Causes and Consequences of the 1965 Watts Riots
This paper examines the 1965 Watts Riots in South-Central Los Angeles, which resulted in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, and approximately $40 million in property damage. Drawing on historical scholarship, the paper traces the long-term causes of the uprising to World War II-era migration patterns, racial discrimination in housing and employment, chronic police harassment, and the deliberate withholding of antipoverty funds by Mayor Sam Yorty. It then analyzes the precipitating arrest of Marquette Frye, the escalation of violence, media interpretations of the events, the state's role, the enforcement of racial boundaries by the LAPD, and the McCone Commission's findings on the social conditions underlying the riots.
- Introduction: Scale and Significance of the Watts Riots: Overview of death toll, injuries, and property damage
- Long-Term Causes: Migration, Employment, and Racial Inequality: WWII migration, job discrimination, and LAPD harassment
- Political Neglect and Systemic Deprivation: Mayor Yorty blocks antipoverty funds from Watts
- The Spark: Precipitating Events of August 1965: Marquette Frye arrest triggers community uprising
- Media Coverage and Public Interpretation: Conflicting press narratives blame gangs, poverty, or lawlessness
- State Complicity, the Color Line, and the Nature of the Uprising: State failure, racial boundaries, and McCone Commission findings
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What makes this paper effective
- Uses a question-and-answer structure to organize complex historical material, making each analytical dimension of the riots clearly distinct and easy to follow.
- Grounds its analysis in multiple primary and secondary sources, balancing narrative history with direct quotation to support each claim.
- Contextualizes the immediate trigger event within decades of accumulated social grievance, avoiding a simplistic cause-and-effect reading of the riots.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper effectively employs historical contextualization — tracing a single dramatic event back through layers of structural cause, from wartime labor demand in the 1940s through to the specific traffic stop in 1965. This technique demonstrates that civil unrest is rarely spontaneous, but is instead the product of long-accumulating systemic pressures.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an overview of the riots' scale and scope, then proceeds chronologically and thematically through long-term causes, political failures, the precipitating incident, media framing, and finally a multi-part evaluative conclusion that addresses state complicity, racial boundary enforcement, and the nature of the violence itself. The Works Cited section follows MLA-style formatting.
Introduction: Scale and Significance of the Watts Riots
The Watts Riots in South-Central Los Angeles, which took place from August 11–17, 1965, cost approximately $40 million in property damage and caused 34 deaths and over 1,000 injuries. This paper puts that horrendous event in perspective, tracing the causes that led up to the riots, examining the actual damage, and assessing the government's response in the aftermath.
Long-Term Causes: Migration, Employment, and Racial Inequality
The social and economic conditions in South-Central Los Angeles well before the disturbances must be understood in order to explain why tension had built up and why Watts was a tinderbox ready to explode. Writer Josh Sules provided a thorough background essay on the history of South-Central Los Angeles in the book Disasters, Accidents, and Crises in American History: A Reference Guide to the Nation's Most Catastrophic Events, pointing out that the "underlying causes" can be traced back to World War II.
Because so many men and women were involved overseas in the war effort, many jobs opened up in Southern California. There was a period of "intense labor demand," and the management of numerous businesses "temporarily abandoned their decades-old practice" of racial discrimination against African-American employees (Sules, 2008). Black workers were welcomed into the Southern California workforce and were needed to fill positions vacated when the war broke out.
Prior to the war, African-American workers were given "low-paying jobs" that were demeaning, but once the war was underway, Black workers enjoyed "full employment in relatively well-paying and often unionized jobs" (Sules, 328). Meanwhile, the images put forth by Hollywood — that the climate was splendid and race-related violence was rare — along with word of good-paying jobs in Los Angeles, "triggered an unprecedented wave of migration" during and after World War II (Sules, 328). Between 1940 and 1970, Los Angeles' Black population grew from 63,744 to 763,000. Those who came west from oppressive social conditions in Texas and Louisiana enjoyed an improved lifestyle at first, but when they tried to buy homes they soon discovered racial discrimination in housing — and they encountered "chronic harassment from the Los Angeles Police Department" (LAPD) (Sules, 328).
Meanwhile, the offspring of this migratory generation of African-Americans did not experience the stark contrast between the Jim Crow-style racial oppression of the South and the comparatively better conditions in Los Angeles. The children of those who had moved west recognized that they were "second-class citizens" compared with their white and Mexican peers. They were "regularly passed over for promotions" simply because of their race, and were "relentlessly harassed by white officers of the LAPD, whose duties explicitly included the enforcement of invisible racial lines in the city" (Sules, 329).
Further grievances for this second generation of Black families included: poor public transportation; shabby public schools; too few public health facilities; and, due to Mayor Sam Yorty's policies, no access to funding from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty (Sules, 329).
Political Neglect and Systemic Deprivation
On the subject of Mayor Yorty, author Gerald Horne writes in his book Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s that Yorty emulated Alabama Governor George Wallace by figuratively standing in the door of City Hall. Horne explains that Yorty blocked the fair distribution of antipoverty funds from the Office of Economic Opportunity to Watts and other blighted neighborhoods (52). Yorty's philosophy was "right-wing," and the mayor feared that if he shared Office of Economic Opportunity money with Watts, the resulting reform "eventually could undermine him" (Horne, 52).
There were many more circumstances that negatively impacted African-Americans in South-Central Los Angeles, including a UCLA study that revealed the "fantastic incidence of tuberculosis" in Watts and the "interrelatedness of environment, income, and disease" in that community (Horne, 52).
The Spark: Precipitating Events of August 1965
The background of frustrations and injustice among the citizens of Watts having been established, it is important to identify the spark that ignited the uprising. It happened on August 11, 1965, a day that was "uncommonly warm — the continuation of a heat wave," as Horne wrote (53). Some psychologists and analysts pointed to the heat and smog as contributing factors. What triggered the rebellious mayhem, however, was a traffic stop of a 21-year-old African-American named Marquette Frye. He was arrested for drunk driving a couple of blocks from his home, according to the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute Encyclopedia at Stanford University.
When Frye's mother learned of his arrest — Frye's brother Ronald, a passenger in the car, had alerted her — she began to fight with the officers, "tearing one officer's shirt." That officer struck Marquette's head with a nightstick, and all three family members were arrested (mlkc). A crowd quickly gathered, numbering in the hundreds, and soon, fueled by rumors and long-pent-up anger throughout Watts, a raging mob began throwing stones at cars and attacking white people who came into the area.
After two days of rioting, California Governor Pat Brown called in 14,000 National Guard troops to quell the violence. Firefighters attempting to extinguish the many blazes set by rioters were shot at, and "looting was rampant" (mlkc). "Rioters overturned and burned automobiles and looted and damaged grocery stores, liquor stores, department stores and pawnshops" (Civil Rights Digital Library). Using stolen firearms, some rioters aimed their weapons at police helicopters. A curfew was imposed once the National Guard arrived, covering a zone of over 46 square miles in South-Central Los Angeles. Sules reports that 28 of the 34 people killed were Black (329).
Works Cited
Civil Rights Digital Library. "Watts Riots." Retrieved February 11, 2016, from http://crdl.usg.edu. 2016.
Dawsey, Darrell. "25 Years After the Watts Riots: McCone Commission's Recommendations Have Gone Unheeded." The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved February 11, 2016, from http://articles.latimes.com. 1990.
Edy, Jill A. "Watts Riots of 1965." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Retrieved February 11, 2016, from http://www.britannica.com. 2016.
Horne, Gerald. Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press. 1997.
Martin Luther King Encyclopedia. "Watts Rebellion (Los Angeles, 1965)." Retrieved February 11, 2016, from http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu.
Sules, Josh. "1965: Watts Riot." In Disasters, Accidents, and Crises in American History: A Reference Guide to the Nation's Most Catastrophic Events. New York City: Infobase Publishing. 2008.
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