BILL ANALYSIS Ó
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Date of Hearing: July 7, 2015
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON JUDICIARY
Mark Stone, Chair
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(Gipson) - As Amended July 2, 2015
SUBJECT: 50th Anniversary of the Watts Revolt
KEY ISSUE: Should the California Legislature Commemorate the
50th anniversary of the 1965 Watts Revolt, an event of profound
historical significance for california and the nation?
SYNOPSIS
This resolution commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Watts
Revolt that occurred in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in
August, 1965. Like so many subsequent episodes of racial and
social unrest, that event was sparked by an encounter between
police and an African American man in a community located within
a setting of racial and economic injustice. The Watts Revolt
was neither the first nor the last "race riot" in American
history, but coming only five days after the signing the
historic 1965 Voting Rights Act, the event drew national
attention to persistent but often overlooked issues of racial
injustice outside of the southern United States. In the summers
of 1966 and 1967, similar unrest occurred in cities throughout
the nation. The 1965 McCone Commission investigation and report
- like the national 1967 Kerner Commission report on the later
riots - concluded that the unrest was due to a potent
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combination of poor police-community relations, poverty and
unemployment, deteriorating urban infrastructure, under-funded
schools, and a general sense of hopelessness among the African
American community. This resolution not only remembers the
event itself, but perhaps more importantly, calls upon the
Legislature to urge public and private solutions to the
conditions that gave rise to the Watts Revolt and continue to
persist and negatively impact communities of color in California
and the United States, as well as to celebrate peaceful efforts
to redirect community energy into more constructive channels.
There is no opposition to this timely resolution.
SUMMARY: Commemorates the 50th Anniversary of the Watts Revolt.
Specifically, this measure:
1)Declares that Whereas:
a) Economic inequality is a critical component of community
well-being and the maintenance of social peace.
b) In 1964, there were a total of eight revolts across
African American communities, including Chicago, New York
City, Philadelphia, and Jersey City, that came as a result
of racial tension and economic deprivation.
c) August 2015 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Watts
Revolt, which began on August 11, 1965, when Marquette Frye
and his brother were stopped by police under a drunk
driving suspicion, which resulted in a hostile
confrontation between the Frye family and police officers
on the scene.
d) The Watts Revolt was the culmination of historic and
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systemic circumstances of racial and economic injustice
that include frustration with the passage of Proposition 14
of 1964 in California, which sought to nullify the state's
fair housing law.
e) The historic event, which took place in the greater
Watts neighborhoods of Los Angeles and the City of Compton,
involved six days of protest resulting in 34 deaths, 1,032
injuries, and over $40 million worth of property damage.
f) Between 31,000 and 35,000 adults participated in the
revolt over the course of six days.
g) The Watts Revolt is an important part of Los Angeles
history and it is critical that we mark the 50th
anniversary of this event appropriately.
h) The McCone Commission was established to investigate the
Watts Revolt and identify solutions to ensure that such an
event never reoccurred.
i) The results of the investigation found that the Watts
Revolt was a consequence of discrimination in employment,
education, housing, healthcare, and law enforcement.
j) The aforementioned issues persist within the communities
today.
aa) When discussing the topic of social unrest in America,
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "I would be the first to
say that I am still committed to militant, powerful,
massive, nonviolence as the most potent weapon . . . But it
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would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without,
at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable
conditions that exist in our society."
2)Resolves that the California Legislature should do the
following:
a) Commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Watts Revolt,
one of the largest uprisings in 20th century America.
b) Urge the development of public and private solutions to
statewide and local disparities on the basis of legal and
institutional racism in areas including but not limited to
education, employment, housing, healthcare, and law
enforcement.
c) Pay tribute to the establishments of institutions that
sought to remedy the key challenges in the South Los
Angeles Community, including California State University,
Dominguez Hills, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and
Science, and Martin Luther King General Hospital and
Outpatient Center.
d) Celebrate the organization of local peaceful actions to
redirect community energy in positive and constructive
ways, including the development of the Watts Summer
Festival, Watts Summer Games, Watts Christmas parade, and
Watts Labor Community Action Committee.
e) Transmit copies of the resolution to the cities of Los
Angeles and Compton and encourage them to disseminate
copies to local, community, and statewide organizations
throughout California.
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FISCAL EFFECT: As currently in print this measure is keyed
non-fiscal.
COMMENTS: In many ways, the 1965 Watts Revolt - also known as
the "Watts Rebellion" or "Watts Riot" - can be traced to the
migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans to
California, during and after World War II, from the Jim Crow
South who hoped to escape poverty, segregation, and political
disenfranchisement. Many did indeed find greater opportunities.
But wartime jobs vanished, "white flight" initiated a spiral of
lost revenue, and urban services declined to a point where many
African Americans found that the de jure segregation that they
had experienced in the South had simply given way to de facto
desegregation and discrimination in jobs and housing in the
West. But African Americans in California could at least vote
and, ironically, partly because of residential segregation,
could elect African American legislators like William Byron
Rumford, whose legislative achievements included the 1959 Fair
Employment Practices Act and the1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act
that prohibited racial discrimination in employment and housing,
respectively. In 1964, however, California voters adopted an
initiative that effectively overturned the Rumford Fair Housing
Act. Proposition 14 - sponsored by the California Real Estate
Association and supported by the John Birch Society and the
California Republican Assembly - declared that "neither the
State nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall deny, limit or
abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person, who is
willing or desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his
real property, to decline to sell, lease or rent such property
to such person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion,
chooses." In short, sellers and landlords could discriminate
against anyone for any reason. [Official Ballot Summary,
Proposition 14 (1964), at
http://repository.uchastings.edu/ca_ballot_props/672 ; See also
Rice, et.al. Elusive Eden: A New History of California 531-534
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(3d Ed. 2002).]
The California Supreme Court eventually struck down Proposition
14 as unconstitutional in 1966, and the U.S. Supreme Court
affirmed this decision in 1967. (Prenderergast v. Snyder (1966)
64 Cal. 2d 877; Reitman v. Mulkey (1967) 387 U.S. 369.)
However, Proposition 14 was still in effect at the time of the
Watts Revolt. The commission that investigated the causes of
the Watts Revolt concluded that one of the immediate causes of
the Watts unrest was "that [African Americans] had been
affronted by the passage of Proposition 14 - an initiative
measure passed by two-thirds of the voters in November 1964
which repealed the Rumford Fair Housing Act." [Governor's
Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, Violence in the City - An
End or a Beginning (Sacramento: 1965); hereafter McCone
Commission Report.]
Like many so-called "race riots" before and since, the Watts
Revolt started with a confrontation between white police
officers and black residents in a highly segregated and
economically disadvantaged community. On August 11, 1965, a
white police officer stopped a black motorist, Marquette Frye.
A crowd gathered and watched an escalating confrontation between
police officers and members of Frye's family, including Frye's
mother. All members of the Frye family were arrested. Rumors
circulated - possibly untrue - that police officers had also
assaulted a pregnant African American woman. Over the next six
days, the conflict escalated into an all-too familiar pattern of
violent clashes between citizens and police, culminating in
nighttime arson and looting. The unrest finally abated on
August 16 with the arrival of the National Guard. By the time
the unrest ended, there had been 34 deaths, over one thousand
injuries, and over four thousand arrests. Property damage
amounted to about $40 million. (Rice, et.al. The Elusive Eden
511-524.)
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Many, at the time, and since, have noted the irony that the
Watts Riot came only five days after the signing ceremony for
the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Coming one year after the 1964
Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act seemed to represent a
culminating victory for the Civil Rights Movement. According to
many historians, however, while those legislative achievements
may have addressed the problems of de jure segregation and
formal political disenfranchisement in the South, they did
little to help urban blacks in the North and West who faced a
more complex set of social and economic problems. If anything,
for blacks outside of the South, the legislative achievements
may have even contributed to the urban unrest by raising
expectations without producing any concrete results. (See e.g.
Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality 184-193
(1993).) African Americans in California did not face
state-mandated de jure segregation, but rather a de facto
segregation that resulted from limited economic options and
private real estate practices.
Unlike the situation in the South, blacks in California were
generally free to register and vote and by the mid-1960s had
elected many African American officials, including Assembly
Members W. Byron Rumford, F. Douglas Ferrell, Mervyn Dymally,
and Willie Brown. In 1966, the year after the Watts Revolt,
Yvonne Brathwaite Burke - a staff attorney for the McCone
Commission (and mother of current Assembly Member Autumn Burke)
- became the first African-American female to serve in the
California State Assembly. Proposition 14 suggested to black
Californians, however, that even when they could elect members
to the state legislature and win favorable legislation, those
victories could be negated by the majority through the
initiative process. (Rice, et.al. The Elusive Eden, supra at
511, 531-538.)
"Two Societies -- Separate and Unequal:" McCone and Kerner
Commissions. In the wake of the Watts Revolt, then-Governor
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Edmund G. "Pat" Brown appointed the "Governor's Commission on
the Los Angeles Riots," more commonly known as the McCone
Commission. The Governor asked the Commission to do three
things: first, "prepare an accurate chronology and description
of the riots;" second, "probe deeply the immediate and
underlying causes of the riots;" and third, "develop
recommendations for action designed to prevent a recurrence of
these tragic disorders." The final report - entitled Violence
in a City - an End or a Beginning - identified both long-term
and short-term causes of the unrest, including the impact of
Proposition 14 to negate the Rumford Act. The deeper and
longer-term causes, however, included poor police-community
relations, unemployment, inadequate schools, poor health and
insufficient medical facilities, and deteriorating urban
infrastructure.
These problems were not unique to Los Angeles. In the summers
of 1966 and 1967, dozens of cities across the nation experienced
similar uprisings. Just as Watts generated the McCone
Commission, the nation-wide riots of 1966 and 1967 produced the
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner
Commission) which found that riots had been sparked by similar
events (usually charges of police harassment or brutality), took
similar courses, and had similar underlying causes. The Kerner
Commission report listed the causes by "levels of intensity,"
and in the following order: police practices; unemployment and
underemployment; inadequate housing; inadequate education; poor
recreation facilities and programs; ineffectiveness of the
political structures and grievance procedures; disrespectful
white attitudes; discriminatory administration of justice;
inadequacy of federal programs; inadequacy of municipal
services; discriminatory consumer and credit practices; and
inadequate welfare programs. As the Kerner Commission's
executive summary concisely put it: "Our nation is moving toward
two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal."
(Summary of Report: Introduction, National Advisory Committee on
Civil Disorders, 1967.)
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The More Things Change. The Kerner Commission concluded its
summary with the words of one of its first witnesses, Dr.
Kenneth Clark. Dr. Clark was an African American psychologist
whose work on the psychological impact of segregation on
children was cited in Brown v. Board of Education. Having
turned his attention to the history of race riots in American
history, he offered the Kerner Commission this observation:
I read that report. . . of the 1919 riot in Chicago,
and it is as if I were reading the report of the
investigating committee on the Harlem riot of '35, the
report of the investigating committee on the Harlem
riot of '43, the report of the McCone Commission on
the Watts riot. . . . I must again in candor say to
you members of this Commission - it is a kind of Alice
in Wonderland - with the same moving picture re-shown
over and over again, the same analysis, the same
recommendations, and the same inaction.
In light of recent events, Clark's testimony is arresting.
Testifying in 1967, he saw "the same moving picture re-shown
over and over again." Looking backward, he saw the riots in
Chicago in 1919, Harlem in 1935, Harlem again in 1943, and
Watts in 1965. If Dr. Clark could have looked forward he
would have seen Los Angeles in 1992 and, more recently,
Ferguson and Baltimore. Perhaps, therefore, it is a good
time to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Watts Revolt,
as this resolution does, and hope that we can finally get
past "the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the
same inaction."
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION:
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Support
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti
NAACP, California State Conference
Watts Labor Community Action Committee
Opposition
None on file
Analysis Prepared by:Thomas Clark / JUD. / (916) 319-2334
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