RACES The Loneliest Road

On the southeastern fringe of Los Angeles, the Negro ghetto of Watts was a smoldering ruin. Wisps of smoke still curled from the skeletons of charred buildings. Wrecked cars lay around the streets like swatted beetles. Sidewalks were buried under huge shards of glass and chunks of concrete that had filled the air at the riots' height. The glint of sunlight on thousands of brass cartridge casings gave the eerie look of an abandoned battlefield -which it was. "This is just a quietness," said a Negro minister. "The riot is not over."

That after-image haunted all Americans, in a week that brought successes for their nation almost everywhere save in the unillumined corners of its own big cities. The U.S. could look proudly to the skies, where the Gemini 5 capsule whirled in orbit; to far-off Viet Nam, where raw young marines scored the war's most notable victory against a well-entrenched, battle-seasoned Viet Cong force; to their own boundless farm lands, where record crops were ripening.

Against all this, the Negro's unbridled rage pulsed in a deeply disquieting counterpoint, drumming home the belated realization that while the black American's legal rights at last seem securely anchored in the law, his problems of identity as a citizen have only now begun to nudge the nation's conscience (see TIME ESSAY).

Telltale Signs. If the fires of hatred and frustration had subsided, they had not gone out in Watts. All week, scattered scenarios of violence unfolded in the ghetto's rubbled streets. A Negro woman tried to run a National Guard blockade and was riddled with .30-cal. machine-gun fire. An 18-year-old boy caught looting a fire-damaged furniture store was shot dead; near where he fell was a body so hideously charred that police were unable to determine its sex. Fifty police rushed to the Black Muslim mosque in Watts on a tip that arms were being laid in there, arrested 59 Negroes after a half-hour gunfight.

But -for the time being, at least -the volcanic fury had spent itself, and white officialdom slowly relaxed its tight vise on the area. By week's end only 1,000 National Guardsmen remained of the 14,000 who had been rushed in at the riots' peak.

The toll stood at 35 dead and 900 injured.* Property damage was estimated at $46 million, with 744 buildings damaged or destroyed by fire, 457 picked bare by looters. Nearly 4,300 had been arrested, and the total kept on mounting as Negroes who sported telltale new clothes or possessions were hauled in on suspicion of receiving stolen goods. To avoid a similar fate, other looters began abandoning their booty. Police recovered more than 50,000 stolen articles: television sets, a score of sofas, hundreds of lamps, a truckload of beer. More than 3,000 of those arrested faced felony charges ranging from looting and armed burglary to arson and murder. To complicate things for the courts, some of the prisoners gave fake names like Richard Burton and Edward G. Robinson. According to a tongue-in-cheek theory making the rounds of white Los Angeles, the riots had not been halted by the National Guard; they simply petered out when all the rioters went home to see themselves on their looted TV sets.

Sense of Pride. Yet the mood in Watts last week smacked less of defeat than of victory and new power. "They have developed a feeling of potency," said Negro Psychiatrist J. Alfred Cannon. "They feel the whole world is watching now. And out of the violence, no matter how wrong the acts were, they have developed a sense of pride."

They have also discovered a convenient if desperate device to draw attention to their plight. Two weeks ago hardly anybody had heard of Watts. Now, a big-name, eight-man commission appointed by Governor Pat Brown and headed by former CIA Chief John A. McCone, was looking into community problems that everyone else had ignored for years. Now, $1,770,000 was being rushed from Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity to hire up to 2,000 local residents for the clean-up job. Now, after months of petty political bickering (see following story), $20 million in federal anti-poverty funds was on its way to Watts and the rest of Los Angeles' Black Channel.

And after all, as a 19-year-old Negro rioter pointed out, "What Watts needed was rebuildin'. Now we made sure they're gonna have to rebuild it. And it's gonna mean some jobs for Negroes here, like me and my old man."

Temper Tantrum. But if the people of Watts -and a good number of sympathetic Negroes elsewhere -took pride in their bloody outburst, there was far more reason to count it a tragic setback for the Negro and the nation.

"It bore no relation to the orderly struggle for civil rights that has ennobled the past decade," said President Johnson in unusually stern tones. "A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face. They are both lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of a free America. They must be exposed, and they must be dealt with."

To Martin Luther King, the Negro's chief apostle of nonviolence, it was a blind, misguided "lashing out" for attention, a kind of "temper tantrum" by those at the very brink of hopelessness.

"You with The Man." Though a favorite rallying cry of the mob was "Get Whitey!", most Negro leaders interpreted it as a class explosion, in which The Man -the white cop and shopkeeper, social worker and politician -was attacked more because he was a symbol of the Negro's deprivation than because his skin was white. The troublemakers in Watts could have claimed scores of white victims, if racial vengeance had been their aim. "This wasn't no race riot," said a Watts woman. "It was a riot between the unemployed and the employed. We are tired of being shelved and" told we don't want to work."

In fact, the rioters' resentment was aimed at the successful, assimilated Negro as well as the white man. "The time is coming," said Negro Author Louis Lomax, "when some of us who look like middle-class success symbols will have to march to Watts in all humility, and we're going to have to show these people that we are just as willing to die right here in Los Angeles to help this man reidentify as we are willing to die in Selma." To illustrate the gulf that existed between the Negro "haves" and "have-nots," Negro State Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally recounted an exchange at the riots' height with a boy who was brandishing a Molotov cocktail:

Dymally: Cool it, man.

Youth: You with us?

Dymally: Yeah.

Youth: Well then, here, you throw it.

Dymally: No, I'm for peace.

Youth: Then you with The Man.

No Fathers. As happened in Harlem last summer, packs of youths took over the Watts riot, commanding the streets, defying anybody to challenge them. No Negro leader accepted the challenge. "They have rejected their elders," said New York's Bayard Rustin, who had helped organize the triumphant 1963 March on Washington. "These elders are not people of achievement. Their fathers are out of work. Their mothers are on relief. And the established civil rights leadership is out of touch with them. We've done plenty to get the vote in the South and seats in lunchrooms, but we've had no program for these youngsters. They can't look to their fathers and they can't look to us."

The Negroes of Watts were less polished but no less forceful in condemning their leadership. "We've got enough big nigger preachers here, doing nothing but taking our money and talking for the white man," said a Watts housewife. "I figure I'm my own best leader," said another, "except for the President, and he better be white and black or he can burn too."

Ghetto to Suburb. The President was trying to be just that. In a speech to a White House Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, he spoke of his efforts to improve the lot of "Americans of every color." Said he: "In education, in housing, in health, in conservation, in poverty, in 20 fields or more, we have passed -and we will pass -far-reaching programs heretofore never enacted. Our cause is the liberation of all of our citizens through peaceful, non violent change." He concluded, "I'm enlisted for the duration."

Surely the duration will extend beyond Lyndon Johnson's presidency and many , more to come. Through legal action, the road from shantytown to voting booth has been cleared. Now Los Angeles has shown that the road from deprivation to decent schools, jobs and homes, may be even more tortuous and lonely. There are no short cuts, and in the aftermath of violence the people of Watts may begin to grasp that fact. Many did. "I don't want anyone to give me anything," said a Negro laborer. "All I want is a job."

-Detroit's race riot in 1943 claimed 35 dead, 700 injured. The 1919 race riots in East St. Louis, Ill., cost 47 lives.

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