Fifty years after ‘Burn, Baby! Burn!’

I walked to the end of my block and looked south. Just a few blocks away, looters and arsonists were, in local neighborhood parlance, “gettin’ busy.” Smoke rose in the air as looters, struggling under the weight of refrigerators, televisions, mattresses and car parts, systematically stripped businesses clean of anything and everything.  Such was the ugly scene during the initial days of the South Central Los Angeles 1965 Watts Riots.

In August of 1965, I lived a few blocks from the intersection of Florence Avenue and Broadway. This was one of several areas in South Central L.A. that received the brunt of the nihilists’ rage. Shops and businesses along 103rd Street in Watts were the first to be looted and burned, but farther north, the heart of the historic Central Avenue also would soon be destroyed by looters and arsonists. Word on the street was that this was “payback” for the years of police abuse at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department under the command of Chief William H. Parker.

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