Watts: The Model

RIVERS OF BLOOD, YEARS OF DARKNESS by Robert Conot. 497 pages. Banfam. 95-c-.

Watts, 1965, was the precursor and model for the race riots of 1967. In the sunny, sullen ghetto on Los Angeles' southeast side, all the elements of racial violence were present: rat-ridden housing, usurious white shopkeepers, broken black families, humiliating welfare-office routines, tough cops, kids with a yen to loot and lash out, and the random spark of a clumsy arrest. In this meticulously researched reconstruction, Robert Conot, 38, a Los Angeles newspaperman and novelist, shows how all those elements combined to produce six days of madness.

Marquette Frye, the 21-year-old high school dropout whose arrest for drunken driving was the proximate cause of the riot, becomes a sympathetic figure. Raised in Hanna, Wyo., with no angry sense of color, he came to Watts in 1957 and was quickly told by new classmates that he "talked funny." By August 1965, he was talking wise--and wearing tight trousers and Italian shoes. Officers Lee Minikus and Bob Lewis of the California Highway Patrol, who arrested Frye in the sight of hundreds of irritable Negroes, were well-trained, ambitious cops who bore no overt prejudices against Negroes. One of the rioters that the book focuses on is Cotter Williams, 15, who hated the "Whips" (white power structure); when the $16 a month he made from his paper route was deducted from his mother's relief check, Cotter simply dropped the route. His half-sister Baby Doe, 16, was a swinging streetwalker whose IQ (according to welfare and school records) had fallen from 117 to 82 since the third grade. Warner O'Seyre, a Negro schoolteacher who knew many of the ghetto kids, tried to cool the riot once it broke; yet to the raging Negroes of the ghetto, he seemed half Whitey himself. On one occasion, before Watts broke, O'Seyre's young son, raised in an integrated neighborhood, spotted a Negro in Griffith Park and said: "Look, Daddy, there's a nigger man." Reprimanded, he broke into tears when he realized that he too was black.

Once the riots began, Conot says, violence was turned against not white people but white property. One woman, carrying a TV set from a pawnshop, explained: "It just hit me I been paying $25 a month for three years on a bunch o' furniture that cost me no more than $300 to start with, so the least they can do for me is give me a TV." Conot's characters--from Frye through Williams to the well-meaning but ineffectual welfare workers and Negro intellectuals--all appear beset by a sense of corrosive despair, which rendered them incapable of handling the horror that took 34 lives and caused $40 million in damage.

Conot asks: "Who are these people? What is the history of the man left at the bottom?" His answers are incomplete, but important--and dismaying.

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