"Well, how was Watts?" neighbors would ask me after I returned from a summer of teaching there. I was always at a loss for a good answer, knowing that they knew about the ghetto only through the newspapers or perhaps Life magazine. To most of them, living in an all-white suburb, Watts meant violence, a pocket of black men seething with discontent, waiting for another incident to spark a week of looting and burning. Behind the curiosity of my neghbors was the tacit question, "Were they out to get you?"
Such is the mistaken image which has grown out of not only last year's riots, but also the controversial phrase "black power." For if hate is the motivating force in Watts, it is hate modulated by shrewdness. And regardless of how great a myth has been built around August '65, even the militants know that burning down your own house is a poor way to relieve frusttration.
Los Angeles is a unique metropolis. Unlike New York, where diverse number of socio-economic groups are packed into a small area and where life is arranged vertically, Los Angeles sprawls like a can of spilled paint over 455 square miles, and neighborhoods are divided and connected by her inadequate answer to the subways: the freeways.
Watts is a correspondingly different kind of ghetto. When you turn east off the Harbor Freeway, you are confronted with rows of small homes, looking much like any other lower middle-class neighborhood in the city. You cross Main and begin to see dilapidated Baptist Churches in white stucco and small restaurants featuring "soul food." You're wondering how a riot could have occurred in such a spacious, decentralized area, how a mob could assemble in these quiet streets.
Then you cross Avalon and see the first of the "Treeline Projects," long chains of two-story apartments built by federal, state, and local welfare agencies. Groups of eight or ten men, young and old, may be sitting on the small patch of grass in front, waiting for another day to pass, thinking about a gallon of wine. And traveling east you may see a poster on the wall of a deserted building urging "Boycott, Baby, Boycott," or just "B---, Baby, B---." Now you're in Watts.
103rd Street cuts through the heart of Watts. Along its 4-block "business" section are a couple of drug stores, some food counters, and a small clothing store, but most of the buildings are either deserted as a result of the riots or occupied by a government poverty agency. It is also along this strip that Westminister Neighborhood Association, a large all-black organization run mainly on federal funds, has its detached workers' office.
In the middle of the block stands Watts Happening, the coffee house started by some members of the community after the riots. In an area studded by Teen Posts, offices of OEO and OIC and Headstart, it is one of the few establishments that the residents can call their own: they own it, they run it, and they decide what happens in it. It is here, accompanied by Afro-Cuban jazz made by local musicians, that the "grassroots" voices can be heard. Tortured images of Negro life by local artists cover the walls. African sculpture stands in the corners. Just inside the door is a poster with a black panther on it and "black power" inscribed above, and another one saying, "Black America, Keep on Pushin'".
The riots changed Watts. As one of the coffeehouse militants told me, 'Watts was considered backward among Negroes before...the riots put her on the map." For five days the nation's eyes turned toward Watts, and this new-found sense of importance is still very much alive; it echoes, for instance, in the words of ghetto-poet Johnnie Scott: "A man called Fear has inherited a half-acre, and is angry." Eldridge Cleaver, in a letter written from Folsom Prison shortly after the outbreak, sums it up: "Watts was a place of shame. We used to use Watts as an epithet in much the same way as city boys used "country" as a term of derision...But now, blacks are seen in Folsom saying "I'm from Watts, Baby! ...I lived there for a time, and I'm proud of it, the tired lamentations or Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and The Preacher notwithstanding." This is the reeling of the young Negroes, the Jacobins of post-Revolutionary Watts. It is this new self-consciousness that permeates the "half-acre" around the Westminister Neighborhood Association and 103rd Street.
"Black nationalism" and "black power" go hand in hand with this new tone of excitement, of anticipation. "Black nationalism" is a vague term, however, and in Watts it describes a feeling as well as a program. Malcolm X coined the term, but now those who call themselves "nationalists" range from "primitivists" who believe all white men are blue-eyed devils to a more pragmatic sort who believe that even a white man can be a nationalist if he shares their approach to the civil rights problem.
On the political level, nationalism is a reaction to King's non-violent tactics and all the "go-slow" methods of an older generation. Perhaps the key phrases are black autonomy and black pride, in addition to black power. The nationalist is a man who feels that it is time for the Negro to stop wondering if he's going to accept the white. He is a man reacting to what Richard Wright called a "frog perspective," a tendency to define oneself by white man's standards: "If you ask an American Negro to describe his situation, he will almost always tell you, 'We are rising.' Against what or whom is he measuring his 'rising'? It is beyond doubt his hostile white neighbor."
This is why integration is a word rarely heard among the younger leaders--they are tired of hearing that they must improve themselves so they can "step up" into the white society. This is why the poverty program, aimed at the "culturally deprived," is regarded by the nationalists as just another tool of the white man. In a conversation over why I, the White Student Liberal, was tutoring in Watts, a nationalist said, "Your job is not to tell those kids that they're as good as you are, but to prove that you're as good as they are." The young men of the ghetto don't want culture--just power. The American dream has no place for the black man, they feel, and they have no use for it if integrity is the price to be paid.
Ron Karenga, if not the leader of the nationalists, is at least their most flamboyant representative and most clamorous public relations man. His primary goal is to create a new Negro self-image, based not on white middleclass stereotypes, but on the Negro's African heritage. When I went in to see him, he was wearing a green buba--a long shirt of African origin--speaking into the telephone in Swahili.
When he finished, I asked him, "What are you and your organization trying to do in the community?"
"Wake up the black man."
"Waking up' seems to mean stressing the African heritage of the black man; do you think this will work in a culture that has been shaped more by America than by Africa?"
