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.
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).