Statement by Dr. Ralph J. Bunche,
Under-Secretary of the United Nations,
on the Rioting in Los Angeles
17 August 1965
These have been sad and shocking days in Los Angeles. I came up as a youth in that city, on its east side, and therefore in what even in the twenties was its burgeoning Negro ghetto. Indeed, all of my close blood relatives still live there. Watts, now so deep in devastation and shame, was a part of that sprawling ghetto and, over the years, became a ghetto within a ghetto - festering and somehow apart - a suburb of the big ghetto. In Watts, poverty, family disintegration, illiteracy, unemployment, delinquency and crime have long flourished. It has houses - bungalows and yards - but its population is 90 percent black and ghettoes need not have tenements.
Unspeakable tragedy has occurred in Watts - tragedy for the city, for the nation and, most particularly, for the American Negro and his cause. There can be no doubt about this: Negroes throughout the country will have to pay for what has happened there.
It is all so deplorable and senseless. It is also very frightening in its implications. The arsonists, the snipers and the looters - there were far too many of them - are detestable enemies of society who cannot be tolerated in any community and they should be brought firmly and quickly to justice. The large-scale looting has been an especially dismaying spectacle. Nor can it be anything but horrifying when great numbers of people in a community suddenly, without leadership or reason, except, perhaps, unseasonal heat, become spontaneously maddened and blinded by bitterness, frustration and color-hate and then set about to destroy their own community: to steal, destroy, maim and kill. It was insane, wicked and suicidal.
There was no "insurrection" in Los Angeles; the rioting had no politically motivated leadership or organization and no rational purpose. It was sheer lawlessness in the mass to the dimension of madness. It is no apology for the crime to say that many heretofore innocent and decent people were apparently caught up in the tidal wave of emotion. The victims, black and white alike, and far more black than white, have suffered enormously.
The ominous message of Watts, I fear, for all America, is that it has produced, raw and ugly, the bitterest fruit of the black ghetto. Every city in this country, if it has a substantial Negro population, can experience a similar tragedy at any time.
There will now be inquiries and investigations of many kinds designed to explain the tragedy of Watts. But the root cause is already all too clear - had Watts not been a ghetto of unhappy, insecure and restive black folk there would have been no rioting there.
There is but one remedy: city, state and national authorities must quickly show the vision, the determination and the courage to take those bold - and costly - steps necessary to begin the dispersal of every black ghetto in this land.
Courtesy of Dept of Special Collections/UCLA Library, A1713 Charles E. Young Research Library, 405 Hilgard Ave, Box 951575, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575; http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb9d5nb7xj&brand=oac4
Title: Statement by Dr. Ralph J. Bunche, Under-Secretary of the United Nations, on the rioting in Los Angeles
By: Bunche, Ralph J. (Ralph Johnson), 1904-1971, Author
Date: August 17, 1965
Contributing Institution: Dept of Special Collections/UCLA Library, A1713 Charles E. Young Research Library, 405 Hilgard Ave, Box 951575, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575; http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/
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