The Explosion in Watts

The Second Reconstruction and the Cold War Roots of the Carceral State

The explosion in Watts reminded us all that the northern ghettos are the prisons of forgotten men.

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., New York, September 18, 1965

In August 1965, the California Highway Patrol stopped an unemployed resident of South Central Los Angeles named Marquette Frye and proceeded to beat him. Frye's assault ignited the fury of the Black working class in Watts. Many took up burning and looting as their form of protest against this particular episode and the more general epidemic of police violence. Over the next five days the masses were on the move. The uprising — popularly known as the Watts rebellion or insurrection — occurred within days of the passage of the historic Voting Rights Act in 1965. National and international attention was drawn to the events, especially as they appeared to contradict the dominant national narrative of appeasement and racial overcoming. Moved by the events, Martin Luther King Jr. was compelled to visit Los Angeles. Against the counsel of advisors who recommended that King denounce the rebellion and the conditions that produced it, King met with the participants of the then–largest urban uprising in U.S. history. In a press conference shortly after the meeting he stated that the rebellion "was a class revolt of underprivileged against privileged." While King celebrated the political victories of the freedom movement, he framed the Watts insurrection as the outcome of class anger among those who found their material conditions, despite the new legislation, unchanged.

In the wake of this encounter, King and his colleagues increasingly worked to articulate alternatives to the race and class inequality they witnessed in Watts. King came to the ethical position that "something is wrong with capitalism. ... There must be a better distribution of wealth, and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." This realization transformed King as he sided with working people in the struggle against racism, militarism, and poverty. King thus affirmed the insurgent impulse of the urban uprisings, as he well understood the material conditions that had produced them. In his estimation, the struggle of the urban multiracial poor was the decisive factor in elevating the crisis of racism and poverty to the national political stage.

King sought to rebuild an alliance between civil rights and labor movements to confront the crisis politically. As part of this effort, he located the origins of the rebellion in the automation and deindustrialization in the period. This focus resonated as the intersecting crises of racism, urban poverty, unemployment, and police violence disproportionately impacted the African American and Mexican American working class in the city. In his speeches he increasingly highlighted the social forces producing concentrated unemployment and poverty among the racialized poor. He therefore provided a critique of the changing geography of U.S. racial capitalism. He inspired a radical return in the freedom movement to materialist analysis and class questions that had been marked as outside the bounds of tolerable discourse during the Cold War.

That is not to say that visions of redistribution had not been central to the freedom movement well before Watts. They had played a powerful role in connecting labor and civil rights movements for decades. Taking a long view of the civil rights movement, this chapter traces the rise of what activists, artists, and intellectuals in the Black freedom movement called the Second Reconstruction during the 1930s. It explores how they formed a popular alliance with radical labor and socialist movements against Jim Crow capitalism. It shows how they offered a materialist analysis of racialization, and critiqued policing and prisons as political expressions of the systemic inequalities of capitalism. It also explores how their critique was silenced as "subversion" during the post–World War II Red Scare amid the broader criminalization of antiracist freedom struggles. It demonstrates that this reaction created a political vacuum in which the logic of the carceral state would come to flourish.

As the Cold War took hold after 1948, incarceration rates expanded. African American workers were members of the reserve army of labor. They were the last hired, first fired, and also increasingly subjected to surveillance, arrest, and incarceration. Prisons began to fill with people who were young and working class — groups who also made up the social basis for the labor and civil rights struggles of the postwar era. This was particularly true in California, where the dispossessed had been forced to migrate from the South in search of waged work during World War II. Indeed, while the incarceration rate for the United States as a whole remained relatively steady in the two and half decades after the war, as the journalist Min S. Yee observed, the California prison population by contrast grew from about five thousand in 1944 to more than twenty-eight thousand by 1968. This shift coincided with a transformation in the racial demographics of the prison. The California prison population went from 68 percent white and 17 percent Black in the 1940s to 54 percent white and 28 percent Black in the 1960s, even while the percentage of Black people in California remained between 5 and 6 percent of the population throughout the period. This seemingly exceptional form of carceral control requires explanation, especially as it became the dominant strategy of racialized crisis management in the long late twentieth century.

This chapter shows how carceral policies were developed in response to the most radical political and economic demands of the long civil rights movement. It argues that the national security state's attempts to silence materialist critiques of racism produced the political and ideological conditions of existence for the Watts insurrection in 1965. In turn, it suggests that the state's response to the revolt and the rise of Ronald Reagan during the late 1960s in California created the political foundation for the making of a neoliberal carceral state. By analyzing the speeches and writings of figures such as King and James Baldwin, I seek to demonstrate that the rebellion was a turning point in the history and future of freedom struggles. I argue that the Watts insurrection represented an organic crisis of Jim Crow racial regimes, one that presented the opportunity to form a broad alliance...