Donna Murch
The Many Meanings of Watts:
Black Power, Wattstax, and
the Carceral State
O
When I teach the history of
n August 11, 1965,
the Watts Rebellion, I juxtapose
the California Hightwo starkly contrasting images:
way Patrol (CHP)
one apocalyptic and the other
flagged down two young Afrijoyous (Figure 1). Taken in 1965,
can American men, Marthe first is a desolate image of a
quette Frye and his little
young black man cuffed and prosbrother Ronald. They were
tate on the ground with three
celebrating because the U.S.
helmeted white officers standing
Air Force had just discharged
over him. All four figures direct
the younger sibling. While
their gaze to the street behind
accounts differed between
them as dark smoke and bright
the youths and the arresting
orange flames consume neighofficers, both would agree
boring storefronts and busithat after their encounter
nesses. The second image is a
with police, the boys’ mother
Day-Glo movie poster from the
became involved, along with
film Wattstax (1973), which docua growing crowd of bystandments the 1972 Los Angeles music
ers from the neighborhood.
festival—sometimes called the
Within several hours, direct
conflict broke out between Figure 1. At left, three police officers detain an unidentified man in the Watts section of “black Woodstock”—sponsored
growing numbers of African Los Angeles during the August 1965 clash between local residents and law enforcement by Wattstax Records. The poster
American residents of Watts authorities. In its wake, over thirty people lay dead, more than four thousand were incar- features a giant psychedelic siland the three branches of cerated, and property damage exceeded $200 million. Yet, from this violence and houette of Isaac Hayes with
local law enforcement: the destruction emerged a heightened sense of community and racial pride among Los smaller busts of Jesse Jackson,
CHP, Los Angeles Police Angeles blacks, as seen in the film Wattstax (1973) documenting the 1972 music festival Richard Pryor, the Staple Singers,
Department (LAPD) and the sponsored by Wattstax Records (poster at right). These two images illustrate the diver- and Rufus Thomas nestled within.
Taken together, these two
county police. A violent upris- gent consequences of Watts: the rise of the carceral state and a vibrant affirmation of
Black Power. (Courtesy of AP images and Stax Records)
pictures encompass not only the
ing ensued that lasted a total
temporal era of the “long hot sumof five days from August 11 to
mers,” but the multiple meanings of the 1965 events in Watts. As the conAugust 16 with the National Guard summoned to quell the protest (1).
trast between these two images shows, it is important not only that students
Once a tally could be taken of the human and physical damage
grapple with the causes, but also with the consequences. Ultimately,
to the city, thirty-four people lay dead, the value of property losses
these legacies proved contradictory. On the one hand, Wattstax brilliantly
exceeded two hundred million dollars and over a thousand people
captures how the urban rebellions nurtured a strong sense of community
had been physically injured. Nearly all of the wounded and deceased
pride that reached its zenith in the Black Power and Black Arts movewere black, thereby revealing that while tens of thousands of resiments of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Conversely, the vicious backdents participated, the police and National Guard perpetrated the
lash by the state, law enforcement, and National Guard anticipated the
overwhelming majority of violence against people (2). Equally
rise of mass incarceration and the expansion of the modern “carceral”
alarming, the arrest statistics proved staggering. Police jailed over
state in the decades to come.
four thousand people for a number of offenses including “loitering,
looting, and vandalism” or simply being in the wrong place at the
Riot or Rebellion?
wrong time (3). With such overwhelming destruction and chaos,
Among several generations of journalists and historians, the very namdiscerning coherence in the barrage of events was left to hindsight.
ing of the urban popular uprisings of the 1960s has been hotly contested.
Government inquiries, journalists, movement activists, historians,
As scholar Heather Thompson has shown, the choice to use the term
and ordinary people drew widely divergent conclusions (4).
OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 37–40
doi: 10.1093/oahmag/oar062
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
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“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 spontaneous 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 community stood untouched, as did the spiraling modernist Watts Towers 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 Africans 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 northern 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 largescale 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 emulation 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).
38 OAH Magazine of History • January 2012
In his dystopian urban history, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future
in Los Angeles (1992), popular historian Mike Davis dubbed this creeping 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 enforcement also linked domestic politics to anti-colonial struggles and anticommunist foreign policy in ways that resonated well beyond 1965 (13).
Emergence of the Carceral State
As 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)
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)
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 movement helped to fuel the longer term development of the New Right and
the contemporary carceral state (17).
Wattstax
The 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 compelling 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 Memorial 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 welfare, 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,
OAH Magazine of History • January 2012 39
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 underscores perhaps the most important lesson of the larger Black Power
movement, that “Black is Beautiful.”
Conclusion
Bringing 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 classrooms, 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 campuses 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 historian E. P. Thompson so powerfully annointed “the moral economy of
the crowd” has renewed meaning for many, both at home and abroad.
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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 secondary 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 workingclass 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 (September 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,
40 OAH Magazine of History • January 2012
18.
ed. Martin Schiesl and Mark M. Dodge, 137–74; Davis, City of Quartz;
Murch, Living for the City; Horne, Fire This Time.
Horne, 66.
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).
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.
Donna Murch, Crack: A Social History, forthcoming book manuscript.
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).
Horne, The Fire This Time; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow.
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.
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.
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.