Watts Riots, 40 Years Later

Nine people who were in the midst of the turmoil recall how six days of violence changed lives -- and L.A. itself.By Valerie Reitman and Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writers .The divisions are still there, 40 years later.

To many, the events that began in Watts on Aug. 11, 1965, remain a riot, pure and simple ��� a social breakdown into mob rule and criminality. To others, they were a revolt, a rebellion, an uprising ��� a violent but justified leap into a future of black self-empowerment.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the riots, The Times asked nine people, all of whom witnessed the events firsthand, to recount their memories of six days that changed their lives and the course of the city. They include a rioter, a business owner, a Highway Patrol officer, a National Guardsman, ordinary residents and a newspaper reporter.

The riots that summer were sparked by the arrest of a black motorist, Marquette Frye, for drunk driving. When Frye's mother intervened, a crowd gathered and the arrest became a flashpoint for anger against police. The deeper causes, as documented by the McCone Commission, which investigated the riots, were poverty, inequality, racial discrimination and the passage, in November 1964, of Proposition 14 on the California ballot. That initiative had overturned the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which established equality of opportunity for black home buyers.

After nearly a week of rioting, 34 people, 25 of them black, were dead and more than 1,000 were injured. More than 600 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Thriving business districts, their stores mostly white-owned, were burned to the ground. Eventually, the National Guard put a cordon around a vast region of South Los Angeles that ranged as far east as Alameda Street, as far west as Crenshaw Boulevard, and from just south of the Santa Monica Freeway to about Rosecrans Avenue.

The recollections that follow are repeated as they were spoken. However, in the interests of space and readability, they have been condensed, without the usual ellipses to indicate cuts. In a few cases, they have been reorganized or lightly edited for clarity. Subjects were allowed to review the edited interviews.

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