Watts, August Nineteen Sixty-Five

The intersection of One Hundred Sixteenth Street and Avalon Boulevard is not marked. There is no plaque. Cars pass through it the way they pass through any other corner in South Los Angeles. On the evening of August eleventh, nineteen sixty-five, this is where it started.

California Highway Patrol officer Lee Minikus stopped Marquette Frye here, suspecting drunk driving. Frye's mother arrived. A crowd gathered. Police reinforcements were called. What followed over the next five days has been documented in two competing narratives that have never fully resolved.

The official record, produced by the McCone Commission, attributed the uprising primarily to poverty, high unemployment, and inadequate city services. The Commission documented thirty-four deaths, over one thousand injuries, thirty-four hundred arrests, and approximately forty million dollars in property damage across fifty square miles of South Los Angeles.

Community members and subsequent historians have consistently argued that the Commission's framing missed the essential cause. The LAPD under Chief William Parker had operated in South Los Angeles neighborhoods for fifteen years with documented patterns of aggressive enforcement targeting Black residents. The complaints were in the record. Civil rights organizations had filed them. The McCone Commission did not recommend criminal investigation of any officer involved in any of the thirty-four deaths.

The Watts Rebellion lasted six days: August eleventh through the sixteenth. It remains one of the deadliest American urban uprisings of the twentieth century, though both the nineteen sixty-seven Detroit uprising and the nineteen ninety-two Los Angeles riots killed more people. The political consequences included accelerated white flight from Los Angeles, federal attention to urban poverty, and a confrontation between Black residents and city leadership that changed the terms of Los Angeles politics for decades.

The intersection is still there. It is still not marked.