History Daily - The Watts Rebellion Takes Over Los Angeles

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

August 11, 1965. The arrest of a young Black man for drunk driving sparks riots in Los Angeles. This episode originally aired in 2023. Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.

It's the evening of August 11, 1965, in the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts in southern Los Angeles. One of the area's young residents, Ronald Fry, sprints down the street toward his family home. As he approaches, his mother, Rina, abandons her dinner preparations and heads to the front door, ready to confront her son. He and his stepbrother Marquette borrowed her car this afternoon to go have a few beers, and they promised to return it more than half an hour ago. But as the front door swings open, Rina's reprimands get stuck in her throat. Ronald appears visibly shaken, and it's clear something's wrong.

Her stomach sinks as he explains that Marquette has just been pulled over two blocks away from their home. A white police officer accused him of drunk driving, and Marquette failed the sobriety test. Since Ronald doesn't have a valid driver's license, the officer is threatening to tow the car unless Rina comes to claim it and drive it safely home. Immediately, Rina tosses her apron aside and follows Ron. back to the scene. She and her sons are black and knows interactions with the police sometimes don't go well. When she arrives, a crowd of their neighbors is already gathered around Rena's car.

At first, everything seems fine. Marquette and the officers are even joking and laughing together, but everything changes as Marquette's mother closes in. As she publicly chides him for driving drunk, Marquette's smile fades. He passionately maintains his sobriety, but the officer in informs Rina that he did fail a field sobriety test. Feeling accosted on both sides, Marquette's tone shifts, and he proclaims that they'll have to kill him before he goes to jail. One of the officers responds with aggressive racial slurs. When Rina protests, he uses offensive language toward her as well.

This enrages Marquette, and as the officers attempt to handcuff him, he resists arrest. In response, one of the officers strikes him in the head with a nightstick, knocking him to the ground and drawing blood. Horrified, Rina jumps onto the officer's back, tearing at his shirt, while Ronald attempts to restrain the other officer as he calls for backup. All the while, the number of onlookers grows, disturbed by the violence in their street. By the time additional officers arrive on the scene and arrest all three members of the Fry family,

the crowd is over a thousand strong. While the squad cars pull away, Ronald peers out the back window. He sees the scene grow more heated, watching as angry residents pelt the remaining line of officers with rocks. But as the chaos fades into the distance, Ronald can hardly imagine the full scale of the uproar that has just begun. For years to come, the circumstances of the Fry family's arrest will remain disputed. Some will claim that Marquette was actually sober. Other witnesses will maintain he was drunk, but that the police still used excessive force during the arrest. Whatever the case, Marquette Fry's arrest will cause uproar in Watts,

awakening the community's long-held frustrations around systemic discrimination and police brutality. Though Ronald, Rina, and Marquette will all be released on bail the following morning, the public's fury will continue to surge until it consumes Los Angeles, burns hundreds of businesses to the ground, and takes the lives of 34 people in a multi-day rebellion ignited by the arrest of Marquette Fry on August 11, 19th, Hello, History Daily listeners. The live show I've been telling you about for a few weeks has a new date, October 23rd at the Plaza Theater in Garland, Texas.

This is my Days That Made America Tour, a thrilling evening of history, storytelling, and music with me and a band live on stage. So if you're in the North Texas area or anywhere close, be sure to come out and see me live. More shows will be announced soon, too. So for information on tickets and upcoming dates, go to History Daily. DailyLive.com. That's HistoryDailyLive.com. Come see my Days at Made America Tour live on stage. Go to Historydaily.com. From Noisor and Airship, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is History Daily. History is made every day. On this podcast, every day, we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world. Today is August 11, 1965, the Watts Rebellion takes over Los Angeles.

It's 3 p.m. on August 11, 1965, in the Central Division Dispatch Center at the Los Angeles Police Department. 22-year-old Regina Jones sits down at her desk, ready to start the night shift. One of only six black employees in a division of more than 100 people, Regina is responsible for handling calls for a predominantly black part of Los Angeles that includes the neighborhood of Watts. It's a tough job. Her first four months with the LAPD have been grueling and loaded with racist microaggression. but Regina is undeterred and determined to help serve the community she grew up in. Regina's family was part of a large-scale migration of black Americans

from small southern communities to coastal and northern cities. Between 1940 and 1965, Los Angeles's black population grew from 75,000 to 650,000. Among the new arrivals was Regina's grandfather, who fled a lynch mob to move his family to Watts. But even after escaping the racism of the South, life wasn't easy for Regina's grandfather or many others. Economic deprivation and systemic oppression has continued to plague black Los Angelinos, the majority of whom have been confined to the southeastern area of the city, where neighborhoods suffer from a range of issues, including failing schools,

inadequate housing, and limited access to public transportation. Police violence and misconduct are also rampant. In the past two years alone, 65 black residents have been shot by police. More than a third of them were unarmed and shot in the back. Over the same period, black communities across America have been rising up, resulting in riots in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia that overtook sections of those cities for days. But the chief of the LAPD is deaf to black residents' complaints of police brutality. Still Regina hopes she can at least do her part within the LAPD to look after the city's black community.

As her shift begins, calls start to pick up after a relatively quiet afternoon. Then, around 7 p.m., Regina receives one call saying that an officer needs help. When she asks for more details, there's no response. Her heart begins to race, fearing the worst for the officer. She asks again for information on who the officer is and where the help is needed. Finally, a faint whisper comes over the radio, but there's so much static that Regina can't make out anything the officer says, other than the location, 116th Street and Avalon in Watts.

Worried that this situation could be dire, Regina calls out that they have an officer in need and the room erupts into action. As a sense of urgency takes over, Regina tries to moderate their response. She understands just how flammable tensions are in Watts. She implores her superiors to avoid escalating the situation there, whatever it might be. And at the very least, she explains, they should dispatch more black officers to the scene who might be able to establish a calmer dialogue with the local community. But the department heads ignore her and dispatch a large number of primarily white officers to the scene,

where they then detain Rina, Marquette, and Ronald Fry. But the incident doesn't end there. While the fries are apprehended and taken away, police pull a young couple out of the crowd of observers and arrest them on charges of inciting violence. A rumor then spreads that the woman arrested is pregnant and that the officers employed unnecessary violence against her, drawing hundreds more protesters to the streets. As the crowd grows, it begins to break into smaller groups, some of whom turn violent.

When they begin to pelt officers with rocks, others start to loot and set local businesses on fire, and a few redirect their anger onto passing white motorists who they drag out of their cars and beat in the street. By the time Regina finishes her shift and returns home to Watts, she's devastated to discover that the buildings across her street have been burned to the ground. More violence is on the way. Regina hurries inside and moves her four children to the back of their house where they stay huddled all night, listening to the sounds of breaking glass, screaming voices, and police gunfire. The next morning, Regina attends a community meeting set up by local churches

and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP. There, Rina Frye steps up to the podium, having been released on bail with her sons just hours earlier. From the audience, Regina listens to Rina, call for calm, but be interrupted by a teenager who tears the microphone from her and issues his own announcement, declaring that the riots will continue, and tonight they're moving into the white neighborhoods. By sunset, more than 7,000 people will once again take to the streets, many armed with guns and machetes stolen from local pawn shops. By the end of the night, 75 people will be injured.

And in the days to come, that number will stretch to more than a thousand, as southern Los Angeles becomes an epicenter of violence and destruction. It's the morning of August 13, 1965, the third day of the Watts Rebellion. Los Angeles Police Chief William H. Parker walks into the mayor's office, his face strained with fatigue. He's barely slept since the city's unrest began, and he doesn't expect he'll get much rest today either. Last night, thousands of new people took to the streets to join the uprising that began in Watts. As expected, more businesses were reduced to ash. More people were injured, and more cars were were set on fire. To combat the chaos, the police have set up roadside checkpoints and have

begun aggressively searching cars at gunpoint, but this measure has become a point of contention. The LAPD officers on the scene are predominantly white, something local leaders believe is worsening the conflict. Yesterday, community advocates, also eager to end the violence, publicly asked that more black officers be dispatched, but Chief Parker refused. Instead, he openly derided the rebellion with racist rhetoric, comparing the rioting. behavior to monkeys in a zoo. This only intensified the disdain many black residents already had for the police chief who see him as a racist leader. Many have argued that the department's policies and practices under Parker's leadership are discriminatory and have exacerbated racial tensions.

Since Parker took over as the head of the LAPD in 1950, there have been many documented incidents of white supremacist racial violence in Los Angeles, and black and Latino residents have been repeatedly beaten by officers for straying into the city's predominantly white communities. But punishments in these cases have been slim to none. And Parker's also known to enforce segregation in his own ranks. Within LAPD, Parker rarely hires black officers, and those who are on the force often aren't allowed to have white partners. But while residents of Watts blamed the rebellion on his department's history of violence

toward the black community, Parker cites a different reason. He maintains the riots broke out because his officers. were using kid gloves and not being aggressive enough. But Parker insists that's about to change. Despite early morning police reports that the situation has been brought under control, thousands of people have once again started to fill the streets of southern Los Angeles. Worried that their efforts to contain the uprising are failing, Mayor Sam Yorty has called to meet with Chief Parker.

To Yorty, it's clear that the riots are too much for the LAPD to handle a loan, and he's ready to call for backup. He tells Parker that the times come to request aid from the National Guard. The police chief hesitates. In his many years with the LAPD, he's never backed down from a fight, but even he can't deny the scale of this rebellion is overwhelming his department's resources, so with a nod, he agrees to the mayor's plan. At 10 a.m., the two men call the governor's office,

ready to ask that 14,000 National Guard troops be sent to extinguish the riots. But with the governor on vacation, the request falls to lieutenant governor Glenn Anderson, who fails to respond to their calls. By mid-afternoon, they've still received no response from Anderson. And meanwhile, conditions on the ground have continued to escalate with devastating results. Watts and the surrounding communities have started resembling a war zone. Chief Parker receives reports of insurgent snipers firing at police, Molotov cocktails being thrown into buildings and police vehicles,

and eventually he gets word that a young black man has been shot and killed by police the first fatality of the uprising. Without the resources of the National Guard, Chief Parker fears that the rebellion will continue to spread across Los Angeles. But then, around 4 p.m., Mayor Yorty finally receives a call from Lieutenant Governor Anderson, alerting him that their request has been approved. But it takes the National Guard nearly five hours to arrive. By then, two more lives are lost.

a fireman killed on scene by a collapsing wall and a sheriff's deputy struck down by friendly fire. When the National Guard does finally arrive in Los Angeles, 14,000 of their troops joined with 2,000 LAPD officers to erect a perimeter around the almost 50-square-mile area occupied by the rebellion. Together they escort patrols of firefighters through the area, allowing them to finally address the ongoing blazes without fear of attack. The next morning, the lieutenant governor announces an 8.000,

PM curfew in the area. Patrols of police and National Guard roam the streets and arrests thousands of rioters. 17 people are killed, most of them black residents shot by police. Two days later, the National Guardsman will be sent home. By the rebellion's end, 600 businesses will have suffered more than $40 million worth of damage. 3500 people will be arrested, 34 killed, and over 1,000 injured. The uprising will become a turning point in the civil rights era, demonstrating the intensity of the nation's racial tensions. And for one of the movement's leaders, it will become a moment of serious reflection,

one that will transform his vision for the country. It's August 17, 1965, six days after the Watts' rebellion began. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., stares at the window of his car as he rides through South L.A. towards a small church in Watts. His gaze is unblinking as he takes in block after block of desolation. Until last night, King had been in Puerto Rico, rallying against the Vietnam War. But news of the tragedy and wreckage left by the Watts Rebellion drove him to cut his trip short

and rushed to Los Angeles. He did so against the advice of California's governor, who fearing King's presence would inspire a new wave of unrest, asked him not to come. But King is confident that L.A. is exactly where he's most needed. The way he sees it, this is a critical moment, not just for Watts, but for marginalized communities across the nation, a moment to feel seen, heard, and engaged, so that violence like this does not repeat itself. As King arrives at a press conference, he steps out and takes his place behind a podium, surrounded by journalists. Then he launches into his remarks,

condemning the violence of the rebellion, but focusing on the systemic oppression that must be addressed. That it is a job of all Americans to right the wrongs from which such violence and disorder spring. The criminal responses which led to the tragic outbreaks of violence in Los Angeles are 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 reddish seeds which give birth to tragic expressions of violence.

by acts of commission and omission, none of us in this great country has done enough to remove injustice. I therefore humbly suggest that all of us accept our share of responsibility for these past days of anguish. Over the coming days, King spends his time going door to door in Watts, hearing from the many people who believe that armed insurrection was the only way to be heard by a government. that has mistreated and neglected them in so many ways. The popularity of this sentiment leaves King deeply unsettled. Before he leaves Watts, he encourages President Lyndon B. Johnson to roll out a federal anti-poverty program

directly targeted at the communities in and around Watts. And even after he leaves L.A., the conditions he found there changes King's ambitions permanently. After years spent prioritizing the fight for basic rights in the South, King starts to focus on fighting for economic equality, in northern and coastal communities too, a shift that will lead him to create an entire multiracial coalition dedicated to combating America's poverty. But despite progress in some areas, systemic discrimination and police brutality will continue to affect the nation. While rooted in the specific

struggles of its community, the Watts Rebellion will prove to be a foundational chapter in a nationwide legacy of public revolt against police misconduct. For decades to come, similar incidents will take place around the country. And in 1992, another uprising will consume Los Angeles in response to the police's brutal beating of black motorist Rodney King. Then, years later, in 2020, the nation will be set aflame yet again by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, indicating the enduring nature of the issues that once drove the people of Watts to take their fury to the streets on August 11, 1965. Next, on History Daily, August 12th, 1865. Next, on History Daily, August 12th, 18, British surgeon and scientist Joseph Lister transforms modern medicine with the world's first antiseptic surgery.

From Noisor and Ayrship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham. Audio editing by Mohamed Shazzy, sound design by Molly Bach, music by Lindsay Graham. This episode is written in research by Montgomery Sutton. Executive producers are Alexandra Curry-Buckner for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noisor.