Watts redux

Novelist Walter Mosley's latest Easy Rawlins mystery, Little Scarlet, is set right after the 1965 Watts riot. He writes on today's LAT op-ed page that Watts "was a mass political action that had no leaders, no apologists, no internal critics."

The Watts riot was a spontaneous act of a people who had been oppressed, emasculated and impoverished for too long. It didn't matter if the man being arrested was guilty or not. It didn't matter if the police stood out in the street and said to go home. Who cared what they said or what their laws said? Who cared about property that would never be ours?

Sort of on theme, last Sunday's LAT ran an excerpt from 'Burn, Baby! BURN!': The Autobiography of Magnificent Montague, by the former Los Angeles radio DJ and Bob Baker. Montague writes that his catch phrase became identified with the riots because "The Times had no Negro reporters, and the white ones were getting the hell beaten out of them, so they found a young black ad salesman, sent him out to the ghetto, had him phone in his observations to a white rewrite man, and his first paragraph reported: Negro arsonists raced autos through otherwise deserted Los Angeles streets, flinging Molotov cocktails into store after store and shouting a hep slogan borrowed from a radio disc jockey: "Burn, baby, burn."