Los Angeles Riots, Part I

1965

It was a hot Summer night, a Wednesday, when Marquette Frye peered into the rearview mirror of his 1955 Buick Special and saw the flashing blue and red lights from Officer Lee Minikus’ California Highway Patrol motorcycle behind him. Frye was 21 years old. He had been born in Oklahoma in 1944 and grown up in Hanna, Wyoming, far from the flatlands of the Los Angeles basin. When he was 13, he and his family moved to a neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles called Watts. Marquette struggled to fit in—he dropped out of high school by 16 and not long after that, found himself under arrest for the first time. Now, he was driving along Avalon Boulevard toward 116^th Street with his stepbrother Ronald in the passenger’s side, his life about to change forever.

Initially, it was a routine traffic stop. Frye had been drinking, he admitted as much to Minikus, but only a couple drinks he claimed. The swerving, he assured the officer, had been to avoid the potholes that made Avalon Boulevard into a near-lunar surface. As Minikus later recalled, he and Frye were even joking together. But then Ronald Frye exited the car to retrieve their mother from the family home, which was only two blocks away. Officer Minikus would later recall, “everything was doing just fine until his mother got there.”

By the time Mrs. Frye arrived at the scene, Marquette had been arrested under suspicion of driving under the influence. In the time it took Ronald to walk two blocks to fetch their mother, Marquette had agreed to take a field sobriety test and failed. Almost immediately, Mrs. Frye began shouting at her son for being drunk—and at the officer for arresting him. Here was a 21-year-old kid: a high school dropout, unemployed like nearly 34 percent of adults in Watts at the time, drunk, in handcuffs, and now being yelled at by his mother. A low moment about to get lower.

Soon, Mrs. Frye and Ronald Frye became part of the fray, as a responding officer who had arrived at the scene shoved Mrs. Frye, causing both Frye brothers to respond in kind. Marquette thrashed around in handcuffs as the jokes between he and Minikus became threats. In an instant, Frye found that his forehead was bleeding, the result of a direct blow from a nightstick. Soon, all three Fryes were under arrest. By then, a crowd of hundreds had gathered to watch the fracas. As he was led away by police, a friend turned to Frye, “Don’t worry; we’re going to burn this mother down.”

Not far from the station where Frye was held, rumors began to swirl of an all-out assault on Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, including an incident in which a police officer kicked a pregnant woman. It was August 11, 1965, and the first episode of the Los Angeles Riots was about to begin.

Soon, the long simmering unrest boiled over. In neighborhoods like Watts, where the Fryes lived, Black Angelinos had become isolated from the rest of the city as underhanded housing covenants kept the city in de facto segregation. While there had only been about 60,000 Black residents in L.A. in 1940, by 1965 there were about 350,000. And with little economic opportunity or investment, those neighborhoods became hotbeds of angst. As Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said of the ensuing rioting, the cause was “environmental and not racial. The economic deprivation, social isolation, inadequate housing, and general despair of thousands of Negroes teeming in Northern and Western ghettos are the ready seeds which give birth to tragic expressions of violence.”

However, LAPD Chief William H. Parker was not so understanding. He compared the rioters to “monkeys in a zoo,” while Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty said of the rioters, “the only thing they understand is force and power.” Perhaps predictably then given the attitude of those giving commands, the police response only escalated the situation. The rioting and looting had become worse—the flames literally grew higher. By Friday, California Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown called on the National Guard to occupy the 46 square miles of South Central that had been designated as a combat zone. As Chief Parker said, it was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong,” words that compared Americans to enemy combatants, which were echoed by Governor Brown who described the situation as “guerilla fighting with gangsters.” Soon, 14,000 National Guard troops patrolled the streets of an American city. In the end, across six days, over 3,400 people were arrested, over 1,000 were injured, and 34 people were dead. Among the dead were a fireman, a deputy sheriff, a Long Beach policeman—and 31 Angelinos killed by law enforcement. One of them was named Fenbroy Morrison George. As George ran out of his burning home—salvaging the possessions of his wife and three children—he was shot by two LAPD officers.

Four months prior to the riots, in March 1965, President Johnson had federalized the National Guard in Alabama to protect the peaceful Civil Rights protesters who were fighting for Voting Rights in Selma. Initially, Johnson had urged the state’s governor, George Wallace, to do so himself. After initially agreeing, however, the segregationist Wallace ultimately refused. Two weeks after “Bloody Sunday” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Johnson reluctantly called in the National Guard himself, just as President Kennedy had done in Alabama in 1963 and in Mississippi in 1962, and as President Eisenhower had done in Arkansas in 1957. In each case, it was to protect those protesting—not to protect those being protested. The march stayed on course—and led directly to the Voting Rights Act’s passage on August 5, 1965—exactly six days before Frye was arrested on Avalon Boulevard in Watts.

As the unrest and violence ensued, Marquette Frye sat in jail, just able to see the smoke from the surrounding burning buildings from his small cell window. ''It looked like somebody had dropped a bomb,” he said. “I heard on the radio about how many people had died and then I started to cry.'' His mother would later recall, “I didn’t know about any of the rioting until my daughter came and got me out of jail at seven the next morning.” “I was surprised,” she said. “I had never heard of a riot. There were never any riots before. I went back to my house. Where else was I going to go?”

Life would never be the same for Marquette. After being sentenced to 90 days in county jail and three years’ probation, he would be arrested a subsequent 28 times, as he struggled to hold down a job. Soon, the Civil Rights activists that once sought him out soon began to disassociate with him. His own son’s death years later led him to attempt suicide. He obsessed about that August day when he was 21, when he still had a chance in life, when he rode alongside his stepbrother up Avalon Boulevard, and when his neighborhood hadn’t burned. Eventually, Marquette changed his last name to Price, hoping to shed any shared identity with the kid who grew up in Wyoming and struggled to fit in in Watts. On Christmas Eve, 1986, Marquette was found dead from complications of pneumonia at 42 years old.

As he said of the defining incident of his life, “It just happened to me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Next week, I will be writing about the Los Angeles Riots in 1992 and providing an analysis of the current situation in L.A.

Sources:

https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-marquette-frye-obituary-19861225-story.html

https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-rena-price-20130623-story.html

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-08-19-me-2790-story.html

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/watts-rebellion-los-angeles#:~:text=While%20deploring%20the%20riots%20and%20their%20use,the%20violence%20were%20“environmental%20and%20not%20racial.&text=King%20told%20reporters%20that%20the%20Watts%20riots,the%20past%20decade”%20(King%2C%2020%20August%201965).