L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Remarkably, no one had died during the first two days of rioting in Watts. That changed Friday night. Sometime between six and seven, the first resident of Watts died, an African American caught in the crossfire between police and looters. He would not be the last.

Friday night brought something no American city had ever seen before: a full-scale urban war, one in which firemen and ambulances were fair game. Snipers repeatedly opened fire on the hundred-odd engine companies that were fighting fires in the area. That night, a fireman was crushed and killed by a falling wall. As the shooting intensified, the dying began. At six thirty, twenty-one-year-old Leon Watson was gunned down, standing outside a barbershop. Two hours later, a deputy sheriff was fatally shot with his own gun while struggling with three suspects. The killing came quickly now. One hour later an unarmed Watts resident was killed by police outside a liquor store. Three unarmed companions were wounded. The next civilian died three minutes later. The next, two minutes after that. And so it went. The streets of Watts were washed with blood.

Desperate to restore order, police officers and sheriff’s department deputies joined with more than a thousand Guardsmen, on foot, to sweep the streets. By 3 a.m., some 3,300 Guardsmen had been deployed. Yet still the violence raged. Throughout the night, hundreds of reports of snipers firing on the police were called into the 77th Street station. Not until the following evening, when Lieutenant Governor Anderson imposed an eight o’clock curfew on a forty-six-square-mile area of South Los Angeles and more than 13,000 National Guardsmen had deployed, was order restored. That Sunday, Chief Parker reappeared on the airwaves. His presence was not helpful. An attempt to assert that authorities had regained control—“Now we’re on top and they’re on the bottom”—was misinterpreted by many as an endorsement of white supremacy. Not until Tuesday morning was the curfew lifted. More than a thousand people had been wounded and treated in area hospitals. Thirty-four people had died during the rioting. Nearly four thousand people had been arrested. Six hundred buildings had been damaged by looting and fire, primarily grocery stores, liquor stores, furniture shops, clothing stores, and pawnshops (which seem to have been targeted primarily as repositories for guns). Some 261 buildings were totally destroyed. But as the fires died down, a new conflict flared up. At issue was the question of who was to blame.

      TO GROUPS like the NAACP, the ACLU, SNCC, and others on the left, responsibility clearly rested with Chief Parker, Sam Yorty, and the Los Angeles power structure. Community organizer Saul Alinksy recommended that both Parker and Cardinal McIntyre—“that unchristian, prehistoric muttonhead”—be removed. As the embers of Watts still burned, Dr. Martin Luther King arrived in Los Angeles, where he criticized the Parker/Yorty administration and described the riots as “a sort of blind and misguided revolt against the nation and authority.”^[23] King’s critical yet conciliatory comments were not welcomed. Governor Brown described King’s visit as “untimely.” African American Angelenos were hardly more welcoming. At a meeting in Westminster, he was heckled by the predominantly black crowd. One member of the crowd stood up and said that the community needed “people like Parker and Yorty down here—not Dr. King. They’re the ones responsible for what’s going on.”

King agreed and promised to do everything he could to get the mayor and the police chief to attend a meeting, adding, “I know you will be courteous to them.” The crowd laughed. Neither Yorty nor Parker had set foot in Watts since the riots.

Still, King tried to follow through on his promise. Mayor Yorty was not receptive. In a closed-door meeting, Yorty excoriated the civil rights leader for daring to mention “lawlessness, killing, looting, and burning in the same context as our police department.” He also rejected the idea of a civilian police review board. King left Los Angeles shaken by white obstinacy and by the rise of a new black militancy.

To Mayor Sam Yorty and Chief Parker, the cause of the riots was clear—and had nothing to do with King’s psychological mumbo jumbo. The quick spread of Molotov cocktails, the inflammatory printed handbills that appeared in Watts on Thursday, the reports of men addressing the crowds with bullhorns, the movements of youths in cars through areas of great destruction—Parker felt like everything pointed to the involvement of the Communist Party, the Black Muslims, or both. Parker did not believe that radicals had started the violence; he did believe that they had moved into a chaotic situation and made it immeasurably worse. His department, with its vaunted intelligence apparatus, had not failed. Instead, they had engaged with a deadly foe. Even as the violence on the street wound down, the LAPD prepared to hit back.