Watts Rebellion
History
One event can often make a huge difference in the life of an individual, a community, or a society. Philosopher Alain Badiou contends that some events are so powerful that they force a decisive break with the past, requiring people to develop new ways of knowing, thinking, and being. These events make established meanings obsolete. They overthrow the authority of knowledge as it is currently constituted. They enable people “to exceed their own being” and perceive a new future that becomes possible only from the perspective of the galvanizing event. Badiou argues that particularly important advances occur from events that reveal “how injustices are not marginal malfunctioning but pertain to the very structure of the system.” The Watts rebellion of 1965 was one of those turning points from which there was no turning back. A seemingly routine traffic stop of a Black motorist by white California Highway Patrol officers on August 11 rapidly escalated into a massive insurrection. rioters broke into stores and looted their inventories. They set buildings on fire. They pelted police officers, firefighters, and national Guard soldiers with bricks, bottles, and stones. in slightly more than five days, rioters damaged or demolished nearly six hundred buildings and an estimated two hundred million dollars worth of property. The state responded with massive and deadly force. As historian Gerald Horne establishes in his fine book The Fire This Time, what began as a popular uprising against the police soon turned into a police riot against the populace. Fourteen thousand soldiers and fifteen hundred police officers poured into the riot area, ostensibly to protect property and restore order. They arrested four thousand people, wounded nine hundred, and killed thirty-four. more Americans died in los Angeles during that week than died in the war in vietnam during the same period of time. The death toll from the riot exceeded the combined number of people killed in all of the riots that had convulsed cities across the nation during the preceding year.
The fury and rage of the rebellion grew out of long-standing unaddressed tensions between law enforcement officials and Black citizens, but also from the collective, continuing, and cumulative consequences of systemic racial discrimination in housing, employment, and education. yet while the community lashed out, it did not do so blindly. A Black-owned bank was left untouched on a block where every other building was destroyed. A furniture store owned by whites was looted and burned to the ground, but the storefront next door housing an Urban league employment project remain untouched by the rioters. inside stores known for charging deceptively high interest rates for installment purchases, looters first demolished the establishments’ credit records sections before helping themselves to the clothing, furniture, and appliances on display. The riot demolished many commercial buildings, but almost no private homes, libraries, or churches.
Contemporary observers noted that despite its destructive fury and tragic consequences, the insurrection also produced a collective sense of pride and power. A psychologist conducting interviews with riot participants found that they did not think of themselves as criminals, but as “freedom fighters liberating themselves with blood and fire.” They told him that the rebellion proved that they had overcome the fears of the previous generation, which they portrayed as helpless and intimidated by white authority figures.71 A Black journalist discerned “a certain sense of triumph” in the Black community after the riots, what she described as “a strange, hushed, secretive elation in the faces of the ‘bloods.’” spoken-word artist richard Dedeaux of the famous Watts Prophets performance group celebrated the insurrection in a piece that proclaimed that while it takes millions and trillions of watts to light up most big cities, it took only one “Watts” to light up los Angeles.[1]
Sources
- ↑ Lipsitz, G. (2011) How racism takes place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Page: 144-145