Burn, Baby, Burn!'
MCCORD, WILLIAM M.
THE LOS ANGELES RIOTS 'Burn, Baby, Burn!' By William M. McCord Los Angeles “If they come after you, just run to this house," an elderly Negro told me. He pointed to a trim cottage on one of the...
...And Marquette Fry, whose arrest ignited the violence, told a Black Muslim rally on the same day: "These troops don't mean a thing...
...hopelessness...
...One white woman with whom I talked had lived in Watts for 21 years...
...After the Fryes had been dragged off, the mob broke loose...
...They ignore Proposition 14 and prefer to ask, as one white Los Angeles lawyer asked me several days ago, "What do those Negroes want...
...Negro violence will continue in Los Angeles and spread to other cities...
...As a sociologist, I felt compelled to witness this new and perhaps final stage of the Negro revolution...
...Even Negro reporters, trying to infiltrate the area, joined in beating out the rhythm...
...By a devious route, he took me to the spot on Avalon Boulevard—now spattered with glass and charred remnants—where three days before police had arrested two Negroes for drunken driving...
...There were a lot more 'outsiders' here than regular residents," one old-timer in Watts remarked...
...This demonstration of white contempt did more than anything else to cause the riots...
...We have to keep them in their place"), the most widely discussed "explanation" is that extremist elements or civil rights leaders encouraged the riots...
...White businessmen control all but a handful of the stores, bars and gas stations...
...Chief Parker could have consented to see Negro leaders who have sought conferences...
...Psychological services should be greatly expanded to help the unsophisticated Southern immigrants and to mitigate the effects of the Negro family's disintegration...
...a rootlessness born when immigration from the South did not bring Utopia...
...And I did find them...
...The cause is clear and so simple that it hurts: The Negro in California, that paradise of civil rights, is still treated with indignity...
...Their antagonism was selectively directed against the white merchants who controlled the business of the area and against white policemen...
...The actual civil rights leaders had repeatedly warned the city government that a rebellious situation was building up in Watts...
...Gangs of young men cruised these streets every night...
...Children attend legally integrated schools (99 per cent Negro...
...On the 13th, mobs ran up and down my street," she said, "with the police coming after them in droves...
...We have given them everything...
...The truth is that the riots started spontaneously, but soon came under the control of a variety of groups (none of them "Leftist" or oriented to civil rights) drawn from the normally dominant segments of the community...
...One Negro whom I encountered had seen the incident which triggered the riots...
...Actually, the area has always been the crime center of Los Angeles...
...with machine guns, patrolled the streets while police huddled together protecting themselves from snipers...
...Now, the state's whites will launch themselves on a search for the "real causes" of the riots...
...They requested but did not receive police cooperation...
...a constant erosion of faith in authority...
...Proposition 14 certified by an overwhelming majority that whites want the Negro kept in his ghetto...
...Will anything be done to change the conditions which produced the riots...
...Jeeps, armed William M. McCord, whose books include Mississippi: The Long Hot Summer and Origins of Crime, is a sociology professor at Stanford...
...The area is three times as crowded with human beings as any other quarter of Los Angeles...
...Thus, the reasons behind the revolt are not hard to discover: a well-nourished criminal culture...
...Religious whites are passing around a supposed Biblical verse proclaiming that "men of color" will take over at the end of the world...
...We were throwing at anything white...
...Here is where the Negroes' hopes were to be fulfilled...
...Those cops and their reinforcements cursed us as 'dirty niggers'," my informant said...
...Jones believes that the riots were "an attempt to give Negro leadership a bargaining position with white authorities...
...They joked, yelled, drank, looted, and burned—asserting, they thought, a sense of manhood which had been denied them...
...Young Negroes, often stripped to the chest, slipped from building to building...
...a true, if hopeless and unwise revolt...
...There was ample warning, but no action.' Some in the "Freedom Movement" go even further: They claim that police brutality caused the explosion...
...Certainly, the original arrest of the Fryes could have been handled more tactfully and particular officers could have acted with less "vigor" against the mobs...
...Get out of here, all you niggers.' " Hundreds gathered at the scene...
...A gangland tradition, established by whites, surrounded the Negroes who were first forced to move into the district 30 years ago...
...Gun stores in Los Angeles have sold out their weapons...
...Other groups within Watts —rallying around the cry, "We'll get them for Bogalusa"—attacked the most Scrooge-like of white merchants...
...The Black Muslims, I was told, wore red arm-bands to identify their members, harangued the crowds, directed them to appropriate targets, and bailed out comrades who suffered arrest...
...They obviously felt a joyous release in fighting back...
...Laying aside the comments which one usually hears ("Those niggers are just different from us...
...Proposition 14—that ironic product of democracy's hope, the referendum—repealed a fai housing law and made it clear that California whites hated the Negro...
...They signaled each other by holding up one, two, or three fingers, indicating the section (and gang headquarters) to which they belonged...
...People came from all over—some for profit, I suppose, but a lot came because they thought we were really accomplishing something.' The rioters had, in fact, forced the police to admit defeat...
...To my shame (since I am that rare breed, a third generation Californian), the state's residents refuse to recognize their guilt...
...Where can they go...
...They told us last year that they didn't want no niggers living near them," a Negro explained to me...
...These gangs, operating independently of each other, went on a looting spree...
...Around them, on the main streets, the hulls of stores smoked and let out occasional flames...
...Don't forget now, it's the pink one with the white shutters.' I welcomed this act of hospitality and honored the courage which prompted it...
...All of the ingredients of a classic revolutionary situation are there: an objective lessening of white oppression...
...And there is no way out for the Negro victims: A year ago, California passed a law legalizing housing discrimination and insuring that Negroes would forever be kept in their ghettos...
...Parents have the vote...
...Some 40 per cent of the families are broken by divorce or desertion...
...My own feeling is that this prediction will come true...
...Now, the whites are suffering from their own backlash...
...On August 15, after dodging the various Army blockades, I found myself deep in the devastated section of Los Angeles...
...it could, among other objectives, produce a class of merchants to compete with the whites...
...The average boy comes to despise authority...
...The anti-poverty program could educate, retrain, and equip people for useful lives...
...Harold Jones, a Negro psychiatrist in charge of a Watts clinic, reported that "the rioters shared a common motivation for their actions—a determination to show their strength by using violence...
...In the present climate of opinion, however, no advances will be made...
...White landlords own 70 per cent of the homes and apartments...
...To the superficial white observer, Watts seems a most unlikely place for mass violence to erupt, for its inhabitants have benefited from most of the civil rights advances of the last decades...
...Even in the midst of the flames (100 major fires had been set that day), I discovered many Negroes—some terrified, some aiding the wounded, some trying to calm the mob—who would talk with a lone white man and offer to help him...
...Public accommodations are open to all...
...The riots, therefore, were neither an expression of pure lawlessness nor the product of civil rights demonstrations...
...On August 14, as the battle gained in intensity, Negro white collar workers from all over the city joined in the attack...
...In a number of interviews, I found nothing to substantiate the charge that police have acted viciously, or, as a group, even unfairly...
...The Los Angeles Times has already carried crude cartoons depicting thick-lipped, drooling Negroes rampaging under the banner "We Shall Overwhelm...
...The future in California is not difficult to predict: white bigotry will increase...
...And this very promise attracts 1,000 Negroes a month, 65 per cent of them Southerners, to Los Angeles...
...For a man from Mississippi, Los Angeles would seem a haven of freedom...
...I had to keep moving as quickly as possible to locate Negroes who would not automatically regard my white face as a symbol of tyranny...
...This breakdown of the family has predictable results: Children see their father, if at all, "sitting around the kitchen drinking beer with his buddies while the mother works...
...a consequent spiraling of Negro aspirations...
...The world knows what happened later: 35 killed, hundreds wounded, 4,000 arrested, and hundreds of millions in property damage...
...Compared to the Bull Connors, Chief Raineys, and Jim Clarks, the Los Angeles police force is a model of civic responsibility...
...The riots here were not just an unplanned explosion of hoodlumism: They were an organized, armed marshaling of the Negroes' hatred for "whitey...
...Wearing green berets, military uniforms with the pants tucked in paratrooper boots, the Minutemen have invaded the Watts area to display their force...
...Well-printed pamphlets, mysteriously distributed in Los Angeles, declared on August 16: "The song has ended, but the melody lingers...
...and in San Diego, 120 miles down the coast, the Logan Heights ghetto exploded in its own riot...
...But not one person with whom I talked believed that another display of force could long be postponed...
...Over 30 per cent of the men are unemployed wanderers...
...What we need here are more police, more patrolmen cruising around," one middle-class Negro in Watts commented...
...He pointed to a trim cottage on one of the attractive side-streets in the Watts area...
...in Orange County—the home of Disneyland—roving cars of Negroes attacked some whites...
...I threw bricks and rocks and anything I could get my hands on to hurt them," an 18-year-old girl said...
...Proposition 14 should be repealed so that 85 per cent of Los Angeles' Negroes will not, as now, be compelled to live in 1 per cent of the city's area...
...We are seeing the beginning of an armed Negro insurrection in Northern cities...
...Realistically, I believe, the answer is: No...
...As i saw the area on Sunday, August 15, Southeastern Los Angeles, ravaged by hundreds of blazes, resembled an embattled city under artillery fire...
...Their mother joined them, swearing at the police...
...The next large-scale explosion may not come again until the 1966 "long, hot summer...
...Yet these actions hardly amount to brutality...
...Further, the few white people who lived in the district and had earned a reputation for gentility were not molested...
...They haven't seen anything yet...
...On Monday the Army announced that it had won control over the riots...
...Here, you have to pay the white man, jump when the white cop calls you 'nigger'," a Negro labor union official told me...
...The astonishing element in the Los Angeles riot is not the pillage and passion, but the respect for decent white men...
...Not unreasonably, the Negro adults in Watts regard the white merchants and police as their most visible oppressors...
...This restraint suggests that the riots had a more important aim than sheer revenge...
...18,000 National Guardsmen moved into the 21 square-mile area, declared a curfew, and opened fire with machine guns...
...Yet, as news reports came in, one wondered whether the end had come: In Long Beach, riots resulted in the death of another policeman...
...But my neighbors, who are all colored, made sure that no one disturbed me...
...When they find life so empty, what can they do...
...The usual canards in the civil rights movement about police brutality will not suffice to explain the Los Angeles riot, nor will the vapid generalizations produced by white politicians...
...Instead, the future will bring increased anti-Negro attacks from California politicians and newspapers, a hardening of discriminatory lines in housing, greater police repression, and a withering of whatever compassion is felt by whites for their Negro fellow citizens...
...The area is ruled by 272 policemen, 90 per cent white, who act like troops occupying enemy territory...
...My husband and I saw 10 cops beating a man," a Negro woman later testified...
...The Negroes in Watts have sought release in drugs, rackets, and crime: a fact which Police Chief William Parker claims Negro leaders have ignored...
...We knew months ago what was coming," one leader told me...
...Burned automobiles lined the streets...
...The neighborhood is composed of clean, spruce, if modest, dwellings enclosed by clipped lawns—far from the diseased alleys of Harlem...
...Perhaps most ominously, the paramilitary "Minutemen" have openly appeared on California streets...
...Signs stating "Coloredowned" saved the smaller establishments: Negro businessmen received explicit warnings that riots would begin at a particular hour on their street...
...My husband told the officers, 'You've got him handcuffed.' One of the officers answered, 'Get out of here, nigger...
...Now, we are showing them that we don't want them sucking our blood...
...Tooting the slogan on their car horns, groups of Negroes cruised the neighborhood chanting "Burn, Baby, Burn...
...a phrase made popular by a local disc jockey...
...In the sweltering heat of that Wednesday evening, the conflagration began...
...and, as reality dashes these new hopes, a heightening of frustration...
...I had disobeyed the police injunction to stay out of the ghetto, for I realized that the often prophesied "Fire next time" had finally started...
...This initial passionate hatred of the white man per se, contrary to the lurid press reports, soon abated...
...Surely, too...
...But the reality of Watts hardly fits the dream of the Southern Negro...
...To aid a man of white skin during the August days of madness in Los Angeles required unusual kindness, even valor...
...Various criminal gangs also intervened...
...The rioters smashed cars and looted the district of clothes, food, liquor and guns, but the victims were almost invariably the white businessmen regarded as parasites in Watts...
...On Thursday, August 12, 7,000 Negroes rioted in the Watts ghetto...
...Two men, Marquette and Ronald Frye, had resisted arrest...
Vol. 48 • August 1965 • No. 17
