[Mb-civic] The Watts Riots, Burned Into Memory - Roger Wilkins - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Watts Riots, Burned Into Memory

By Roger Wilkins
Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Page A15

John McWhorter is right to say that we ought to pause and remember the 
Watts riots of 40 years ago and ponder their implication for America's 
present and future ["Burned, Baby, Burned: Watts and the Tragedy of 
Black America," Outlook, Aug. 14]. I take strong issue, however, with 
the conclusions he draws from his review of the events in Watts and 
South Central Los Angeles in 1965.

I think the difference between McWhorter and me arises in large measure 
from our profoundly different perspectives on the event. He writes that 
he was born two months after the riots occurred and that his conclusions 
are based on his research on the subject. Mine are based largely on what 
I learned when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent me to Watts 40 years ago 
this month as a part of two federal teams -- one headed by former 
Florida governor LeRoy Collins and the next by then-deputy attorney 
general Ramsey Clark -- both charged with helping to end the violence 
and figuring out what had caused it.

McWhorter dismisses the conventional wisdom that the riots occurred 
because of the miserable conditions in the bleakest ghettos of what was 
then America's most glamorous city, and he notes that "the National 
Urban League had rated Los Angeles the best city in the nation for 
blacks to live in." That might have been true of Crenshaw or other 
upscale black neighborhoods, but not of South Central and Watts. In one 
community meeting I arranged for Collins and two others I set up for 
Clark, the bitterness and anguish laced through the testimony of poor 
neighborhood residents were heart-rending and, when they spoke of the 
city's neglect, just cause for indignation.

The police were brutal; there were no jobs anywhere near the 
neighborhoods; public transportation was unreliable and inadequate; the 
schools were atrocious; housing was deteriorating; health care 
facilities were far away, limited and hard to get to. And worst of all, 
nobody cared enough to come and listen to their complaints.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/22/AR2005082201111.html
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