August, the Mother of All Months

by Gary Phillips

Now with Beckapalooza or the I Have a Scheme chest-beating extravaganza, to steal the headline from The Daily Show, is behind us, it’s noteworthy several anniversaries have come and gone this past August. Though come on, did anyone really believe this Don Draper crossed with Lonesome Rhodes would succeed in psychologically hijacking the legacy of the momentous March on Washington? Yes, he issued hyperbole like “We’re going to reclaim the civil rights movement.” But really, there was no chance of that happening given the right wingers speaking at the rally, and I’d hazard a significant number of the attendees pretty much hold antithetical views to what King and company spoke about all those years ago on August 28.

This past August 29 was also the 40th anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium, an anti-Vietnam war march and rally that resulted in a sheriff’s riot in East L.A. I’ll take a look at this event in a blog on Friday. Another anniversary that passed on August 11th was the 45th anniversary of the Watts riot, or Watts Rebellion if you prefer. I was ten at the time and remember being scared and confused as to what exactly was going on as a kid growing up in South Central on Flower Street. Watts was actually several miles to the south of where me and my dad lived, but there was a heavy police and National Guard presence in my neighborhood as well as the shooting of unarmed black civilians, supposed looters, not too far away at an appliance store at 61st and Vermont.

The riot started ordinarily enough, ordinary in the ghetto at least. A young black man, Marquette Frye, was pulled over in his way back home on Towne in his ’55 Buick by California Highway Patrol officer Lee Minikus in an unincorporated patch of the city, technically not Watts, which is a section of L.A. Frye’s brother Ronald, recently having mustered out of the Air Force, was with him in the car. The two had been drinking vodka and orange juice prior with two young women at their house and had departed, the Buick reportedly weaving in traffic.

In Gerald Horne’s Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s, he recounts in his interview with Frye that Minikus was about to let them go with a warning when another CHP car rolled up. The officers in this car had an attitude, according to Frye, and unpleasant words were exchanged. A jeering crowd had gathered, including Frye’s mother Rena Frye. Frye said one of the Highway Patrol officers twisted his mother’s arm around her back and handcuffed her. He was then struck by one of the officers and a shotgun pressed against his temple. The riot was on.

It wasn’t like this was the first time this kind of altercation between the mostly white law and black folks in mid-’60s Los Angeles. While the CHP wasn’t the LAPD, it’s fair to state certain perspectives about inner city residents were shared by the entities. Then Chief of Police William H. Parker, an attorney by training, had openly recruited white personnel from the south and summed up the bad relations his department had with Negroes and Mexicans by claiming those groups were more likely to commit crimes than whites. That particular hot night in August, some Highway Patrol cops arrived on their motorcycles and drove up on the sidewalk trying to disperse the crowd. This only got the gathered angrier, as this was seen as endangering children.

The Watts riot wasn’t just an expression of the strained relationships between the police and the community. Even though Frye’s stop was two days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into being, Watts was also an expression of unequal treatment in hiring, lack of jobs and job training, and housing conditions. Forty-five years down the line from the uprising (as well as other such ’60s-era civil unrests in Detroit and D.C., then again in L.A. in ’92), the Urban League’s annual State of Black America reported that blacks have lost ground in income, education, healthcare and their treatment in the criminal justice system as compared to whites.

Given that, I wonder how come black folk weren’t at Beck’s Restoring Honor shindig. As he correctly pointed out, all those people he got out there on the Washington Mall didn’t come because they were happy about current conditions. Surely the residents of New Orleans, no matter their color, in the wake of the BP oil spill and the fifth anniversary of Katrina (August 29 is when the levee was breached in the Lower Ninth Ward) aren’t exactly happy campers. Various media types including CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the Newshour on PBS, Tavis Smiley (New Orleans: Been in the Storm Too Long), Spike Lee (the two-part HBO special If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise), and Jordan Flaherty, editor of Left Turn magazine and author of the just released Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, have documented the travails of New Orleans post Katrina.

Oh wait, the back cover blurb to Flaherty’s book might be a clue as to why Beck didn’t invite certain Louisianans to his confab. “Jordan Flaherty expertly weaves the interconnected stories of public housing residents, gay rappers, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, and grassroots activists into a compelling story of resistance.” As Flaherty points out in an article he posted on the Huffington Post on August 27, “On the Fifth Anniversary of Katrina, Displacement Continues,” many African Americans don’t feel welcome in the city there were born in. There’s been problems obtaining federal rebuilding dollars because a number of black houses have been passed down through the generations without proper paperwork being filed each time. The public housing tracts were torn down, though structurally they had survived Katrina, but the storm provided the excuse developers sought, replacing them with so-called mixed-income units, essentially pricing low income folks out of the market.

Flaherty’s article mentioned a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation where 42% of blacks, versus 16% of white New Orleanians, say they still haven’t recovered from Katrina. Thirty-two percent versus eight percent of white respondents stated they had trouble paying for food or housing in the past year. Those are telling stats. How telling too is it that as shown in Lee’s doc, the Make it Right effort, founded by Angelina Jolie’s husband Brad Pitt, demonstrates quality, green, affordable housing of sound materials and innovative designs can be built, and don’t have to look or be like typical low income unimaginative housing tracts. As acknowledged by Pitt in the film, this kind of project takes time, continual efforts to raise the money, meetings with individual families to hammer out what they want versus what’s possible, retain local workers, etc., but it can be done. Make it Right has a modest goal of building 150 homes in the Lower Ninth Ward, with about a third of that goal achieved.

Surely replicating this kind of work has more merit and is far more in line with what Martin Luther King, Jr. was about than the mischief Beck is engaged in as he, apparently, considers a third party run for the presidency with Sarah Palin in 2012.

For if those two were to gain high office, history would record their inauguration day as the beginning of an epic disaster ... a bleak and dreary anniversary for far too many of us.

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