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Almost as soon as the fires had been extinguished in Watts and South Los Angeles in August 1965, Johnny Otis started to write about the riots. He penned a long letter to a friend about the uprising less than a week after he drove down Central Avenue into the heart of the conflagration. During the weeks that followed , he collected oral testimonies from eyewitnesses to the insurrection and began to compose a series of short essays about the uprising and its importance. These writings grew into a book, Listen to the Lambs, published in 1968. It is an impassioned and incendiary volume that supports the insurrection and the people who waged it. Otis argues that the destruction in Watts in August 1965 stemmed from pressures built up over centuries throughout U.S. society. He rejects accounts of the riots as acts by deranged or criminal elements in the community, depicting the uprising instead as a political statement by people deprived of any other effective way of getting their grievances heard. The book delineates the complex constraints that shaped life and death in the ghetto. In one poignant passage, Otis points to the multiple indignities and disappointments that preceded the rebellion, asking, “Do we bury the dead in American flags . . . or canceled welfare checks . . . or Baptist choir robes? . . . or Los Angeles Police Department handcuffs? . . . or eviction notices? . . . or selective service questionnaires?”1 As an entertainer whose career relied on public approval, corporate support, and police toleration, Johnny Otis took a huge risk in writing Listen to the Lambs. By publishing this book in the wake of the fires that had 80 Four LISTEN TO THE LAMBS consumed much of Watts, Otis was seemingly willing to light a match and torch the rest of his career. He surrendered any future viability he might have had as a mainstream commercial entertainer in exchange for the opportunity to speak truth to power. In associating himself with the rage of the urban poor and connecting himself to the principles, commitments, and beliefs of the most ferociously disaffected opponents of white supremacy, he revealed himself as someone willing to surrender money, fame, and prestige for ideas in which he believed. This radicalism had professional and personal consequences. In those years of government programs like COINTELPRO, designed to monitor and harass dissidents, Otis set himself up as someone who could be singled out for repression. The book guaranteed that some doors would be closed to him forever. It marked him as someone who might be dangerous to know. In writing Listen to the Lambs, Otis made certain that in the future he would not be the person selected to host New Year’s Rockin’ Eve specials on television, like Dick Clark, that he would not become the subject of mainstream Hollywood films about rock ’n’ roll, like Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly, and that he would not be able to leverage his fame later in life into a successful career in politics, like Sonny Bono. When he wrote Listen to the Lambs, Johnny Otis was a forty-six-yearold high school dropout who had never written a book before. He had no credentials as a sociologist or political scientist. He held no elected office and led no organization. No one had asked him to volunteer his opinions. He was not even Black. Yet Otis believed he had something important to say. Listen to the Lambs remains one of the most unusual books ever written . It mixes impassioned polemics about the present with whimsical anecdotes from Otis’s past. It blends bold diagnoses of major social issues with loving descriptions of everyday life events in the Black community. It is, in many ways, a work of improvisational art, a book written quickly in the heat of the moment, a virtuoso performance of verbal bravado designed to serve immediate ends: to salve a community’s wounds and lift its spirits. It is in every respect a vernacular text, a message from and for a particular place and time, speaking to contemporary issues in the language of the day, replete with the new slang words and the new language patterns being forged in the wake of the turmoil of the 1960s. It resonates with the tones and textures of twentieth-century Black political activism, with what Cedric Johnson aptly describes as the culture of the soapbox, the pamphlet, and the bullhorn.2 Listen to the Lambs 81 [18.118.210.213] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 02:13 GMT...

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