Races, Los Angeles: Rap’s Bomb

RACES

S.N.C.C. Leader H. Rap Brown emerged undaunted last week from four days of imprisonment in New York City. Arrested for transporting a .30-cal. carbine over state lines while under indictment for his role in the Cam bridge, Md., riots the previous month, Brown was released only after his bail had been reduced from $25,000 to $15,000 (bondsmen would not put up the bail, which had to be raised in toto among S.N.C.C sympathizers). “If President Johnson is worried about my rifle,” he said on leaving jail, “wait until I get my atom bomb.”

LOS ANGELES

Mighty, Mighty Watts

Exactly two years after its explosion in fire, bloodshed and ugly fame, Watts last week showed a striking change of face. Two thousand youngsters worked cheerfully at $1.27 an hour to beautify the ghetto streets; 2,400 more sang and sweated to overhaul an Army camp. Trees were growing, flowers were planted, and the slum dwellers were even about to take up farming. Watts today is no man’s El Dorado, but it is no longer a no-man’s land. There are hopeful new blossoms in yesterday’s burned-out jungle.

The man most responsible is a burly, black labor leader named Ted Watkins, 44, a born cajoler, red-tape cutter and pragmatic humanitarian whose Watts Labor Community Action Committee has shown an uncanny ability to attract outside help while galvanizing Watts from within. Watkins and fellow

Wattsians are trying to achieve by peaceful, productive means the sense of racial pride and accomplishment that Black Power advocates hope to instill with bomb and bullet.

Having lived 30 years in Watts, Watkins knew firsthand what was needed to lift the area from the mire of resentment and despair: first a hospital, next employment for the angry kids, then a start on badly needed adult payrolls. Watkins linked jobs with community improvement and got money to spend on all three projects. He also persuaded the Los Angeles city government to let him plant vegetable gardens along water-main rights of way in the widely ducted conurbation, putting farm-bred Southern migrants to work for pay at the only jobs they know well.

To offer his youngsters a summer alternative to the city’s streets, he organized a vast community task force to activate the Army’s semiabandoned Camp Roberts, 250 miles to the north. The city administration came up with a battalion of buses and drivers for the trek, and last week Camp Roberts—home base for the National Guard units that put down the 1965 riots—rocked to Watkins’ army of teen-agers in a summer-camp project so successful that it may become an annual event. The children are proud of themselves and proud of Watts. Raising three fingers in their own salute, they chant a rousing, bluesy marching song:

Everywhere we goO, People wanta know-O,

Where do we come from? So we tell ’em:

We’re from Watts, you know,

Mighty, Mighty Watts!