by John Buntin
Yet signs of racial strife were everywhere. That April, black youths had clashed with police on multiple occasions, first at a track meet at Jefferson High School, then, two weeks later, at the scene of a traffic accident. (Parker blamed “social unrest and resentment against all forms of governmental authority” for the disturbances.) In May, California assistant attorney general Howard Jewell warned, in a report to the state AG, that the bitter conflict between Parker and civil rights leaders risked sparking rioting unless the tensions were addressed. Judge Loren Miller, a member of the Jewell Commission, was even more pessimistic.
“Violence in Los Angeles is inevitable,” wrote Miller. “Nothing can or will be done about it until after the fact. Then there will be the appointment of a commission which will damn the civil rights leaders and the Chief alike.”
Parker vehemently disagreed.
“I doubt that Los Angeles will become part of the battleground of the racial conflict that is raging in the United States today,” Parker told the Sigma Delta Chi journalism fraternity that fall. “This city is ten years ahead of other major metropolitan areas in assimilating the Negro minority.” Real unrest would only become a danger, Parker told the Sherman Oaks Rotary Club in the spring of 1964, if “the current soft attitude on the part of the republic to crime and Civil Rights demonstrations” continued.
Even with three African Americans on the city council, no one could check Chief Parker’s course. Councilman Bradley became so frustrated with the situation that in the spring of 1965, he even introduced legislation that would have made the chief of police more powerful. Bradley’s rationale was that it was time to end the charade that the Police Commission directed the department and hold accountable the man who really did. But like most of Bradley’s other attempts to restrain Parker, it failed. Bill Parker would chart his own destiny.
27
Watts
“This community has done a magnificent job [with race relations]. We’re afraid to tell the truth, because it would prove this is the Garden of Eden.”
—Chief William Parker, June 25, 1963
ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, August 11, 1965, a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer, Lee Minikus, was waved down by a passing African American motorist. The motorist told Minikus that he’d just seen a white Buick headed up Avalon Boulevard, driving recklessly—“like he might be drunk or something.” Minikus, who was white, set off in pursuit and soon caught up with the speeding car. He pulled it over at 116th and Avalon. Its driver was twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye. His stepbrother Ronald, twenty-two, was also in the car. Office Minikus asked Marquette for his license. He didn’t have one. Smelling alcohol, Officer Minikus asked Marquette to get out of the car to perform the standard field sobriety test. Frye failed the test. Minikus went back to his motorcycle and radioed for his partner, who was patrolling the nearby Harbor Freeway. He also called for a patrol car to take Marquette in to be booked and a tow truck for the car. It was a minute or two after seven o’clock in the evening.
Minikus told Marquette that he was under arrest. Still good-natured, Marquette asked Minikus if his brother or some other family member could take the car home. They were only a block away. Officer Minikus said that he could not. Department procedure called for towing away and impounding the car. At that very moment, an ex-girlfriend of Marquette’s walked by. Seeing that Marquette was about to be arrested, she hurried over to the apartment where he lived to fetch Marquette and Ronald’s mother. When she arrived at the scene to find a second motorcycle patrolman (Minikus’s partner), a transportation car, and the tow truck, Mrs. Frye got upset—at Marquette. She started to scold him for drinking. Up until this point in the arrest, Marquette had been subdued but cooperative. Now, his mood changed. He pushed away his mother and allegedly started shouting, “You motherfucking white cops, you’re not taking me anywhere!” yelling that they would have to kill him before he would go to jail.
It was a sweltering day. Since Monday, temperatures had been in the mid-nineties—fifteen degrees hotter than it had been all summer. A yellow-gray blanket of smog lay heavy across the city. In 1965, air conditioners were still a rarity in this part of Watts, a working-class neighborhood of newly built two-story apartment buildings and bungalows. As a result, residents tried to spend as much time outside as they could. The neighborhood was full of people that evening—people who were naturally curious to know what all the ruckus was about. By the time Marquette got angry, a crowd of roughly a hundred bystanders had gathered. Some of them started to murmur, angrily. Minikus’s partner slipped off and radioed a code 1199—officer needs help. He returned with a baton used for riot control. The officer in the patrol car grabbed his shotgun.
The crowd, now numbering perhaps 150 people, was starting to turn hostile. “Hit those blue-eyed bastards!” a voice yelled. While one highway patrol officer waved his shotgun at the crowd, the two motorcycle patrol officers attempted to grab Marquette. A scuffle broke out as California Highway Patrol reinforcements arrived at the scene. Marquette was struck by a baton and collapsed on the ground. Mrs. Frye jumped onto the back of one of the arresting officers, screaming, “You white Southern bastard!” Little brother Ronald got into the mix too. By 7:23 p.m., all the Fryes were under arrest. The crowd was now screaming.
“Leave the old lady alone!” someone cried.
“Those white motherfuckers got no cause to do that,” yelled someone else.
“We’ve got no rights at all—it’s just like Selma,” shouted someone else.
The number of onlookers swelled to between 250 and 300 persons. The crowd was getting more and more agitated. Who didn’t know about the shootout three years earlier with the Nation of Islam? Who didn’t know that just one year earlier white Californians had voted to maintain housing segregation, to keep black Angelenos confined to the ghetto? Picking up on the mood, one of the highway patrol officers slipped off to radio for more backup. Soon three more highway patrol officers appeared. Minikus and his partner were now struggling with Marquette and his stepbrother—and with Mrs. Frye. Another officer swung his nightstick at Marquette, hitting him on the forehead and opening a nasty cut. As this was going on, the first LAPD units arrived at the scene.
The arresting officers caught the crowd’s mood. They knew things could get violent. The patrol cars and the tow truck pulled away fast. But as the motorcycle patrolmen revved their engines, one of the officers felt a wad of spit hit the back of his neck. He and his partner stopped and plunged back into the crowd, grabbing the woman they thought was responsible, who started screaming that she hadn’t done anything. The patrol cars returned to the scene, where the crowd, enraged by police mistreatment of a pregnant black woman (as the rumor now had it) was screaming for blood.
“Motherfuckers! Blue-eyed devils! Motherfuckers!”
Another man started urging the crowd to respond; the highway patrol arrested him as well. Then they left to take the Fryes to be booked at a local sheriff’s substation. By 7:40 p.m., the police were again pulling away. A youth hurled a bottle at one of the retreating patrol cars, hitting its rear fender with a crash. This time the police did not return, but instead of dispersing, the assembled crowd headed out into the neighborhood, intent on venting their anger. White motorists passing through the area soon found themselves pelted with stones and, in some cases, beaten. One of the people driving through the area was Chief Parker’s protege, Daryl Gates.
Gates had enjoyed a rapid ascent in Parker’s police department. In 1963, Parker confidant James Hamilton, the longtime head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s intelligence division, had left the department to go to the National Football League. (The NFL was having problems with gambling and organized crime, and Robert Kennedy had recommended his old friend as the perfect person to clean it up.) No position in the department was more sensitive; Parker tapped Gates to fill it. After two years of exemplary service in that position and another outstanding performance on the civil service exam, in June 1965 Gates bec
ame (at the age of thirty-eight) one of the youngest inspectors in the history of the LAPD. A Herald-Examiner story on the appointment noted that Gates was “rumored to be Parker’s choice as a successor.” He was assigned to command Patrol Area 3—Highland Park, Hollywood, Hollenbeck, and Central Division. But in early August, the inspector who was normally in charge of Patrol Area 2—South-Central and southwest L.A.—went on vacation. As a result, those areas were added to Gates’s command.
On the evening of August 11, Gates was heading over to check on security at the Harvey Aluminum Company plant at 190th and Normandie, where workers were out on strike. Over the radio he heard a dispatcher alerting all units to “a major 415”—a large-scale civil disturbance. Gates was about a mile from the intersection of Avalon and 116th Street. He decided to drive over and see what was going on.
What he saw was mayhem. “A kind of crazed carnival atmosphere had broken out,” Gates recalled later in his memoirs. “Laughing, shouting, hurling anything they could find, people were running helter-skelter through the streets. Cars—ours and those of unsuspecting motorists—were pelted with rocks and bottles.” But, as Gates noted, “no single mob had formed.” Moreover, most of the violence was confined to an eight-block area that centered on the scene of the Frye arrest. There was still a chance to control the chaos.
The police had regrouped at a gas station just off the Imperial Highway, where an ad hoc command post had been set up. As the ranking officer, Gates took charge of the field office. Using the roughly twenty patrol cars on hand, Gates attempted to cordon off the area. It was seventy police officers against a mob of five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand—no one really knew for sure. That wasn’t counting reporters, whose presence seemed to spur the youths to additional acts of violence. Nonetheless, by the early hours of the morning it appeared that the police had managed to contain the violence. By 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning, the rock-throwing had died down and the streets had largely cleared. Deputy Chief Murdock, with whom Gates had been in communication all evening, gave the order for the exhausted police officers to retire.
LOS ANGELES was not having a race riot.
If officers on the street were attuned to the possibility of spontaneous racial violence, Chief Parker was not. Even as the violence spread, Parker told a Los Angeles Times reporter that the city was not experiencing a race riot—where blacks attacked whites—“since all the rioters were Negroes.” Rather, what Los Angeles was witnessing was an outburst of childish emotionalism—“people who gave vent to their emotions on a hot night when the temperature didn’t get below 72 degrees.”
In fact, Parker’s police department had been caught off guard—despite ample warnings. Earlier that summer, for instance, Chief Parker received a letter from B. J. Smith, director of the Research Analysis Corporation in McLean, Virginia. Smith noted that Rochester, Philadelphia, New York, and Newark had all experienced race riots during the summer of 1964. How was the country’s greatest police department preparing for the possibility of urban violence? Smith’s questions were timely: “What are the signs or indications of impending civil disturbance? What measures can be taken to avert this trouble? What techniques are most effective for controlling and discrediting demonstrations and riots?”
Chief Parker’s response, in a letter written on May 12, was telling. “The Los Angeles Police Department has never experienced an insurgency situation,” he replied. Moreover, it never expected to. “There have been no occurrences of civil disturbances nor serious conditions which might initiate such a situation in this city.” He concluded the letter by referring Smith to cities that had.
It was a curious response. Parker’s apocalyptic imagination was well developed. Just a few weeks after receiving Smith’s letter, for instance, Parker sat down for a radio interview with ultra-right-wing radio host Dean Man-ion. The tone of their conversation was dark. Parker told his listeners that America was in the midst of a slow-motion socialist revolution: “The difficulty encountered in this socialistic trend is that it is a revolution and it is not entirely a bloodless one, I assure you.” Yet somehow the prophet of social anarchy seemed unwilling to accept the possibility that anarchy might erupt in his own city, even after it already had.
THURSDAY MORNING dawned uneasy. The violence had stopped, but no one knew what would happen that night. Eager to defuse the tensions, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Committee scheduled a 2 p.m. community meeting at Athens Park, eleven blocks from the scene of the rioting. Community leaders from across Watts and, indeed, the city appeared—before a huge throng of print, television, and radio reporters—to urge the residents of Watts not to resort to violence. The meeting started well. Even the combative Mrs. Frye urged residents “to help me and the others calm this situation down so that we will not have a riot tonight.” But as the event continued, a different mood swept through the crowd. Appeals to calm gave way to expressions of grievance. In a moment of confusion, an African American high school student dashed up to the microphones and informed the crowd that black youths would attack the white areas adjacent to Watts that evening. His remarks were widely carried by the media.
Chief Parker did not attend the meeting. Nor would he agree to meet with those whom he dismissively called the “so-called” Negro leaders, who he believed were attempting to “relieve the Negro people of any responsibility in this situation.” Instead, the chief spoke to the press. His comments were not helpful. When asked about the causes of the unrest, Parker replied that the trouble started “when one person threw a rock, and like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.” Calls by assemblyman Mervyn Dymally to announce the immediate establishment of a civilian police review board were dismissed as “a vicious canard.” Parker believed it was now time to meet force with force. After being briefed on what had transpired at the Athens Park meeting, Parker called the adjutant general of the California National Guard to inform him that Los Angeles might well need the Guard. But calling out the Guard was something that only the governor could do and Governor Brown was in Greece on a trip. As a result, the authority to call out the Guard rested with Lt. Gov. Glenn Anderson, who was in Santa Barbara. That evening, Parker called Anderson to brief him on the situation. The lieutenant governor decided to drive back to his house in Los Angeles that evening so he could assess the situation for himself.
At roughly the same time, a delegation of African American activists was meeting with deputy chief Roger Murdock. The activists wanted no visible police presence in Watts that evening. They believed the sight of police would only spur further violence. Instead, they asked the department to deploy only black officers—in civilian clothes and unmarked cars.
Deputy Chief Murdock rejected this proposal out of hand. All day long, he, Daryl Gates, and Inspectors John Powers and Pete Hagan had been working to craft a plan to control South-Central Los Angeles. Their strategy was to deploy units from across the city—as well as roughly 150 deputy sheriffs from the 77th Street station. The hope was that the heavy presence of officers on the street would deter the rioters. Gates would deploy with a contingent of officers to the north of the Imperial Freeway; Inspector John Powers would come in from the south.
THE EVENING began uneventfully—so much so that Gates and the other inspectors decided to treat themselves to a celebratory dinner. But when Gates arrived at the center of field operations, it was clear that things were going badly, even worse than the night before.
The LAPD’s training in riot control had taught officers how to handle large groups of people—a mass protest heading down the street. The police mass in formation, split the rioters into two, and disperse them down two different streets. That, at least, was what the training manuals said. But this was different. There was no mass of marchers or rioters to confront. Instead, it was guerrilla warfare. Shots were being fired, Molotov cocktails thrown. Assailants disappeared down alleys and over fences seconds after they appeared. All around, windows and storefronts were being smashed and stores looted. B
uildings were starting to go up in flames. Gates realized with horror that the LAPD’s field deployment was “a complete abject failure.” Confronted with tactics they had never imagined, much less trained against, the LAPD was adrift.
Orders from headquarters that came over the squawking radios only added to the problem. While the burden of directing the department’s overall response had fallen primarily on Deputy Chief Murdock, Chief Parker was also taking a role in directing the department’s response. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly helpful one. On the first night of the riots, Gates recalls Chief Parker “barking out orders on the radio.”
“Get everyone out of their cars! Everybody out of their cars.”
Eventually, Gates turned the radio off.
Around midnight, the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory suddenly appeared at Gates’s command post. He wanted to address the rioters. Initially Gates refused to provide a bullhorn or an accompaniment of officers, but he was overruled. So Gregory went out—and was promptly shot in the leg. His quick-witted reply: “All right, goddamn it. You shot me. Now go home.”
They didn’t. By 4 a.m., some one hundred people had been injured and stores up and down Avalon had been looted and burned. Yet once again, the police were optimistic. Gates “sensed that the worst was over” and reported that the situation was “under control.” Other senior officers echoed this sentiment. When a member of Lieutenant Governor Anderson’s staff called the department’s emergency control center early Friday morning to get an update, the sergeant on duty told him that “the situation was well in hand.” Reassured, Anderson left Los Angeles at 7:25 a.m. Friday morning for Berkeley, where he was scheduled to attend a meeting as a member of the finance committee of the university’s board of regents.
