The darker side
Forty years since the Watts riots, blacks are still struggling
ON AUGUST 11th 1965, a white motorcycle cop in south Los Angeles stopped a black driver he suspected of being drunk. His action sparked a sequence of events that led to six days of race-inflamed rioting, resulting in 34 deaths, more than a thousand injuries and some 4,000 arrests. Forty years on, have the racial inequalities that fed those infamous Watts riots been smoothed away?
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “The darker side”
From the July 23rd 2005 edition
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