Rising crime, declining employment opportunities, inadequate housing and growing despair. This, “Sweet” Alice Harris told BlackAmericaWeb.com, is how one could describe Watts, a South Central Los Angeles neighborhood, today.

Ironically, Harris said, it’s an appropriate description of what Watts was like 40 years ago when six days of looting, burning, and violence left the nation with a searing image of a community on the brink of disaster.

“It sort of made us look like we were the worst people in the world,” the 70-year-old Harris said of the riots that began on August 11, 1965.

The tumultuous period began after Lee Minikus, a white police officer, pulled over Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old black motorist at the intersection of Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street for suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol. As neighbors began to gather, Frye's mother and brother arrived at the scene. The situation escalated when police used their batons to subdue them, causing the restless crowd to erupt in raw anger and repressed frustration. Nearly a week of rioting ensued, leaving 34 dead, more than 1,000 people injured and millions of dollars in damaged property.

The entire nation watched in horror as one fire after another was set at local businesses, and people were shown fleeing burning buildings with appliances, clothes, food and anything else they could get their hands on.
 
At some points, Harris said, it seemed as if blood was streaming down the streets like water.

“I can’t say what it meant to me because it hurt me,” said Harris, who, at the time, was a single mother of two teenagers and a six-week-old infant. “It hurt all of us who lived through it. At that time, if somebody asked you where you stayed, you said L.A., because being from Watts made us embarrassed.”

Today, on the corner where it began, there are no signs of the uprising that helped transform the civil rights movement from peaceful protests in the South to violent clashes in the nation's major cities.

For days, police would sit back and let residents loot the stores, Harris told BlackAmericaWeb.com, joking that one man left a grocery store with a cow on his back. The disorder not only led to injuries, Harris said, it essentially robbed the community of any semblance of normalcy.

“I don’t know if I was afraid then because I didn’t have time to be afraid. You just didn’t know what was happening,” said Harris, who on one occasion could not find her oldest children for several hours. “The time you got scared was when you needed to go to the grocery store and there wasn’t one.”

“We were all like stuck in a hole," Harris said, "because we didn’t know what we was gonna do for food. If you didn’t have a car, you had to find a way to get to (another community) because that was where the closest grocery store was.”

activists want to share more than vivid recollections. They want younger generations to understand the effect of the riots on Watts and the nation.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Ph.D., was 16 when the riots took place. Like Harris, Hutchinson remembers his hometown being a virtual battle zone.

“It was pandemonium and chaos,” Hutchinson told BlackAmericaWeb.com, vividly recalling how the streets were strewn with bottles and cigarette cartons from the liquor stores, and how mom and pop shops were either gutted out or burned to the ground.

National Guardsmen and LAPD, manned with rifles and bayonets, were, Hutchinson said, stationed on every corner.

“The police chief had a shoot-to-kill order, so that meant trigger-happy cops,” Hutchinson said, adding that a white, deaf milk man was shot and killed by police because he never heard their order to stop.

“He was white, and they did that to him. If you were young and black, you could forget it,” Hutchinson said. “They treated this not as a riot, but as a rebellion or insurrection. It was a terrifying experience.”

Activists like Harris and Hutchinson want to share more than vivid recollections. They want younger generations to understand the effect of the riots on Watts and the nation.

Watts was a tinderbox in 1965, one of the few Los Angeles neighborhoods where blacks were allowed to live. It had high unemployment, no local hospital and the heavy presence of a mostly white police force.

Despite the riots' widespread negative impact on Watts, Hutchinson said, many of his peers viewed it as a turning point for the better.

“On that first day back to school, there was a sense of uplift. There wasn’t a depression. It was almost like the Watts riots kind of liberated people to the possibility of empowerment,” Hutchinson, who graduated from Dorsey High School in 1967 and went on to earn degrees from California State and Cornell universities, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

“During everything, there was anger and disgust,” said Hutchinson, who, like many Watts residents during that period, had to stand in line at relief posts in public parks and schools to receive food and other goods.

“And at the time that it happened, there was a fear factor simply because there was an occupied army sitting, literally, a stone’s throw from your doorstep,” Hutchinson said. “But there was a new spirit coming out of that, one of 'Black Power' and 'Black is Beautiful.'

“There was this whole kind of groundswell, a community-based way of positive thinking of looking forward and realizing that we can change things. All of that really came out of the ashes of Watts,” said Hutchinson, a sociologist and writer who now lives in nearby Baldwin Hills.

President Lyndon Johnson signed his War on Poverty program a month after the Watts riots. The county opened Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in South Los Angeles and activists founded the Watts Festival, drawing politicians and stars such as James Brown and Stevie Wonder.

But the violence also destroyed community ties, expediting the flight of businesses and the black middle class.

South Los Angeles has seen 42 homicides since January, and its hospital came close to shutting its doors this year. Few businesses have returned, and less than 50 percent of adults are employed.

Today, Hutchinson is still moved by the very physical signs of a turbulent time now four decades old.

“You still have empty lots where stores once stood but were never rebuilt,” Hutchinson said, adding that despite the obvious pall cast over the neighborhood at that time, residents still felt relatively safe amongst one another.

“People knew who their neighbors were and weren’t scared of drive-by shootings or gangs. There were no bars on windows or doors,” Hutchinson said. “There was more of a pulling together then that, unfortunately, over time has been a feeling that was lost.

Well known for her community involvement, Harris, founder of Parents of Watts, was featured on Season One of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” for her work throughout the Watts community. Originally from Alabama, Harris moved to Watts from Detroit to start a career as a beautician.

After some soul-searching in the days following the riots, Harris decided to remain there, although some did their best to leave the torn and tattered neighborhood, originally an independent suburb of working class blacks. It became, over the last few decades, increasingly populated by Latinos.

“We owed it to the community to help fix it up and get it back as a community. That’s why we stayed, and that’s what we started doing -- fixing it up and making it livable,” Harris said. “And, we have survived.”

Harris and many pillars of the community were out en masse in 1992 when four white police officers accused of beating Rodney King were acquitted.

“We told people that nobody was going to burn up those stores, and we saw to that,” Harris said, adding that she and others held peaceful rallies in central places to ensure that looting and violence was kept to a minimum.

“You can’t run out on people when they need you. You’ve got to help people,” Harris said. “I didn’t have to stay here, but I think it was God’s intent for me to never leave.”