From traffic stop to fiery uproar, a look at the Watts riots as 50th anniversary approaches

AP via Orange County Register ^ | 08/09/2015 | staff

[Kid Shelleen]

It began with a routine traffic stop, blossomed into a protest with the help of a rumor and escalated into the deadliest and most destructive rioting Los Angeles had seen. --SNIP-- The commission that investigated the riots recommended better schooling, job training, more low-income housing, public transportation, health services and better relations between the police and the community.

Few of those things were realized.

Today, the Watts neighborhood is largely Hispanic, but remains poor. Unemployment is high.

[brivette]

facts are facts...

[Paladin2]

Watts is fortunate that the journey of the US towards the socialist utopia of Venezuela has been slow.

[MeneMeneTekelUpharsin]

When the rocks started, police should have been authorized to start killing whoever is throwing rocks, right then.

[Dilbert San Diego]

And the solutions to ghetto problems are??????

Is there any liberal idea which hasn’t been tried, from increased public assistance to job training to special programs for at risk youth to section 8 housing to free healthcare to free Obama phones ??? Any other ideas which liberals have in mind to resolve the problems of ghettos???

[umgud]

Tensed times. I lived 10 miles away at the time of the riots.

[Jack Hydrazine]

“The commission that investigated the riots recommended better schooling, job training, more low-income housing, public transportation, health services and better relations between the police and the community.”

How about just doing regular air drops of cash from a C-130 into those neighborhoods? It would have had the same effect as what we see today.

[oh8eleven]

the Watts riots
That's racist. Surely the author must mean the Watts Uprising.

[I want the USA back]

0’s solution is to send the residents to live among the successful people, all expenses paid by the successful people.

Better solution: limit immigration and make the current occupants work.

[oh8eleven]

I just did location shoots near Watts and it’s the same as the pictures from the riots.
Rochester NY had 2-3 days of riots back in '64. Fifty years later and you can still see lots of evidence.

[P.O.E.]

“No way to delay that Trouble Comin’ Every Day”

- Zappa

[Fiji Hill]

Tensed times. I lived 10 miles away at the time of the riots.

Although our home was in Whittier, about 15 miles away, we were more than 5,000 miles away, in Darmstadt, Germany, and first learned about the riot in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, where it made the leading headline. Even that far away, I heard someone on the corner of Moosberg Street and Heidelberg Street yell in English, "burn, baby, burn!"--the rioters' slogan.

[Fiji Hill]

Believe it or not, Watts has a song. It mentions 103rd Street, the main drag, which was turned into "Charcoal Alley" during the riot, as well as the spacious Will Rogers Park (now renamed for labor leader and community organizer Ted Watkins) and the Club Savoy, to the north on Central Ave.

Watts--Brother Woodman & the Chanters (1955)

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Hispanics are a far cry from blacks in many ways. One of the most important ways is that they do not tolerate blacks in their community, and encourage them to leave. Hispanics have zero “white guilt” about blacks, so can be very blunt about this.

[Puppage]

And, nothing’s changed.

[gibsosa]

bump