Los Angeles Snapshots 1 MUSEUM
1 MUSEUM DIGITAL ARCHIVE NOW DIG THIS! ART & BLACK LOS ANGELES 1960–1980 Los Angeles Snapshots ROBERTO TEJADA 1. [COVER STORY: “SOUTH OF CHU LAI”] “A huge section of Los Angeles was virtually a city on fire,” reported theLos Angeles Times, “as flames from stores, industrial complexes and homes lit the night skies.”1 On August 11, 1965, when “rocks, bricks, and bottles” first erupted at the corner of 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard, and desperation unleashed scenes of uprising in Watts and elsewhere—with firebombs setting storefronts and overturned cars ablaze and law enforcement barricades confining the throng, followed by an escalating storm of tear-gas missiles, mass arrests, and slayings in what the Times at first called a “melee” and later “virtual guerilla warfare”—that day found staff reporter Rubén Salazar en route to his assignment in Vietnam to dispatch from the paper’s Saigon bureau. One of two Mexican Americans at the Times, Salazar found opportunity in Vietnam to remark on the crisis in Los Angeles. (A glaring omission during the Watts rebellion, the newspaper had never hired any African American journalists.) In an August 23 report, Salazar interviewed twenty-nine-year-old Marine Sergeant Harrison Madison, “a Negro formerly of Long Beach,” stationed in Chu Lai, South Vietnam, on the “racial trouble in Los Angeles.” The Marine at first denounces the revolt as unfounded: “Violence is never justified,” he claims, “when peaceful settlement is possible.”2 The wartime irony is not lost on Salazar, who in the same first paragraph describes the sergeant ordering his mortar section “to fire on nearby Viet Cong guerillas.” The rhetorical nuance builds with each paragraph in this brief report from the combat zone.
[Show full text]