Watts Riots - The Riot

The Riot

After a night of increasing unrest, police and local black community leaders held a community meeting on Thursday, August 12, to discuss an action plan and to urge calm; the meeting failed. Later that day, Los Angeles police chief William H. Parker called for the assistance of the California Army National Guard.

The rioting intensified and on Friday, August 13, about 2,300 National Guardsmen joined the police trying to maintain order on the streets. That number increased to 3,900 by midnight on Saturday, August 14. Sergeant Ben Dunn said "The streets of Watts resembled an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country, it bore no resemblance to the United States of America." Martial law was declared and curfew was enforced by the National Guardsmen who put a cordon around a vast region of South Central Los Angeles. In addition to the guardsmen, 934 Los Angeles Police officers and 718 officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department were deployed during the rioting.

Between 31,000 and 35,000 adults participated in the riots over the course of five days, while about 70,000 people were "sympathetic, but not active." Mainstream white America viewed those actively participating in the riot as criminals destroying and looting their own neighborhood. Many in the black community, however, saw the rioters as taking part in an "uprising against an oppressive system." Black civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in a 1966 essay states, "the whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life."

Those actively participating in the riots started physical fights with police, blocked firemen of the Los Angeles Fire Department from their safety duties, or beat white motorists. Arson and looting were mostly confined to primarily white-owned stores and businesses that were said to have caused resentment in the neighborhood due to perceived unfairness.

Los Angeles police chief Parker publicly described the people he saw involved in the riots as acting like "monkeys in the zoo". Overall, an estimated $40 million in damage was caused as almost 1,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Homes were not attacked, although some caught fire due to proximity to other fires.