The Watts Rebellion and the Neighborhood That Rebuilt Itself

On August 11, 1965, a traffic stop in Watts — a Black neighborhood in south Los Angeles — escalated into six days of civil unrest that killed 34 people, injured over 1,000, and caused $40 million in property damage. The Watts Rebellion (sometimes called the Watts Riots) was not spontaneous — it was the eruption of decades of racial discrimination, police brutality, and economic isolation that had been building since the Great Migration brought Black families to Los Angeles and the covenants, redlining, and police department kept them confined to a few square miles.

The McCone Commission, appointed to investigate, concluded that the underlying causes were unemployment, inadequate housing, and poor schools — a diagnosis that was accurate and has remained largely unaddressed, which is both the tragedy and the ongoing relevance of Watts. The neighborhood today is poor, under-resourced, and largely invisible to the tourists who visit the city's beaches and studios, and that invisibility is itself a continuation of the conditions that produced the rebellion.

The Watts Towers — Simon Rodia's extraordinary sculptural monument — stands in the neighborhood as a counterpoint to the narrative of destruction. Built by one man over 33 years, the towers survived the rebellion, survived the earthquake, survived every attempt to demolish them, and stand today as proof that Watts is not just a place where something terrible happened but a place where something extraordinary was created.

The Watts Towers Arts Center adjacent to the towers hosts exhibitions, performances, and community programs, and the annual Watts Towers Day of the Drum and Jazz Festival (September) draws thousands to a celebration that insists the neighborhood's identity is creative, not catastrophic. Understanding LA requires understanding Watts, and understanding Watts requires visiting — not driving past, but stopping, walking the streets, seeing the towers, and reckoning with the distance between what the city promises and what it delivers.