@originsosu

#OnThisDay in 1965, riots erupted in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts, lasting for five days and underscoring the appalling relations between minority communities and LAPD. ⁠ .⁠ Watts is best understood in context of the longer history of policing in the United States--check out Dr. Sarah Siff's article at 🔗 in bio to learn more.⁠ .⁠ "Little recognized as landmark victories for the civil rights movement—though in fact they were—a series of cases aimed to control police conduct and thereby extend the many constitutional protections for accused criminals. These rights include freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, a privilege against self-incrimination, and protection against cruel and unusual punishments.⁠ .⁠ And just as state governments implemented policies of massive resistance against school integration, law enforcement bodies resisted reforms to their systems of criminal justice.⁠ .⁠ In Los Angeles, for example, Police Chief William H. Parker shielded his notoriously brutal and racist police force from court directives to stop their violent witness interrogations and to start using search warrants. Parker railed against 'lenient' judges who threw out illegally obtained evidence and campaigned loudly for state laws to circumvent the court rulings.⁠ In the case of Los Angeles, the dismal relations between city police and minority communities had been evident for more than a decade when riots erupted in the Watts neighborhood in 1965. Drawing national media attention, the Watts riots and the brute force used in the same year against protesters in Selma, Alabama, presented two unsavory sides of the same civil rights issue.⁠ .⁠ Nonviolent protesters in the Deep South confronted the police brutality issue in the most literal sense, placing their bodies in harm’s way. Organizers became police targets. The notion of police as guardians of the public and impartial enforcers of the law grew more difficult to maintain as violent images from both ends of the country played to mass audiences on the nightly news."⁠ .⁠ #historytoday #pastisprologue #ushistory #blackhistory #watts #civilrightsmovement #1960s #60s