Students: The is part of an article called "America's Urban Crisis a Decade After the Los Angeles Riots, by Peter Dreier. It was published in The National Civic Review in 2003. It concentrates on the 1992 "Rodney King Riots," but mentions the conditions in Watts in and around the Watts Rebellion.
If you need to present, this is one possibility. You can also present the article I posted last week.
America's Urban Crisis a Decade After the Los Angeles Riots, by Peter Dreier.
The tenth anniversary of the April 1992 riots in Los Angeles--which left fifty-five people dead and caused more than $1 billion in property damage, the most costly in the nation's history--sparked a small industry of reports and assessments by think tanks and the news media. During the week before the anniversary, reporters from almost every major newspaper were swarming around Los Angeles, preparing their predictable ten-years-later stories. They asked the expected questions: Why did it happen? Has any progress been made? And as the British paper The Guardian headlined its story, Could it happen again?( n1)
The Los Angeles Times published a weeklong series of front-page articles reviewing the day the riots erupted, assessing contemporary conditions in the riot corridor, and examining the current state of race relations in America's most racially diverse city. Reporters interviewed academic experts, community activists, ordinary residents, business leaders, and others; and the paper sponsored a public opinion poll to probe how Angelenos now felt about their city.
But the paper's most telling story was buried on page 20 on the day of the anniversary, April 29. The headline was "Tax Cut Clouds Bush's Urban Agenda." Bush came to Los Angeles that day to speak at a church-sponsored community development center at the 1992 riot's epicenter, South Los Angeles--an area with almost 700,000 residents, bigger than most cities. Reporters might have expected him to announce a new initiative to address the nation's serious urban problems, but instead he simply touted his most visible urban program--encouraging urban churches to sponsor social programs such as homeless shelters, food kitchens, and drug counseling. His proposal (which has been stalled in Congress because of disagreements over federal funding for religious activities) added no funds for these worthy, though Band-Aid, efforts, but simply called for redirecting existing moneys. Also, by pushing $1.3 trillion in tax relief, mostly for the wealthy, Bush made it impossible for the federal government to provide any significant aid to the nation's cities or to the poor.
The president's advisers must have reminded him that his father's hesitant response to the 1992 riots--he failed to visit the city until a week after the violence erupted, denounced the rioters, and proposed nothing meaningful in the way of policy solutions--contributed to his defeat by Bill Clinton. (As a candidate, Clinton visited South Central LosAngeles before Bush did, and announced a package of policy proposals to create more jobs, improve education, and strengthen public safety.) But George W. Bush came to Los Angeles bearing only rhetoric. "You know, we live in a great country," he said. "I'm proud of America. I'm proud of our country I'm proud of what we stand for. Oh, I know there's pockets of despair. That just means we've got to work harder. It means you can't quit. It means we've got to rout it out with love and compassion and decency. But this is the greatest country on the face of the Earth. And it is such an honor to be a resident of such a great land."
Trying to combine the roles of preacher and historian, Bush offered this lesson: "Out of the violence and ugliness came new hope" he said, in the middle of a neighborhood where only 23 percent of the commercial buildings destroyed by the riots are back in business (according to a report by the Los Angeles Economic Roundtable( n2)), where there are 43,800 fewer jobs than there were in 1992, and where more than one-third of the residents live in poverty.
Riots and Reform
In fact, history tells us that riots don't bring about hope or positive change. If anything, by creating a backlash in the larger community, riots stall positive reforms rather than accelerate them. The deeper social logic in response to riots is retrenchment and reaction. Public opinion becomes polarized. The flight of the middle class and business from the cities accelerates. This in turn undermines the fiscal capacity of cities to meet basic needs.
Riots are expressions of outrage about social conditions, but they are not truly political protests. They do not have a clear objective, a policy agenda, or a target for bringing about change. At most, riots are a wake-up call--to political and business leaders in particular, as well as to the media--that things are seething below the surface. But how political and business leaders respond to that wake-up call may have little to do with what's needed.
What brings about positive change--especially for the poor and working class--is the slow, gradual, difficult work of union organizing, community organizing, and participation in electoral politics. To the extent that Los Angeles is a better city today than it was ten years ago, it is due to the grassroots activists--and their allies among foundations, media, clergy, and public officials--who have worked in the trenches pushing for change against difficult obstacles.
The United States has gone through several waves of race riots. After World War I and during World War II, riots swept through a number of major cities--primarily whites using violence to resist blacks moving into white neighborhoods and moving into jobs previously limited to whites. In the mid and late 1960s, riots exploded in the nation's urban ghettos, typically triggered by an incident of police brutality, but rooted in growing frustration at the pace of change--the persistence of miserable poverty amid growing affluence and the continued political powerlessness of the nation's black poor.
As we entered the twenty-first century, some urban experts and journalists--most prominently Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio in their book Comeback Cities--were talking about an urban renaissance in America.( n3) Data from the 2000 census showed some promising signs. During the 1990s some major cities, including New York and Chicago, reversed their long decline in population. The nation's urban crime rate was lower than it had been a decade earlier. So was the urban unemployment rate. Home ownership rates for Latinos and blacks had increased. Also, by 2000 the nation's overall poverty rate (11.3 percent)--and that of central cities (16.1 percent)--was lower than it had been in twenty-five years. Even air quality improved in many urban areas.( n4)
But despite pockets of gentrification in quite a few cities, the basic trends of widening income equality and persistent poverty persist. Vast disparities of wealth and poverty are sometimes located only a few zip codes from each other. Prosperity does not just "trickle down" by itself. In some of the nation's most troubled urban neighborhoods--as well as in a growing number of low-income suburban areas--the economic recovery of the 1990s simply passed by, as the Clinton Administration acknowledged in a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) report about places "left behind."( n5)
The message of "comeback cities" is certainly preferable to the widespread stereotype that America's cities are cauldrons of social pathology that are beyond the point of no return. But the positive trends were neither inevitable nor durable. As the nation's economy drifted downward from 2000 through 2002, the indicators of an urban revival--reductions in poverty, crime, and the proportion of families without health insurance among them--reversed their direction.
During the 1990s, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter gained considerable attention from scholars and policymakers by arguing that inner cities have a competitive advantage and will prosper if governments simply step out of the way and promote a favorable business climate. But the extent to which cities improved in the 1990s was due largely to an unprecedented national economic expansion, reinforced by national policies that reduced unemployment, spurred productivity, lifted the working poor out of poverty, and targeted private investment to low-income urban areas. Cities improve when the federal government promotes full employment and supports targeted programs such as revenue sharing, subsidized housing, and urban mass transit. Federal policies that help the poor and working class--from job training to subsidized health insurance--tend to help cities.
For example, the Clinton administration's expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)--which provides the working poor with additional income (up to $3,888 a year for the poorest)--was particularly helpful in cities. In 2001, the EITC provided more than $30 billion to 18.4 million poor families in the United States, making it the nation's largest antipoverty program. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, in 1997 775,000 residents of LosAngeles County earned $1.2 billion in EITC refunds; about $500 million went to families living in Los Angeles.( n6)
In contrast, the Clinton welfare reform policy, enacted in 1996, has mostly been a disaster for cities, as reports from the Brookings Institution, Urban Institute, and elsewhere have documented.( n7) Many welfare recipients (and their kids) who were forced off federal aid are worse off, having been pushed into low-wage jobs without health care benefits or child care subsidies. As the recession has deepened, many of them are now losing their meagerly paying jobs and have no safety net to cushion the blow. According to Dan Flaming of the Los Angeles Economic Roundtable, fewer than one-quarter of former welfare recipients in Los Angeles County--which in 2002 had the largest number of welfare recipients of any urban area in the nation--are currently working at jobs with wages above the poverty line; the rest are either jobless or working for below-poverty pay.( n8)
Contrary to the conservative view that cities would prosper if Washington would just step aside, the Clinton administration's strong enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act--the nation's anti-redlining law--pushed banks to make more loans in low-income urban neighborhoods, leading to an increase in home ownership (particularly among blacks and Latinos). During the Clinton years, HUD promoted the efforts of community development corporations (CDCs)--nonprofit groups that have carried the burden of building affordable housing and rebuilding poor urban neighborhoods. In Los Angeles and others cities, CDCs have built most of the affordable housing that has been added to the city's inventory in the past decade. What CDCs have accomplished is remarkable, but the shortage of federal funds for housing ensures that they can have only a marginal impact on improving inner-city areas.
In the past two years, urban conditions have worsened. Poverty, crime, and unemployment have increased. Foreclosures have increased, especially on recent first-time homeowners, disproportionately blacks and Latinos. Meanwhile, the nation's urban crisis has been spreading to the older suburbs, where poverty is increasing and local governments are cutting basic services just like their urban neighbors.
But what happens if, when the economy picks up, conditions don't improve for the poorest Americans--stuck in the nation's ghettos and barrios--isolated from suburban job growth, unable to earn more than poverty-level wages in jobs that provide no health insurance, paying half or more of their meager incomes in rent? Historians and sociologists note that riots occur when poor people see little or no progress despite the prosperity in the surrounding society Who can say whether the ticking time bomb will eventually explode again?
A Tale of Two Riots: 1965 and 1992
Fifty years ago, Los Angeles was still America's Eden--the land of sunshine, beaches, open spaces, opportunity, and ambition. It was the home of Hollywood, the nation's dream factory, and it was a city where Americans moved to follow their dreams. Now when Americans think about Los Angeles, the images are more troubling: urban riots and severe earthquakes (two of each in the past forty years), traffic congestion and ugly sprawl, dominated by an asphalt jungle of freeways and shopping malls. But the reality fifty years ago was never as good as the city's civic boosters claimed, and the reality today is not as awful as portrayed in Mike Davis's books (City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear) or Hollywood films like Traffic.
More than any other urban area, Los Angeles has reflected the impact of federal government policies and subsidies that encouraged suburbanization, auto dependency, and racial segregation. In the postwar period, the city's business and civic elite forged a local growth coalition that promoted a combination of suburban sprawl and downtown redevelopment, locking out the poor from the benefits of both. The economic and racial disparities that led to the wave of urban riots in American cities during the 1960s emerged first in Los Angeles--in the Watts riots of 1965.
In 1965, an incident of police misconduct unleashed cumulative rage at the police and at pervasive racial discrimination, leading to the explosion in Watts, a predominantly African American area. The casualties included 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, and 3,952 arrests. Twenty-seven years later, triggered by the acquittal of police officers for the beating of Rodney King, riots erupted in South Central Los Angeles, a mixed black and Latino section of the city. The casualty figures were significantly larger: 55 deaths, 2,383 injuries, and more than 17,000 arrests.
After the Watts riots, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty and business leaders did little to respond to the grievances that led to the violence. If anything, Yorty stoked the racial tensions by encouraging stronger police measures and downplaying the social and economic causes. According to Raphael Sonenshein's Politics in Black and White, a study of racial politics in Los Angeles, "the president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce sent Yorty a bound volume of letters from individual members of the Chamber, all praising the mayor and [Police] Chief [William] Parker. Letter after letter congratulated them on restoring law and order."( n9)
But the Watts riots did energize the city's liberal forces to find an alternative to Yorty and his conservative agenda. A liberal alliance, primarily of blacks and Jews, coalesced around Tom Bradley--a police lieutenant prior to his election in 1963 as the first black member of the Los Angeles City Council--to replace Yorty. Bradley had been a strong critic of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), strengthening his own support in the black community Backed by the liberal alliance, Bradley narrowly lost in his effort to unseat Yorty in 1969, but was successful four years later. He served as mayor for twenty years.
Bradley's early years in office could be considered the "feel good era" of Los Angeles. He nearly carried the white vote in the 1973 election (he carried it decisively in all of his four subsequent reelections). Never in America had this many white people voted for a black candidate. More than just a mayor, Bradley--a figure of great dignity and almost sphinx-like reserve--became a symbol of the city's racial enlightenment, an image he reinforced by fostering cross-racial alliances (although he also declined to get involved in an early-1970s fight for compulsory busing to integrate the Los Angeles schools).
During his first term, Bradley made Los Angeles a center of the social welfare and public employment programs of the 1970s, drawing on the federal antipoverty and urban renewal programs to carry out his agenda. Like most postwar mayors, however, Bradley struck up an alliance with business interests to promote and revive the city's downtown. These business elites quickly realized that they could do business with Bradley. Downtown Los Angelessoon became home, during the 1970s and 1980s, to a generation of gleaming high-rise office towers. It had a skyline at last.
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