Trigger of Hate

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Far out at sea, mariners puzzled over a molten glow in the eastern sky. Over the roar of the freeway, motorists heard the unmistakable crack of rifle fire, the chilling stutter of machine guns. Above city hall, billowing smoke from 1,000 fires hung like a cerement. From the air, whole sections of the sprawling city looked as if they had been blitzed.

The atmosphere reminded soldiers of embattled Saigon. Yet this, last week, was Los Angeles -- the City of Angels, the "safe city," as its boosters like to call it, the city that has always taken pride in its history of harmonious racial relations.

Savagery replaced harmony with nightmarish suddenness. One evening white Angelenos had nothing to worry about but the humidity. The next -- and for four nights after that -- marauding mobs in the Negro suburb of Watts pil laged, burned and killed, while 500 po licemen and 5,000 National Guardsmen struggled vainly to contain their fury. Hour after hour, the toll mounted: 27 dead at week's end, nearly 600 injured, 1,700 arrested, property damage well over $100 million. Minute by minute, police radios logged a Wellsian cata logue of carnage: "Manchester and Broadway, a mob of 1,000 . . . Shots at Avalon and Imperial . . . Vernon and Central, looting . . . Yellow cab over turned . . . Man pulled from car on Imperial Highway . . . 88th and Broad way, gun battle . . . Officer in trouble." The riot was the worst in the city's history, one of the worst ever in the U.S. To help quell it, California's Gov ernor Pat Brown broke off a vacation in Greece and hurried home. "From here it is awfully hard to direct a war," said Brown. "That's what this is."

Black Channel. The war's major bat tleground was a 20-sq.-mi. ghetto. Watts is the kind of community that cries out for urban renewal, poverty programs, job training. Almost anything would help. Two-thirds of its residents have less than a high school education; one-eighth of them are technically illiterate.

Only since 13% of homes are have been built since 1939 the rest are decaying and dilapidated. Nearly 30% of the chil dren are from broken homes; their drop out rate is 2.2 times the city's average, and prison parolees, prostitutes, narcotics addicts and drunks live among them. Over a recent three-month period, cops reported 96 felonious crimes, including murders, rapes and assaults. The David Starr Jordan High School, which serves Watts, is not legally segregated; yet its student body is 99% Negro. Watts is a slum--but not in the Eastern sense. There are no rows of mul tiple-story tenements or concrete canyons. Its streets are generally broad, occasionally tree-lined and bordered by dusty lawns. Its dwellings are mostly one-and two-story frame and stucco houses. But in the small rented houses and apartments, money-short Negroes often crowd four and five families; children are left alone while parents work, and youths roam the streets seeking relief from the monotony of daily life. Watts is part of the Black Channel, a 72-square-mile area that houses 90% of Los Angeles County's 600,000 Negroes. It is the "hard," unchanging ghetto, a traditional portal for Negroes migrating to Los Angeles. Few of its people are native Californians. Of the 1.5 million Negroes who have fled the South in the past decade, one out of four went to California; thousands settled in Watts. There they were trapped among their own kind, smothered in their own ignorance of a new way of life, drowned in their frustration. "What they know about sheriffs and police is Bull Conner and Jim Clark," says Los Angeles Municipal Judge Loren Miller, a Negro. "The people distrust the police and the police distrust the people. They move in a constant atmosphere of hate." This was the atmosphere, largely unsuspected by most Angelenos, in which last week's fury erupted. The chronology:

WEDNESDAY At 7:45 p.m., two white California highway patrol officers spotted a car weaving recklessly around the southeast Los Angeles slum districts. After a six-block chase, the troopers halted the car in Watts -- and arrested its Negro driver, Marquette Frye, 21. Out of Frye's nearby home came his mother, scolding her son for being drunk. In front of some 25 other Negroes standing near by, Frye started to struggle with the patrolmen. "You're not going to take me to jail," Officer Lee Mini-kus quoted him as saying. "You're going to have to take me the hard way."

As the crowd grew, Minikus' partner radioed for help and Minikus drew his revolver. Then, the officer reported later, Frye jumped in front of him and shouted, "Go ahead, kill me!" A backup patrolman arrived and, with shotgun at the ready, held the crowd at bay while Minikus and his partner hustled Frye, a brother and their mother off to the station. Frye later pleaded guilty to drunken driving; his brother pleaded guilty to battery and interfering with officers; but their mother pleaded not guilty to a charge of interfering with an officer.

"I Got Mad." Back in Watts, the crowd had gone wild. Negroes insisted that the officers had beaten and kicked Frye into the squad car. Said Richard Brice, who operates a corner grocery: "This officer had this man handcuffed in the car and the man was trying to fight. The officer took his club and kept jamming it into his stomach. When that happened, all the people standing around got mad. And I got mad. It's just too bad the officer couldn't have driven away and then struck the man. His action was breeding violence."

Police denied that there was any brutality. But as word of the arrest spread, the crowd quickly grew, and became steadily angrier, egged on by Negro hoodlums. Soon it numbered some 1,500, and Negro youths started throwing rocks at stores and passing cars in an eight-square-block area. Motorists were bombarded with empty bottles, slabs of concrete, rocks, bricks, nuts, bolts, boards and chunks of asphalt torn from the pavement. More than 100 helmeted police poured into the area; under orders not to use tear gas on the rioters, they chased them with billy clubs. The police, nearly all white, only infuriated the mob. Said one Negro girl: "There was one Negro officer there. He was trying to talk to us. He got us calmed down. Then all these white cops came. They pulled out their shotguns and clubs and the whole thing started again." Some Negroes charged that the police seemed eager to stir resentment. Said Bobby Daniels, 23, who was returning from a fishing trip: "We got out of the car and these 15 officers ran up to us. They jabbed us in the back with clubs and told us to get off the street. They pushed us down and jumped on us, laughing about it." In retaliation, gangs of Negroes overturned, burned or damaged 50 vehicles, including two fire trucks. Not until dawn did the crowd disperse. The first night's toll: 19 policemen and 16 civilians injured, 34 persons arrested. THURSDAY Most undamaged stores opened for business as usual. Throughout the day, knots of young Negroes clustered on street corners discussing the previous night's excitement, speculating about the night to come. Boasted one teen-age boy: "Anyone with any sense will stay out of here tonight. We're really going to show those cops." They did just that. By midnight, some 7,000 rioters were swarming through the streets, smashing anything they could find in an area that had spread to 20 square blocks of Watts and environs. By now, 900 city policemen, deputy sheriffs and state highway patrolmen were on duty, but again they were overrun; though they had been given long-range tear-gas guns, they were told again not to use them until ordered to. Anarchy on Avalon. During the day the rioters had apparently prepared stockpiles of Molotov cocktails, which they hurled on any inviting target. Fires blazed in liquor stores, in a church, in overturned cars, in piles of debris along Avalon Boulevard, a major highway. Fire trucks and ambulances delayed entering the area for fear of flying missiles .--while false alarms from rioters tried to lure more of them in as targets. White drivers were dragged from their cars and beaten. After looting pawnshops, hardware and war surplus stores for weapons, the Negroes brandished thousands of rifles, shotguns, pistols and machetes. When fire trucks came to extinguish three burning cars at Avalon and Imperial Highway, they were driven back by gunfire. Later, when a grocery store at the same intersection was set ablaze, the firemen could not get through until 50 armed policemen cleared a corridor. Robert Richardson, a Negro advertising salesman who spent hours in the riot area that night, marveled that "anyone with a white skin got out of there alive. Every time a car with whites in it entered the area, word spread like lightning down the street: 'Here comes Whitey--get him!' The older people would stand in the background, egging on the teen-agers and the people in their early 20s. Then young men and women would rush in and pull white people from their cars and beat them and try to set fire to their cars." When two white men were attacked, one was so badly beaten that an eyeball was hanging out of its socket. "Some Negro ministers carried both men into an apartment building and called an ambulance," said Richardson. "The crowd called the ministers hypocrites. They cussed them and spit on them." "He's Blood." Whenever rioters attacked whites, Richardson wrote, bystanders shouted, "Kill! Kill!" Even light-skinned Negroes occasionally found themselves targets until someone would shout, "Lay off, he's blood." Negro shop owners posted signs pleading: "This is a Negro-owned business" or "Blood Brother"--but many of these also were pillaged by the mobs. After the looting began, Richardson reported, "everybody started drinking, even little kids eight or nine years old. The rioters knew they had the upper hand. They seemed to sense that neither the police nor anyone else could stop them." One who tried was Negro Comedian Dick Gregory, an ardent leader of Southern civil rights demonstrations. Dropping by the riot area after an evening's nightclub performance in nearby Ontario, Gregory asked if he could have a try at quieting the mobs. Police took him to a hot spot, handed him a bullhorn. Gregory had uttered only a few words when a bullet ploughed into his leg All through the second night, the mob rampaged through a vastly expanded area, barricading the streets with ripped-up, cement-anchored bus benches. FRIDAY From early morning, rioters surged through the streets screaming imprecations at "Whitey," "blue-eyed devils," "Okies" and "Crackers." Before picking up a rock and smashing a passing white man on the head, one Negro youth explained to two Negro newsmen: "This is just what the police wanted--always messin' with niggers. We'll show 'em. I'm ready to die if I have to." Even in daylight, Negroes congregated on all four corners of intersections waiting for whites. As they attacked, many cried, "This is for Selma" or "This is for Bogalusa." Young Negroes in late-model convertibles took command of the streets, screaming "Burn, baby, burn!", a hipster term popularized locally by "the Magnificent Montague," a Negro disk jockey. Ring leaders identified themselves by holding up three fingers on the right hand signifying that they were true "to the cause of the black brotherhood." Radios & Rugs. Suddenly the mob turned its energies to looting. Even women, children and grandparents joined the orgy of rapine. As soon as any store was bare, it was set afire. At 103rd Street and Compton Avenue, a mob methodically sacked a whole row of shops. The plunderers carted off radios, TV sets, clothing, lamps, air conditioners, rugs, musical instruments. A little boy of eight or nine sat sobbing his heart out on a pawnshop shelf. Every time he took a radio, he whimpered, somebody bigger snatched it away from him. Reported Negro Photographer Jimmy Thompson: "They don't even know why they're doing it any more. They're taking stuff they don't even need." But one rallying cry never failed: "We're paying Whitey back!" A shirtless youth boasted: "Man, I got clothes for days. I'm gonna be clean." He added breathlessly: "Tonight they're gonna git a furniture store on Manchester and Broadway, and you know I'm gonna be there." "Safeway's open!" someone shouted as the crowd ripped off huge sheets of plywood that had been hurriedly installed over the plate glass windows of a nearby supermarket. Looters swarmed into the store like ants, hauling out case after case until the shelves were bare. Then the huge, block-long structure was engulfed by flames. The looters took anything they could move and destroyed anything that they couldn't. One booty-laden youth said defiantly: "That don't look like stealing to me. That's just picking up what you need and going." Gesturing at a fashionable hilltop area where many well-to-do Negroes live, he said: "Them living up in View Park don't need it. But we down here, we do need it." One of the riot leaders, a biochemistry graduate, was carting out cases of vodka from a liquor store when he was approached by a Negro newsman. Said he: "I'm a fanatic for riots; I just love them. I've participated in two in Detroit, but they were far, far better than this one. In Detroit, blood flowed in the streets." Gazing fondly back at flames billowing from a nearby supermarket, he marveled: "Oh man, look at that! Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it pretty? Oh man, just look at it!" Though the city's authorities later indicted state officials for their tardy response to appeals for help, they too at first seemed curiously unperturbed by the mounting casualty lists. Not until Friday did Mayor Sam Yorty take to the radio to address the rioters, and then his appeal was an irrelevant plea to parents--if any were listening--to "know and supervise the whereabouts of your children." Only at 11 a.m. Friday did Yorty approve Police Chief William Parker's request, made the previous day, to summon the California National Guard. But Democratic Governor Pat Brown was vacationing in Greece, and Lieutenant Governor Glenn M. Anderson cautiously insisted from Sacramento that he would have to size up the situation at firsthand before sending in troops. Finally it was Brown, reached in Athens, who called out the Guard and ordered an 8 p.m. curfew. The decision to call in troops came too late to stop an orgy of destruction that throbbed higher than ever. The rioting spread over 150 square blocks, and the roving mobs multiplied so fast that police quit trying to estimate their numbers. Molotov cocktails kindled 70 new fires. Police and news helicopters were fired upon. Miraculously, there had been no deaths so far, but shortly before 9 p.m. Deputy Sheriff Ronald Ernest Ludlow, 27, was shot in the stomach by looters, and died on his way to the hospital. For the first time the Los Angeles police opened fire on their assailants. A 20-year-old Negro died of a bullet wound in a hospital in the area as a rampaging mob outside blocked an anesthesiologist from reaching him. On South Central Avenue, many miles from the original riot scene, police shot and killed a Negro looter. Said a National Guard officer: "It's going to be like Viet Nam." Machine Guns & Bayonets. That night, 2,000 helmeted National Guardsmen from the 40th Armored Division rolled into the riot zone in convoys led by Jeeps with mounted machine guns. Officers set up a command post at Riis High School, while infantrymen, advancing with bayonets at the ready, fanned out through the littered streets and assembled .50-cal. machine guns on tripods at intersections. Their first challenge came from an unlighted car that barreled down on a line of troops, hitting and seriously injuring one man. Nearby county marshals halted the vehicle with crackling rifle fire and the Negro driver was killed. After being fired on by pistols and a rifle, one Guard unit opened up for ten minutes with a machine gun on a band of rioters, sent them fleeing. SATURDAY By midday, the number of Guardsmen patrolling the area had swelled to 4,000 and 700 more were being flown in from Fresno. They set about "sweeping" three separate zones totaling 40 blocks; the largest was a section of Watts bounded by Century Boulevard, Central Avenue, Compton Avenue, and 103rd and 104th Streets. Forming a skirmish line that extended across a street from sidewalk to sidewalk, and carrying M-l and M-14 rifles with drawn bayonets, the Guardsmen stalked abreast down the street while police and deputy sheriffs followed them, arresting anyone on the street. Guardsmen killed a second Negro whom they found looting a store. Another of the Negro victims killed had incredibly taken up a post on a rooftop overlooking Watts's 77th Street precinct station. As he directed sniper fire at police and soldiers below, a Guardsman wheeled, drilled him cleanly through the head with a rifle bullet. But the war-weary police were still doing most of the yeomen work. They shot four looters dead in stores they were sacking, fought a pitched gun battle with several others holed up in a garage; the rioters emerged carrying a wounded woman and waving a white flag. Gradually hemmed in, the rioters attempted to regroup elsewhere, started appearing in widely separated areas of Los Angeles County as far as 10 miles from the original battleground. Threatening bands of Negroes roamed as far west as La Brea Avenue, little more than a mile from hallowed Beverly Hills. Panic seeped through the whole vast city. From Van Nuys to Long Beach, nervous housewives traded rumors of new eruptions. Most citizens stayed home, and the thrumming, garish metropolis seemed unnervingly still. In neighborhoods surrounding the riot center, frightened whites--and some Negroes--were queuing up at sporting-goods stores to buy guns. At an Inglewood store, Owner Bob Ketcham reported selling 75 shotguns and rifles in one day, added: "They're buying every kind of weapon--guns, knives, bows and arrows, even slingshots." Though they now risked being shot, gangs of looters were still burning stores and houses. The Fire Department announced that 1,000 fires had been set, 300 of them major. At least 200 stores had been burned to the ground; along one four-block stretch not a shop remained standing. From his Texas ranch, the President branded the disorders "tragic and shocking." Said Lyndon Johnson: "I urge every person in a position of leadership to make every effort to restore order in Los Angeles." As Pat Brown hurried home, Johnson dispatched LeRoy Collins, former director of the Federal Government's Community Relations Service, and White House Assistant Lee White to confer with the Governor on his arrival in New York, and offer federal cooperation in any additional measures that might be needed to restore peace to the City of Angels. At week's end the Federal Government agreed to transport up to 6,000 additional Guardsmen from northern California. By Sunday night, officials planned to have at least 10,000 troops on the scene. In addition, the Pentagon ordered into Los Angeles an 840-man U.S. Marine Reserve detachment. The marines were equipped with 40,000 rounds of ammunition. Like bubbles in hot asphalt, violence popped up elsewhere across the land. The next serious outburst erupted in Chicago. It, too, started with an incident that might have passed unnoticed in a less volatile time. Answering what turned out to be a false alarm in Garfield Park, a Negro neighborhood about five miles west of the Loop, a speeding hook-and-ladder truck knocked down a sign pole, killing Dessie Mae Williams, 23, a Negro. It was a bad setting for such an accident. Only a month earlier, a militant civil rights group called ACT had led 60 marchers to the West Garfield firehouse to demand that the all-white company hire Negroes. After Dessie Williams' death last week, some 200 Negroes gathered around the firehouse, shouting, jeering and throwing rocks. They taunted the firemen by setting small piles of debris ablaze, hurled a Molotov cocktail onto the roof of a mobile classroom across the street. Heaving missiles and assaulting whites, the crowd spread over a twelve-block area before it was dispersed. Seven persons were injured, among them four policemen hit by bricks and bottles. Not Satisfied. Next morning the Fire Department suspended the fire-truck driver and the company's captain--and shifted a predominantly Negro company to the firehouse. But the disorders flared even higher that day, possibly fanned by a leaflet distributed by ACT that proclaimed: "DRUNKEN WHITE FIREMAN KILLS BLACK WOMAN"--prefaced in minute type: "Allegedly." The second-day riot lasted for nine hours; 18 policemen and 42 civilians were hospitalized, 105 persons jailed. The FBI was investigating the origin of another, anonymous leaflet distributed in the area. "After years of frame-ups, brutality and intimidation," it said, "the black people are throwing off the control of the same rulers who are making war on working people throughout the world--in Viet Nam, the Dominican Republic and the Congo." At week's end Chicago--where civil rights groups have long campaigned against Mayor Richard Daley and School Superintendent Benjamin Willis--was quiet. But Governor Otto Kerner, at the request of Chicago police, ordered 2,000 Illinois National Guardsmen into the city to stand by in armories in case of further trouble. Then Springfield. Violence then leapfrogged east to the rifle manufacturing city of Springfield, Mass. Trouble had been brewing since last month, when police arrested 17 Negroes during a disturbance outside a nightclub. A crowd of 300 accused the officers of brutality and attacked them with bottles and rocks. Last week 23 persons, 18 Negroes and five whites, including a 46-year-old white lawyer's wife, began a 24-hour-a-day sit-in at city hall, ostensibly to protest the fact that the cops had not been transferred to another area pending an investigation. After four days, police hauled the demonstrators off to jail. That night two youths hurled gasoline bombs into two white-owned stores, wreaking damage estimated at $30,000. At week's end, amid mounting tension, 250 singing, clapping demonstrators held a CORE-sponsored rally in the Negro section's Winchester Square. Afterward, 25 were arrested when they adjourned to another square for a sit-in. Vowed Mayor Charles Ryan: "There is still a government in this city. It's the government that's going to decide when rules and regulations, reasonable at all times, are going to be imposed." Lack of Communication. Public officials across the U.S. could doubtless sympathize with Mayor Ryan's words. Most responsible Negro leaders also fear that such insensate outbursts of anarchy can only discredit the Negro's legitimate struggle for civil rights. What caused the disorders? There were as many explanations as" there were points of view. In Los Angeles, "the long, hot summer" was blamed --as it was in Harlem last year--and not without reason: the rioting broke out on the fourth day of an unusual heat wave in which Angelenos sweltered in humid 90DEG-to-100DEG temperatures night and day. A deeper source of irritation for urban Negroes is their isolation and poverty in a land of conspicuous plenty. Undeniably, also, there is a "lack of communication" between whites and blacks, between responsible Negroes and the predominantly white police force. Watts only too plainly lacks Negro leadership--except for the hotheads who could whip up last week's passions. Yet the Los Angeles Negro is incomparably better off than his cousin back home in the South. The biggest single cause for his rage and frustration lies probably in the very fact of his migration to an alien and fiercely competitive urban world in which the Negro's past miseries and future expectations have been callously exploited. Police Chief Parker squarely blames civil rights leaders for honing the Negro's sense of oppression. Says he: "Terrible conflicts are building up within these people. You can't keep telling them that the Liberty Bell isn't ringing for them and not expect them to believe it. You cannot tell people to disobey the law and not expect them to have a disrespect for the law. You cannot keep telling them that they are being abused and mistreated without expecting them to react." Riots such as those in Los Angeles have no real object--and therein lies the pity and the danger.

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