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paying Whitey back!"
A shirtless youth boasted: "Man, I got clothes for days. I'm gonna be
clean." He added breathlessly: "Tonight they're gonna git a furniture
store on Manchester and Broadway, and you know I'm gonna be there."
"Safeway's open!" someone shouted as the crowd ripped off huge sheets
of plywood that had been hurriedly installed over the plate glass
windows of a nearby supermarket. Looters swarmed into the store like
ants, hauling out case after case until the shelves were bare. Then the
huge, block-long structure was engulfed by flames.
The looters took anything they could move and destroyed anything that
they couldn't. One booty-laden youth said defiantly: "That don't look
like stealing to me. That's just picking up what you need and going."
Gesturing at a fashionable hilltop area where many well-to-do Negroes
live, he said: "Them living up in View Park don't need it. But we down
here, we do need it." One of the riot leaders, a biochemistry graduate,
was carting out cases of vodka from a liquor store when he was
approached by a Negro newsman. Said he: "I'm a fanatic for riots; I
just love them. I've participated in two in Detroit, but they were far,
far better than this one. In Detroit, blood flowed in the streets."
Gazing fondly back at flames billowing from a nearby supermarket, he
marveled: "Oh man, look at that! Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it pretty?
Oh man, just look at it!"
Though the city's authorities later indicted state officials for their
tardy response to appeals for help, they too at first seemed curiously
unperturbed by the mounting casualty lists. Not until Friday did Mayor
Sam Yorty take to the radio to address the rioters, and then his appeal
was an irrelevant plea to parents—if any were listening—to "know and
supervise the whereabouts of your children."
Only at 11 a.m. Friday did Yorty approve Police Chief William Parker's
request, made the previous day, to summon the California National
Guard. But Democratic Governor Pat Brown was vacationing in Greece, and
Lieutenant Governor Glenn M. Anderson cautiously insisted from
Sacramento that he would have to size up the situation at firsthand
before sending in troops. Finally it was Brown, reached in Athens, who
called out the Guard and ordered an 8 p.m. curfew.
The decision to call in troops came too late to stop an orgy of
destruction that throbbed higher than ever. The rioting spread over 150
square blocks, and the roving mobs multiplied so fast that police quit
trying to estimate their numbers. Molotov cocktails kindled 70 new
fires. Police and news helicopters were fired upon. Miraculously, there
had been no deaths so far, but shortly before 9 p.m. Deputy Sheriff
Ronald Ernest Ludlow, 27, was shot in the stomach by looters, and died
on his way to the hospital. For the first time the Los Angeles police
opened fire on their assailants.
A 20-year-old Negro died of a bullet wound in a hospital in the area as
a rampaging mob outside blocked an anesthesiologist from reaching him.
On South Central Avenue, many miles from the original riot scene,
police shot and killed a Negro looter. Said a National Guard officer:
"It's going to be like Viet Nam."
Machine Guns & Bayonets. That night, 2,000 helmeted National Guardsmen
from the 40th Armored Division
