Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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bowl of inner-city students, and, despite a reactionary administration, perhaps the most likely campus for the inauguration of a new generation of protest. A nearby coffeehouse, Pogo’s Swamp, provided a home for freewheeling political debate under the gentle eye of its manager, Levi Kingston, an LA native (from the Pueblo del Rio projects) who had seen the world as a merchant seaman. The ISU, unlike later student groups, was solidly multiracial, and two of its most charismatic leaders, both South Central locals, had recently joined the Communist Party: Carl Bloice, the speaker at the first Chessman rally, and Franklin Alexander, the ISU president. Bloice would soon move to the Bay Area and eventually become the editor of the Peoples’ World, while Alexander, after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, would become a leader of the Che-Lumumba Club (joined by Angela Davis in 1968). Other ISUers, if not party members, had heroic red diapers. Paul Rosenstein, a key figure in the LA Peace and Freedom Party in 1967–68 and much later mayor of Santa Monica, was the son of a renowned International Brigader. Likewise, Ellen Kleinman (Broms), soon to be a Freedom Rider, was the daughter of the last American prisoner released from Franco’s prisons.
Two leaders of the future Black Power movement were also habitués of Pogo’s Swamp. Ron Everett, whom Ellen Kleinman remembers whistling Beethoven’s Ninth on picket lines, was vice president of the LACC student body (the next year he would become its first Black president) and a spellbinding orator. Intensely interested in African languages and cultures, he went on to UCLA, and then, as Malauna Ron Karenga, founded the controversial US organization. His roommate, Ed Bullins, became a celebrated avant-garde playwright and a central figure in the Black Arts Movement. (He also served a stint as minister of culture in the Black Panther Party.) However short lived, the ISU was both a stepping-stone to the civil rights battles of 1961–63 and a sign that the anti-communist ice age was beginning to thaw on campuses.
June: Fire Rings
A specter haunted Los Angeles in the summer of 1960: beach fire rings. Captain Robert Richards of the Venice Division of the LAPD warned the press that the five rings at Playa Del Rey Beach would “sooner or later” be the scene of a riot. He cited instances of unsupervised teenagers gathered around beach fires, drinking and necking. When told to leave, he reported, “they become angry and vandalize property.” The county had already taken action against such anarchy by closing its beaches at night. Surf fishermen protested, and sheriffs replied that they would only enforce the law against “loiterers,” that is to say, juveniles and young adults.35 Los Angeles, it seemed, had too many beaches, too many deserted roads, too many spaces where young libidos and imaginations ran wild. Black and Chicano kids, of course, were used to being denied access to public space, but white teenagers were now seen as a comparable problem, not as individual, alienated delinquents like those depicted in Rebel without a Cause, but as rowdy crowds and defiant mobs.
Captain Richards’s warning seemed prescient when in August 3,000 young people in San Diego, angry at the closure of the only local drag strip, blocked off a main street to race their ’40 Fords and ’57 Chevys. The arriving police were greeted with a hail of soft drink bottles and rocks; it took baton charges, tear gas, and Highway Patrol reinforcements to finally quell the hot-rodders. One hundred sixteen were arrested. The city’s ultra-conservative daily paper immediately discerned “a family relationship” between the riot, the Southern sitins, and the supposed targeting of youth by Communists. According to one syndicated columnist, the Reds were also encouraging kids to organize “sex clubs” on their high school campuses. Los Angeles meanwhile braced for its turn, and in 1961 ten so-called “teen riots” erupted in a six-month period, three of them involving thousands of youth. These were not trivial events. The subsequent political activism and youth culture of the sixties would be built upon this substratum of rebellion against curfews, closed beaches, disciplinary vice principals, draft boards and racist cops. Indeed, spontaneous anti-authoritarianism would define the temper of an entire generation.
July: The Democrats Come to Town
The 1960 Democratic National Convention at the new LA Memorial Sports Arena is best remembered for the dramatic battle between Kennedy and Johnson for the nomination, both of whom were almost upstaged by an emotional last-minute rally for Adlai Stevenson. But it was also the occasion of a bitter breach between Jesse Unruh, who had already endorsed JFK, and Governor Pat Brown, who was running as a favorite-son candidate.36 (Henceforth, every California Democrat had to choose which camp they belonged to: Unruh or Brown.) It was also a unique opportunity for the nuclear disarmament and civil rights movements to strut their stuff on television and, for the latter, to directly confront the candidates about their plans to dismantle segregation.
On July 10, the day before the opening of the Convention, 3,000 supporters of a nuclear test ban marched from MacArthur Park to Exposition Park, to hear Nobelist Linus Pauling, fresh from an interrogation by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and General Hugh Hester. Hester had won a Silver Star in the First World War and was a quartermaster to MacArthur in the Second, but the nuclear arms race, he told the crowd, had turned him into an “atomic pacifist.” The sponsoring groups included the American Friends Service Committee, which later during the Vietnam War would play an inestimable role in supporting conscientious objectors and draft resisters; SANE, the largest mainstream peace group, internally wracked since May by accusations that it had been infiltrated by Communists; and the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs, the reliable old guard in any peace or civil rights demonstration. A new group also announced itself at the demonstration: the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth wing of the Socialist Workers Party (the main Trotskyist group in the United States). YSA members would become indefatigable, if sometimes sectarian, builders of the local and national anti-war movements from 1965 onward.
The big event, however, was a rally of 7,500 people at the Shrine Auditorium, which Loren Miller described in the Eagle as the largest Negro political gathering since the 1940s. The Eagle had polled a sample of the community, finding universal opposition to LBJ and some support for Kennedy. Stevenson, however, remained far and away the most popular choice. When Kennedy arrived at the Shrine, the crowd, which had been jeering the names of Truman and Johnson, continued to boo, very disconcertingly, as he entered the auditorium. In contrast, “tumultuous, whistling standing ovations were given to Senator Hubert Humphrey [far down the list in the delegate count] and later, Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King.” Powell, Harlem’s outlaw congressman, stole the show, as he almost always did with urban Black audiences. After the speeches and lofty promises, 5,000 people marched down Figueroa to the Sports Arena, where Democratic Party chairman Paul Butler declared, “We dedicate ourselves to the elimination of all discriminatory practices at the earliest possible moment without violence.” Black voices chanted, “No! No! Now—not later!”37
August: Moving Mountains and Neighborhoods
In August the California Division of Highways began to excavate the tonnage equivalent of the Panama Canal in the Sepulveda Pass between West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. This segment of the San Diego Freeway—supplanting Sepulveda Boulevard and its infamous “Dead Man’s Curve”—would uncork the worst traffic bottleneck in Southern California and humanize (for a few years at least) the drive between the aerospace plants around LAX and the homes of engineers and technicians in Sherman Oaks and Reseda. If the giant Caterpillar earthmovers were symbols of liberation to middle-class commuters, they had more sinister significance for the communities they divided or destroyed. Ground zero of residential displacement in Southern California was the star-shaped ring of freeways around downtown that sliced the Eastside into half a dozen pieces, consuming 20 percent of its land area and forever enshrouding its playgrounds and schools in carcinogenic pollution. The great stacked interchanges, still engineering wonders of the world in the early 1960s, had been sited on residential and park land to avoid any conflict with adjacent railroad yards or the huge Sears Roebuck distribution center in Boyle Heights. In any event, inner-city residential property was easier to condemn, cheaper to buy and risked less of a political backlash.38
Affluent neighborhoods, on the other hand, had dismaying clout. Although the Division of Highways wanted to construct freeways down Olympic Boulevard, across Beverly Hills, and through Laurel Canyon, wealthy homeowners and celebrities eventually nixed the latter two projects and forced planners to reroute the Santa Monica Freeway southward