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Unlock This CourseWatts was a mainly black district of Los Angeles, California. There were no Jim Crow laws there, but life was hard. Many people had no job, housing was crowded and schools were poor. The city's police force was almost all white and had a name for treating black people roughly.
On the evening of 11 August 1965 a white traffic policeman stopped a young black driver, Marquette Frye, on suspicion of drink-driving. A crowd gathered, there was a scuffle and Frye, his brother and his mother were arrested. Rumours of police violence spread and people began to throw stones.
The riot lasted six days. Shops were looted and whole streets were set on fire. Nearly 14,000 soldiers of the National Guard were sent in. When it ended, 34 people were dead, more than 1,000 were injured and nearly 3,500 had been arrested. The damage came to about 40 million dollars. It had begun just five days after the Voting Rights Act was signed.
Key terms:
Watts was the worst riot of the 1960s so far, and more 'long, hot summers' followed. In July 1967 riots in Newark killed 26 people and riots in Detroit killed 43. After Martin Luther King was shot dead in Memphis on 4 April 1968, there were riots in more than 100 cities.
In October 1966 two students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, set up the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence in Oakland, California. They took the panther from the symbol used in Lowndes County. Their Ten-Point Programme demanded jobs, decent housing, schools that taught black history and an end to police brutality.
Panthers wore black berets and black leather jackets. They followed police cars through Oakland, carrying guns and law books, to watch how officers treated black people. Carrying a loaded gun openly was legal in California at that time. On 2 May 1967 about 30 armed Panthers walked into the state parliament building in Sacramento to protest against a bill to ban this. The pictures made the party famous.
Newton was the party's Minister of Defence and its main thinker. He planned the armed patrols. In October 1967 he was arrested after a shoot-out in which a policeman died, and in 1968 he was jailed. 'Free Huey' rallies won the party thousands of supporters. He was freed in 1970 when the verdict was overturned.
Seale was the party's chairman, organiser and best-known speaker. He led the Sacramento protest. In 1969, on trial in Chicago over protests at a political meeting, he was tied up and gagged in court on the judge's orders. In 1973 he ran for mayor of Oakland and came second.
From 1969 the Panthers ran 'survival programmes', such as free breakfasts for thousands of schoolchildren and free health clinics. At its peak the party had more than 2,000 members, with branches in many cities.
The party also frightened people. There were gun battles with the police, and J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI called it the greatest threat to the country's internal security. The FBI spied on it and worked to break it up. In December 1969 the Chicago leader Fred Hampton was shot dead in a police raid. Arrests, deaths and quarrels among the leaders left the party much weaker by 1974.
Segregation by law was over, and black Southerners could vote. By 1970 there were about 1,500 black elected officials. In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress. In 1973 Tom Bradley became the first black mayor of Los Angeles, the city of the Watts riots.
In 1974 about three in ten black Americans lived in poverty, compared with fewer than one in ten white Americans. Black unemployment was about twice the white rate. Housing and schools in many cities were still segregated in practice. In Boston in 1974, buses taking black children to white schools were stoned.
So there was far more equality in law than in daily life.
Don't place Watts in the South: it shows that racism was a national problem. Don't describe the Panthers only as gunmen, or only as a charity. They were both, and a good answer says so.
'The main effect of the race riots of 1965-68 was a white backlash against civil rights.'
How far do you agree? Explain your answer. [16 marks]
You may use the following in your answer:
You must also use information of your own.
I agree to a large extent. The riots had several effects, but the backlash changed who held power in the USA, so it mattered most.
The riots certainly caused a white backlash. The Watts riots began only five days after the Voting Rights Act was signed. They left 34 dead and about 40 million dollars of damage, and Detroit in 1967 was worse, with 43 dead. Many white Americans, watching on television, felt that new laws had been answered with violence, so sympathy for civil rights fell. Richard Nixon used this feeling. He promised 'law and order' and won the presidential election of November 1968. This shows that the riots moved many voters away from further reform.
However, the riots also forced the government to look at the ghettos. The Kerner Report of February 1968 blamed white racism, not agitators, and warned of 'two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal'. A week after King's death, while cities were still rioting, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 on housing. Yet this effect was limited, because Johnson did not act on Kerner's call for huge spending on jobs and homes.
A third effect was on black protest itself. The riots showed that non-violent campaigns in the South had done little for the cities of the North and West. King was heckled in Watts and moved his campaign to Chicago in 1966. Others chose a more militant path. In October 1966 Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panthers in Oakland to patrol the police, whose actions had sparked the riots. The party spread to many cities, but even at its peak it had only a few thousand members, and it was much weaker by 1974.
Overall, the backlash was the main effect if we judge by how many people were affected and for how long. The Kerner Report was shelved and the Panthers were always a small group. The backlash helped to decide a presidential election, and so it shaped what every later campaign could hope to win. The riots drew attention to ghetto poverty, but their main result was to make it harder to end.
What lifts this to the top level: it covers three aspects (one from own knowledge), weighs each against the statement and judges them by a clear test, how many people were affected and for how long.
An answer that uses only the two bullet points cannot reach the top level, so always plan a third point of your own before you start. Here it was the effect of the riots on King and the Black Panthers. In your conclusion, name the test you are using to decide which effect was the 'main' one.