(See Cover)
Far out at sea, mariners puzzled over a molten glow in the eastern sky. Over the roar of the freeway, motorists heard the unmistakable crack of rifle fire, the chilling stutter of machine guns. Above city hall, billowing smoke from 1,000 fires hung like a cerement. From the air, whole sections of the sprawling city looked as if they had been blitzed.
The atmosphere reminded soldiers of embattled Saigon. Yet this, last week, was Los Angeles — the City of Angels, the "safe city," as its boosters like to call it, the city that has always taken pride in its history of harmonious racial relations.
Savagery replaced harmony with nightmarish suddenness. One evening white Angelenos had nothing to worry about but the humidity. The next — and for four nights after that — marauding mobs in the Negro suburb of Watts pil laged, burned and killed, while 500 po licemen and 5,000 National Guardsmen struggled vainly to contain their fury. Hour after hour, the toll mounted: 27 dead at week's end, nearly 600 injured, 1,700 arrested, property damage well over $100 million. Minute by minute, police radios logged a Wellsian cata logue of carnage: "Manchester and Broadway, a mob of 1,000 . . . Shots at Avalon and Imperial . . . Vernon and Central, looting . . . Yellow cab over turned . . . Man pulled from car on Imperial Highway . . . 88th and Broad way, gun battle . . . Officer in trouble." The riot was the worst in the city's history, one of the worst ever in the U.S. To help quell it, California's Gov ernor Pat Brown broke off a vacation in Greece and hurried home. "From here it is awfully hard to direct a war," said Brown. "That's what this is."
Black Channel. The war's major bat tleground was a 20-sq.-mi. ghetto. Watts is the kind of community that cries out for urban renewal, poverty programs, job training. Almost anything would help. Two-thirds of its residents have less than a high school education; one-eighth of them are technically illiterate.