Revolution Televised.pdf

Was the Revolution Televised? 33
to examine the “principal events and causes of the nightmare in
Watts.” This program illustrates the difficulty that this show and
other documentary texts of the time had in overcoming the central
contradiction between the United States’ position as leader of the
free world and the clear evidence of its human rights violations.
The documentary also calls attention to the instances of what Bill
Nichols terms “documentary excess,” moments that are uncontainable
within the “narrative structure.” 20 These were times in which
black people used the public venue of television to assert the politics
that evolved within black society yet were not recorded or displayed
in mainstream U.S. settings. Also central to our discussion here is
the focus of “Watts: Riots or Revolt?” which, like many other documentary
texts of the era, was on the conflicts of blackness within
the urban space. This and other documentaries had an influence on
the perceptions of the inner-city black community, especially when
urban conflicts escalated in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Mass migration to urban centers began at the turn of the century.
By the 1960s, large segments of the black population lived in
enclaves of major urban centers across the United States. Many of
these people, who had moved out of the South in hopes of finding
better opportunities, were faced with new as well as familiar types
of oppression in northern and western cities.
One such enclave of black life was Watts in Los Angeles. Many
African Americans had migrated to Southern California with hopes
of new jobs but were systematically excluded from work in construction
and the rapidly expanding aerospace industry. Black unemployment
between 1959 and 1965 increased from 12 percent to
30 percent in Watts, and the median income decreased significantly.
21 Efforts of civil rights organizations to improve the lives of African
Americans in Los Angeles were curtailed. One such example of
this occurred with the passage of Proposition 14 (1964), which was
intended to repeal the Rumford Fair Housing Act. The Rumford
Act, which passed into law in 1963, prevented racial discrimination
in the sale of homes by allowing housing grievances to be handled
by the California State Fair Employment Practices Commission
rather than through the courts. This system was more accessible to
minorities who could not afford expensive court proceedings when
filing a housing discrimination claim. 22 Although later declared unconstitutional
by the U.S. Supreme Court, Proposition 14 passed
with 75 percent of the white vote. 23