From the archives: the Los Angeles riot study

Abstract

The 1960s was a consequential decade for race relations in the United States. At mid-decade, it seemed that the long struggle to achieve the goal of racial integration would soon be achieved. Congress enacted a series of federal civil rights laws that ended de jure racial segregation and promised to achieve the major goals of the “second reconstruction” – the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet less than a week after the signing of the Voting Rights Act, a riot broke out in South Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, following the arrest of a 21-year-old African American driver, Marquette Frye, for suspected drunk driving. Like the Harlem Riots of 1964, which followed the police shooting of 15-year-old Jerome Powell, the Watts Riots differed from many earlier “race riots.” While “race-related collective violence is a recurrent, periodic theme in American history,” riots in the first half of the 20 century “were characterized by violent interracial clashes between blacks and whites, usually initiated by whites” while the disorders of the 1960s “featured clashes between blacks and law enforcement officials” (Lipsky & Olson, 1977, p. 37). Many argued that the riot, now called by some an uprising, reflected frustration at the continuing challenges of police brutality and segregation during a period of superficial progress. Years later, Frye, who had resisted arrest, told a reporter, “All I knew that day is that I was tired of being treated bad by a policeman” (Szymanski, 1990, para. 15). Immediately after the riot, the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) initiated the Los Angeles Riot Study (LARS). The study, funded by a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity, was staffed by faculty members from a variety of social science disciplines. Nathan E. Cohen, a national social work leader who had joined the faculty of the UCLA School of Social Welfare in 1964, served as study coordinator. The Institute of Government and Public Affairs issued a preliminary report in 1967; the final report was issued five years after the riot (N. Cohen, 1970), after more than 300 other American cities had experienced serious riots (Lipsky & Olson, 1977, p. 10).