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Only since 13% of homes are have been built since 1939 the rest are decaying and dilapidated. Nearly 30% of the chil dren are from broken homes; their drop out rate is 2.2 times the city's average, and prison parolees, prostitutes, narcotics addicts and drunks live among them. Over a recent three-month period, cops reported 96 felonious crimes, including murders, rapes and assaults. The David Starr Jordan High School, which serves Watts, is not legally segregated; yet its student body is 99% Negro. Watts is a slum—but not in the Eastern sense. There are no rows of mul tiple-story tenements or concrete canyons. Its streets are generally broad, occasionally tree-lined and bordered by dusty lawns. Its dwellings are mostly one-and two-story frame and stucco houses. But in the small rented houses and apartments, money-short Negroes often crowd four and five families; children are left alone while parents work, and youths roam the streets seeking relief from the monotony of daily life. Watts is part of the Black Channel, a 72-square-mile area that houses 90% of Los Angeles County's 600,000 Negroes. It is the "hard," unchanging ghetto, a traditional portal for Negroes migrating to Los Angeles. Few of its people are native Californians. Of the 1.5 million Negroes who have fled the South in the past decade, one out of four went to California; thousands settled in Watts. There they were trapped among their own kind, smothered in their own ignorance of a new way of life, drowned in their frustration. "What they know about sheriffs and police is Bull Conner and Jim Clark," says Los Angeles Municipal Judge Loren Miller, a Negro. "The people distrust the police and the police distrust the people. They move in a constant atmosphere of hate." This was the atmosphere, largely unsuspected by most Angelenos, in which last week's fury erupted. The chronology:
WEDNESDAY At 7:45 p.m., two white California highway patrol officers spotted a car weaving recklessly around the southeast Los Angeles slum districts. After a six-block chase, the troopers halted the car in Watts — and arrested its Negro driver, Marquette Frye, 21. Out of Frye's nearby home came his mother, scolding her son for being drunk. In front of some 25 other Negroes standing near by, Frye started to struggle with the patrolmen. "You're not going to take me to jail," Officer Lee Mini-kus quoted him as saying. "You're going to have to take me the hard way."
As the crowd grew, Minikus' partner radioed for help and Minikus drew his revolver. Then, the officer reported later, Frye jumped in front of him and shouted, "Go ahead, kill me!" A backup patrolman arrived and, with shotgun at the ready, held the crowd at bay while Minikus and his partner hustled Frye, a brother and their mother off to the station. Frye later pleaded guilty to drunken driving; his brother pleaded guilty to battery and interfering with officers; but their mother pleaded not guilty to a charge of interfering with an officer.