Watts Riots (1965): Six Days of Unrest in Los Angeles

The Watts riots, also called the Watts rebellion, were six days of unrest in the predominantly Black Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles from 11 to 16 August 1965. Triggered by a roadside arrest, they left 34 people dead, about 1,000 injured and large parts of South Central Los Angeles burned. Coming just days after the Voting Rights Act became law, the riots showed that the problems of Black Americans in Northern and Western cities ran deeper than legal segregation.

Background: Watts in 1965

Watts, in southern Los Angeles, had become a largely Black district as hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved west during and after the Second World War. Racially restrictive housing covenants and discrimination by estate agents and lenders confined most Black residents to a few crowded areas of the city.

By the mid-1960s unemployment in Watts was far higher than in Los Angeles as a whole, schools were overcrowded and public transport to jobs elsewhere was poor. Relations with the Los Angeles Police Department, led since 1950 by Chief William H. Parker, were deeply hostile; many residents regarded the police as an occupying force. Only a small share of the city’s officers were Black, and complaints of verbal abuse, rough arrests and unjustified stops were common. Parker, a nationally respected administrator who had professionalised the department, was also known for dismissive remarks about minority communities.

In 1964 California voters had approved Proposition 14, which repealed the state’s fair housing law. Many Black Californians saw the vote as a direct rejection of their demand for equal housing. The measure was later struck down by the courts, but it fed a sense that peaceful political change was blocked.

The arrest of Marquette Frye

At about 7 pm on Wednesday 11 August 1965, a California Highway Patrol officer, Lee Minikus, stopped 21-year-old Marquette Frye, who was driving his mother’s car with his brother Ronald, near 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard. Frye failed a sobriety test. A crowd gathered on a hot evening, and Frye’s mother, Rena Price, arrived from her home nearby.

What began calmly turned into a scuffle. Officers struck Marquette Frye, and all three family members were arrested. As more police arrived, the crowd grew angry, and rumours spread that officers had beaten a pregnant woman. People threw stones and bottles at police cars, and disturbances spread through the night.

Six days of unrest

On 12 August a community meeting called to calm tensions failed, and violence grew that evening. By 13 August large crowds were looting and burning shops along major streets, especially businesses owned by outsiders and accused of overcharging local residents. Firefighters were attacked as they tried to reach blazes. The slogan “Burn, baby, burn!”, borrowed from a local radio disc jockey’s catchphrase, became associated with the riots.

Governor Pat Brown was abroad in Greece, and on 13 August Lieutenant Governor Glenn Anderson called out the California National Guard. Eventually about 14,000 Guardsmen were deployed, along with hundreds of police and sheriff’s deputies. A curfew was imposed across an area of some 46 square miles (about 120 km²) of South Los Angeles.

Some community figures tried to stop the violence. The comedian and activist Dick Gregory went into the streets to appeal for calm and was wounded in the leg by a gunshot. Local ministers and youth workers also tried to mediate, but police commanders rejected a proposal from a community meeting to withdraw white officers from the area and send in Black officers in plain clothes.

Order was largely restored by 16 August, and the curfew was lifted a few days later. Mayor Sam Yorty and Chief Parker blamed agitators and criminals; Parker made remarks about the rioters that many Black residents found insulting.

Casualties and damage

Most of those killed were Black residents, many shot by police or National Guard troops; the dead also included a firefighter, a sheriff’s deputy and a police officer. Several deaths were later ruled to have been unjustified or were never fully explained.

The McCone Commission

Governor Brown appointed a commission chaired by John A. McCone, a businessman and former director of the CIA, to investigate. Its report, “Violence in the City: An End or a Beginning?”, was published in December 1965.

The commission identified three main causes: high unemployment, poor education and resentment of the police. It recommended job training and placement programmes, intensive early-childhood education such as preschool classes, better public transport, a stronger police complaints system and more low-cost housing. It also called for a new hospital to serve the area.

The report was soon criticised. Its picture of the riot as the work of a small, unrepresentative minority, sometimes summarised as the “riffraff theory”, was challenged by surveys at the University of California, Los Angeles, which suggested that participation was broader and that many residents saw the riots as a protest. The historian Robert Fogelson published a pointed critique in 1967. Many of the commission’s recommendations were carried out only slowly or not at all.

Consequences and legacy

Watts was the most destructive urban disturbance in the United States up to that time and marked the beginning of a series of “long hot summers”, including major riots in Newark and Detroit in 1967 and in many cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. In 1968 the national Kerner Commission concluded that the country was moving towards two separate and unequal societies, one Black and one white.

The riots shocked civil rights leaders. King visited Watts days after the violence and was struck by the anger and despair he found. The events helped turn the movement’s attention to poverty, housing and policing in cities outside the South, and fed the growth of the Black Power movement and groups such as the Black Panther Party.

In Watts itself, community groups founded the Watts Summer Festival in 1966 and the Watts Writers Workshop. The Martin Luther King Jr. hospital, recommended by the McCone Commission, opened in 1972 alongside the Charles R. Drew medical school. Yet many burned commercial streets were not rebuilt for years. When riots broke out again in South Los Angeles in 1992, after the acquittal of police officers who had beaten Rodney King, many observers drew comparisons with 1965.

The Watts Towers, Simon Rodia’s tall mosaic sculptures built between the 1920s and 1950s, survived the unrest and remain the neighbourhood’s best-known landmark.

Timeline

• 1964, November: California voters approve Proposition 14, repealing the state’s fair housing law.
• 1965, 11 August, evening: Marquette Frye is stopped and arrested near 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard.
• 1965, 12 August: A community meeting fails to calm the area; rioting grows.
• 1965, 13 August: The National Guard is called out; widespread looting and fires.
• 1965, 14 August: A curfew is imposed across South Los Angeles.
• 1965, 16 August: Order is largely restored.
• 1965, December: The McCone Commission publishes its report.

Why it matters

The Watts riots revealed that legal equality did not end poverty, segregation in housing or tension with police in American cities. They changed the national debate on civil rights, foreshadowed the urban unrest of the late 1960s and remain a reference point in discussions of policing and race in the United States.