On Aug. 11, 1965, 60 years ago, I stood transfixed with hundreds of others on the corner several blocks from my house in South L.A. watching what seemed like a horrid page out of “Dante’s Inferno.”
But this was real life. Liquor stores, a laundromat and two dry cleaners blazed away. There was an ear-splitting din from the crowd’s shouts, curses and jeers at the police cars that sped by crammed with cops in full battle gear, shotguns flailing out of their cars.
There was an almost carnival air of euphoria among the roving throngs as packs of young and not-so-young people darted into the stores snatching and grabbing anything that wasn’t nailed down. Their arms bulged with liquor bottles and cigarette cartons. I was 18 and felt a childlike mix of awe and fascination watching this.
For a moment there was even the temptation to make my own dash into one of the burning stores. But that quickly passed. One of my friends kept repeating with his face contorted with anger: “Maybe now they’ll see how rotten they treat us.” In that bitter moment, he said what countless other Black people felt as the flames and the smoke swirled.
The events of those days and his words remain burned in my memory on the 60th anniversary of the Watts riots. I still think of the streets down which we were shooed by the police and the National Guard during those hellish days.
They’re impossible to forget for another reason. Exactly six decades later, some of those streets look as if time has stood still. They are dotted with the same fast-food restaurants, beauty shops, liquor stores and mom-and-pop grocery stores. The main street near the block I lived on then is just as unkempt, pothole-ridden and trash littered now as it ever was. All the homes and stores in the area are hermetically sealed with iron bars, security gates and burglar alarms.
In taking a hard look at what has changed in Watts — and all of America’s neighborhoods like Watts — since the riots, the picture is not flattering. According to Data USA, Watts still has the runaway highest poverty rate in L.A. County. Nearly one-third of the households are far below the official poverty level. It has the highest jobless rate. It is still plagued by the same paucity of retail stores, healthcare services, chronically low educational test scores and high dropout rates.
The near-frozen conditions in Watts were hideously punctuated in the lengthy battle that residents and advocacy groups waged last year against city agencies to clean up the contaminated water that posed huge safety and health hazards to thousands. It’s a battle that’s still being fought.
In some ways, what I see in Watts now is worse than what I remember before the riots. Despite the grinding poverty among many in Watts six decades ago, nearly all the residents had shelter. The sight of people sleeping on the streets, at bus stops and in the park was practically unimaginable in Watts in 1965. That is not the case today. Homelessness, as in other parts of South Los Angeles, is a major problem.
However, this is only one benchmark of how little progress has been made since the riots in confronting racial ills and poverty in a still grossly underserved Watts.
Many Black people in the six decades since the riots have long since escaped such neighborhoods. Their lives, like mine, are now lived far from the corner in South L.A. where I once stood amid the flames and chaos. Their flight was made possible by the avalanche of civil rights and voting rights laws, state and local bars against discrimination, and affirmative action programs that for many of them crumbled the nation’s historic racial barriers. The parade of top Black appointed and elected officials, including one former president, the legions of black mega millionaire CEOs, athletes and entertainers are evidence of that.
However, that does not alter the hard reality that a new generation of Black people now languishes on corners like the one I stood on in August 1965. For them there has been no escape.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. There are advocacy groups such as Watts Rising that press L.A. city and county officials for greater funding initiatives and programs in every area of life, including housing, jobs and income boosting programs, along with huge investment in improved healthcare services.
One other memorable moment for me during those hellfire days was when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Watts at the height of the riots. He was jeered by a few Black residents when he tried to calm the situation. But King did not just deliver a message of peace and nonviolence; he also deplored police abuse and the poverty in Watts. Sixty years later, he would almost certainly have the same message if he came to South L.A. or any of America’s other similar neighborhoods. Too little has changed. Too much has gotten worse. What I see in those communities 60 years after the Watts riots remains stark and troubling proof of that.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s latest book is “Day 1 The Trump Reign.” His commentaries can be found at thehutchinsonreport.net.
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