The Riots broke out when a Caucasian policeman named Lee Minikus arrested African American Marquette Frye after he failed to pass a sobriety test while driving. Prior to this event, however, racial tensions in the Watts neighborhood had escalated, and therefore black citizens lived in fear of the white policemen. After Minikus refused to let Frye's mother drive his car home, calling for it to be impounded, she and his brother Ronald resisted, gathering a crowd of a couple hundred around the scene.
When the police withdrew, the people--angered and tense--began to riot, threatening the police and stoning cars. The mob grew and buildings were soon set on fire. By the fourth day, 13,000 National Guardsmen had arrived in the area hoping to stop the more than 100 building fires that had resulted from the riot. By the last day, almost 1,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed, causing an estimated $40 million in damage.
I chose to study the implications of the racial tensions boiling in Los Angeles during this time, as I still see traces of these conflicts in the present day. I am interested to see the connections between the 1965 Riots and the 1992 Riots, and how the latter could have been prevented had we learned from our mistakes.
You implicate a mob mentality in the cause of the Watts Riots following the fallout of a sobriety stop. Buildings were razed, property was damaged, but, in the aftermath of the incident, did the citizens of Los Angeles learn anything from the Watts Riots? What exactly are we supposed to learn from the Watts Riots? I suppose that we did not take anything from the experience at the time, given that the Rodney King Riots destroyed even more of the city and worsened racial tensions even further. Regardless, an analysis of perhaps a fault of lessons from the Watts Riot as the prelude to the Rodney King Riots would possibly add to your paper.
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