Like the connected Brooklyn neighborhoods of Flatbush, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick and East New York, Watts had been a white and Jewish neighborhood before World War II. But when the returning veterans took advantage of housing opportunities to move to nicer places, poor black people moved in, and found it harder to move up.
There had already been a black community in Los Angeles, having arrived there as a result of what's known as the Great Migration. In the 1910s and '20s, thousands of black people left the South, and headed for the industrial cities of the Northeast and the Midwest, and some went to Los Angeles, looking for jobs without segregation, with limited success.
Then came another migration, this time of white people out of the South. The Great Depression, its bank foreclosures on farms, and farms rendered useless by the Dust Bowl forced a lot of people out of the Southern States of Oklahoma and Arkansas.
These people, derisively nicknamed Okies and Arkies, headed west on U.S. Route 66, and looked for farm jobs in the interior of California. Some of them kept going and reached Los Angeles.
Ray Manzarek, keyboard player for the Los Angeles-based rock band The Doors, made the point that some of these migrants joined the Los Angeles Police Department, bringing their Southern attitude with them. This manifested itself in the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, when LAPD officers joined with white soldiers and sailors from the South, stationed in LA, to attack Mexican American teenagers wearing the fancy suits of the period.
As is so often the case, once a family enters law enforcement, it stays there, and the rednecks-turned-cops of 1940s L.A. had sons who became urban racist cops in the 1960s. And the already-present conservative oil and film industry executives of the city were all too happy to accept this.
By 1965, Southern California was more Southern than white liberal America realized, or perhaps was willing to admit. Indeed, to this day, many people, including LAPD officers, call Southern California "The Southland."
As with the race riots in Harlem and North Philadelphia the year before, and the Newark and Detroit in 1967, the event that sparked the Watts Riot was an act of white police brutality on a black person.
On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, 21, was pulled over for perceived drunken driving. After he failed a field sobriety test, officers attempted to arrest him. He resisted arrest, and was hit in the face with a baton.
A crowd of onlookers had gathered. As with the Newark Riot two years later, an erroneous belief that the situation was even worse then it was led to the start of civil unrest, which in this case lasted six days.
The riots were finally suppressed by the California National Guard, and led to 34 deaths, 3,438 arrests, and $40 million in property damage -- about $408 million in 2025 money.
Marquette Frye found it difficult to get a job after the riots, even using his mother's maiden name for a time, before he finally found a living as a motivational speaker, on the subject of civil rights. But his health was not good, and in 1986, only 42 years old, he died of pneumonia. He did not live to see the beating of Rodney King in 1991, the travesty of a verdict a year later, and the even worse race riots that followed that.
August 11, 1965 was a Wednesday. Actress Viola Davis was born.
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