Two Riots and a Revolution: An Institutional Genealogy of Our School (PART ONE)

Of course it all began on a hot August 11 evening in 1965 when a seemingly “routine” traffic stop at 116^th Street and Avalon escalated into a confrontation between police officers and African American residents made angry by years of harassment, brutality, segregation, unemployment, isolation, and poverty. The ensuing violence came to be known as the Watts Riot.

By the third day of looting and burning, nearly fourteen-thousand National Guardsmen occupied the south central sector of the city. They rolled up and down the long flat boulevards, set up checkpoints and enforced a strict curfew. Police Chief William Parker blamed “outside agitators” and later, when the size of the insurrection disproved that claim, said:

“They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

Central Avenue, once a cultural center of jazz clubs, dance halls and theaters, was reduced to ashes. Thirty-four people died and more than 800 were injured. Arrests, depending on who you ask, ranged from three to four thousand. Property damage estimates were between twenty-seven and thirty-five million dollars.

In the political aftermath, an angry community was promised jobs and other opportunities for economic and geographic mobility, a more reasonable police force, and better schools. One promise made good on was a community college in South Central Los Angeles. It was an idea that had been around since 1950, promoted by community residents led by Odessa Cox, activist, lifelong learner (through the city’s community college system), and owner of the Utopia Dry Cleaners -- which was thirteen miles south of the nearest city college.

For years, Cox and other residents of Watts had to ride the Red Car trolley downtown, and then catch a bus west to Vermont Avenue (a two hour trip one way) in order to attend Los Angeles City College. The city government and school district had never cared about any of that, but now, after the conflagrations of August, the LA Unified School District (which then oversaw the community colleges, referring to them as grades 13 and 14) found a piece of land in the Athens Park section of South Central. The land was just a few blocks from where, during the third day of the 1965 insurrection, young men who had looted gun stores brandished their new arsenals and threatened to “invade white neighborhoods.”

On July 11^th of 1967, in the pre-dawn hours, a convoy of trucks hitched a pair of gray wooden trailers, (cast-offs from LA’s oldest city college campus), and towed them down Vermont Avenue, then dumped them onto a depleted oil field that had been sucked dry by Union Oil. 14.2 acres of the field had been sold to LAUSD for a few hundred thousand dollars. The property bordered South Western Avenue to the west and Frances X. Cabrini Church to the east. To the north was Imperial Highway—named for the Imperial Wooly Mammoths to which the neighborhood had once belonged—and to the south were the tracks of a Union Pacific freight line. The land itself, with its dusty slopes, had been known as Devil’s Dip, where boys tried to defy gravity on makeshift dirt bikes and homemade motorcycles, and where, quite possibly, gang bangers had buried the murdered corpses of enemies.

Nearby residents who were awakened by the loud rumble of trucks and the groaning of their wheels could witness a college crawling into the ghetto. It was going to be their college. It would belong to Odessa Cox and everyone who had stood with her. Cox was among the twenty-five people standing in the darkness of this unfolding dream as those first buildings arrived at what would be called South Central College, then, later, Los Angeles Southwest College.