The 50th Anniversary of the Watts Riots of 1965

Fifty years ago, on August 11, 1965, a heated encounter between a white California Highway Patrol officer and an African American motorist whom he had pulled over for suspicion of driving while intoxicated sparked an angry response from onlookers. It ignited six days of rage—including violent confrontations between residents and police, looting, and property damage—in Watts and other impoverished predominantly African American neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. Some 14,000 national guardsmen were called in to quell the violence. By the time the Watts Riots ended, 34 people had been killed and more than 1,000 injured. More than $40 million of property had been destroyed.

Many explanations arose for the causes of the riots, but the most lasting built on the report of the commission established by California Gov. Pat Brown to study the event. The report highlighted the Watts community’s long-standing despair and discontent in the face of racial prejudice, geographic isolation, chronic unemployment, poor schools, and substandard housing. Riots had occurred a year earlier in Rochester, New York, in Philadelphia, and in the Harlem section of New York City, and riots would follow in the Hough section of Cleveland (1966),in Newark, New Jersey, in Detroit (both 1967), and in other U.S. cities before the 1968 report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) famously concluded that the United States was becoming “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

That the federal, state, and local governments ultimately failed to arrive at adequate solutions for the social and economic problems that plagued Watts and many communities like it throughout the United States was reflected in the outbreak of the Los Angeles Riots of 1992. Moreover, What Together We Can Do: A Forty Year Update of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, published by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation in 2008, made clear the continued widespread persistence of many of the problems outlined in the Kerner Commission report. Finally, recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, offer their own echoes of the Watts Riots.