The Fire This Time

By

JOHNIE H. SCOTT

California State University, Northridge

Johnie Scott’s old neighborhood was forever branded in the public’s consciousness by the burnings and deaths that occurred during the infamous Watts Revolt of 1965. Revolt – is Scott’s name for those days of violent upheaval. Riots – is what mainstream history has dubbed them. It is the difference of one word. But that word is just one of the shibboleths that divides the races. Them and Us. Freedom or Anarchy. The stark black and white of those words is the well-traveled landscape of Scott’s adult life. As a teacher and a poet, Scott daily confronts the conflict between the two worlds that those words imprison. “The Fire This Time,” by Johnie H. Scott, reprinted from The Stanford Magazine, December 1992, copyright © by Johnie H. Scott, received the 1993 Council for Advancement and Support of Education National Silver Award for “Best Feature Article.”

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One evening last December 1991, I was sitting at home watching the news on television with my wife and three daughters in our North Hills house in the West San Fernando Valley. The TV reporter was “on location” in the Jordan Downs Housing Projects located in the predominantly black South Central Los Angeles ghetto of Watts where one of the apartments had been firebombed and a man shot. A Mexican man had, earlier that day, told a group of young gangbangers to stay away from the front of his apartment. Those gangbangers, he later told reporters, constantly hung out in the area in front of his apartment and dealt crack cocaine. He had finally grown tired of calling the police with no results and that day had decided to take the law into his own hands. Arming himself first, this man confronted the hoodlums himself, then fired his handgun in the air in an attempt to scare them off.

They left, but not for long. Later that same day, they returned and bombed the apartment, which was quickly engulfed in flames. As a crowd of onlookers gathered, people heard the cries of one of the little girls still trapped inside. A black man broke out of the crowd and rushed through the flames to rescue her. The father, trapped inside with the child, mistakenly thought this black man to be one of the perpetrators and shot him in the chest. Fortunately, the man survived the gunshot wound, though the apartment was gutted.

Just another news report from South Central LA? Yes. But this story carried a special meaning for me – the apartment that had been burned was in the very building in which my mother had raised me and my six younger sisters and brother. I had lived in the Jordan Downs Projects until I first came to Stanford University in 1966!

As I watched the news footage, it stirred my memory. I was 10 or 11 years old. I remembered hearing police sirens in the night and a loud crash outside. I left our apartment with my mother and the other residents of the building. A black man in his 20s was sitting on a curbside, right in front of 102^nd Street Elementary School which I then attended, holding a blood-soaked towel to his head. The school fence was buckled by the crashed car he had been riding in. Inside that car was a dead companion, also black and young. Both of them were surrounded by uniformed, white members of the Los Angeles Police Department.

I don’t know what caused the incident to happen, but I do remember the angry shouts from the crowd, from people I knew, from my friends and neighbors, when they heard that the man in the car had been shot dead by the police. “They was only joyriding! The police wouldn’t have done it if those was white kids!” In their eyes, this death was unnecessary, and the police were guilty of murder. Anger quickly spilled over into violence. The crowd picked up bottles, bricks, and any other objects that came to hand, and hurling them at the police.

I remember the rush of excitement, and the fear as well. I remember even now my mother grabbing me and saying, “Johnie Harold, get in the house right now!” I remember the gunshots fired in the air by the officers to back off the crowd. And I will never, ever forget the sight of that man as he rocked back and forth on that curbside, shaking his head in the middle of it all, moaning and groaning, his blood dripping through that towel onto the sidewalk.

Now, some 35 years later, another black man had been wounded in the same neighborhood. That weekend, I drove down to the Jordan Downs to see with my own eyes what had happened and, I hoped, revisit some childhood friends I had not seen since moving to the San Fernando Valley in 1982.

Any nostalgia I might have entertained about “going back home,” however, was quashed as I exited the Harbor Freeway on Century Boulevard and headed east toward Watts. Gang graffiti was everywhere – on the walls of the liquor stores that proliferated like roaches (I can remember one demographic study that showed there were more liquor stores in the black inner city Los Angeles community than in the states of Delaware, Rhode Island and Maine combined!) as well as the fences and sides of homes. Burglar bars glared from the doors and windows of every house.

"I try not to talk about 1965, the Revolt, or the Watts that has been demonized by the media down through the years," says the author. "But I have learned that to tell the truth, to bear witness, I dare not back away from letting it be known those signs I have found on the streets of the Watts I grew up in no matter how painful and upsetting they might be, or trying to hush the anger of those voices that still trust me to tell what it is they feel. And the only reason they trust me is because I am a Native Son, I happen to be one of the few who was able to get out and make a way."

My memories were of a different Watts. Small groups of men sitting at tables in the front yards, loud-talking and noisily playing dominoes, while their wives hung out the family wash to dry and children laughed in the background. Foursomes and fivesomes of young black men, standing in the parking lots, doing their best imitations of groups like the Platters and Drifters in hopes one day of making it themselves as some did like the Whispers, Invincibles, Coasters and Blossoms. A neighbor wringing the neck of a chicken for dinner and then letting it run headless through the projects, pursued by a ragtag bunch of screaming kids.

Driving down 103^rd Street, the “main drag” in Watts, I was rudely reminded of what the media christened it during the 1965 Revolt – “Charcoal Alley Number One.” If anything, there was more gang graffiti on 103^rd than there was on Century Boulevard. As I passed by the Simon Rodia Homes on 103^rd and Wilmington, I saw a group of nine or ten black male youths with no shirts on, with Levis sagging on their hips and black Van sneakers, walking toward three black teenagers. Suddenly, one boy from the larger group ran up and punched one of the other kids in the jaw, knocking him to the ground. The boy’s “homies” then ran up and began kicking the victim, while the other two youth stood helplessly by. When the attackers stopped, the other two helped their helped their bruised and bleeding friend up before running with him into the safety of the Rodia Homes named for the Italian immigrant who just a few years earlier built the world-famous Watts Towers that loomed in the background.

I watched paralyzed and shocked from my car which was still in motion. The whole thing hadn’t taken more than 30 seconds. The assault happened in the middle of the day, and these young boys didn’t give a damn who saw them. I saw the assailants give one another high fives as though they had won a basketball game and then pimp down 103^rd Street, masters of the turf. I began wondering if my wife, Bessie, was right in saying, “You don’t have any reason to go back there! Those are not the same people you and I grew up with!”

Two city blocks later, I was at the Jordan Downs. What greeted me was startling. I have seen the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green projects of Chicago, the Frederick Douglass projects in Harlem and the bombed-out streets of Newark after that city’s violent upheaval in the 1960s. These did not prepare me, however, for what my old home, the Jordan Downs, had become much less what had become of the people. The paint on the buildings was faded and old, the once neatly-kept gardens neglected. Where I remembered every apartment having screened back doors, now each was boarded up. It was a sad attempt by the residents to stop gang members, youth living in those same projects, from using the apartments as escape routes. Now I understood why so many people called Watts the “war zone.”

Hudson Shoe Store was a landmark in the Watts that existed before August 1965 but this photograph, taken by the Associated Press during the height of the insurrection, showed Johnie Scott and many others who were of the generation which grew up in the Los Angeles of the 1950s and 1960s that things were never be the same for as the Bob Dylan song said, "The times they are a'changin'."

There is a liquor store on 103^rd and Hickory streets that fronts the projects. It has been there as far back as I can remember. Back in the 1950s and 60s, the store was called Bob’s. The owners and people who worked there were al Mexicans who lived in the community. Now it was called Ford’s Liquor Store, Bob and his family having long since sold their ownership and moved on. Standing in front of it and across the street were a group of men, women and children. Many of them I recognized from childhood – people like Tommy Flanagan, Harold Barnes, J.C. Gavin and tall, lanky Willie Ray “Mumbles” Adams.

I parked my 1977 rust-colored Cadillac Seville in front of Ford’s on 103^rd and got out. Tommy, Harold, J.C., Rashad and Willie Ray immediately recognized me. We glad-handed one another and talked. While in high school, Tommy had been an All-Marine League selection in baseball and basketball at Jordan. He was a year younger than me but didn’t look it. His teeth were almost all gone, and those that remained were blackened. Even though the day was still young, just past noon, his eyes were bloodshot. Tommy had obviously fallen on hard times. He asked if I “wouldn’t mind goin’ into Ford’s and buying us fellas a drink for old times’ sake.”

I couldn’t help noticing the groups of young men suspiciously eyeing me and my car, its classic frame with the moon roof and Rolls Royce grille conspicuously standing out, as I gave Tommy $20 and told him to buy what he wanted. As he quickly disappeared inside, I glanced back at the other groups. Some of the young men were shooting craps on the sidewalk in front of the apartment, a sight that didn’t particularly disturb me. As a teenager growing up in Watts, I had done the same. Both others were hustling in and out of the parking lot, ferrying the crack cocaine from the projects to the outsiders who drove into to buy drugs round-the-clock. You want to have pleasant memories, where possible, of childhood. This, though, was hard.

Tommy came out of the liquor store, looked across the street to see where we were standing, spotted us and walked over. The $20 bill had been spent on a quart of Gordon’s Gin, a large bottle of orange juice, a bag of ice and Dixie cups. Tommy added that he had “used the rest of the change to buy some cigarettes.” I let everyone pour themselves a drink and we set the bottles down. This was important. It recognized a ritual, a way of coming back for “the homebody who had made it.”

As we stood drinking, I casually asked why there were no Latinos in the immediate area. Tommy wasted no time in responding bluntly to my question as he said,” They know where to hang out. This is still our turf!’

Two of the young men left their dice game and came over to ask for a drink. As I handed the gin to one of them, he peered into my eyes and asked me, “Scott, don’t you recognize me?”

I stared for a long time into his bearded face which had been hardened by jail time and then said, “You’re Maurice, right?” He grinned. Yes, it was. Maurice had to be in his mid-30s by now. His family had lived in the apartment right next door to ours in the projects. Maurice wasn’t working, he told me, having just gotten out of Vacaville minimum security prison some three months before now. Maurice became the first person in the parking lot that afternoon to comment on the firebombing I had seen on television.

“Man, these Mescans think they can just come in here and take over,” he said. “They don’t have no respect, and that old man gonna pull out a piece and try to bust a cap on the bruthas? He lucky they didn’t blow up him and his whole family!”

While Maurice talked, a small crowd started gathering around us, and both men and women nodded their black faces in silent agreement. One dark-skinned youth, an angry scar rippling down his forehead in a zagged line from the scalp line to just above his left eyebrow spat out to all but no one in particular, “You muthafuckin’ got that right!”

I grew up with this anger. As I looked around the group, I recalled that 250 of us had started out in 1962 as 10^th graders at nearby David Starr Jordan High (named, I would later find out, after Stanford University’s first president). Yet, only 96 had graduated in 1964. I recalled my best friend, Louis Norris, now Rashad Hassan. He had physically fought in the class with our white algebra teacher, Mr. Lee, because Rashad one morning refused to stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance along with the rest of the class. Mr. Lee had no way of knowing that Rashad started attending meetings held by a group known as the Nation of Islam that was new to the area, or how Rashad told us of those meetings and about “a Muslim minister named Malcolm, who spoke the truth about the white Devils.”

Three years after that fistfight with Lee, Rashad and I watched the news together as reporters told us and the nation that “crazed Negroes in Watts were burning the city down!” We went out on those streets afire to see what was really happening and there, on a street full of looters, our lives would diverge. Police cars pulled up and officers jumped out with pistols and riot shotguns in hand. They screamed out for everyone to freeze, but Rashad and I chose to run for safety. I made it to the corner. Rashad didn’t, and that is the difference today. At the junction of Manchester and Vermont Avenues, he was shot in the hip and arrested as one of the supposed “looters.” I escaped and, less than one month later, went to Washington, D.C., as a delegate at President Lyndon Johnson’s “To Fulfill These Rights” Conference at the White House.

Signs like this posted by the National Guard made it clear just how dangerous it was to be out on the streets during the height of the rebellion.

I went representing the Watts community and a group we had formed, called the Sons of Watts. I made a presentation called “The Coming of the Hoodlum” before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Urban Affairs chaired by the late Senator Abraham Ribicoff and, in less than a year, started attending Stanford University. Rashad stayed in Watts and is still a Muslim. My friend worked for more than ten years as a counselor for the South Los Angeles-based House of Uhuru (Swahili for “Freedom”) Substance Abuse Treatment Program. As I stood talking outside Ford’s Liquor Store that afternoon, I learned that Rashad’s 13-year-old daughter was already a mother and that, only a few months earlier, he had buried his 16-year-old son, a victim of one of Los Angeles’ notorious drive-by shootings.

Some things change, but some remain the same. As I stood there recalling that night at the corner of Manchester and Vermont, of how Rashad’s life and mine had gone off in directions that were so profoundly different, I saw a black-and-white L.A.P.D. patrol car drive off 103^rd Street into the parking lot. The car rolled up onto the sidewalk and then continued rolling across the lawns in front of each house there in the projects. The men shooting dice paused only momentarily to watch. The brothers selling drugs stopped just long enough for the police to pass by and then continued on with their routine. And those of us standing there with our drinks in hand continued to do just that. No one poured their drinks out, and no one tried to hide anything. It was clear and unspoken – Us against Them. Occupied territory. The police were still the objects of hatred that they had been 30 years ago.

I had seen enough. I didn’t go to my old address to see the gutted building. Some childhood memories you want to keep intact, if only to indulge the fantasy. This place, though, destroys dreams. For the few remaining minutes I was to be there in the Parking Lot, this truth was confirmed as I learned the fates of so many I had grown up with and known.

Harold Tyiska was one of them. He was a handsome young man who had been leader of The Family, one of the numerous street gangs. I worked with Harold during the early 1970s in an effort to unite the gangs and bring about a truce to the bloody gang wars, directly after graduating from Stanford where I had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing followed with a Master’s degree in Mass Communication. Tyiska, I found out, had been stabbed in the heart while ordering barbecue from a takeout stand

Not too far from where I was. Sid Warren and Willie Sampson, whom I joined with in helping to form the Sons of Watts following the Revolt, had both died of drug overdoses. Where heroin, Seconal, PCP and, more recently, crack cocaine had not claimed lives, then Soledad and San Quentin more than made up for the difference. Those not on the roll call of the dead, drug-addicted or incarcerated had either moved from the neighborhood or become religious fanatics.

Mine was the first generation to emerge from the 1965 Watts Revolt, arguably the defining event for America’s cities during the ‘60s. I witnessed the upheaval, the looting, firebombing and Molotov cocktail-throwing. I observed the National Guard as they set up machine-gun nests at intersections like 103^rd and Grape Streets within seeing distance from our apartment on 102^nd and Grape. I watched tanks rumbling down our streets and I was astounded when I saw the athletic field as Samuel Gompers Junior High School converted into a vast holing area for hundreds of men, women and children. There they were, seated on the field like prisoners of war, hands held up over their heads, while the National Guard nervously patrolled the perimeter and the smoke from fires burning throughout the city blotted out the sun.

The author here draws on personal memories from being a witness to what transpired on streets of South Los Angeles in 1965, his eyes taking in sights of a city under siege with soldiers on patrol that would be incomprehensible to those born during and after the 1980s, the Hip Hop Generation.

Watts was changed, but I was changed as well. Home would never be the same. As I stood outside Ford’s Liquor Store on that December afternoon, that realization came back again with a stunning force. It was time for me to go.

Four months later in April of 1992, I came home from my California State University, Northridge office just in time to see the first images of destruction from South Los Angeles, following the Simi Valley jury’s now infamous “not guilty” verdict in the Rodney King case. I remember saying “It hasn’t started yet!” to my three daughters – 15-year-old Cicely, 14-year-old Chelsea and 12-year-old Charmaine. My mind was filled with images of buildings burning for block after block in Watts during those days of revolt in the summer of 1965, long before they had ever been born. And maybe, too, my comments unconsciously echoed those of James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time.

In less than an hour, the fires did start. And, for the next three days, Los Angeles experienced a paroxysm of violence, arson and shooting that truly shook the senses in the worst outbreak of domestic destruction to happen in the 20^th century. On the streets of Watts and elsewhere in the city, those 72 hours of terror were called the Los Angeles Rebellion. Fifty-one percent of those arrested this time were Latinos, and 34 percent were African Americans – radically different numbers from the 1965 Revolt. The reality of poverty and an enervating sense of entrapment had now expanded beyond African Americans.

This summer of 1992, the Reverend Jesse Jackson stood before the Democratic National Convention and told the delegates gathered there of “spending a night in the Nickerson Gardens Housing Projects in Watts” with Congresswoman Maxine Waters. He spoke of meeting young men for whom “going to prison means getting to eat three meals a day, getting to go to school and not worrying about being the victim of a drive-by shooting.” Many of those present at the convention and looking in on national television thought Jesse Jackson was, once again, exhibiting his charismatic gift for hyperbole and rhetoric.

For those people, I have a great deal of sadness. I know that neighborhood Jackson spent a night in, for he was telling you about my home. And as I said to my wife and daughters that December evening when I returned from Watts, “Where I grew up is no place I want you to go or see. It’s not a place where I would want to raise a family today.”

For what so many once thought would be the Promised Land of hope and opportunity has been revealed for what it: the killing ground.

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Questions

1. Briefly summarize the major points Scott makes in this personal narrative.
2. Discuss the description given here of police-community relations and how what Scott presents either agrees with or runs counter to current viewpoints on the same where African Americans and the criminal justice system is concerned.
3. How does the sense of “Us against Them” complicate any hope of resolving the distance between Black Americans and mainstream society. What factors are identified as playing major roles in creating this impasse?
4. It has been said that “You can’t go home again.” For Scott, what is the truth of that statement? How does he handle it?
5. What qualities would you say gives this essay the force that it has? What other essay or writers have you read whose work evoked a similar response from you?
6. The late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in one of his most famous speeches before being assassinated spoke of “a Promised Land” those involved in the Civil Rights Movement were headed towards. Scott concludes “The Fire This Time” by remarking on a Promised Land that “…has been revealed for what it is: a killing ground.” What has happened in America to lead Scott to make such a statement and why?