Black Lives Matter at Work

HISTORY/PRACTICE
69
Fifty Years Later
Vanessa Lopez, CSU–Dominguez Hills Labor Studies, Alum
This short documentary—created by students and faculty at Cal State
Dominguez Hills—shows that the causes that fueled the 1965 Watts
Rebellion had been brewing from decades of racial, political, and
economic inequalities in South Los Angeles. Starting with housing policies
that segregated a growing Black wartime work force in the Watts area
during and after World War II, to growing police brutality during the Civil
Rights Era, South Los Angeles residents suffered years of police abuse,
educational disinvestment, loss of jobs, housing discrimination, and
substandard health care. By 1965, outrage was in the air when Marquette
Frye, his brother, and mother were accosted by police, and Watts
residents began targeting and burning unfairly high-priced business as a
means of voicing their anger and frustration with racial discrimination,
high rates of unemployment, inadequate schools, and dilapidated
housing. The national attention received after the riots bred a civic and
cultural awareness in the community that led to an increase in the arts,
education, healthcare, employment training, and home buying access.
At the end of the documentary, students ask, “What issues of social
significance have transpired since the Watts rebellion? Are the embers of
the Watts Rebellion still smoldering today? Fifty years later, we are ripe
for another rebellion. What seemed to have happened fifty years ago are
similar situations that are happening today, but in a different time. Today
the same conditions remain amongst minorities—police brutality cases
are being exposed all over the nation. We witness such cases like Michael
Brown in Ferguson and Walter Scott in North Charleston… We see a
trend in which Blacks and Browns keep struggling for dignity.”