Los Angeles councilman urges commemoration of Watts Riots

Los Angeles Daily News ^ | November 27, 2014 | Rick Orlov

[EveningStar]

As protests continue to sweep across the country following the Grand Jury decision in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a Los Angeles official is calling for the city to commemorate the Watts Riots of 50 years ago.

Councilman Bernard Parks has introduced a resolution asking the city to begin planning to mark “this historic event….considered by many to be a key turning point in the local African-American civil rights movement.”

[Texan5]

I read somewhere that the ranchers got their right to water livestock at the river back after the sonafabitch died, but that was an awful lot of years.

[joshua c]

Liberals like to celebrate the worst in people. Its what they do.

[dsrtsage]

Here is the commerative statue to the rioters...

[Fiji Hill]

Although it has been nearly 50 years, Watts has never recovered from the riot. East 103rd Street was once the community’s business district, but when I visited there some years ago, there were few businesses but many vacant lots where businesses stood before the riot. It probably hasn’t changed much since.

[kearnyirish2]

Newark NJ is the same way; areas have never been rebuilt, and the population never recovered to pre-riot levels. Most cities shamefully try to sweep these riots under the rug, since they were the death knells of those areas; this is a bad move for LA.

While they might think they can re-stoke white guilt (as another FReeper pointed out), they also run the risk of having blacks realize they’ve only fallen further behind in the last 50 years (and successive waves of foreigners imported by the city have left them in the dust).