A New Message From Watts: Hope But Verify

We've been on the verge of what seemed like permanent ideological transformation before. For liberals, the most dramatic such moment came with Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in 1964. "These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem," Johnson declared while lighting the White House Christmas tree that year. He had already passed a landmark bill outlawing Southern segregation and had launched his War on Poverty. He was about to pass the first federal aid to education, Medicare, the National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, pioneering environmental legislation and the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. The nation's racial ordeal apparently all but surpassed, one of Martin Luther King's deputies proclaimed, "There is no more civil-rights movement. President Johnson signed it out of existence."

The rioting in Watts began five nights later. On Aug. 11, 1965, 103rd Street would become known to the world as "Charcoal Alley." A scuffle with police some 15 blocks away had escalated into violence, which spread, first to 103rd, and eventually all the way to 52nd, far north of Watts's borders. A local news station dispatched the nation's first news helicopter, which was targeted by armed rioters taking potshots from below. Thus did Watts become not merely the country's worst race riot, but the first to unfold live on TV.

In the next congressional election, Lyndon Johnson's coattail liberals were incinerated in Charcoal Alley's flames—and the chaos of riots in over a dozen cities more. Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California decrying the "arson and murder in Watts." Richard Nixon—and then Reagan himself—was on his way to the presidency. It wouldn't be long before pundits began speaking of the United States as a fundamentally conservative nation.

The corner of 116th and Avalon, where it all started, is quiet now, unmarked, virtually unmarkable: it's hard to imagine its placid beige and sky-blue stucco bungalows as the epicenter of anything. It takes five minutes for anyone to pass by—a clutch of cute kids, escorted by a crossing guard, on their way to school. It's where they're heading that history is being made now. The line at the polling station closest to 1965's ground zero is longer than anyone can ever remember.

Seventy-seven-year-old Maurice Banks has been here since 6 a.m. He remembers the riot—"every bit of it." He didn't really disapprove. "People fought for thingswhen things needed to be changed. It was a rebellion." Unbidden, he adds: "Right now, you don't need to fight for it. You're gonna have somebody that's going to fight for you. Someone you can trust."

Banks's polling station is as close to a festival as you can get on a rainy day with no food, no music and too many people who've forced themselves out of bed two hours before they usually leave for work. "Obama is going to win in a landslide!" a building manager says. "McCain doesn't even have to set up his victory party." Fernando Martin, whose parents were born in Mexico—Watts used to be virtually all black, now it's majority Latino—sounds like he stepped out of an Obama commercial. I note that most of the people in line are black. He smiles a smile of solidarity. "Definitely! Yeah! Breaking a barrier. That's cool."

On the No. 53 southbound bus, a young black man asks an old one: "You already vote?"
"Yep. It show?"
It does. He's been smiling for five minutes straight, and saying "beautiful day" to everyone he sees.

"Need a change"; "we ready for change"; "he's going to make a change": they all sound like they stepped out of an Obama commercial. No anger, not even when I ask what might happen if lightning strikes and their candidate doesn't win. "If he loses," the first person in line says, "well, that's how it goes. We gave it a good fight. We know how to take losses pretty good." Violence? "Naw," a woman shakes her head. "That's the past," a man chimes in. A second woman: "Education, health care. That's what's on people's minds. Our future—that's what's on people's minds." Not too much glibness, either, about mystically magical transformations. "Next year I hope that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will be leading the country where it really needs to go, that we'll be on our way to bringing the troops home from Iraq." She pauses thoughtfully, as if indicating her awareness of just how slow, or uncertain, ventures to change the world can be: "We'll be rebuilding," she says. Hope, but verify.

If any place knows the intractable challenges of change, it's this neighborhood. After the riots, a state commission led by a conservative Republican former head of the CIA recommended a hospital as the first step in rebuilding Watts. As it was, the nearest one was 10 miles away, with wards designed for eight patients crowded with as many as 16. The county board paved the way, placing a $12.3 million bond issue on the June 1966 primary ballot. A month before the voting, a policeman named Jerold Bova, 23, pulled over a speeder and ended up shooting the driver, 25-year-old Leonard Deadwyler. Accounts differed as to precisely how it happened (the discharge was eventually ruled accidental), but all agreed as to Deadwyler's last words, gesturing to his pregnant wife beside him: "But she's having a baby." One month later, overwhelmingly white Los Angeles County nonetheless voted against a Watts hospital.

Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital wasn't built until 1972, though thanks to a combination of mismanagement and official indifference the showplace soon began falling to ruin. Via a computer search of L.A.'s venerable black weekly the Sentinel,I found the first reference to the hospital's infamous nickname—"Killer King"—in 1980. But in the decades that followed, the defiant pride of local black activists force-fed the community denial: "It gives you hope for the whole race that we're achieving and doing something," one commented on the hospital in 2002—though the facility's surgery, neonatology and radiology training programs had already lost their accreditations by then. In 2005, a Los Angeles Timesexposé about the hospital's "long history of harming, or even killing those it meant to serve" won the Pulitzer Prize. Now the facility exists only as a single outpatient clinic. "If Deadwyler was shot again," says veteran Los Angeles journalist and historian Bill Boyarsky, "the same thing could happen again. Because there's no hospital there. It's a disgrace."

The city-council member for much of Watts is Janice Hahn, who was 13 in 1965 ("I remember this glow of orange around the entire Watts community"). Getting that hospital built was the crowning achievement of her father, the legendary county board member Kenneth Hahn. The Hahns are white. Kenneth was first elected to the city council when Watts was still an all-white neighborhood. Their family's work—Janice Hahn remembers visiting a grandmother in her district with pictures on the wall of Jesus, Martin Luther King and her father—is a testament to the sort of cross-racial solidarity Barack Obama hopes to represent. But that didn't stop Kenneth Hahn from getting a huge brick through his car window that frightening, hot August day. Janice Hahn insists it wouldn't have happened if the culprit had known who was inside the car. But she also has to admit that she remembers people warning the family to keep the doors locked because militants might be coming after them.

America's racial ordeal has a way of pushing back against fantasies of false comity. And Hahn would be the last to deny the bitterness that still is fresh. "I've seen firsthand the feelings, still, of disenfranchisement, feelings that, still, a community needs better jobs, needs better schools." And why shouldn't it be fresh? The last Census showed the average annual household income in her district was $28,305, less than half that for Los Angeles as a whole. Thirty-seven percent of its adults 25 years or older don't possess a high-school diploma, and a stunning 60 percent of its children live in poverty. The unemployment rate is 23 percent—comparable to the rate of 30 percent in 1965.

What can Barack Obama do? He'll need help. The world, alas, is not a Barack Obama TV commercial. F––– NIGERS, read graffiti—a sign of simmering black-Latino tensions—on the sidewalk in front of one Spanish-language bodega. Watts seems pleased at least to have a president who will more assiduously notice that such crises exist. "We don't need any more of those Bushes," I overheard a woman say riding up Central Avenue on the No. 53. "Now with that Katrina and FEMA, when they said he went on vacation—that killed me! You got dead bodies floating in the water!" But hope's evil twin can be disillusionment. Sociologists' most common explanation for the baffling 1965 riots in Watts was the "crisis of rising expectations"—like what happens when a president proclaims these the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem, while some Americans felt they were watching progress only on TV. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, after all, affected only the South; it did nothing to improve police brutality in Watts.

Transformative change in our republic is difficult, for good or for ill—which was how the Founders devised it. Some things a president, no matter how great, has no control over at all. Among the many challenges President Obama will face, the biggest may be to live up to the transformative hopes he stoked during this campaign.