Note (Back) — CHAPTER 23

Useful against legalized discrimination, chiefly in the south, the civil rights laws of the mid-1960's were conspicuously less successful in those areas where discrimination operated outside the law. In the great urban centers of the north and west, home of some 45 percent of the black population, de facto segregation in housing, employment, and education had excluded millions of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress. This ghettoization, this failure to meet human needs, led to the alienation of many young Americans and a bitter resentment against society that was dramatized just five days after the signing of the 1965 voting rights act when the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded in flames and violence. There had been racial unrest before, especially during the two previous summers when flare-ups occurred in Cambridge (Maryland), Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Brooklyn, Cleveland, and elsewhere, but Watts was a different matter. Before the California National Guard with some logistical help from the Army quelled the riots, thirty-four people were killed, some 4,000 arrested, and $35 million worth of property damaged or destroyed. The greatest civil disturbance since the 1943 Detroit riot, Watts was but the first in a series of urban disturbances which refuted the general belief that the race problem had been largely solved in cities of the north and the west.[23-30]