Watts: "We're Pro-Black. If the White Man Views This as Anti-White, That's Up to Him."

"Well, how was Watts?" neighbors would ask me after I returned from a summer of teaching there. I was always at a loss for a good answer, knowing that they knew about the ghetto only through the newspapers or perhaps Life magazine. To most of them, living in an all-white suburb, Watts meant violence, a pocket of black men seething with discontent, waiting for another incident to spark a week of looting and burning. Behind the curiosity of my neghbors was the tacit question, "Were they out to get you?"

Such is the mistaken image which has grown out of not only last year's riots, but also the controversial phrase "black power." For if hate is the motivating force in Watts, it is hate modulated by shrewdness. And regardless of how great a myth has been built around August '65, even the militants know that burning down your own house is a poor way to relieve frusttration.

Los Angeles is a unique metropolis. Unlike New York, where diverse number of socio-economic groups are packed into a small area and where life is arranged vertically, Los Angeles sprawls like a can of spilled paint over 455 square miles, and neighborhoods are divided and connected by her inadequate answer to the subways: the freeways.

Watts is a correspondingly different kind of ghetto. When you turn east off the Harbor Freeway, you are confronted with rows of small homes, looking much like any other lower middle-class neighborhood in the city. You cross Main and begin to see dilapidated Baptist Churches in white stucco and small restaurants featuring "soul food." You're wondering how a riot could have occurred in such a spacious, decentralized area, how a mob could assemble in these quiet streets.

Then you cross Avalon and see the first of the "Treeline Projects," long chains of two-story apartments built by federal, state, and local welfare agencies. Groups of eight or ten men, young and old, may be sitting on the small patch of grass in front, waiting for another day to pass, thinking about a gallon of wine. And traveling east you may see a poster on the wall of a deserted building urging "Boycott, Baby, Boycott," or just "B---, Baby, B---." Now you're in Watts.

103rd Street cuts through the heart of Watts. Along its 4-block "business" section are a couple of drug stores, some food counters, and a small clothing store, but most of the buildings are either deserted as a result of the riots or occupied by a government poverty agency. It is also along this strip that Westminister Neighborhood Association, a large all-black organization run mainly on federal funds, has its detached workers' office.

In the middle of the block stands Watts Happening, the coffee house started by some members of the community after the riots. In an area studded by Teen Posts, offices of OEO and OIC and Headstart, it is one of the few establishments that the residents can call their own: they own it, they run it, and they decide what happens in it. It is here, accompanied by Afro-Cuban jazz made by local musicians, that the "grassroots" voices can be heard. Tortured images of Negro life by local artists cover the walls. African sculpture stands in the corners. Just inside the door is a poster with a black panther on it and "black power" inscribed above, and another one saying, "Black America, Keep on Pushin'".

The riots changed Watts. As one of the coffeehouse militants told me, 'Watts was considered backward among Negroes before...the riots put her on the map." For five days the nation's eyes turned toward Watts, and this new-found sense of importance is still very much alive; it echoes, for instance, in the words of ghetto-poet Johnnie Scott: "A man called Fear has inherited a half-acre, and is angry." Eldridge Cleaver, in a letter written from Folsom Prison shortly after the outbreak, sums it up: "Watts was a place of shame. We used to use Watts as an epithet in much the same way as city boys used "country" as a term of derision...But now, blacks are seen in Folsom saying "I'm from Watts, Baby! ...I lived there for a time, and I'm proud of it, the tired lamentations or Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and The Preacher notwithstanding." This is the reeling of the young Negroes, the Jacobins of post-Revolutionary Watts. It is this new self-consciousness that permeates the "half-acre" around the Westminister Neighborhood Association and 103rd Street.

"Black nationalism" and "black power" go hand in hand with this new tone of excitement, of anticipation. "Black nationalism" is a vague term, however, and in Watts it describes a feeling as well as a program. Malcolm X coined the term, but now those who call themselves "nationalists" range from "primitivists" who believe all white men are blue-eyed devils to a more pragmatic sort who believe that even a white man can be a nationalist if he shares their approach to the civil rights problem.

On the political level, nationalism is a reaction to King's non-violent tactics and all the "go-slow" methods of an older generation. Perhaps the key phrases are black autonomy and black pride, in addition to black power. The nationalist is a man who feels that it is time for the Negro to stop wondering if he's going to accept the white. He is a man reacting to what Richard Wright called a "frog perspective," a tendency to define oneself by white man's standards: "If you ask an American Negro to describe his situation, he will almost always tell you, 'We are rising.' Against what or whom is he measuring his 'rising'? It is beyond doubt his hostile white neighbor."

This is why integration is a word rarely heard among the younger leaders--they are tired of hearing that they must improve themselves so they can "step up" into the white society. This is why the poverty program, aimed at the "culturally deprived," is regarded by the nationalists as just another tool of the white man. In a conversation over why I, the White Student Liberal, was tutoring in Watts, a nationalist said, "Your job is not to tell those kids that they're as good as you are, but to prove that you're as good as they are." The young men of the ghetto don't want culture--just power. The American dream has no place for the black man, they feel, and they have no use for it if integrity is the price to be paid.

Ron Karenga, if not the leader of the nationalists, is at least their most flamboyant representative and most clamorous public relations man. His primary goal is to create a new Negro self-image, based not on white middleclass stereotypes, but on the Negro's African heritage. When I went in to see him, he was wearing a green buba--a long shirt of African origin--speaking into the telephone in Swahili.

When he finished, I asked him, "What are you and your organization trying to do in the community?"

"Wake up the black man."

"Waking up' seems to mean stressing the African heritage of the black man; do you think this will work in a culture that has been shaped more by America than by Africa?"

"I don't stress the African heritage entirely; I stress a fusion between American and African cultures. We're Afro-Americans."

(Just then a Negro girl walked into the office to remove some chairs. "You'd look good in a natural, Sister," Karenga remarked as she walked out.)

"Black nationalism' and 'black power' are synonymous with anti-whitism to most of the white community. Would you say this is a fair interpretation?"

"We're pro black. If the white man views this as anti-white, that's up to him."

"You emphasize a consciousness of culture. What about political power--doesn't the kind of ethnic identification you promote imply political autonomy?"

"Before people gain political power, they need a cultural base."

Karenga is a "purist" nationalist and preaches a sort of up-dated, watered-down Garveyism--he is not so much interested in going back to Africa as in creating Little Africa rgiht in Los Angeles. He wants to incorporate Watts,. for instance, and call it Freedom City, with its own police force, transportation and school systems. "I am obsessed with the idea of freedom, of self-determination," Karenga said at a rally during the Watts Festival, "and I'd rather use a pump in Freedom City that we controlled than to turn on a faucet in a city where we are daily brutalized and have no power."

Karenga speaks of seven measures which could lead to Freedom City, such as Umoja (Unity), Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility), and so on--all in Swahili. He emphasizes the need for basing all action on tradition as a precondition for freedom.

Two or three years ago, Karenga might have been received as just another preacher of black Zionism, a peddler of false hopes. But now, even though some may regard him as stylized or exaggerated, and though some may not identify with Africans, Karenga represents a new set of voices in Watts--voices that reject the tactics and the aims of the civil rights movement. And regardless of whether these new radicals support the Freedom City plan or prefer women with unstraightened hair, their attitude toward race relations is the same. They see an integrated society of equal freedom and equal opportunity either as a fatuous ideal of the deluded or as a possibility too distant to be relevant. Instead, they are saying, "We don't want to get out of the 'ghetto'; we just want to make it a better place to live."

Black Power

Those who label themselves nationalists are a minority in Watts organizations, but the feelings evoked by the phrase "black power" has influenced a whole generation of leaders. f To some it means political power, to some separatism, to some merely a rejection of non-violence. To the youths in their late teens, black power is symbolized by the riots--or the Revolt, as Karenga calls it. It means that the Man can't come down and "whup" them without getting whupped back.

Unfortunately, this last, most simplistic, interpretation of black power seems also to be the one projected most outside the community. When groups of teenagers wearing "Black Power" sweatshirts assaulted white youths at the Teen Post Junior Olympics, for instance, headlines in the L.A. Times read, "'Black Nationalist' Plot Blamed for Teen Post Melee." The Youths undoubtedly had no idea of what nationalism is all about, but this is the way "black power" has filtered down to them, and to the white press.

The Teen Post incident is significant because it shows how many ways the ambiguous phrase has affected the Negro movement in Watts. On the one hand, it is a constructive, positive approach to a situation where other approaches don't seem to have worked. On the other hand, nationalism, for all its constructive principles of self-determination and self-defense, draws most of its energy from hostility, at least in its appeal to the hard-core ghetto youth. They are the ones who are conscious of the extreme social and psychological gap between what they are and what they are "supposed" to be in order to "make it" in this society. They are the ones that grow up in a world of soul, pot, and poor schools, only to be told in their late teens by a man in a business suit that they had betten change fast if they want to escape. And they are the ones that believe that there can never be--because they have never experienced it--any communication between whites and blacks in this country.

Nationalism has caught on in Watts not because it is a new and exciting idea, but because it is an approach to the race problem which is grounded in the reality of being a ghetto Negro. It is not that nationalists or quasi-nationalists are trying to persuade or propagandize--it is more a matter of articulating feelings which are already there. As one nationalist put it, "If you grew up in the ghetto and think, you're automatically a nationalist."

In one sense, Karenga is just playing with words when he says pro-black doesn't mean anti-white--either that or he has no feel for his andience, which is not likely. But in another sense he is giving a positive formulation to what, in a great number of young militants, is a destructive sentiment. The things springing up in Watts are not new street gangs; they are new grassroots political organizations.

Change and Conflict

For if the new men emerging from the masses are proclaiming the dignity of the Negro culture as it is, they also recognize that the need for change is the very reason for the conflict: "the thing that keeps us together is the very thing we're trying to eradicate," as one nationalist told me in a moment of candor. The nationalists want their people to have the good life without having to "bleach themselves out," to become bourgeois in order to attain it. "We've been singing and dancing for 400 years, and it's time we built some rockets and ran some businesses," said nationalist leader Tom Jaquette. "But I don't want one to mean the loss of the other." To the nationalists, the Negro has two choices: either to live in poverty or to change his manner of speech and his tastes in music and say "Yes Sir" long enough to be accepted as an "equal" by a white employer.

In adopting a more revolutionary stance toward the black-white situation, the nationalists have also become trenchant critics of the middle-class Negro leadership. In the first place, the "black bourgeois" who has moved from Watts to Baldwin Hills represents the "respectable" Negro as the white man defines him: he is a man who has adapted, who has forgotten--or pretended to forget--how to talk to his brothers in the ghetto.

In the second place, the young militants feel that the middle class Negro-white liberal coalition can make no claims to representing the Watts community: "We want somebody from the masses to speak for the masses, not some Tom who drops down to Watts once a week to see how things are going." Yet the push for a leader who really represents the people has not served to unify the community: the entire Negro population of Los Angeles does not center around the radicals' "half-acre" and for every angry young man on 103rd calling King a bourgeois, there is a man of another, more resigned, generation or one from Baldwin Hills calling Carmichael an anarchist.

Nevertheless, there is more evidence of cooperative community effort in Watts than might be expected, despite the fact that "There's no unity of Negro leadership" has become almost a cliche. One of the most dramatic results of cooperation is the Community Alert Patrol (CAP), a group of Watts residents who, in privately-owned cars with large black flags billowing from their aerials, watch for incidents of police brutality and try to handle situations which could lead to police action.

CAP grew out of a temporary group formed just after the Deadwyler incident. It was called TALO, "Temporary Alliance of Local Organizations," and represented a coalition between extreme nationalists; civil rights groups, militant and moderate; and middle-class businessmen. Its original function was to avert another spree of violence which seemed very possible at the time.

The important fact was that all factions of the Negro community were represented in TALO. As Chester Wright, an official of the organization, stated, "When we began, we did what the city has never done--we involved people, not a certain class of people. We didn't care if you represented the Society for Crippled Prostitutes. If you represented a body of people you were given a seat, given the same position and dignity of anyone else."

CAP, the outcome of this temporary group, turned out to be a very effective way of fighting police brutality. It also assumed the task of keeping order during the Watts Festival, and the patrol groups were manned by the "grassroots" faction of the community. "When the time came to man these cars," Wright recalls, "the people who could be depended on to be there turned out to be the same people whom the city labels 'bad' and whom the bourgeois Negro considers 'lowclass'...he boys that mingled with the crowd are the same who last year at this time chanted 'Burn, Baby, Burn.'"

CAP is an effort by the people of Watts to keep their own community peaceful, a self-help project that even the nationalists could not demean, although it came from a coalition group. Lou Gothard, an active member of TALO, thinks this kind of unity is a necessity for community action. Although he has nationalist sympathies, he feels that nationalist have often hampered effective action by taking a hard, doctrinaire line that prevents coalition. "The function of nationalism is to point out the fallacies of the civil rights movement," Gothard said, implying that before equality can be achieved, Negroes must be able to bargain from a position of power. But building power involves compromise, at least within the community.

Disagreement

It is for this reason that many of the effective organizers in Watts, though they may agree with "black power" as a necessary approach to the problem, disagree with the black nationalist version. On the one hand, there are those who would rather see assimilation than separation. As one young administrator at Westminister said, "Sure I buy black dignity and black power. But there's a world out there much bigger than Watts--and I've never been called a Tom."

On the other hand, there are those who consider the whole separation-assimilation controversy irrelevant in terms of action, but consider too much noise about "black power," too many anti-white tirades as just poor politics.

Ocie Pastard is the head of community development at Westminister. He is in his middle twenties and was imported from Detroit because of his reputation as a community organizer. Pastard is very middle-class in appearance, but, unlike most of the executives at Westminister, he actually lives in Watts. Members of the grassroots organizations are reluctant to call him bourgeois, yet he talks a much different line than they do. He moves around by himself quietly, behind the scenes, and accomplishes such things as organizing block councils for voting purposes.

Pastard feels that the phrase "black power" has split the Negro community, and that before the riots triggered the slogan the community was approaching some sort of unity. Pastard views black autonomy as primarily economic autonomy--"don't call it 'black' power; call it 'green' power.'" Karenga may prefer pumps in Freedom City to the city's faucets, but Pastard is more interested in getting faucets for Freedom City. "I don't believe the poverty program is sincere...money has never been spent so loosely. It causes just greater confusion by telling the people they're equal...Developing economic power means keeping the money circulating here--it means learning how free enterprise works."

One of Pastard's most recent schemes is a plan for a credit union for Watts residents. He has done an exhaustive study of prices in Los Angeles, found that those in Watts are higher, and plans to accuse Watts business owners, most of whom are white, of "misappropriating community funds." The credit union is part of Pastard's effort to show the people of Watts that they have more power than they realize if they just organize --that they don't have to go to Whitey every time they need something. "The nationalists call it 'waking the people up,'" Pastard said, "and I call it 'educating' them." It is for this reason that he regards nationalists of Karenga's stripe, who are doing little to promote solidarity, as naive politicians.

On the other hand, Pastard realizes that Negroes are still dependent on certain members of the white community for "green power" at this point, and feels that the insistence on black power, with its current overtones, will be an alienating influence. He told of a wealthy white woman who came down to Watts and wanted to do her part by writing him a check for $20. "I told her 'We don't want your money, madam; we just want you to spend some of your time working in our community.' Since then she's contributed a couple thousand dollars," Pastard said. Then he looked up with a mischievous smile.

Slogan for a Hate Movement?

Pastard, Karenga, the boys on 103rd -- all believe that the racial situation in America will never be solved through cooperation on the part of whites. The problem is no longer one of white intolerance but one of white power; the aim is no longer to get into a white neighborhood, but to weaken the grip of the white power structure. The angry men of Watts are out to claim their birthright, not to ask for it as though it were a gift. To the young nationalists, no white man, regardless of his ethics, can serve a useful function in the movement, because his very color gives him a freedom that he can't negate. ToS-1