The Why's of Watts

A week after the savage Watts riots last August, California's Governor Pat Brown appointed a commission to find the reasons for the six-day uprising. The commission, headed by tough-minded John McCone, 63, former boss of the Central Intelligence Agency, spent 100 days at its task, interviewed hundreds of people ranging all the way from the Negro whose arrest for drunken driving touched off the holocaust to Brown himself. Last week the commission released its findings and no-nonsense recommendations* with a sober warning that unless immediate action is taken, the August riots "may seem by comparison to be only a curtain raiser for what could blow up one day in the future." Highlights: > To erase the appalling gap between the educational levels of whites and Negroes in Los Angeles schools, it-urged a one-third reduction of class size in Negro schools, a permanent preschool teaching program to include all children from age three. Cost: at least $50 million, or roughly one-tenth of the city's total school budget. >To reduce Negro unemployment, it asked for establishment of job training and placement centers in all Negro neighborhoods, state legislation to force big employers to report how many Negroes they have on the payroll. >To meet persistent Negro charges of police oppression, it recommended strengthening the Los Angeles' figurehead Board of Police Commissioners and creation of an inspector general's office to investigate citizens' complaints, Even before the commission finished its report, Chairman McCone predicted that it would anger as many people as it pleased. It did. Civil rights leaders accused it of superficiality, said it skirted around the question of police brutality, and almost entirely ducked the problem of discrimination in housing. "A mouse-size solution to lion-size problems," cried the United Auto Workers Union. The commission staff itself was split. Some thought it should tell Californians what should be done as well as what could be done. But a more pragmatic majority, led by McCone, insisted that it should deal factually with existing causes and conditions.

"There was a complete obsession with facts rather than insights," maintained one disappointed staff member. "I felt that what we needed was some perspective on where we were going. There was nothing offensive about the report--maybe that was the problem."

McCone, a bluntly honest man with a lifetime of practical experience in business and government, disagreed. "We wanted to work with real problems," he said, "not broad philosophical questions. We wanted to do something, not get bogged down in sociological speculation. We wanted immediate solutions, not theories."

* In contrast to a Washington idea conference on Negro problems, which last week came out with such far-out solutions as a federal Department of Decolonization and enclaves reserved exclusively for Negroes in the South.

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