The worst rioting of the century in the United States occurred in the Watts area of Los Angeles on Aug. 11-16, 1965.
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Watts is an impoverished district with a 90 per cent Negro population, most of them unskilled workers and many of them recent immigrants from the South-East. Before the riots 40 per cent of the adult population were unemployed, and illiteracy, broken homes, crime, prostitution, drug addiction, and alcoholism are common. Civil rights organizations and the Negro clergy had strongly criticized alleged police brutality. The Black Muslim movement had been strong in the area for some years, and a heat wave with temperatures approaching 100 degrees added to the atmosphere of tension.
After three Negroes had been arrested in the evening of Aug. 11 on a charge of drunken driving the onlookers alleged that the police had used excessive violence, and rioting started which continued all night and broke out again on the following evening (Aug. 12). On Aug. 13 the disorders went on throughout the day and spread to the main Negro area of the city; bands of Negroes roamed through the streets in an orgy of violence, attacking Whites and Negroes indiscriminately, looting shops, setting on fire scores of stores, shops, and offices, as well as churches and a timberyard, and driving fire engines approaching the area back with a hail of bricks and stones.
A curfew was imposed and 15,000 National Guardsmen called in to reinforce the police, who were exhausted after their battle with 7,000 rioters. The mob armed themselves by looting gun shops and pawnbrokers' stores, and when driven off the streets by the National Guardsmen, who used tear gas, rifle fire, bayonets, and machine guns, sniped at them from rooftops. The firemen, who had been issued with bullet-proof vests, had to be protected by troops against snipers and were often unable to reach fires before they were beyond control; at least 1,000 fires were reported in the riot area by the city's Fire Department, 300 being classified as major fires.
The disorders continued on Aug. 14, and although the situation in the Watts area was gradually brought under control on Aug. 14-15, sporadic outbreaks of rioting also occurred from Aug. 14 in other areas of Los Angeles, including Long Beach, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Venice, Hollywood, and Wilmington, while on Aug. 15-16 widespread disturbances were reported from San Diego (125 miles south of Los Angeles), San Bernardino (60 miles east of Los Angeles), and several other centres in southern California. The riots in the Watts district were officially declared ended on Aug. 16, the curfew being lifted on the following day; on Aug. 18, however, police who tried to search a Black Muslim mosque for arms were fired on, about 10 people being wounded in the ensuing gun battle and 50 arrested.
A total of 34 people were killed in the Los Angeles riots, 31 of them Negroes, and between 900 and 1,000 injured, including over 100 police and firemen; nearly 4,000 people were arrested and hundreds of guns seized. Over 500 buildings, mostly White-owned, were looted and burnt, the damage caused being estimated at some $100,000,000, but within a week more than $300,000 worth of looted goods were recovered by the police. By Aug, 21 conditions were officially declared to have virtually returned to normal and the National Guardsmen were withdrawn from Los Angeles city.
(New York Times - New York Herald Tribune - U.S. Information Service - Times)
This article comes from Keesings Worldwide Online
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