August 11: When the trouble is bricked in, not solved
On August 11, 1965, the Watts Riots erupted in Los Angeles. Tonight's film: Escape from New York (1981).
August 11. Two dates land on this day, and each one has a film. But the headline tonight belongs to Watts, because there is something about how a routine traffic stop turned into a six-day war that ate into the American self-image of the twentieth century.
On Wednesday, August 11, 1965, around seven in the evening, a California Highway Patrol officer named Lee Minikus pulled over twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye on Avalon Boulevard near 116th Street, on suspicion of drunk driving. Frye was not sober. He failed the field test. He was arrested. At first it was all jokes, the two of them laughing together. Then his younger brother Ronald showed up and ran to get their mother, Rena Frye. Rena stepped in, the argument escalated, and an officer hit Marquette in the face with a baton. All three of the Fryes were arrested. But by then a crowd of hundreds had gathered, and the rumor went around the neighborhood that the police had beaten a mother.
What came next lasted six days and swallowed forty-six square miles of South Los Angeles. Thirty-four people dead, the vast majority Black civilians shot by police and National Guard troops. More than a thousand wounded. Nearly four thousand arrested. Forty million dollars in property burned. Whole city blocks gone. Acting Governor Glenn Anderson declared a state of emergency, and under “Operation Safeguard” close to fourteen thousand National Guard troops moved in with tanks and machine guns. LAPD Chief William Parker called the rebellion an “insurrection” and compared the residents of his own city to the Viet Cong. They kept shooting even after the curfew was officially lifted: on August 18, LAPD officers and sheriff’s deputies raided a Nation of Islam mosque and wounded nineteen men.
