Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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along with Cal State LA and Valley State (later Cal State, Northridge). The latter was the site of a 1969–70 uprising by the Black Student Union and SDS that was quelled by police batons, mass arrests, and a staggering 1,730 felony charges against Black students: repression on a scale that rivaled or exceeded the more famous battles at San Francisco State.
Historians and political scientists have generally conceded that the one hundred or so ghetto insurrections of the 1960s should be regarded as genuine protests, but they have usually described them as leading to mere chaos and demoralization. Conventionally, “rioters” have been portrayed as the opposites of organizers and builders. This does not describe events in Los Angeles. The 1965 explosion unified and energized a generation of young Black people, ended gang conflict for a number of years, and catalyzed the extraordinary “Watts Renaissance,” the city’s most important arts and literary movement of the decade. “Black Power” became an aspiration shared by thousands, and in 1967 this grassroots unity found expression in the emergence of L.A.’s Black Congress—the more radical successor to the United Civil Rights Committee. It included SNCC, the Black Student Alliance, the Che-Lumumba Club of the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and the powerful US organization (or Organization Us) led by Ron Karenga. (The Congress would later be destroyed by a violent conflict between US and the Panthers, instigated and fueled by the FBI’s secret COINTELPRO program.)
Contests over public space were also extraordinarily important in Los Angeles. In part this was the legacy of earlier decades when the LAPD’s notorious Red Squad had been the enforcer of the anti-union “open shop” doctrine, and when the city council supplied draconian anti-picketing and anti–free speech ordinances. The Sixties saw a renewal of this unsavory tradition. The LAPD, aided by the LA County Sheriffs, conducted an unending siege of bohemian Venice, tried to drive “teenyboppers” and hippies off Sunset Strip, regularly broke up peaceful “love-ins” and rallies in Griffith and Elysian Parks, suppressed lowriders on Whittier Boulevard, harassed kids selling the “underground” LA Free Press, raided coffeehouses and folk clubs, and invoked “obscenity” as an excuse to crack down on artists, poets and theater groups. No other major city outside of the Deep South was subjected to such a fanatic and all-encompassing campaign to police space and control the night. Along with minorities, many young whites were also routinely victimized, leading hatred of the LAPD to grow into a common culture of resistance.
The cops, however, had a formidable opponent in the ACLU of Southern California, the national organization’s most hard-charging and activist affiliate. When national ACLU director Roger Baldwin and a majority of the national leadership publicly embraced anti-communism in the late 1940s, A. L. Wirin, ACLU SoCal’s legendary chief counsel, pointedly challenged the ban on representing Communist Party members in trial proceedings, taking on several cases in private practice. Moreover, in 1952 the local branch chose as its new director Eason Monroe, a state college professor from San Francisco who had been fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. A decade later, Monroe charted a novel course for the affiliate by not only defending the local civil rights coalition in court but also joining in its leadership. Significantly, it was an ACLU team, led by UCLA professor John Caughey and his wife LaRee, that launched the legendary 1963 lawsuit to force integration of L.A.’s de facto Jim Crow school system—an effort that would reverberate for three decades. No other ACLU branch claimed such a large role in the decade’s protest movements.
Understanding Los Angeles in the Sixties also requires rewriting the histories of gay liberation and the women’s movement. Indeed, New York City was not the origin and center of everything. Los Angeles had the first gay street protest in America—over police raids on the Black Cat tavern in Silver Lake, two years before the Stonewall Uprising; it had the first gay church—the Metropolitan Community Church, now the largest gay institution in the world; and it had the first officially recognized gay pride parade—on Hollywood Boulevard in 1970. L.A. also witnessed the nation’s first police raid on a women’s health clinic, following which the organizers were put on trial for “practicing medicine without a license.”
Finally, the course of events in Los Angeles challenged the myth that the “Old Left” was irrelevant in the Sixties and that the New Left had invented itself ex nihilo. The Communist Party, for its part, never appears in the standard narrative except as an unattractive corpse. But in Los Angeles its most unruly and dissident branch remained very much alive under the charismatic and eventually heretical leadership of Dorothy Healey. Despite the party’s devastating losses following Soviet secretary Nikita Krushchev’s 1956 “Crimes of Stalin” speech, Healey was determined to resurrect what she could of the 1940s Popular Front and to reach out to the new radicals on campus, in the ghettos and in the barrios. Still under the threat of a prison sentence, she found a niche at KPFK, the new 75,000-watt Pacifica Radio FM station, in 1959, where her Communist Commentary impressed even hostile listeners with its intelligence and wit—although it almost cost the station its license. In 1966 she ran in the primary for county tax assessor and received a staggering 85,000 votes. By then the local Communist Party had confidentially rebuilt many of its links with progressives in the Democratic Party and had assumed an important role in the Peace Action Council. Its youth members, relatively unconstrained by a party line or adult control, played innovative roles in the early Sixties, including participation in Southern Freedom Rides, and later, more influentially, as the Che-Lumumba Club—which would become the political base of Angela Davis. For two generations Healey defined radicalism in the public eye.
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A mea culpa. When we began research for this history, we assumed that our canvas was at least Los Angeles County, if not the entire metropolitan region, including Orange County and the “Inland Empire.” However, we eventually had to confront the runaway inflation of both the project’s word count and its cost of publication. As a result we decided to confine the narrative within the Los Angeles city limits, albeit with some necessary excursions to unincorporated East L.A., the segregated white suburb of Torrance, and a few other essential locales. The result is a book that our publishers still think is too long, but that many readers will find frustrating because it doesn’t deal with such important topics as the school integration battles in Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley; police abuse in Pomona, Riverside and San Bernardino; GI organizing at Camp Pendleton; or the rise of the New Left at Cal State Fullerton. We also realize that some readers may be shocked that the campus New Left is not center stage in the story, while others will be unhappy that, for the counterculture, we focus only on its politicized aspects. And because our goal was to write a “movement history” of Los Angeles, we look at the city from the vantage points of its flatland neighborhoods and bohemian beaches, where the working-class heroes of this story lived. We invite younger historians and activists to enlarge and revise our account of this crucial but misunderstood decade.
E. P. Thompson, one of the auteurs of the New Left, characterized the 1950s as the “apathetic decade” when people “looked to private solutions to public evils.” “Private ambitions,” he wrote, “have displaced social aspirations. And people have come to feel their grievances as personal to themselves, and, similarly, the grievances of other people are felt to be the affair of other people. If a connection between the two is made, people tend to feel—in the prevailing apathy—that they are impotent to effect any change.”1 1960 will always be remembered as the birth year of a new social consciousness that repudiated this culture of moral apathy fed by resigned powerlessness. “Our political task,” wrote the veteran pacifist A. J. Muste that year, “is precisely, in Martin Buber’s magnificent formulation, ‘to drive the plowshare of the normative principle into the hard soil of political reality.’”2 The method was direct action, nonviolent but unyielding.
First behind the plow were Black students in the South, whose movement would name itself the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The lunch counter sit-ins