Download or read book Fire this Time written by Gerald Horne and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In August 1965 the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in flames and violence following an incident of police brutality. This is the first comprehensive treatment of that uprising. Property losses reached hundreds of millions of dollars and the official death toll was thirty-four, but the political results were even more profound. The civil rights movement was placed on the defensive as the image of meek and angelic protestors in the South was replaced by the image of "rioting" blacks in the West. A "white backlash" ensued that led directly to Ronald Reagan's election as governor of California in 1966. In Fire This Time Horne delineates the central roles played by Ronald Reagan, Tom Bradley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Edmund G. Brown, and organizations such as the NAACP, Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, and gangs. He documents the role of the Cold War in the dismantling of legalized segregation, and he looks at the impact of race, region, class, gender, and age on postwar Los Angeles. All this he considers in light of world developments, particularly in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and Africa.
Download or read book Set the Night on Fire written by Mike Davis and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power-where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation-and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of 'Asian America' as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.
Download or read book The Watts Riots written by Clayton D. Clingan and published by Vantage Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Wandering in Strange Lands written by Morgan Jerkins and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of TIME's 100 Must Read Books of 2020 and one of Good Housekeeping's Best Books of the Year “One of the smartest young writers of her generation.”—Book Riot Featuring a new afterword from the author, Morgan Jerkins' powerful story of her journey to understand her northern and southern roots, the Great Migration, and the displacement of black people across America. Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as The Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors’ journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California. Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family’s oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of black people she met along the way—the tissue of black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history. Incisive and illuminating, Wandering in Strange Lands is a timely and enthralling look at America’s past and present, one family’s legacy, and a young black woman’s life, filtered through her sharp and curious eyes.
Download or read book Official Negligence written by Lou Cannon and published by Crown. This book was released on 1997 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How Rodney King and the riots changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.
Download or read book America on Fire The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s written by Elizabeth Hinton and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.” —Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Washington Post From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.
Download or read book The Essential Kerner Commission Report written by Jelani Cobb and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recognizing that an historic study of American racism and police violence should become part of today’s canon, Jelani Cobb contextualizes it for a new generation. The Kerner Commission Report, released a month before Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, is among a handful of government reports that reads like an illuminating history book—a dramatic, often shocking, exploration of systemic racism that transcends its time. Yet Columbia University professor and New Yorker correspondent Jelani Cobb argues that this prescient report, which examined more than a dozen urban uprisings between 1964 and 1967, has been woefully neglected. In an enlightening new introduction, Cobb reveals how these uprisings were used as political fodder by Republicans and demonstrates that this condensed edition of the Report should be essential reading at a moment when protest movements are challenging us to uproot racial injustice. A detailed examination of economic inequality, race, and policing, the Report has never been more relevant, and demonstrates to devastating effect that it is possible for us to be entirely cognizant of history and still tragically repeat it.
Download or read book Policing Los Angeles written by Max Felker-Kantor and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying its power. In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the Watts uprising.
Download or read book The Kerner Report written by National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark study of racism, inequality, and police violence that continues to hold important lessons today The Kerner Report is a powerful window into the roots of racism and inequality in the United States. Hailed by Martin Luther King Jr. as a "physician's warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life," this historic study was produced by a presidential commission established by Lyndon Johnson, chaired by former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, and provides a riveting account of the riots that shook 1960s America. The commission pointed to the polarization of American society, white racism, economic inopportunity, and other factors, arguing that only "a compassionate, massive, and sustained" effort could reverse the troubling reality of a racially divided, separate, and unequal society. Conservatives criticized the report as a justification of lawless violence while leftist radicals complained that Kerner didn’t go far enough. But for most Americans, this report was an eye-opening account of what was wrong in race relations. Drawing together decades of scholarship showing the widespread and ingrained nature of racism, The Kerner Report provided an important set of arguments about what the nation needs to do to achieve racial justice, one that is familiar in today’s climate. Presented here with an introduction by historian Julian Zelizer, The Kerner Report deserves renewed attention in America’s continuing struggle to achieve true parity in race relations, income, employment, education, and other critical areas.
Download or read book The Los Angeles Riots written by Mark Baldassare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-12 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Los Angeles riots in the Spring of 1992 were among the most violent and destructive events in twentieth-century urban America. This collection of original essays by leading urban experts offers the first comprehensive analysis of the unrest that took place after a jury acquitted the police officers who were accused of using excessive force in t
Download or read book Little Scarlet written by Walter Mosley and published by Vision. This book was released on 2005-04 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Watts is smoldering in ruins-and the cops are on Easy Rawlins's doorstep. Easy expects the worst, as usual. But, incredibly, they're asking for his help. A redheaded woman known as Little Scarlet had sheltered a man during the riots. Witnesses later saw him fleeing her building; not long after, Little Scarlet was found viciously murdered. Now, with his old friend Mouse at his side, Easy follows the case's single clue across Los Angeles. The missing man is the key, but he's only the beginning. Hidden in the heart of the city is a killer whose red-hot rage is as fierce as the fires that rocked L.A.
Download or read book The 1992 Los Angeles Riots written by Louise I. Gerdes and published by Greenhaven Publishing LLC. This book was released on 2014-04-14 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American public was holding its collective breath as four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were acquitted of excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. Upon the exhale came relief for some, but for many more came a crushing grief and anger. This essential volume gives readers a strong background on the events leading up to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Essays also present the controversies related to the event, including whether the police department protected its citizens during the riots. The last chapter shares first-person narratives and accounts of those impacted by the riots, giving your readers a chance to go beyond simple facts and experience the event for themselves.
Download or read book L A City Limits written by Josh Sides and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-01-27 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass—embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South—is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, L.A. City Limits critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis. Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities—and limits—quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.
Download or read book The Long Fall written by Walter Mosley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new mystery series from the author of the classic work "Devil in a Blue Dress" offers a new character, a new city, and a new era.
Download or read book Winning the Race written by John McWhorter and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-12-28 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his first major book on the state of black America since the New York Times bestseller Losing the Race, John McWhorter argues that a renewed commitment to achievement and integration is the only cure for the crisis in the African-American community. Winning the Race examines the roots of the serious problems facing black Americans today—poverty, drugs, and high incarceration rates—and contends that none of the commonly accepted reasons can explain the decline of black communities since the end of segregation in the 1960s. Instead, McWhorter posits that a sense of victimhood and alienation that came to the fore during the civil rights era has persisted to the present day in black culture, even though most blacks today have never experienced the racism of the segregation era. McWhorter traces the effects of this disempowering conception of black identity, from the validation of living permanently on welfare to gansta rap’s glorification of irresponsibility and violence as a means of “protest.” He discusses particularly specious claims of racism, attacks the destructive posturing of black leaders and the “hip-hop academics,” and laments that a successful black person must be faced with charges of “acting white.” While acknowledging that racism still exists in America today, McWhorter argues that both blacks and whites must move past blaming racism for every challenge blacks face, and outlines the steps necessary for improving the future of black America.
Download or read book Africa Speaks America Answers written by Robin D. G. Kelley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, pianist Randy Weston and bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik celebrated with song the revolutions spreading across Africa. In Ghana and South Africa, drummer Guy Warren and vocalist Sathima Bea Benjamin fused local musical forms with the dizzying innovations of modern jazz. These four were among hundreds of musicians in the 1950's and '60's who forged connections between jazz and Africa that definitively reshaped both their music and the world. Each artist identified in particular ways with Africa's struggle for liberation and made music dedicated to, or inspired by, demands for independence and self-determination. That music was the wild, boundary-breaking exultation of modern jazz. The result was an abundance of conversation, collaboration, and tension between African and African American musicians during the era of decolonization. This collective biography demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered politics and culture on both continents. In a crucial moment when freedom electrified the African diaspora, these black artists sought one another out to create new modes of expression. Documenting individuals and places, from Lagos to Chicago, from New York to Cape Town, Robin Kelley gives us a meditation on modernity: we see innovation not as an imposition from the West but rather as indigenous, multilingual, and messy, the result of innumerable exchanges across a breadth of cultures.
Download or read book Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department written by Warren Christopher and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1998-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the Rodney King/Los Angeles Police incident, the Independent Commission on the L.A. Police Dept. was created to examine any aspect of the law enforcement structure in L.A. that might cause or contribute to the excessive use of force. This reports presents the results of this unprecedented inquiry, conducted through witness testimony; interviews of private citizens and current and retired police officers; computerized studies of force reports and complaints filed by the public; reviews of patrol car communications; and examination of the files in civil damage cases. Recommendations are presented in detail.
