From traffic stop to fiery uproar, a look at the Watts riots

Language advisory: Quotes in this story contain potentially offensive language. Watkins was only 12 years old, but the memory of that bad chapter in his community remains vivid to this day.

On a hot summer evening near the predominantly black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, a white California Highway Patrol officer pulled over Marquette Frye, 21, for reckless driving, according to a report commissioned by the governor. “She got upset with the son because he was drunk”. The hatred and violence of race riots is triggered by contempt, and of all forms of contempt the most intolerable is nonrecognition, the general unawareness that a minority is festering in squalor. More than a thousand people were injured; more than 100 were shot.

Rumors swirled that the Los Angeles Police had killed someone and hundreds of people swarmed into the streets.

Racial bias among law enforcement and the judicial system was overlooked, a Los Angeles Times editorial published Friday said. “This was that spark everybody needed”.

The name was invoked in the past year after unruly demonstrations following killings by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore.

This year, as the Black Lives Matter movement has ignited a national uproar over the epidemic of police killings of African Americans, we examine the Watts rebellion and its connection with Ferguson. Buildings like libraries weren’t burned. That left a lasting mark on the neighborhood. Harris went on to found the Parents of Watts, a grassroots organization that provides food and shelter, along with family counseling and employment training.

Liberal white America – still patting itself on the back for the triumphant passage of the historic Voting Rights Act just days earlier – experienced a rude awakening when confronted with the searing intensity of the Watts riots.

Hutchinson said you could feel change happening during the Watts riots.

Jordan says the community has also transformed their relationship with the police.

Crouch has earned that respect from both the police and his fellow residents partly for his work brokering a peace treaty between rival gangs, and for his efforts to get guns out of the community.

“I know some of the press and some of the media and reporters couldn’t quite get to where they wanted to”, during the riots, he told the paper. I stand firmly with them and anyone else who is committed to staying in the fight, as together we move toward the Watts imagined by heroes past (Ted Watkins, Tommy Jacquette, Edna Aliewine), present (Sweet Alice Harris, Arturo Ybarra, Arvella Grigsby), and 50 years into the future. “Like community leaders, our job is crowd control”.

I joined NBC News shortly after the riots and spent many days and nights in those neighborhoods, reporting on the massive amount of aid that poured in, the continuing crime problems and police controversies.