In the mid-1960s, California occupied a singular place in the American popular consciousness as a perpetually sun-drenched, wave-lashed paradise populated by tanned white people. TV shows such as 77 Sunset Strip competed with teen movies such as Beach Party and Bikini Beach to buoy up the myth, while a succession of classic Beach Boys hits hymned California’s endless summer.
This airbrushed image helped distract from the reality of an openly racist society. Glendale, for instance, was, as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener put it: “Los Angeles County’s most notorious ‘sundown town’: no blacks were allowed to live there, apart from a few servants, and any person of colour on the streets after 7pm was automatically arrested.” Across the state, black people dared not set foot on all but a few beaches for fear of arrest or violence from white gangs. At the time, California’s non-white population was more than a million people; they were all, as Davis and Wiener put it, “edited out of utopia”.
The image of a California dreamscape, nevertheless, survived intact until August 1965, when the so-called Watts riots left whole blocks burning across the black ghetto of the same name, before spreading through black communities from Venice Beach to San Diego. The violence left 34 people dead, many of them innocent bystanders shot by police, and more than 1,000 injured. On one night alone, as Davis and Wiener attest, 10 unarmed black civilians were shot dead, including one man who, sheltering inside his house, “had been hit by 11 shotgun blasts by 15 cops”.
Watts was a rebellion rather than a race riot, with police brutality, endemic racism and urban poverty as its main causes. The social conditions that prevailed in black areas of California were all but overlooked in the mainstream media, though, with the Los Angeles Times describing it in distinctly colonial terms as a “guerrilla war” and comparing it to “the Mau Mau eruption in British East Africa”. For all that, as the authors point out, the burning and looting that left Watts in ruins was seen as a victory of sorts by many black people in the neighbourhood and beyond. It precipitated a street-level cultural renaissance there with the formation of community arts projects including the Watts Writers Workshop and the Underground Musicians Association, which was led by the visionary free jazz pianist Horace Tapscott.
This complex dynamic – political and cultural activism emerging as a direct response to racist politics and brutally oppressive policing – is a recurring trope in the often tumultuous events recounted in Set the Night on Fire. It is a book that at times makes Los Angeles seem like an outpost of America’s deep south. Though race is inevitably the faultline on which most of that tumult erupts, it is the chasm between the city’s carefully cultivated image and its dark, violent heart that is most striking throughout.
Anyone familiar with Mike Davis’s magisterial social history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, will know what to expect in terms of the epic sweep and questioning tone of Set the Night on Fire. This time, the focus is firmly on race and rebellion, but he and Wiener also map out the myriad protest movements, countercultural voices and campaigns that made 1960s Los Angeles an altogether more edgy and volatile city than the state’s hippy capital, San Francisco.
Beginning with the formation of the LA branch of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1961, the authors take us on a turbulent journey that ranges from the Ban the Bomb marches of early in the decade to the late-60s Stop the War protests against the conflict in Vietnam. Along the way, they trace the gestation of the women’s movement and gay rights in the city, as well as exploring the importance of alternative media such as the Los Angeles Free Press, an underground newspaper that reached a quarter of a million readers in the late 1960s, providing a counterpoint to the conservatism of the city’s mainstream newspapers.
There are several chapters devoted to the various, often competing, strands of black nationalist politics that sprang up post-Watts, producing a new breed of young radicals such as Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers. Less well known, but no less fascinating, are the chapters on Mexican-American protests, including the Chicano Blowouts (1966-68), a mass walkout by pupils in protest at segregation in California schools. There is a fascinating account of the “reign of terror” conducted by the Gusanos, an anti-Castro Cuban terrorist group that “declared war on anyone and anything in Los Angeles that they deemed friendly to Havana”. Begun in 1968, their three-year bombing campaign remains the longest wave of terrorism in the city’s history.
Around the same time, white middle-class teenagers were finding themselves for the first time on the receiving end of police violence as they congregated in their hundreds along Sunset Strip. Their presence signalled the coming of the “Summer of Love” in 1967, mobilising the LAPD, a force seemingly primed to respond with violence to the slightest manifestation of nonconformity. This characteristic reaction inflamed, rather than cowed, the teenagers, whom Davis and Wiener describe as “a cross section of white teenage southern California”. A subsequent protest march drew several thousand kids to the Strip, many of whom defied a police curfew that banned juveniles from the streets after 10pm. Many carried placards that read “Stop Blue Fascism”, prefiguring the Dead Kennedys’ gleefully provocative punk song California Über Alles by a decade.
Reading this book, the message on those placards does not seem like an overstatement. The kind of police violence, often contested, but seldom punished, that is catalogued in these pages echoes across the years, most loudly in the acquittal of four police officers captured on video brutally beating a young black man, Rodney King, in 1992. It echoes, too, in the riven political landscape of Trump’s America, where a nationwide protest movement insists, in the face of repeated incidents of lethal police violence, that Black Lives Matter. Los Angeles’s recent past, as it is recounted in Set the Night on Fire, makes America’s present seem somehow less surprising, but no less depressing.
Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener is published by Verso (£25)
