Watts riot

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As Watts Riots or Watts riots heavy to race riots referred that in 1965 in Los Angeles in the southern district of Watts broke out and demanded within six days 34 deaths and over a thousand injured. Called "The Watts riots" in American, also known as the Watts Rebellion. There were around 4,000 arrests and property damage was estimated at a good 40 million US dollars.

background

Burning buildings during the Watts riot

The neighborhood's residents were 99% Afro-American , the rest of which were Latinos and Jewish merchants. Unemployment and poverty were higher in Watts than any other part of Los Angeles. Of the 205 police officers in charge of the area, only five were African American. There was a widespread opinion among the population that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) treated black people particularly brutally, abused them with racist expressions, and that the police officers were also accused of raping African-American women.

The riot broke out on August 11, 1965 after Marquette Frye (* 1944 in Oklahoma ; † December 24, 1986 in Los Angeles , California ) was stopped by a Highway Patrol officer for suspicious driving behavior. Frye and his brother Ronald were questioned and a crowd began to form. Shortly after Frye's mother, Rena Price (1916–2013), there was a scuffle in the course of which a bottle was thrown at the police vehicle. As a result, the Frye brothers and their mother were arrested. When the police left with those arrested, the angry crowd boiled over and the rioting began.

The rebels' destructiveness was directed primarily against businesses and businesses that had drawn the resentment of the black population because they felt they were being treated unfairly. Residential houses were not attacked, but some went up in flames from overarching fires.

Government response

A man was arrested during the riot

Eventually, the National Guard stepped in and pulled a barrier around a large area in the southern Los Angeles district. A commission was set up to investigate the riots and concluded that the causes were high unemployment, lack of schools and overall poor living conditions in Watts. The government did not go to great lengths to correct these problems and the damage caused.

In response to the unrest and the way it was going on, the LAPD- SWAT was established as a special police unit that same year . At the time, the “Station Defense Teams” were supposed not only to solve special tactical situations, but also to defend police stations in the event of unrest.

consequences

Similar unrest occurred in the following years in Washington, DC , New York City , Chicago , Cleveland , Baltimore and Detroit , among others .

In 1966, about a year after the riots, the Black Panthers were founded in Oakland, California .

Balance sheet

There were 34 fatalities, including a fireman who was killed while extinguishing a collapsing wall, a deputy sheriff who was killed when a shot from a colleague's shotgun went off during an argument with rioters, and a police officer who was also shot through the A colleague's bullet died when he was attacked by rioters. The remaining 31 dead were civilians, 26 of whom were killed in self-defense, 23 of which were carried out by security forces.

In addition, there were 1,032 known injuries.

Property damage was over $ 40 million. More than 600 buildings were damaged, of which more than 200 burned out completely. There were 2,000 to 3,000 fire alarms. The destruction mainly affected shops, public buildings were hardly affected. It is noteworthy that car dealers and petrol stations were hardly attacked.

3952 people (3438 adults and 514 young people) were arrested, of whom approximately one third each had either no, a slight or a serious criminal record. Proceedings were initiated against approximately 85% of them, which resulted in a guilty verdict in more than two thirds of the cases.

During the riot, 851 weapons were confiscated by the security forces. Much of it came from pawn shops, which were looted right from the start.

Response in media and culture

The television broadcaster KTLA , at the time the only broadcaster in Los Angeles with its own helicopter , continuously reported on the unrest and discovered several rioters and arsonists from the air. As a result, the police and other media outlets increasingly used helicopters for observation.

The writer Joseph Wambaugh , who was at the time of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles policeman who recorded his experiences in his first novel night patrol ( The New Centurions, 1970), the episodic describes experiences and career three officials who come together from the police academy and lose sight of each other until they meet again towards the end of the book in the commotion. The novel, which has autobiographical traits, also deals with the influence that the police had on the minority society in the Watts district in previous years. The book was made into a film in 1972; the film was released in German cinemas under the title Polizeirevier Los Angeles-Ost .

Frank Zappa and his band The Mothers of Invention released their first album Freak Out! In 1966 . the song Trouble Every Day, commenting on the Watts riot: “Well, I saw the fires blaze / saw the people go up / the vendors and shops in their area / […] / but it's the same across the country / black people and whites discriminate against each other [...] ”.

In addition, the motif of riot was included in various television series in the 1990s. The piece House Burning Down by Jimi Hendrix (on the album Electric Ladyland 1968) also deals with the events. There is also mention of the riot at the beginning of the Menace II Society film .

The unrest is also mentioned in the 2003 novel The Time Of Our Singing (German: The sound of time ), a work by the American writer Richard Powers .

See also

literature

  • Janet L. Abu Lughod: Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Oxford University Press, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-993655-7 , pp. 197-226 (= 6. The Watts Riot of 1965 - the Beginning or the End? ).
  • Jerry Cohen, William S. Murphy: Burn, Baby, Burn! The Los Angeles Race Riot, August, 1965, E. P. Dutton, New York 1966
  • Bayard Rustin : The Watts . Article in Commentary magazine, March 1, 1966, online at commentarymagazine.com

Web links

Commons : Watts riot  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Text excerpt from the publisher's translation into German, quoted from: Frank Zappa - Plastic People - Songbook, Two Thousands, Frankfurt am Main. 30th edition, corrected and supplemented by hand by the author, 1995. ISBN 3-86150-053-1 . Trouble Every Day lyrics , pp. 44–49.