WATTS LOS ANGELES STILL HOVERS ON THE EDGE OF VIOLENCE

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31098, 29 June 1966, Page 16

WATTS LOS ANGELES STILL HOVERS ON THE EDGE OF VIOLENCE

/By a Special Correspondent of "The Times.” London, trritinp from Loe Angeles.> (Reprinted from "The Times.")

A former Rhodes scholar, born in Watts, Los Angeles, is giving up this summer to work with a community organisation in the Negro quarter of the city. He talked to me of the Black Nationalists’ “function”—to show that the Negroes are a community, not a flock. The threat of a recurrence of violence in Watts was as much a power, he said, as force itself.

A Negro social worker, who saved a white reporter from being lynched by Watts youths in the riots last August, told me: “This unrest in the United States will go on for years—until there is social change. But. of course, you can’t say that because it scares white liberals. The Los Angeles police lost control last August. They were powerless, and neither side has for- ! gotten it.... We have to walk a very thin line now to keep in contact with the people in Watts.” Conscious Of Power Watts is still a political “disaster area” for the Los Angeles authorities. But, as my encounters suggest, it is a black enclave conscious of a new found power, though uncertain as yet which way to swing it—for or against American society. No-one I encountered believed that a sincere attempt has yet been made by the authorities to put an end to the social ills, which produced the Negro explosion in which 34 people died during three days of rioting, arson, and plunder. There is really no mystery about why Watts revolted. It was the protest by a group of people maddened by their own wretchedness in the midst of unparalleled prosperity. For 25 years white and black Americans, both largely from the depressed south, have been flocking into southern California, eager to secure their place in the sun. Now Los Angeles is at the centre of the biggest concentration of America’s principal expansion industries, the Arms whose equipment is behind the latest space achievements, and of a sizable part of the country’s defence industries.

Falling Incomes The most revealing statistic produced in all the heartsearching which followed the Watts incidents came not from the McCone Commission, whose findings voiced overwhelmingly the fears of white Californians, but from a survey made by the United States Bureau of Census. This showed that the average family income in the area of Los Angeles where 250,000 Negroes are concentrated actually declined between 1960 and 1965, while nonwhite family incomes increased substantially across the nation. In most cases it was at a faster rate than among white families.

This is more significant than the physical condition of south-central Los Angeles. It is not a ghetto in the sense of Harlem’s crowded, black tenements. There are pockets of Negro homes almost like a garden suburb, but in this vast area—it is a 12 mile drive down to City Hall—most of the property linking the unending grid roads (some over 100 blocks long) consists of single-storey, wooden frame house in dilapidated condition, two-thirds owned by absentee landlords. Apart from shops and occasional petrol stations there is nothing to break the monotony. There is not even a cinema in Watts. Like A Prison Californian psychologists who went to Watts after the riots have reported two observations which recurred in answers to their questions. First, people spoke of Watts as a "prison”—and some psychologists went on to explain the riot pattern on the lines of a prison riot.

Negroes in Los Angeles said, however, that the selection for first plundering and then firing of stores had a basis in the local reputation of the store, particularly as regards its pricing and credit policy. Jewish shopkeepers have a bad reputation in Watts and there is Negro anti-Semitism. Second, the psychologists noted a refusal to believe that any education or training could help Watts Negroes.

The human waste of Watts comes at one driving by—the jobless men and youths at the intersections, the overburdened women, and the dirty children. The average age of the city’s Negro population is 25. A quarter of the area’s families were on public relief when the riots broke out. Today throughout the Negro quarter, one man in every 10 of working age is still without a job: in Watts the figure is higher. The California figure is 4.7 per cent.

Providing sufficient work would probably be the step which could turn the Watts problem. The ordinary Negro still longs to belong to American society and rejects the Black Nationalists’ suggestion for a separate Watts municipality. Plans by the state of California for a public works programme costing 5250 rnillion (over £B9 million) a year and another by Los Angeles Negro leaders for a 5125 million crash programme to provide jobs for 25,000 heads of families estimated to need them have got nowhere, because no-one knows where the money is coming from.

What has been done of any effect since the riots is the work of the United States Govern- ' ment, the State Government, or small private interracial bodies. The “War on I Poverty” has added $7 million to its programme (and might have done more if it did not; i have to fight the mayor of Los Angeles), chiefly for job training and supplementary schooling. The Department of Housing has made a granfc of!

$2,700,000 towards improving i bus services, branded by the McCone Commission as the worst in America’s big cities. Bond Issue Refused None of the white-owned ; stores in the riot area has 'been rebuilt. A few Negrodowned ones have begun to take their place. The Los 'Angeles voters have just refused to approve a $l2 million bond issue, conceived to spare the ratepayers, for building a public hospital for Watts and demanded by the McCone Commission as urgent. The feeling that Negro life is cheap to “whitey” is one of the most inflammable issues right now in Watts. The people of Los Angeles are showing themselves

unwilling to foot the bill to remedy some of the biggest grievances behind the riots. Recently the youthful publisher (and heir) of the “Los Angeles Times,” the most respected newspaper on the west coast, publicly accused Mr Sam Yorty, the mayor, of failing to give the kind of leadership needed to begin rebuilding confidence between black and white citizens in Los Angeles. Mr Yorty had just piled up nearly a million votes in the Californian primaries in a white “backlash” campaign on television.

The city council still has not put into operation the McCone Commission’s demand for a city human relations commission and has only unapproved plans for a sl4m urban renewal programme in the Negro quarter (twothirds of the cost would be paid from federal money). But City Hall’s relationship with Negroes has so

deteriorated that it fears to go beyond a shopping renewal in a first stage, in case clearing the shabby homes results in large-scale disturbances. Force Of 5000 The Los Angeles police force is now run as a paramilitary organisation. It is highly mechanised, an elite force of 5000. and the latest scheme is for applying the modern control technology developed by the space and defence industries to law enforcement. The force has been infiltrated by the John Birch Society. In a recent Watts Incident involving the shooting of a Negro motorist by a white policeman, which kept the authorities on alert for days,

Negro violence failed to materialise. “Do you think we strike when the man wants it? You go back to London and say those Negroes aren’t stupid after all,” I was told in Watts. So Watts drifts and the Negro Ministers, who used to be local leaders, admit privately that they are now on the way out. A solution, if it is to be an American solution, can come only from liberalminded whites.