TPPM Watts:

[Otto]

Civil wrongs

Decades after the Watts riots, life for the people of South Central Los
Angeles is as tough as ever - and now they are losing their only good
medical facility, reports Dan Glaister

Friday September 24, 2004

Next year sees the 40th anniversary of the Watts riots - or rebellion,
depending on your politics. Among the hottest points of the civil rights
struggles of the 1960s, the riots were condemned by the white establishment
at the time as one of the largest outbreaks of mass looting ever seen,
involving an estimated 50,000 people.
Almost 40,000 police and national guard officers confronted the
rebels/rioters as the authorities reacted belatedly and heavy handedly. Of
the 34 people who died during the six days of unrest, 28 were
African-American.

After the event, despite the tepid recommendations of the official McCone
commission, orthodoxy swung behind the more liberal interpretation of
events: the Watts riots had been a "rebellion of rising expectations"
fuelled by poverty, racial injustice, a lack of services and the awareness
that Watts, Willowbrook and Compton, predominantly African-American areas of
Los Angeles that were later renamed South Central, were being left behind.
(...)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1312004,00.html