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15. Watts
- University of California Press
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ONAUGUST13,1965—by weird happenstance a Friday the thirteenth—Pat Brown spent the evening in Athens, Greece, attending the World Congress of the American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association. Attended by thirteen thousand Greek Americans, the conference offered Brown a chance to burnish his connections with an important ethnic constituency. It was the kind of event Brown liked, but he was also looking ahead a few hours. His Greek political chores completed, he and Bernice were scheduled that night to begin a monthlong tour of Europe, a reprise of the rambling vacation they had enjoyed the year before. Their bags were packed, and they were assured a dramatic start: a midnight cruise on the Aegean Sea.1 But at the convention banquet Brown was suddenly told he had a call from America. His closest aide, Hale Champion, was on the phone, and the news was horrific. Massive rioting had erupted in Watts, a predominantly black section of Los Angeles, and the violence had mushroomed beyond control. Overwhelmed, the mighty Los Angeles Police Department was asking for help from the California National Guard.The request was not going smoothly. Glenn Anderson, the lieutenant governor and the state’s acting chief executive in Brown’s absence, could not be found. He was flying from Sacramento to Los Angeles, but in the meantime the request for the National Guard was awaiting action as the crisis escalated. There were rumblings that federal troops might be needed before order could be restored.2 314 15 WATTS It seemed a stunning development. The tensions that accompanied the Civil Rights movement had occasionally required soldiers in American cities, but that happened in the South, in backward places like Arkansas and Alabama, not in progressive California. Brown justifiably thought of himself as a good guy on racial questions. He was the governor who had signed more civil rights bills than any other chief executive in California history. He had pushed for laws to ensure fair housing and fair employment and had fought like hell when conservatives pushed for the repeal of the housing law. He was confident that black Californians knew their state was a decent place to live, and there was reason for his belief. Only months earlier the Urban League had rated sixty-eight American cities and concluded that blacks enjoyed more opportunities in Los Angeles than anywhere else.3 And yet now Brown’s most trusted adviser was on the phone with news of an urban apocalypse in the land of endless sunshine. It was California’s greatest emergency since Brown had been governor—and he was halfway around the world. ——— For Brown, 1965 had been a hard year from the start. Deep into the sixties socially as well as chronologically, California was now a place of division as much as dreams. The acid battles over the Rumford Act and the Free Speech Movement the previous fall had split the state, and the rifts were re- flected in opinions about the governor who played so crucial a role in both controversies. Regarding Brown, fewer people than ever before were neutral . More voters thought the governor was doing a good job, and more a poor one. Only the dispassionate percentages—people who gave him a middling “fair” rating or who had no opinion at all—had dropped.4 The Democrats Brown supposedly led were more deeply divided than ever, a fact that haunted the governor through the early months of the year. In January he headed a big California delegation that went east to attend the inauguration of Lyndon Johnson, but the Democratic politicos took along their battles from home. From the start the Californians sundered into peevish and competing camps devoted to Brown and his rival, Speaker Jess Unruh. There were separate airplanes and hotels, even separate social events once the group reached Washington. One newspaper chronicled the hostility and headlined the story “State Sends a Civil War.”5 The year’s legislative session was equally frustrating, both because of the Democratic bickering and because of Brown’s own shriveled policy ambiWATTS 315 [44.213.75.78] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:41 GMT) 316 FALLING tions. Once, the governor had pushed the legislature toward big steps, massive engineering projects or major civil rights bills or large tax increases needed to fund an activist government. Now, at the start of his seventh year in office, his administration fatigued and sagging, Brown’s chief complaint was that lawmakers were doing too little to...