I’ve spent a lot of time recently reflecting on how we teach and learn the history of the Civil Rights movement. In the UK, and indeed in much of the US, the narrative is often sanitized into a series of Southern milestones: the bus boycotts in Montgomery, the dogs of Birmingham, the bridge at Selma, and the soaring rhetoric of Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial. It is a story of legal triumphs—the dismantling of de jure segregation.
But as I discussed in the latest episode of the Explaining History podcast, if we stop the clock in 1964 with the signing of the Civil Rights Act, we miss the most explosive and perhaps most instructive chapter of the era: the urban uprisings of the West and North. Chief among these is the 1965 Watts Riots (or the Watts Rebellion). To understand Watts, we have to look past the “official” version of history and examine what Mike Davis and Jon Wiener call the “Economic Flytrap.”
The Myth of the Californian Promised Land
During the 1960s, Los Angeles was often portrayed as a beacon of hope for African Americans fleeing the overt, state-sponsored violence of the Jim Crow South. In what historians call the Second Great Migration, thousands arrived from Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. They were looking for the “Promised Land.”
What they found was what many scholars, including Gerald Horne in Fire This Time, describe as a “hidden” Jim Crow. While L.A. didn’t have “Whites Only” signs at the lunch counters, it had rigid residential segregation enforced by restrictive covenants and, later, by redliningRedlining Full Description:The systematic denial of financial services—primarily mortgages and insurance—to residents of specific neighborhoods based on their racial composition. Maps were literally drawn with red lines around Black communities, marking them as “hazardous” for investment. Redlining was a discriminatory practice institutionalized by federal housing agencies and private banks. It effectively prevented Black families from buying homes and accumulating equity, while subsidizing white flight to the suburbs. It trapped minority populations in decaying urban centers with underfunded infrastructure.
Critical Perspective:This practice explains the persistence of the racial wealth gap today. It demonstrates that the “ghetto” was not a natural occurrence, but a government-engineered reality. By shutting Black families out of the post-war housing boom (the primary generator of middle-class wealth), the state ensured that economic inequality would endure long after legal segregation was abolished.
Read more. This created a hyper-segregated environment where Black communities were physically and economically cordoned off from the post-war boom occurring in the rest of the city.
In our episode, I referenced the groundbreaking work found in Set the Night on Fire. Davis and Wiener highlight a crucial, often overlooked study by UCLA’s Institute of Industrial Relations in 1965. The researchers, Paul Bullock and Fred Schmidt, discovered a paradox that challenged the liberal assumptions of the time: long-term residents of the Watts ghetto, despite having higher education levels than recent arrivals from the South, were more likely to be unemployed. Education, the supposed “great equalizer” of the American Dream, was failing to provide an exit.
The Economic Flytrap: Poverty as a Policy
The “Economic Flytrap” wasn’t an accident of the market; it was a structural cage. As the manufacturing sector began its long, slow retreat from the urban core, Black workers were the first to be discarded. In Watts, the unemployment rate for Black women was a staggering 60%.
Scholarship by historians like Thomas Sugrue has shown that the “urban crisis” was fueled by a combination of deindustrialization and persistent workplace discrimination. Even in a “booming” 1965 economy where manufacturing wages were hitting record highs, the Black community in South Central L.A. was being systematically bypassed.
When we talk about the Watts Riots, we aren’t talking about a sudden, irrational outburst. We are talking about the result of a community being snared in a “flytrap” where the harder they worked to improve their station—through education or migration—the more the structural walls of the ghetto seemed to close in.
The LAPD and the “Negative Employment Scheme”
Perhaps the most insidious part of this flytrap was the role of law enforcement. Under the leadership of Chief William Parker, the LAPD operated less like a community service and more like an occupying force. Parker was a proponent of “Proactive Policing,” which in reality meant a relentless dragnet of “stop and frisk” tactics targeting Black and Chicano youth.
In the podcast, I described this as a “negative employment scheme.” Here’s how it worked: The LAPD would stop young men without probable cause, searching for “weed or stolen items.” Even if no major crime was committed, these encounters frequently led to petty arrests for “resisting” or “disorderly conduct.”
As Davis and Wiener point out, while these arrests rarely resulted in prison time, they created a permanent arrest record. In the 1960s, a “criminal record” of any kind was an automatic disqualifier for most union jobs, civil service positions, or corporate roles. By criminalizing the mere act of being a young Black man on a street corner, the LAPD effectively rendered a generation “unemployable.”
When the formal economy rejected them, these men were forced into the “street economy”—drugs, petty theft, and gambling—which in turn led to more serious arrests. This was a vicious circle of state-manufactured criminality. As I discussed with the anecdote of the McCone Commission staffer, the white establishment simply could not—or would not—see the link between an arrest record and the inability to find a job. To them, the record was a sign of a “bad character”; to the people of Watts, it was a brand that kept them in poverty.
The Political Gridlock: Mayor Yorty and the Triumvirate
If the economy was the trap and the LAPD was the guard, the political establishment was the locked door. In the mid-60s, L.A. was governed by what was known as the “Ruling Triumvirate”: Mayor Sam Yorty, Chief Parker, and Cardinal James Francis McIntyre.
Yorty is a particularly fascinating and frustrating figure in this history. He was a populist who increasingly leaned into a hard-right, racially coded politics. By 1965, the federal government under Lyndon B. Johnson had launched the “War on Poverty” through the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Millions of dollars were earmarked for urban centers to create job programs and youth recreation.
However, the OEO had a catch: the “Maximum Feasible Participation” clause. This required that the poor themselves have a seat at the table in deciding how the money was spent. Yorty, a man of profound ego and racial bias, refused to yield an inch of power to Black community leaders. He engaged in a bitter, month-long feud with Sargent Shriver (head of the OEO), essentially holding federal aid hostage.
Because Yorty refused to play by the federal rules, L.A. became the only major city in the US to see its anti-poverty funds frozen in the summer of 1965. Summer jobs for 20,000 teenagers were canceled. Youth programs were shuttered. As the “hottest summer” began, thousands of young men had nothing to do, no money in their pockets, and a deep, justified resentment toward a city hall that viewed them as a nuisance rather than a constituency.
Malcolm X and the Prophecy of Rage
We cannot discuss the lead-up to Watts without mentioning Malcolm X. Just months before he was assassinated, and only weeks before the uprising, Malcolm spoke in Detroit and L.A., warning that the “atmosphere is too tight.”
He spoke to the “disillusioned” and the “fed up.” He understood that while the Civil Rights movement was winning legal battles in Washington, it was losing the battle for the hearts and stomachs of the urban North and West. He saw that the “non-violent” approach of the Southern leadership did not resonate with a young man in Watts who was being beaten in the back of a squad car or rejected from a factory job because of a “proactive” arrest record.
His prophecy came to pass on August 11, 1961, following the arrest of Marquette Frye. The six days of fire and fury that followed were not just a “riot”—they were a rebellion against the “Hidden Jim Crow.”
The McCone Commission: A Missed Opportunity for Truth
After the fires were extinguished, the state did what it always does: it formed a commission. The McCone Commission was tasked with finding the “cause” of the violence.
However, as I noted in the podcast, the commission was a masterclass in “white-washing.” It largely ignored the structural economic arguments and the LAPD’s systemic brutality. Instead, it focused on “outside agitators” and a “lack of leadership” within the Black community. It treated the rebellion as a pathology—a disease to be cured with better policing—rather than a symptom of a failed social contract.
Scholars like Robert Conot, who wrote Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness, provided a much more nuanced view, detailing the “chaos, disunity, and suspicion” that Yorty’s political games had fostered. But the official record chose to look away.
Why This Matters Today
As we look at modern movements for social justice, the lessons of Watts remain hauntingly relevant. We are still grappling with the “vicious circle” of criminalization and unemployment. We are still seeing the ways in which “proactive policing” creates barriers to economic mobility.
The story of Watts teaches us that legal rights are hollow without economic power. It teaches us that “liberal” cities like Los Angeles can be just as oppressive as the segregated South if the underlying power structures remain unchallenged.
In my upcoming Masterclass on February 15th, we’ll be looking at the period from 1945 to 1974 in much more detail. We will trace the line from the post-war boom to the ash-filled streets of 1965, and finally to the political disillusionment of Watergate. History isn’t just a list of dates; it’s a map of how we got here.
I hope you’ll join me for that. In the meantime, keep questioning the narrative.
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