Black Rebellions I Have Known: The L.A. Episodes

Watts Rebellion, Los Angeles, California, August 13, 1965

Having grown up swathed in unrecognized white privilege (i.e. The Fifties), I accepted the common term “riots,” which the mainstream media used to delegitimize the violence.

I was unaware of Black rebellions in the past – they were certainly never mentioned in history class. And the first one that hit Los Angeles, the Watts Rebellion of August 1965, packed a wallop. Six days of unabated rampage and crackdown produced 34 deaths,1,032 injuries, and over $40 million in property damage. Newspapers were filled with front-page photos of carnage and burning.

I was fifteen and, though familiar with the potential condensation of suspicion that being Jewish sometimes produced, I never thought to apply it to other minority groups. I never questioned why there were no African Americans in my neighborhood, very few in Pasadena High, rare on TV except for the sports news. I wasn’t primed for fear. Anyway, Pasadena was 20 miles away from the mayhem, and suburban life continued as it always had. The rebellion remained distant. It hadn’t sensitized me to the conditions that brought about the rebellion in the first place: high unemployment, poor schools, inferior living conditions – POVERTY. All these facets of systemic racism were meticulously elaborated in the McCone Report, commissioned by the governor, ceremoniously received, then consigned to oblivion.

Three years later, Dr. King was assassinated, and violence erupted in 125 cities around the country. But not Los Angeles. I was a senior, still at Pasadena High and was appalled like everybody else. Less than three months later, Robert Kennedy (the hero, not the fruitcake) was assassinated, also in Los Angeles. It seemed like a violent time. People spoke fearfully of “the long hot summers” that would ignite Black rage and consume other neighborhoods.

For the next dozen years, all seemed quiet (or effectively clamped down) on the racial front – if you were white. White America refused to recognize that police departments all over the country could commit atrocities on Black individuals and communities with impunity. The inciting incident for all these rebellions was white cops taking African Americans into custody with horrifically excessive violence. That sparked the Miami Rebellion of 1980.

Then the chickens came home to roost again. On March 3, 1991, African American motorist Rodney King was viciously beaten by four white officers while being arrested. This police brutality, usually invisible to the public and strenuously denied by the men in blue, was caught on camera and broadcast on local and national news. This video, the first of its kind (such violence now being sadly commonplace), shocked Americans across the country – again, the white ones. But since the cat was out of the bag in such a public manner, the Los Angeles Police Department had to put the four officers on leave and give them up to a State trial for excessive use of force. (King suffered a fractured skull, a broken right ankle, broken teeth, and permanent neurological damage.)

The trial venue was moved from Los Angeles Country to the all-white town of Simi Valley. On April 29, 1992 the jury of ten white men, one Asian, and one Latino, acquitted all four police officers of assault. The Rodney King riots started that same day. The rebellion lasted six days, quelled only by the combined forces of the State. 63 people died (no law enforcement officials), 2,383 were reported injured, some 3,600 fires were set destroying 1,100 buildings. Estimated property damage swung from $800 million to $1 billion.

I was teaching at UC Irvine in April of ‘92. Once again, I was showered with news and images of the violence, only this time I was even further from the action – 40 miles. And yet there was a palpable anxiety in this largely white, well off, and extremely conservative town. (I only spent six months there and disliked it intensely.) We didn’t really expect the maddened Black mob to invade our space and torch our buildings, but they were so volatile! Would it be even safe to goto events or parties in Los Angeles?

I was in complete sympathy with the Black community, had been since I learned about the injustices of racism in college, and that was 20 years ago. I shook my head in disbelief at the announcement of the verdicts, but I had never chafed under the yoke of racism. I didn’t understand how much I didn’t understand until October 3, 1995. Once again, the news came out of Los Angeles.

On that October day of 1995, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Like everybody else in America, I’d had the 8-month trial crammed down my throat, and O.J.’s erratic behavior the day of the murder combined with the preponderance of physical evidence all pointed to one verdict – and it was the opposite of what the Simi Valley jury had delivered. “That’s outrageous!” I thought to myself. “How can this be?”

When the shoe was on the other foot, I felt the actual pinch.

–Robert Philipson

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Harlem Renaissance (The California Connection)

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