40 YEARS OF PROGRESS? FEW CHANGES IN BLACK L.A.

Byline: Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The young National Guard officer curtly and sternly ordered my high- school buddies and me to keep moving down the street.

He waved his bayoneted rifle menacingly at us as he barked out his orders. Behind him, a small army of white-helmeted Los Angeles Police officers and battle fatigue-wearing National Guardsman stood tensely with their rifles poised.

I kept a wary eye on them as we nervously walked past the three-deep barricades that ringed the streets around my house.

My friends and I were on our way home from summer-school classes that hot August day 40 years ago. The smoke from burning stores a few blocks away choked our eyes and seared our lungs. In the distance we could hear the crackle of gunfire. The streets were strewn with empty liquor and cigarette cartons that had been hastily discarded by the horde of looters that for nearly four days roamed the streets near my house.

As a resident of the Watts curfew area that fateful summer, I remember not only the fires and the gunfire, but also the blind rage and desperation that drove the rioters as they pillaged stores and shouted, ``Burn, baby, burn'' (taken from a slogan made popular by a local black DJ). Many considered this a ``payback'' for the century of racism and violence against blacks. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Watts in an effort to stop the violence, young toughs shouted him down.

The orgy of violence and destruction marked the end of an era for the nonviolent civil-rights struggle.

To many poor blacks, nonviolent marches and demonstrations seemed a worthless antidote to the cycle of poverty, violence and neglect. In the next few years, Detroit, Newark, Washington, D.C., and dozens of other cities erupted into violence and destruction. Many blacks embraced the call by black militants Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims for black power, armed confrontation and separatism.

The violence in Watts also made many whites recognize that America's ghettos were powder kegs that could explode at any moment. The suburbs suddenly seemed less safe and secure. White fears forced politicians to scramble to find solutions to the racial crisis.

The McCone Commission appointed by Gov. Edmund G. Brown called for modest police reform and increased spending on jobs and social programs. That established an all-too-familiar pattern: When cities erupted in racial violence, hand-wringing city officials would quickly appoint a commission or blue-ribbon panel, issue a voluminous report on the causes of the riots, cobble together a few job programs, and toss out a few more dollars for social-service programs.

To many Americans, that sounded like a reward for criminal behavior. They blamed the violence on liberal permissiveness and outside agitators, demanding more police, heavy weaponry and tougher prison sentences. With the exception of the Martin Luther King Hospital, which was the one tangible benefit that came out of the riots, the McCone Commission's recommendations were mostly ignored. The few piecemeal, badly mismanaged poverty programs, slapped together to cool off the ghetto, did little to relieve the misery of the black poor.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, politicians and the public became even more reluctant to spend more on domestic programs. The black poor, lacking competitive skills and training, were shoved even further to the outer economic fringe. Their anger quickly turned to cynicism and despair.

Many turned to guns, gangs and drugs to survive.

Civil rights leaders and organizations did not help. They defined the ``black agenda'' in increasingly narrow terms. Affirmative action, economic parity, professional advancement and busing replaced poverty, unemployment, quality education, police reform and political empowerment as the goals that all African-Americans should fight for.

Young, upwardly mobile black businessmen and -women and professionals fled the inner cities in droves. In Los Angeles, they took flight to the San Fernando and Antelope valleys, Riverside County and to the Southern states. This further drained talent, skills and leadership and positive role models from poor communities. Economic shrinkage, government budget cuts, and the elimination of job and social programs dumped more and more blacks into the ranks of the underclass.

Watts and other black ghettos were written off as vast wastelands of violence and despair.

That became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many banks and corporations, as well as government officials, reneged on their promises to fund and build top-notch stores, make more home and business loans and provide massive funding for job and social service programs in ghettos such as Watts. Business leaders had horrific visions of their banks and stores going up in smoke or being hopelessly plagued by criminal violence.

The street, for instance, where my friends and I were shooed down by the police and the guardsman 40 years ago looks no different today. There are fast-food restaurants, beauty shops, liquor stores and mom-and-pop grocers. The street is just as unkempt, pothole-ridden and littered.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles' politicians naively buried their heads in the sand and pretended that all was well in the city.

That was glaringly and embarrassingly evident in the rash prediction that then-Mayor Tom Bradley made on the 25th anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots in 1990. When Bradley was asked whether L.A. could be racked by another riot, he confidently said that it couldn't happen again.

A scant two years later, L.A. was torn by nightmarish urban violence after the acquittals in the Simi Valley trial of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat black motorist Rodney King. When the smoke cleared, the death toll and property damage far exceeded the damage and destruction of the Watts riots.

That should have been yet another wake-up call that things were still bad and could get worse. They have.

In July, the local chapters of the National Urban League and the United Way issued an unprecedented report on the state of black L.A. The report called the conditions in Watts and South L.A. dismal.

Blacks have higher school-dropout rates and are more likely to be homelessness. Blacks die earlier and in greater numbers and are more likely to be jailed and serve longer sentences. Blacks are far and away more likely to be victims of racial hate crimes than any other group in L.A. County.

Today, King/Drew Medical Center, once the shining symbol of change and progress in the area, is mired in bitter controversy over mismanagement, medical incompetence and patient neglect. The threat of closure hangs perennially over the hospital.

The only significant social change in Watts is the ethnic demographic shift. Forty years ago, the area was predominantly black; it is now predominantly Latino, with growing numbers of Cambodian, Vietnamese and Filipino residents. The fast-changing demographics have at times resulted in inter-ethnic battles between blacks and Latinos over jobs, housing, schools and deadly clashes within the L.A. county jails.

Black flight has also drastically diminished black political strength in L.A. and statewide. In the past decade, the number of blacks in the state Legislature has shrunk to half the previous high, and there is the real possibility that blacks could lose one, possibly two, of their three City Council seats in the next few years.

Watts is no longer the national and world symbol of American urban racial destruction, neglect and despair. But the poverty, violence and neglect that made it that symbol are still very much there.

Forty years later, little has changed.

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Photo:

(1 -- 2) The looting and rioting that came to be known as the Watts riots began Aug. 11, 1965, with a police stop of a drunk driving suspect. Six days later, $200 million in property had been destroyed, 34 were dead, more than 1,000 injured and 4,000 arrested in the 1960s' first large-scale racially motivated unrest. Some 16,000 National Guard troops were called in to help the Los Angeles Police Department restore order in the Watts area.

File Photos