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Celes King is director of the Los Angeles Rumor Control and Information Center, which serves as a switchboard for the black and Mexican minority organizations. King, a chunky brown man in his 40s, sits in a storefront office on a cheap vinyl couch. I ask him if the blacks are happy. King laughs bitterly. He points out that juvenile unemployment in the black community is 25% to 30%; adult unemployment is 12% to 15%. Transportation is a big part of the problem. Los Angeles is a horizontal city, and it's huge. Most industrial jobs are ten to 20 miles or more from the black ghettos. Angelenos own 3,000,000 cars. But 31% of the black families don't have a car, so how can they get to work? "Then," says King, "there is housing. There are other problems too. The city's going to have to make some substantial moves fast before it decays. The colonies—that's what they are, colonies—are on the threshold of exploding."
Cut to: Black Los Angeles
Saturday night. Watts. Like an anthill. Gaggles of black people gathered and gabbing everywhere—on sidewalks, front steps, bars, service-station lots. Sergeant Warren Larson, white, cool and 30, drives through the gloom. "Shooting at 2024½ W. Florence Avenue," barks Larson's radio. "Any unit that can handle please identify."
Larson finds the victim, a 35-year-old man, sitting on the sidewalk with a groove in his head where one bullet grazed him, and a hole in one leg. The sergeant goes up to talk to the assailant in a two-room apartment. The man is wearing socks and a T shirt. He tells Larson: "You damn right I shot him. I shot at him twice. He tried to break down the door. He had two Molotov cocktails in his hands all set to go. Hey, did I hit him? Where's he hit?" They lead the fire-bomber, drunk and bleeding, to an ambulance. They leave the man who shot him sitting on his bed alone.
Cut to: The Barrios of L.A.
Half of the 2,000,000 Mexicans in Southern California no longer call themselves Mexican Americans. They use the tougher name Chicanos, and they are renaming their political organization, United Mexican-American Students, MECHA—which means fuse. They are getting mad.
Sal Castro, a slight, handsome Chicano leader, walks with me through the broken, crumbling barrios of East Los Angeles and tells me: "We have a new nationalism now. There is no more Tio Taco, which is our version of Uncle Tom. We may be a few years behind the blacks in our militance, but we are getting there very fast.