UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 1 : THE PATH TO FURY : CHAPTER 2 : ‘In L.A., you don’t know where the lines are.’

Onamia Bryant’s parents had devised a clever way to tempt their daughter and her family to leave Minnesota and follow them west to California. They told her that Los Angeles was a land of wealth and opportunity, a pleasant city with a vibrant black community. And, they added, it had sunshine. Year-round. “Pack up in the middle of winter and come for a visit,” they said. “You’ll appreciate California.”

In 1957, Onamia and her first husband, Gerald Brooks, did just that. With their three children, they joined her parents in Los Angeles, settling at first in the Nickerson Gardens housing project. As soon as they unpacked, they began scouring the city for work--and a way out of Watts.

Nettie Lewis had pictured Los Angeles only in her imagination when she left her husband in 1955, settled her 6-month-old daughter into a 3-year-old Ford and headed for her brother’s house in California.

She had spent all of her 20 years in Hope, Ark., but she was quitting its cotton, corn and pea fields in despair. A bad marriage and lack of opportunity had soured her on her hometown. Los Angeles was her new hope--until she arrived. The storied metropolis that she had heard so much about in rural Arkansas bore little resemblance to the scruffy burg she actually motored into.

“It just wasn’t what I expected,” she said. “I expected something big and beautiful, and it was crowded and ordinary.”

Los Angeles in the ‘50s, in fact, could be any kind of city you wanted--or nothing that you expected. The city’s image had been reshaped so often. It depended on which face of the prism you were looking into, and when. Railroad promoters once made L.A. seem like an agricultural paradise, Valhalla with orange groves. Hollywood in the 1930s made it glamorous and sophisticated. Raymond Chandler’s novels in the 1940s made it gritty and tough. Booming housing tracts and a booming economy promised to make Los Angeles the capital of the American Dream in the 1950s.

One constant, maybe the only one, was size. L.A. was always big. And looking to get bigger. Of the nation’s 15 largest cities, 14 lost population during the 1950s. Only Los Angeles grew.

That suited Timothy Howell Sr. just fine. Howell, a young and ambitious 18-year-old in 1958, hitched a ride to Los Angeles with his brother, a Navy man stationed in San Diego. He didn’t find Los Angeles crowded or ordinary, or just a warm spot for snowbirds. As he pulled into town, he felt as if he had landed in heaven. All those impossibly pretty pictures of L.A. he had seen in Detroit were real. This was someplace he could settle in, make a life and start a family.

It was like that all over South L.A. in the 1950s. Alone or with families, farmhands and factory workers were feeding a mighty river of migrants that doubled the black population of Los Angeles, to 461,000 people, in a single decade.

The flow began in the ‘40s, when the number of blacks in the city had tripled, and continued into the ‘60s, when the black population would nearly double again. For every black resident of Los Angeles County at the start of World War II, nearly nine lived here by 1965, as the Vietnam War heated up. It was a remarkable growth rate, even by contemporary California standards.

People of every racial and ethnic group were pouring into Southern California back then, of course. Veterans by the tens of thousands were migrating to the pleasant, bustling city of tomorrow they had glimpsed on their way to fight the Japanese in the Pacific.

Here was a city where everyone, it seemed, could own a house, and every house had a garage, and every garage a car. Brand new, wide-open freeways were being built to whisk folks wherever they wanted to go. Smog was approaching lethal levels--1955 boasted the highest level of ozone ever recorded--but that could be interpreted as a sign of progress, too, couldn’t it?

Thomas Souza certainly didn’t mind the haze. His father, a dry cleaner, brought the Souza clan to California from Boston in a 1953 Chevy fresh off the showroom floor. Thomas’ mother had wanted to be close to a sister who had come West for her health. Thomas’ father wanted his wife to be happy. Thomas himself wanted to hug the place as soon as he got here. Everything was so new in the San Fernando Valley. In Boston, buildings were 200 years old. You didn’t have a yard for your pet. You didn’t need a car because you rode trains and buses. California was different. It was wide open. Big. Free. Everyone was from somewhere else. To 13-year-old Thomas, olive-skinned and scrawny, anything seemed possible.

The Souzas bought a 3-year-old, two-bedroom, one-bath house in Van Nuys, near Vanowen Street and Balboa Boulevard. A Red Car line to Hollywood ran a few blocks to the north, the brand new Birmingham High School sat to the south--a fine location.

But the spread set William Souza back a whopping $10,300, and his wife Helen was not sure they could make the payments, so everyone worked. William Souza worked as a court clerk by day and a dry cleaner at night. The three boys delivered newspapers.

Not that a paper route cut too deeply into Thomas’ fun. He still found time to ride his motorbike on the streets near his home. That was where he met his first Los Angeles cop. Souza doesn’t remember the ticket as well as he remembers the man who wrote it. The officer looked so professional, the teen-ager thought, so ominous. Spotless clothes crisply pressed. Neatly knotted necktie. Shoes and belt so shiny you could see yourself. The uniform was beautiful. Just like on “Dragnet.”

Although they were the same age, of similar means and lived in the same city, there was not much chance that Tom Souza and Tim Howell would meet. Los Angeles in 1958 was still a silently segregated city, where a suburb such as Highland Park could un-selfconsciously erect signs at its city limits announcing, “No Negroes or Orientals Desired.”

Los Angeles proper relied on somewhat subtler means of keeping people in their place. Lily white housing tracts chewed up San Fernando Valley farms. Mexican-Americans, their GI benefits helping them move into the middle class, started the move up from East Los Angeles into such suburbs as Montebello, La Puente and Alhambra. But discrimination and poverty corralled most black families in South-Central Los Angeles and the adjoining neighborhoods: Watts, Willowbrook, Avalon, Florence, Green Meadows, Exposition.

There, in South Los Angeles, the single-family bungalows and two-story apartment buildings were a long way from tar-paper shacks and tenements. But they were just as distant from the new, ranch-style homes for which Los Angeles was becoming famous. In South Central in 1960, most homes were old and run-down. Nearly one in five had indoor plumbing that the U.S. Census Bureau counted as deteriorating, or dilapidated--or altogether missing. South-Central schools were so underfunded and overcrowded that many were on half-day sessions, even as classroom desks sat empty in all-white schools.

The city was not without its progressive thinkers and civil-rights heroes. It was a strong-willed black Los Angeles couple, Henry and Anna Laws, whose lawsuit prompted the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948 to invalidate restrictive covenants--wording, in property deeds, which kept blacks and other minorities from buying property, or at least residing, in segregated neighborhoods.

But the Lawses’ legal challenge had to wait until Los Angeles marshals first imprisoned the middle-aged couple for the crime of living in their own home. Henry had built the house on 92nd Street. But the deed barred residence at that location by blacks, Mexicans, Asians or anyone else who didn’t fit the category “Caucasian.” Anna and Henry Laws argued that was unconstitutional, and they won.

Social limits lingered longer, however.

Black women who shopped at the downtown department stores were often forbidden to try on hats. Or else they were asked to slip tissue paper between their heads and the merchandise. Only one of the city’s 22 hospitals admitted black patients. Black businessmen and entertainers were banned entirely from “white” hotels and clubs, a practice that fostered a lively night life in black-owned clubs and restaurants along Central Avenue. For years, blacks were not allowed to teach in the city’s high schools and junior highs. In some parts of East Los Angeles, Mexican-American residents were only beginning to get accustomed to door-to-door mail delivery.

The sweeping U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, which effectively banned segregation in public schools, prompted city officials to ban segregation in the city’s fire department in 1954. But resistance by Fire Chief John Alderson frustrated the integration order until he retired more than a year later.

Los Angeles was unusual among big cities in its early embrace of black police officers. Even so, blacks patrolled in segregated units assigned only to black neighborhoods. Those cops Thomas Souza so admired in the Valley were white like him.

And the LAPD in the 1950s had a reputation, even among some of its own black officers, for brutalizing black suspects. At the 77th Street Station, it was common for booking officers to harass suspects. Insult them. Shout at them. Arresting officers would punch and prod from behind. Either the suspects took it or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, if they made some kind of move, so much the better. Then the cops could really thump them. Sometimes they would push a prisoner up to the booking window so the booking officer could slug him through the slot. Everybody at the station back then knew about it, but no one said anything. That, at least, is what black officers reported later, with regret. And blacks in Los Angeles either lived it or believed it.

The residents of white Los Angeles, however, were blithely unaware of such conduct. It wasn’t reported in the newspapers and it wasn’t part of their life. To them, Los Angeles was Disneyland and drive-ins or freshly turned earth that held an orange grove yesterday and a housing tract tomorrow. To outsiders, not yet infected with the cynicism of a later generation, the city’s image--of a glamorous Oz populated by movie stars and beach boys, jet planes and convertibles--continued to be shaped by Hollywood myth makers.

In reality, the good life came in layers, with the lighter colors on top. Discrimination in Los Angeles was rarely as ham-fisted as it was in the police department; indeed, it was less of a problem here than most any other big city.

Historian Carey McWilliams once attributed that relative broad-mindedness to the fact that Los Angeles County--despite its Civil War sympathy for the Confederacy--was, by the middle of the 20th Century, populated largely by transplanted, integration-minded Midwestern Republicans. Writers Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy alternatively suggested that the apparent tolerance of blacks may have indicated simply that bigots had to spread their hatred among Latinos and Asians as well.

Laura Price found Southern Californians maddeningly difficult to read on racial issues when she drove to Los Angeles nonstop from Hazelhurst, Miss., with her husband, in 1965. “We were looking for something better, and in a sense I found something worse, because we expected more,” she said of Los Angeles.

“You knew what to expect from white people in Mississippi. You knew what the lines were. In L.A., you don’t know where the lines are. You’ll think you’re free as the white man. Then you learn that you aren’t. That is why it’s worse than Mississippi.”

In an odd way, Timothy Howell found Los Angeles’ peculiar strain of segregation to be calming. In Detroit, his middle-class family had moved into a white neighborhood in the 1950s; some of his 17 siblings were the first black students in a less-than-welcoming white high school. That was tough. Here in California, he had moved in with his sister in Compton, found work in a car wash and a laundry, then moved up to a government job in the food service department of the Westwood Veterans Administration Hospital. Just like that.

Nettie Lewis tried to land a government job, too. She had always had an interest in public service, but could never pursue it at home: Public employment was not open to blacks in Hope, Ark. In Los Angeles, she found, too many blacks competed for the few government jobs available. So Nettie provided for herself and her baby by holding several odd jobs--as the cashier at a dry cleaner and as a baby sitter, among others.

Government jobs, either working for some public agency or for one of the scores of defense contractors dotting Los Angeles County, were the surest way to a decent salary for many of the city’s black residents. It was a path that opened reluctantly during the war, when the drafting of 150,000 Los Angeles men and the creation of 550,000 war-related jobs resulted in manpower shortages so acute that the government ordered its contractors and their unions to integrate.

There were private employers, too, which hired black people, and Onamia Bryant found work at Max Factor & Co. She signed on in the shipping department--and stayed there even after refusing to box a shipment to South Africa--while taking night classes at Compton College. Jesse, her second husband, drove a truck for the Gold Furniture Company. Both had bigger things in mind.

Enough black people found a place in Southern California to maintain its gloss as a welcome destination for migrants from the South and Southwest--if only because where they came from was often so much worse.

Jake Flukers came to Los Angeles in 1965, a year after earning his high school diploma in Eunice, La., and a few months after he and a friend had been beaten by a white man for playing tennis with two white friends at a segregated Eunice tennis court.

Flukers, one of 11 children of a maid and a farmer, had deliberately integrated the public court to make a point with the small town’s racists.

A judge suspended his assailant’s 28-day jail sentence. Yet Flukers had learned something new about white people; when the first blows landed, a white woman unexpectedly had raced to his defense.

“She said, ‘Leave them alone! They’re not bothering anybody,’ ” he remembers. “That was the first time a white person ever defended me. I can’t picture how she looked or anything. I just remember that she said it. And that stayed with me. It made me realize all white people weren’t racist. After I got beat up like that, I could’ve gone around hating a whole bunch of people. But because of what that lady did, it made me know to judge people as individuals.”

Flukers and the friend who had joined him on the court soon left Louisiana for California on a lark, to visit some friends from Eunice who had moved to Los Angeles and loved it. Sunny, youthful and casual, boom-town California in the early 1960s was a magical magnet for thousands of people; young blacks were no exception. Of the 278,410 people residing in South Central in 1965, nearly one in four had moved to California less than five years earlier.

The best jobs, however, had a way of finding white men to fill them, and bad jobs could bring a black man as little as $1.25 an hour, not enough to live on. Even at that, unemployment in South Central stubbornly stuck above 10%, while joblessness in the rest of the city was closer to half that level. It didn’t seem that there was enough gravy in the go-go years to let black unemployment slide into single digits.

There was some hope for Flukers and others in the new federal anti-poverty programs that President Lyndon B. Johnson was creating.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 was both a national tragedy and a blow for blacks; Kennedy had proven himself a friend of civil rights. But Johnson was going beyond civil rights, beyond voting rights; he was talking about a War on Poverty, a Great Society. And this Great Society would finally include black people as equal partners. Jobs were the weapons in this war, and the new Job Corps was issuing arms.

Flukers enlisted.

In the Job Corps, the eager young man earned $30 a month, received free room and board and learned how to weld. It wasn’t much, but it was something. It taught him a trade and it taught him how to work. It gave him a good start in life, taught him self-discipline, and he has not forgotten. “You see a lot of people my age who went through these programs who are living comfortably,” he says today.

The problem was, the Job Corps and other programs were never as big as promised, certainly never as big as needed. In Los Angeles, federal programs by 1965 had created 363 low-paying, full-time jobs for young people and about another 400 jobs for poor adults. But there were 15,000 hard-core unemployed in South Central alone, and these jobs were spread throughout the city.

Money that might have created more work was held hostage as Mayor Sam Yorty resisted federal demands that poor and minority citizens have a say in how it was spent. Yorty had been elected in 1961 on a reform platform with minority support. But by the end of his first term four years later, things had gotten so bad that the Congress for Racial Equality conducted a sit-in in his office to prod him to accelerate the anti-poverty programs. Meanwhile, Johnson and his War on Poverty were being derailed by the intractable, money-gobbling war in Vietnam.

As the programs faltered, they bred despair instead of hope. Rather than integrate society, they alienated further its most marginal segments. The poor and the black--especially the poor blacks--felt they had lost their best chance at working their way into the economic, political and social mainstream. California voters fed those feelings. After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in June, 1964, Californians turned around in November and overwhelmingly approved Proposition 14, a constitutional amendment that voided state fair housing laws. It was an outrageous insult, endorsed by The Times and made worse by the fact that the initiative so clearly violated the new federal civil rights law and was destined to be found unconstitutional in court.

But the legality of initiatives was less an issue than the mood of the voters--a mood reflected wherever the city’s black residents looked, from the condition of their schools to their treatment by police to their opportunity for employment.

And as hard as it was on adults, it was worse for their children. Dispirited parents could not motivate dispirited students, many of whom recognized that a high-school diploma was not the same ticket to the middle class for them as it was for white students.

Test scores in Watts were as low as one-sixth the level of those in the city’s best schools--schools that in the ‘50s and ‘60s were graduating many of the whites who would take their places atop the city’s Establishment leadership in the ‘80s and ‘90s. In the inner city, many children simply gave up--on school, on family, on life. Experts would later lament: “What has depressed and stunned us most is the dull, devastating spiral of failure that awaits the average disadvantaged child in the urban core.”

Like so many matches scattered on smoldering embers, a series of race riots flared in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Illinois in the summer of 1964. Five people died, many hundreds were injured and thousands were arrested. Scores of stores were reduced to ashes.

If that should have worried white Los Angeles, it didn’t. In 1965, less than a handful of buildings looked down on the 28-story City Hall. Los Angeles was built out, not up--an endless suburb more than a city. It had barely had time to put up a real symphony hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The County Museum of Art was still being built. Everything was still being built. It was too soon to imagine something in Los Angeles being decrepit. To 25-year-old Thomas Souza in Van Nuys, just starting his classes at the Police Academy in Elysian Park, inner-city ghettos seemed as foreign as Vietnam.

Watts? he said. “I never knew anything like that existed.”

Life in Los Angeles: 1965

On the eve of the Watts riots, Los Angeles is a largely Anglo city, freeways are sprouting everywhere and the price of an average house is still five figures. Population: The city’s population is just more than 2.5 million, making Los Angeles the nation’s second largest city. About 16% of the population is black. About 70% of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District are white. Politics: Though a reformist cadre has emerged on the City Council, it remains a predominantly conservative body, led by Mayor Sam Yorty. Three blacks serve on the council. Police: Under Police Chief William H. Parker, black officers make up only 4% of the force, and there are even fewer Latinos. No black serves above the rank of sergeant. Development: The San Diego Freeway has just been completed, and construction is under way on the Santa Monica, 605, Antelope Valley and Garden Grove freeways. The cultural landscape changes dramatically with the opening of the new County Art Museum in Hancock Park, just months after the opening of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the new Music Center complex. Economy: Los Angeles surpasses Chicago to become the nation’s second biggest industrial center. Countywide, the unemployment rate is 5.7%, rising to about 16% for blacks and Latinos. The average sales price of a house is $26,000