OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 37–40doi: 10.1093/oahmag/oar062© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

On August 11, 1965, the California High-way Patrol (CHP)

flagged down two young Afri-can American men, Mar-quette Frye and his little brother Ronald. They were celebrating because the U.S. Air Force had just discharged the younger sibling. While accounts differed between the youths and the arresting officers, both would agree that after their encounter with police, the boys’ mother became involved, along with a growing crowd of bystand-ers from the neighborhood. Within several hours, direct conflict broke out between growing numbers of African American residents of Watts and the three branches of local law enforcement: the CHP, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the county police. A violent upris-ing ensued that lasted a total of five days from August 11 to August 16 with the National Guard summoned to quell the protest (1).

Once a tally could be taken of the human and physical damage to the city, thirty-four people lay dead, the value of property losses exceeded two hundred million dollars and over a thousand people had been physically injured. Nearly all of the wounded and deceased were black, thereby revealing that while tens of thousands of resi-dents participated, the police and National Guard perpetrated the overwhelming majority of violence against people (2). Equally alarming, the arrest statistics proved staggering. Police jailed over four thousand people for a number of offenses including “loitering, looting, and vandalism” or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time (3). With such overwhelming destruction and chaos, discerning coherence in the barrage of events was left to hindsight. Government inquiries, journalists, movement activists, historians, and ordinary people drew widely divergent conclusions (4).

When I teach the history of the Watts Rebellion, I juxtapose two starkly contrasting images: one apocalyptic and the other joyous (Figure 1). Taken in 1965, the first is a desolate image of a young black man cuffed and pros-tate on the ground with three helmeted white officers standing over him. All four figures direct their gaze to the street behind them as dark smoke and bright orange flames consume neigh-boring storefronts and busi-nesses. The second image is a Day-Glo movie poster from the film Wattstax (1973), which docu-ments the 1972 Los Angeles music festival—sometimes called the “black Woodstock”—sponsored by Wattstax Records. The poster features a giant psychedelic sil-houette of Isaac Hayes with smaller busts of Jesse Jackson, Richard Pryor, the Staple Singers, and Rufus Thomas nestled within.

Taken together, these two pictures encompass not only the temporal era of the “long hot sum-

mers,” but the multiple meanings of the 1965 events in Watts. As the con-trast between these two images shows, it is important not only that students grapple with the causes, but also with the consequences. Ultimately, these legacies proved contradictory. On the one hand, Wattstax brilliantly captures how the urban rebellions nurtured a strong sense of community pride that reached its zenith in the Black Power and Black Arts move-ments of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Conversely, the vicious back-lash by the state, law enforcement, and National Guard anticipated the rise of mass incarceration and the expansion of the modern “carceral” state in the decades to come.

Riot or Rebellion?Among several generations of journalists and historians, the very nam-ing of the urban popular uprisings of the 1960s has been hotly contested. As scholar Heather Thompson has shown, the choice to use the term

Donna Murch

The Many Meanings of Watts: Black Power, Wattstax, and

the Carceral State

Figure 1. At left, three police officers detain an unidentified man in the Watts section of Los Angeles during the August 1965 clash between local residents and law enforcement authorities. In its wake, over thirty people lay dead, more than four thousand were incar-cerated, and property damage exceeded $200 million. Yet, from this violence and destruction emerged a heightened sense of community and racial pride among Los Angeles blacks, as seen in the film Wattstax (1973) documenting the 1972 music festival sponsored by Wattstax Records (poster at right). These two images illustrate the diver-gent consequences of Watts: the rise of the carceral state and a vibrant affirmation of Black Power. (Courtesy of AP images and Stax Records)

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38 OAH Magazine of History • January 2012

“riot” as opposed to “rebellion” reflected conflicting assumptions about the meaning not only of the popular street protests, but the larger significance of the historical period that immediately followed the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By definition, riots are chaotic, spontaneous, and destructive, an attack on the established order culminating in an assault on property and people. Rebellions, on the other hand, are rational responses to legitimate grievances. In essence, this debate revealed a Manichean logic that pitted spon-taneous vs. planned, irrational vs. rational, and in psychological terms, Thanatos vs. Eros (death vs. life instinct). Needless to say, these competing paradigms offer rich opportunities for teaching the history of the late sixties and linking it to previous eras of modern protest, including both the French and Industrial Revolutions, and to the “Occupy Everything” movements of today (5).

The contemporary assessment of whether the events in Watts constituted a riot or a rebellion hinged on whether or not a clear pattern could be seen in the actions of the crowd. In his definitive monograph, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1997), historian Gerald Horne argued that loose structures of organization emerged in the looting and destruction of city infrastructure. Whites owned nearly all of the business that demonstrators attacked, and tellingly, those with reputations for fair pricing and ties to the com-munity stood untouched, as did the spiraling modernist Watts Tow-ers that became synonymous with community pride, Black Power, and Black Arts (6).

Looked at in hindsight, the long-term causes of urban rebellions revolved around two central issues: the political economy of race and the longstanding history of police abuse and criminalization of Afri-cans Americans, Latinos, and other nonwhite groups on the West Coast and in other cities across the United States. Expressed most eloquently in a September 1966 Commentary magazine article, “Black Power and Coalition Politics,” Bayard Rustin argued that “black power,” and by implication the urban rebellions from which it sprang, responded to the more complex problems of housing, education, and jobs in north-ern cities (7).

Few places embodied the collective effects of the overlapping systems of racial discrimination more than Watts, an urban portal for the poorest and most recent migrants from the South. Eldridge Cleaver remembered his hometown of Watts as “a place of shame.” The Panthers’ short-lived Minister of Information later explained, “We used to use Watts as an epithet in much the same way as city boys used ‘country’ as a term of derision” (8). As newcomers settled at the social margins of America’s second largest city, they faced intense racial and class segregation, miserable schools, and large-scale joblessness. A hostile and overwhelmingly white police force engaged in routine traffic stops of motorists of color, beatings of neighborhood residents, and harassment of interracial couples. The LAPD chief’s claims of black inferiority further exacerbated these everyday practices of intrusive policing (9).

During the rebellion itself, dramatic moments of conflict with law enforcement hinted that the imperial violence of the war abroad had transmuted into a war at home. “I distinctly remember during the Watts riots, young men firing directly on LAPD helicopters in emula-tion of the Southern Vietnamese Liberation Army,” remembered white New Leftist Mike Myerson (10). This connection grew even more literal in subsequent years with the greater utilization of military hardware and integration of municipal police, county sheriffs, and state highway patrols with federal law enforcement. When the LAPD debuted its SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team in a raid on the Los Angeles Black Panther Party on December 8, 1969, they used a battering ram, helicopter, and tank, foreshadowing the overarching militarization of domestic policing (11).

In his dystopian urban history, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1992), popular historian Mike Davis dubbed this creep-ing tide of militarized public space “Fortress Los Angeles.” A decade later, in a move that demonstrated the shocking conflation of the armed forces with domestic police, Chief Daryl Gates offered to deploy LAPD SWAT to Iran to help President Jimmy Carter liberate American hostages. “This is war,” Gates declared. “We want to get the message out to cowards out there . . . that we’re coming to get them.” Echoing this call to arms in 1988, the head of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Hardcore Drug Unit invoked similar language to describe its “war” on local gangs by proclaiming, “This is Vietnam here” (12). So while Watts stood at the crossroads of civil rights and Black Power, understood by most as a moment of internal transformation of the national black freedom movement, the actions of demonstrators and reactions of law enforce-ment also linked domestic politics to anti-colonial struggles and anti-communist foreign policy in ways that resonated well beyond 1965 (13).

Emergence of the Carceral StateAs a new generation of historians explores the emergence of mass incarceration and the modern carceral state, the Watts rebellion is a pivotal moment. Scholars have chosen the term “carceral”—“of or belonging to prison”—to invoke a wide range of punitive state action. It includes aggressive policing; border patrol, military, and immigrant detention; public and private surveillance; imprisonment of adults, juveniles, and undocumented workers; courts, prosecution, and parole; and even restrictive and means-tested welfare and social service policy,

Figure 2. In the aftermath of the Watts rebellion, Ronald Reagan built his California backlash-based gubernatorial campaign by railing against “Beatniks, taxes, riots and crime,” convincing many whites to vote Republican. Joined here by wife Nancy at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Reagan celebrates his victory over incumbent liberal Democrat Pat Brown in the November 1966 election. Such post-Watts “law and order” campaigns were key to the rise of the carceral state. (Courtesy of University of Texas Archives)

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OAH Magazine of History • January 2012 39

with links to the broader systems of criminal and juvenile justice (14). The mass arrests and authoritarian response by police during Watts anticipated for this new era of the modern carceral state, marked by federal and local cooperation in law enforcement and the widespread use of military hardware for crowd control (15).

This growing tendency extended from public streets to the halls of state. During the 1966 California gubernatorial elections a year after Watts, Ronald Reagan denounced the urban uprisings and campus rebellions to powerful political effect (Figure 2). In a pioneering move that proved prophetic for the 1980 presidential election, his diatribes against “Beatniks, taxes, riots and crime” succeeded in convincing large numbers of whites to vote Republican, enabling Reagan to defeat liberal incumbent Pat Brown (16). The vicious political backlash against Watts, the subsequent urban rebellions, and the Black Power move-ment helped to fuel the longer term development of the New Right and the contemporary carceral state (17).

WattstaxThe bleakness of racial retrenchment should not overshadow the meaning of Watts to the participants themselves, the powerful cultural and political movements nurtured in its wake, and the larger African

American community. For teaching, perhaps the single most compel-ling primary source for the response of local residents to the Watts rebellion is the documentary film, Wattstax, which centers on the August 20, 1972 Wattstax music festival held at the Los Angeles Memo-rial Coliseum. Made during the high tide of the Black Power movement, this musical extravaganza commemorated the Watts rebellion seven years before and interspersed live performances from the top Stax Records performers, including Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, and the Bar-Kays with interviews with ordinary citizens in Watts, many of whom participated or witnessed the rebellion as teenagers and children.

Featuring Richard Pryor with a special appearance by Jesse Jackson in full Afro, Wattstax provides a novel historical view of a well-known political figure as Jackson leads the crowd in a rousing call and response of “I am somebody, I am somebody. I may be Black, I may be on wel-fare, but I am Black, Beautiful and Proud.” Equally compelling are the beautiful montages of the streets of Watts, the Pentecostal storefront churches, and the shots of Black women with natural hair, clad in dashikis, bubbas, and the immaculate white headscarves of the Nation of Islam. A visionary mural with pyramid and sun announces to the viewer, “Africa is the Beginning.” Intercut with these utopian images are horrific scenes of police violence and urban destruction,

Figure 3. Memphis-based Stax Records sponsored the Wattstax music festival in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on August 20, 1972 to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1965 Watts rebellion. Some 100,000 people filled the stands. Sporting a full Afro, wearing a dashiki, and giving the Black Power salute, Reverend Jesse Jackson (at left) gives the invocation—a call-and-response version of his “I Am Somebody” sermon. Jackson is joined by Al Bell, a co-owner of Stax Records (at right). The event revealed the powerful appeal of the Black Power impulse in the aftermath of the Watts rebellion. (Courtesy of Stax Records)

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highlighting the power and elegance of Black culture that endured, and even thrived, in the face of oppression and state violence (18). In sum, Wattstax reveals that despite the asymmetry of physical force, fighting back meant something, ultimately inaugurating a new era of Black pride and creativity. In its aesthetics and interviews, Wattstax under-scores perhaps the most important lesson of the larger Black Power movement, that “Black is Beautiful.”

ConclusionBringing the Watts rebellion, the rise of the carceral state, and the celebration of Wattstax into the same frame helps us to educate a new generation about the urban rebellions of the 1960s. As we work to incorporate the black freedom struggle “beyond Dixie” into our class-rooms, seeing the many meanings of the events in Watts can provide students with new insight into both the past and the present moment. Given the wave of popular protests currently sweeping college cam-puses and the streets—and the outrage over recent pepper-spraying incidents by police—a revival of academic interest in urban rebellions seems inevitable. In the aftermath of last year’s social upheaval and massive public protest in the Middle East, Western Europe, and then the United States, celebrated by Wall Street demonstrators as the “Arab Spring, European Summer, and New York Fall,” what radical social his-torian E. P. Thompson so powerfully annointed “the moral economy of the crowd” has renewed meaning for many, both at home and abroad. q

Endnotes 1. Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York:

Da Capo Press: 1997), 45–133; Heather Thompson, “Urban Uprisings: Riots or Rebellions,” in The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s, ed. David Farber and Beth Bailey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 109.

2. Horne, Fire This Time; Horne, “Black Fire: ‘Riot’ and ‘Revolt’ in Los Angeles, 1965 and 1992” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, ed. Lawrence B. De Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 377–404.

3. Horne, Fire This Time, 134–67. 4. To familiarize students with the cross-currents surrounding Watts and

the 1960s urban rebellions, there are a number of rich primary and second-ary sources that offer competing points of view. Some excellent options include The McCone Commission Report on Watts, available online at http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/cityinstress/mccone/contents.html; The Kerner Commission Report, excerpts of which can be found here: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6545/; James Baldwin, The Fire This Time; Johnny Nash and Donald Warden’s performance and spoken word album, “Burn Baby Burn”; writings by the Black Power activists who emerged in the wake of Watts, including Huey Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide (1973) and Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1970). For a broader social history of the West Coast Black Power movement that cohered in the wake of Watts, see Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Judson L. Jeffries and Malcolm Foley, “To Live and Die in L.A.” in Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party ed. Judson L. Jeffries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 255–90; Darnell Hunt, Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

5. Heather Thompson, “Urban Uprisings,” 109–17; Horne, “Black Fire; Horne, Fire This Time; Manning Marable, Race, Reform and Rebellion. The debate about the efficacy and rationality of popular street protest certainly did not start in postwar U.S. and African American history, and compelling parallels can be seen in E.P. Thompson’s revisionist history of working-class struggle in the “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (February 1971): 76–136.

6. Horne, Fire This Time, 64–78; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating The Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 2006).

7. Bayard Rustin, “‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics,” Commentary 42 (Sep-tember 1966): 35–40.

8. Cleaver, Soul On Ice, 38; Horne, “Black Fire,” 381–82. 9. Martin Schiesl, “Behind the Shield: Social Discontent and the Los Angeles

Police since 1950” in City of Promise: Race and Historical Change in Los Angeles,

ed. Martin Schiesl and Mark M. Dodge, 137–74; Davis, City of Quartz; Murch, Living for the City; Horne, Fire This Time.

10. Horne, 66. 11. Washington Post, December 9, 1969, A1; Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 298;

For Panthers’ account of this incident, see “Pigs Attack Southern California Chapter Of Black Panther Party,” The Black Panther, December 13, 1969. For a more comprehensive account of this development in the second half of the twentieth century, see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).

12. Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 221–64, 268. Article dates are misquoted in Davis’s footnotes. For correct article citations, see Los Angeles Times April 3, 1988 and April 6, 1988.

13. Donna Murch, Crack: A Social History, forthcoming book manuscript. 14. For recent historical scholarship on the modern American carceral state

please see Heather Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History” Journal of American History (December 2010): 703–734; Donna Murch, Living for the City; Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (New York: Verso, 1999); Kelly Lytle Hernandez, MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010); Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Ideas about Race and Crime in the Making of Modern Urban America. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of a Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California, 2007).

15. Horne, The Fire This Time; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow. 16. Donna Murch, “The Urban Promise of Black Power: African American

Political Mobilization in Oakland and the East Bay, 1961–1977,” (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2005), 159.

17. This is not to imply that white anti-liberalism started in the late sixties. As Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis, Heather Thompson’s “Mass Incarceration,” and my own book, Living for the City, have shown, white backlash had broader and deeper roots in postwar struggles over jobs, housing, schools, and black migration to northern cities that stretched back to the World War II era. Nevertheless, more historical scholarship is needed examining specific national and regional responses by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies to the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. For important pioneering work in this regard, please see Christian Parenti, Lockdown America.

18. For a wealth of information about the film, including trailers and music clips, visit: http://www.wattstax.com/specialedition.html.

Donna Murch is associate professor of history at Rutgers University. Her scholarly interests include the urban history of California and New York; civil rights, Black Power and postwar social movements; history of policing and prisons; and the political economy of drugs. She is the author of Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). She is currently completing a new book on informal economy, youth culture, and the War on Drugs in the Age of Reagan.

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