This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first modern black urban uprising. A half-century should be enough time to figure out what’s changed (spoiler alert!: not much) and what works (lots of things, mostly untried), but yet we as a country seem as divided and befuddled as we were in mid-August 1965, when the Watts Riots (or Watts Rebellion) exploded in Los Angeles.
Just as we know what causes the measles – the measles virus – and how to prevent it – get a measles vaccine – we know the root problems that cause neighborhoods like Watts and Ferguson and West Baltimore to erupt: poverty, lack of jobs and education, racist policing, and packing people with all of these problems into segregated areas that are quickly blighted, abandoned and forgotten.
But despite the evidence of what works, and despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in top-down, well-meaning anti-poverty programs, we still persist with the same predictable reactions to the same diagnosis.
In August 1965 and since, white conservative commentators said the Watts Riots resulted because mobs of inner-city blacks attacked whites and white businesses to steal. They noted that Watts blew up in the middle of the 1960s economic boom and only a few days after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. That, they said, means that neither poverty nor white racism had any part in the Watts Rebellion, and that it was a lack of family cohesion and individual responsibility that caused the riots.
Similarly, the white-led commission that studied Watts came up with the same prescriptions we hear now. The McCone Commission, chaired by former CIA director John McCone, concluded that another Watts could be prevented by “literacy and pre-school programs, improved police-community ties, increased low-income housing, more job-training projects (and) upgraded health care services.”
Two years later, the Kerner Commission concluded essentially the same things about the 1967 Newark Riots, and you can bet language similar to both will show up somewhere in the Ferguson Commission’s final report.
We seem to be stuck in a racial version of the movie “Groundhog Day,” where we repeat the same day over and over, knowing how it all turns out (because we’ve all seen this movie before), knowing what we have to do to change the outcome, and doing mostly nothing.
All urban riots or rebellions or uprisings in the United States are the same because they react to systematic racism and oppression. And yet, they’re all different, because they all react to specific circumstances within the particular areas where the riots break out. Ferguson, with a black majority facing an almost all-white city and county government and police force, is not the same as Baltimore, where black political and administrative power still couldn’t head off tensions between police and neighborhood residents.
Similarly, while Watts began with a traffic stop that quickly escalated into violence and rage, the roots of the rebellion, as activist and historian Bayard Rustin pointed out at the time, were planted when white California voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure in 1964 that legalized housing discrimination, and said owners could refuse to sell or rent their property to anyone for any reason. That measure, Proposition 14, was finally ruled unconstitutional two years after Watts exploded.
Add an overall national pattern of institutional racism to the very local concerns about Southern California housing discrimination and the racism of the LAPD, and you get Watts. The riots there lasted a week and killed 34 people. But while they were far more deadly and widespread than Ferguson or Baltimore, Watts shared one trigger with current uprisings: all began after a confrontation between a young black man and police.
The poverty and lack of jobs and education are the same, but the economics are different. Blacks were systematically kept out of jobs during the defense-spending boom that fueled Southern California in the 1960s, so prosperity wasn’t spread equally. But in the 21st century, as Baltimore Orioles executive John Angelos pointed out as he reacted to the Baltimore unrest on Twitter, “policies on a national level have transferred American jobs to foreign countries, and policies have reacted to that stress in these communities by seeking people out and putting them in jail in large numbers.”
So while the exact causes of poverty and police repression may have changed, the problems themselves remain. And so do the solution, a half-century after Watts.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, novelist and author who has worked for NBC News, CNN, Fox 2, KMOX and KTRS.
