what happened by some Le Bonian theory of the irrationality of crowd behavior...

...Many individual policemen behaved brutally and harbored deepseated racial prejudices...

...Particular individuals acted from a variety of motives...

...This is no impressionistic quickie...

...But policemen often acted out of sheer animal fear or because they finally broke under the strain of continual harassment and taunting by the crowd...

...The book is a careful chronicle, but more, it is also an effort at compassionate understanding...

...The author provides literally hundreds of illustrative examples...

...Watts, however, is not a community but simply an agglomeration of isolated, terrified, and frustrated human beings living in an environment they never made and which they fail fully to understand...

...No, Conot makes it abundantly clear that what is at issue is not the failing of individuals but the result of an inhuman system which degrades both oppressed and oppressor...

...fear, hatred, re sentment, frustration, as well as thrillseeking and a sense of adventure...

...The rioters, far from being random in their choice of targets, did not attack schools or public libraries, industrial or manufacturing property or public utilities, although there were hundreds of such targets in the area...

...The author is a young journalist and novelist from Los Angeles...

...but, since they have so far produced next to nothing on the riots, this is the best we have, by far the best...

...To be sure, William Parker, who was police chief at the time, acted with incredible ineptness...

...My sociological brethren are likely to call this nonscientific journalism...

...The disorganized police actions and the final intervention of the National Guard are likewise recorded in exhaustive detail...

...Some place we can make the rules...

...He had access to sworn statements by 150 area residents and, most important, has personally interviewed nearly 1,000 persons...

...During the recent Boston riots, a Negro teen-ager told a New York Times reporter, "We want our own place, that's what we want...

...To be sure...

...They yearn for "some place we can make the rules...

...But it would be futile to attempt to explain the riot by adding up the diverse motives of the participants...

...Certain insensitive white observers have remarked that Watts is, after all, by no means as horrid a slum as one can find, say, on the outskirts of most Latin-American cities...

...he has examined the complete transcripts of the McCone Commission hearings, pertinent records of the Los Angeles Fire Department, the County District Attorney's office, the County Probation Department, and the Bureau of Public Assistance, and he has gone through the records of some 200 felony trials...

...Whereas in a community, even in a slum community, one's sense of worth is affirmed by the regard of one's fellows, a disorganized slum, continuously policed by an alien "them," destroys a man's self-regard...

...Let me quote just two: A Negro waitress getting off work and returning home at two o'clock in the morning is stopped by a white motorist who attempts to rape her...

...degrading housing...

...It all started with a comparatively trivial incident, such riots always start in this way: an arrest of a somewhat drunken young Negro driver...

...The riots, though they may originate in a variety of specific situations and be triggered by fortuitous incidents, all seem fundamentally to be rooted in this desire of the ghetto dwellers to escape from the oppressive and degrading impact of "their" law and "their" order...

...lack of recreational facilities—the whole dreary catalogue of indignities white America has imposed on those forced to live in our black ghettos...

...But such Latin-American slum dwellers— Oscar Lewis's recent work to the contrary notwithstanding—still maintain at least the rudiments of a community...

...Conot has written a serious historical account, even though he has couched it in a popularized and sometimes a bit dramatized style...