Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
had kindled the previous year had been curdled into anger by the intransigence of white-dominated institutions, the pervasive sense of losing ground amid prosperity, and, above all, the ruthless iron heel of the LAPD. The real question was whether that anger would be displaced into intra-community violence or unleashed as a unifying wrath. The danger of the former was illustrated by the upward trend in gang warfare. In January, outside a basketball match between Dorsey and Manual Arts Highs, a former star athlete from Dorsey was stabbed to death in a fight with members of the Gladiators gang. A month later, after several weekends of confrontations between the Parks and Businessmen gangs, a member of the latter (famous for their flashy suits and homburg hats) was shot outside the gym at Jefferson High School.8
Before spring 1963, a veteran unit of the probation department known as Group Guidance (GG), would have immediately stepped in and attempted to negotiate a truce between the warring gangs. But Chief Parker, loudly supported by Sheriff Peter Pitchess, had convinced the board of supervisors to disband the unit. Indeed, he had blamed increased gang conflict on the “dangerous activities” of the nine men and three women of GG. The gangs with whom they worked, Parker had claimed, committed three to four times the crimes of non-supervised gangs: proof, in the LAPD’s eyes, that peace talks and other GG interventions were somehow incentives to violence. Raymond Herbert, the director of the probation department’s delinquency prevention services, had scoffed at Parker’s logic, pointing out that GG’s mission was precisely to target the most violent or criminally involved gangs. “You see a lot of firemen at the worst fires but no one blames the fire department for starting the fires.”9 But Parker’s use of sham statistics had little to do with the specifics of GG’s work; his real aim was to evict the unit from LAPD turf and reinforce the dogma that Black youth were “junior criminals” warranting incarceration. Ironically, by removing GG from the streets and ratcheting up police pressure on youth, he inadvertently sowed the seeds (as did Daryl Gates a quarter century later) for the cessation of gang warfare. That came in August 1964, not as a result of Parker’s autocratic policing, but rather as the fruit of a massive uprising against the LAPD.
The revolt was portended by a series of neighborhood riots in April that displayed a new fighting mood in the community. The first fray followed a track meet at Jefferson High School on Friday, April 10, when four plainclothes LAPD officers, moonlighting as event security, roughly arrested a spectator for drinking and placed him in a patrol car. Hundreds of students and other youth surrounded the car and began throwing rocks and sticks. One of the cops was knocked unconscious by a brick and two others injured. An ambulance rushed to the scene only to collide with a speeding police car, resulting in three more injuries. “More than 100 officers were summoned,” the Times reported, “before the crowd, estimated at 600 persons, was dispersed.” Early the next morning a Greyhound bus smashed into a car at Forty-Sixth and Avalon in South Central, killing the driver. Enraged by the delay in the arrival of an ambulance, an estimated 250 onlookers jeered the police, then started stoning them. The battle resumed that evening when police arrested a man near Sixty-Eighth and Central, during or just before (the accounts vary) a massive vice raid by sheriffs. A crowd of approximately one hundred attempted to rescue him and fought the police.10
The weekend’s spontaneous disorder mocked the confident reassurances of the blue-ribbon committee on community-police relations and led to a new confrontation between civil rights groups and Parker’s institutional supporters. South Central’s council member Billy Mills told the press that he had been stopped by the LAPD seventeen times in the previous year “because they saw me at night driving a car provided by the city”; he demanded the police immediately undergo more training in community relations. On the other hand, the Times praised the LAPD, “whose record in recent years has been remarkably free of prejudicial conduct,” warning that “the current soft attitude on the part of the public to crime and civil rights demonstrations could lead to anarchy.” At his weekly press conference, Mayor Yorty declared that “if anything, the police have been too lenient.”11 How the police actually conducted themselves was revealed two weeks later when a traffic stop for a defective taillight escalated into a riot involving eighty to one hundred residents of the Pacoima area, the Black ghetto of the San Fernando Valley. As the Eagle summarized its interviews with witnesses: “They placed full blame on the two officers involved in the original arrest attempt, accused them of using vile racial epithets, knocking a young mother to the ground, grabbing a teenager by the hair, punching her and bashing her head against a car,” the Eagle reported. “They claimed further that one of the officers drew his pistol and threatened to kill the man accused of a traffic violation.”12 The same weekend the LAPD arrested ten people on “riot” charges in the aftermath of a serious traffic accident at Fiftieth Street and Ascot in South Central. Following heckling and scuffles with police at the scene, a group of residents followed the ambulances to the Central Receiving Hospital, just west of downtown, where the “unruly, cursing mob” (Times) knocked down a cop.13
James Farmer was in town that week and, with local CORE chair Art Silvers, immediately called for the resignation of Chief Parker (who was rumored to be sick and considering retirement). He also joined a picket line outside the Newton Street Station protesting the surprise arrest of the N-VAC leadership—Mari Goldman, Robert Hall, Woodrow Coleman and Danny Gray—for a protest at a Van de Kamp’s bakery earlier in the month.14 In an interview with the Sentinel, Silvers, while reiterating CORE’s commitment to nonviolence, warned that the patience of the community “is nearing an end. The forces of hate and love are lining up.”15 Calling for Chief Parker to step down immediately made CORE the target of vilification from all sides. First the city council voted thirteen to two to express its full support for Parker (with Bradley in favor, and Mills and Gilbert Lindsay, the city’s first Black council member, in opposition), as did the police commission (including Elbert Hudson, the sole Black member).16 This coincided with a column by nationally syndicated journalists Rowland Evans and Bob Novak charging that CORE protests, both in California and at the opening of the World’s Fair in New York, had become the movement’s own worst enemy: “If militant demonstrations persist,” they wrote, “the vote in November promises to be a debacle for civil rights not only here but in the whole nation.”17 Then, Maurice Dawkins, the former NAACP head and UCRC founder, now moving rapidly toward the right, convinced three other religious leaders to join him in denouncing CORE for its peaceful sit-in at the Southwest Realty Board, a nerve center of the campaign to repeal the Rumford Act. “We oppose that type of demonstration in Los Angeles which violates law and order in our community.”18
Two weeks elapsed before the UCRC’s Dr. Taylor finally endorsed CORE’s call for Parker’s resignation.19 But Taylor, besieged by critics of his administrative competence as well as of his tolerance for CORE’s direct action methods, was soon forced to step aside for the more dynamic and politically astute Reverend H. H. Brookins.20 The UCRC’s new chairman, tacitly acknowledging the failure of protest, outlined a more elitist vision of the coalition’s future—particularly, the need to refocus on educating and winning support from L.A.’s corporate powers. “The white community,” he told the Times’s Paul Weeks in a lengthy interview, “must be made to understand that the vast majority of Negroes does not want to demonstrate, agitate and put on a show to feed the needs of pseudo-liberals, white or black. I want to bring more specialized, professional personnel into our work, lessening the influence of some of the more radical activists on whom we have had to depend.” Although Brookins did not repudiate CORE per se, he made it clear that UCRC would only selectively endorse those of the group’s actions that were congruent with its new strategy.21 (Yes, for instance, to a demonstration against the formation of a local white citizens council; but no to CORE’s Bank of America campaign and its sit-ins at realtors’ offices.)
Meanwhile, all the real thunder was on the right. As California stumbled toward the June presidential primary, the confluence of the Goldwater and Proposition 14 campaigns, each supercharging the other, brought armies of conservative activists into the field. The John Birch Society, headquartered in the millionaire suburb of San Marino and generaled by John Rousselot, a former congressman from Orange County, shocked old guard Republicans by running candidates not only in every primary (where they emphasized support for Proposition 14)