Problems persist 60 years after Watts riots in Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- Six decades after the Watts riots in southern Los Angeles, the same underlying problems and systemic injustices that fueled the civil uprising continue to plague American society today, particularly in marginalized communities like Watts itself.

On Aug. 11, 1965, what began as a routine traffic stop escalated into one of America's deadliest urban uprisings. The riots claimed 34 lives, injured over 1,000 people and resulted in nearly 4,000 arrests, according to Time Magazine historical records.

The uprising reflected some deep-rooted problems in the country such as racial inequality and economic disparity that persist today. In 1965, Watts, a predominantly black neighborhood, was facing devastating unemployment, with two-thirds of its residents lacking high school education and only 13 percent living in homes built after 1939, as documented by Time Magazine in 2015.

Six decades later, Watts still has the highest poverty rate in Los Angeles County, with nearly one-third of the households living far below the official poverty level, according to Data USA.

"In some ways, what I see in Watts now is worse than what I remember before the riots," Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an 80-year-old African-American author and media critic, wrote in a story published by the Los Angeles Times.

The community still suffers from high unemployment, inadequate retail services, healthcare deficits, and chronically low educational test scores, said the story published on Monday, noting that "in taking a hard look at what has changed in Watts -- and all of America's neighborhoods like Watts -- since the riots, the picture is not flattering."

Besides these fundamental conditions that have remained largely unchanged, the racial wealth gap in the country has actually widened despite legal progress after 60 years.

"The issues that generated the unrest haven't gone away and have possibly gotten worse," Alan Curtis, president of the Eisenhower Foundation, told Axios in a recent story marking the riot's 60th anniversary.

White households, comprising only 66 percent of households, now hold 84.2 percent of all U.S. wealth, while Black families represent 11.4 percent of households but own merely 3.4 percent of total family wealth, according to Aug. 4 data from Inequality.org. The median Black family possesses just 44,100 U.S. dollars in net worth compared to 282,310 dollars for white families.

Black unemployment remained at 7.2 percent against 3.7 percent for white workers, maintaining the same two-to-one ratio that existed in 1965, according to recent employment statistics released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in early August.

"You could see some changes," said Lorena Martinez while commenting about life in the Watts neighborhood today. "But you could also see history repeating itself," the 16-year-old student told the Los Angeles Daily News. ■