The violence left 34 people dead, many of them innocent bystanders shot by police, and more than 1,000 injured. The image of a California dreamscape, nevertheless, survived intact until August 1965, when the so-called Watts riots left whole blocks burning across the black ghetto of the same name, before spreading through black communities from Venice Beach to San Diego. At the time, California’s non-white population was more than a million people they were all, as Davis and Wiener put it, “edited out of utopia”. Glendale, for instance, was, as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener put it: “Los Angeles County’s most notorious ‘sundown town’: no blacks were allowed to live there, apart from a few servants, and any person of colour on the streets after 7pm was automatically arrested.” Across the state, black people dared not set foot on all but a few beaches for fear of arrest or violence from white gangs. This airbrushed image helped distract from the reality of an openly racist society.
0 kommentar(er)
