soldiers on the playground

Forty years ago today the Watts Riots exploded in Los Angeles. A spark was stricken during a traffic stop on a hot summer day and the tense relationship between the community and the police department flared into a conflagration that, I would learn years later, was at once both startling and all-but- inevitable.

I was in the third grade at the time.

I lived outside of the Watts section of the city…more towards the center of town in a neighborhood that included both the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the University of Southern California…and, for the most part, the businesses and homes in our neighborhood were not being looted or put to the torch (there were a couple of exceptions but they were just that.) But we were close enough that we were under curfew…under, for all intents and purposes, martial law…for the duration of the conflict.

Two blocks from the house where I lived was a high school…Manual Arts…that I passed every day on my way to my school…Menlo Avenue Elementary. Manual Arts was one of the staging grounds for the National Guard during the Riots.

At the time, I didn’t understand why the Riots had started…I didn’t understand why people were burning down parts of the neighborhoods were they lived…I didn’t understand why we had to be off the streets by 7 PM…I didn’t understand why armed soldiers were patrolling my neighborhood not so much to protect us as to contain us…and I certainly didn’t understand why I passed tanks and soldiers mustering for war on the athletic fields and parking lots of the high school I could see from my front lawn.

I remember one morning walking past the Manual Arts parking lot and catching the eye of a young Guardsman apparently patrolling the perimeter of the chain link fence. He looked at me…I remember him seeming being both unusually pale (it was years before I realized he might have been afraid of what was to come when they marched into the heart of the riots in Watts) and unusually young for a soldier…and smiled tentatively. I waved back shyly…both fascinated and frightened by his rifle and his uniform…and went on my way to school.

In time, it was over and the fires went out and the soldiers left the high school. It was years before I understood why the Riots started at all.