CONSTRUCTING A PUBLIC:

On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The Los Angeles Times reported on this on the front page of the April 5th, 1968 issue with the headline “DR. KING SLAIN BY SNIPER IN MEMPHIS.”1 The article is what could reasonably be described as informative and sympathetic in nature, relaying the facts of the incident while eulogizing Dr. King and his work, noting both that he was the most public leader of the civil rights movement while also noting that he was “...criticized by both Whites and Negroes….”2 The paper went on to publish many stories in the following days about Dr. King, his life, legacy, and service. Then, on April 8th, 1968, the Times published two letters to the editor regarding his passing. The first was written by Rod Serling, famed host of The Twilight Zone, in which he said the following: “There is bitter sadness and special irony that attends the passing of Martin Luther King. (...) In his grave, we praise him for his decency but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own.”3 The second of these letters was equally sympathetic. However, not everyone who wrote to the Times was Rod Serling, of equivalent notoriety, nor of equivalent sympathy towards Dr. King.

On August 23rd, 1965, some years before King’s death, when he was still considered a troublemaker, a letter by Reverend Albert Miller of Downey, California, was published in the Times in response to the Watts Riots. It begins:

We would be led to believe that the riots are due to unemployment and poverty. This is sheer nonsense. These riotings and demonstrations are going on in nearly every major city of the United States and seem to be following a blueprint for action to throw our country into chaos and anarchy. The agitations stirred up by Martin Luther King played no small part in this.4

This viewpoint should come as no surprise. To put it mildly, Dr. King’s popularity was complicated up to and continuing after his death. However, these letters still strike me as intriguing in a way wholly different from the articles and coverage to which they are responding. These authors both had a strong enough feeling regarding these two events, King’s assassination and the Watts Riots, to write to the Los Angeles Times in the hopes that it might be published, and not just the two of them. There are many letters to the Times that are either about King, positive or negative, with some mentioning him by name.

Such letters to the editors of newspapers are often overlooked when it comes to journalistic history. I think I understand why this happens; these letters are widely considered not to be journalism. They are not written by staff at newspapers; they are not reporting news, they are sent in voluntarily, with the understanding that they may not be published. When I first approached this, I did it wanting to understand a very moderate position on the civil rights movement. This was never going to be what I found. Firstly, the group is self-selecting. Only so many people will have a strong enough position on such issues to write letters hoping for them to be published, and it stands to reason that people who take moderate positions on issues are less likely to send such letters in.5 Secondly, it’s heavily curated. In a study done for the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Portland, Oregon, by Steve Pasternack, he found that in 1988 the New York Times printed less than 10% of the letters it received.6 This presents an interesting conundrum. If a survey of printed letters to the editor is not surveying a middle-of-the-road approach, then what do the letters represent?

The way that such letters get chosen for publication is complicated, and the criteria for publication are different between journals, but one of these criteria must be propriety. Pasternack argues this,7 and my own research reinforces that claim. For example, none of the letters I have found printed in the Times include terminology consistent with any form of ethnonationalism. Two possibilities emerge: either the Times received no letters with ethnonationalist politics being promoted within, which is possible but unlikely given that these letters only exist due to strong positions on such issues, or the Times is deciding not to publish them in their letters to the editor column. They could be doing this for a variety of reasons, but regardless of whether it has to do with morals, profits, or simple journalistic integrity, what we are looking at is not a survey of middle-of-the-road opinions of average Americans—but how these newspapers are using letters to the editor to generate or reinforce an Overton Window, a concept designed to gauge how public opinion changes over time.

This essay argues three points. Firstly, letters to the editor are a unique piece of the propaganda model used by newspapers. They are not a central piece, but the perception of them and how they function adds a unique quality to this propaganda model. Secondly, the greater Los Angeles area was heavily segregated contemporaneously with the civil rights movement, and this propaganda model both illustrates and reinforces that segregation. Lastly, the ultimate effect of this segregation, combined with the tendency to cover more mainstream (one could say ‘establishment’ or ‘White’) newspapers in the history of print media, can help us understand why the state of California is largely absent from civil rights history in any meaningful way until the Watts Riots start in August of 1965.

To this end, I have studied Letters to the Editor columns in the archives of Los Angeles print media of the time. The central newspaper for this study is The Los Angeles Times, the region's largest and most influential newspaper. The Times’ letters column will be compared to the letters column from one of the Black-owned newspapers in the region, the California Eagle. This paper had fewer letters to publish, being a smaller paper, but it did receive letters ultimately. Three events during the civil rights movement aptly illustrate the difference between these letters columns: the Little Rock Nine Incident in September of 1957 and the killing of Nation of Islam secretary Ronald Stokes by the Los Angeles Police Department in April of 1962, and The Watts Riots in 1964.

There is a sense that exists that the letters column in newspapers is a gauge of public opinion on various issues. This is, largely speaking, not true. In Pasternack’s aforementioned study, he proves fairly effectively that, in fact, these letters not only have particular trends regarding class, education, and politics but that the people who send letters into newspapers largely do not at all consider them to be accurate gauges of public opinion.8 Pasternacks’ study also finds that, in his study, race was not a major factor in whose letters got published.

This is the point that makes the letters column interesting historically; it constructs a window of acceptable discourse that can be perceived as public opinion. The important consideration is considering what factors affect whether or not a journal will publish certain letters. Pasternack’s study finds the major factors have to do with language. More articulate and better-written letters are more likely to be published, which has the effect of making higher educated people more likely to be published. Letters that are more emotional are less likely to be published, which has the effect of publishing fewer people in proximity to a potentially traumatic event.9 In this study, letters critical of the publication being written to were not less likely to be published than letters praising the newspaper. Furthermore, journals favor publishing letters of less popular opinions, if a position has already been taken in other letters in a more articulate manner, they are more likely to publish a dissenting opinion that is less indicative of the rates those opinions appear in letters. Pasternack furthermore notes that among the reasons that people wrote letters to the editor, the most common was a desire to influence public opinion.

Aspects of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent that are useful to this study. In their study of newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s reveal aspects of the propaganda model discussed in the newspapers of the Civil Rights Era. Those five points discussed are 1) Mass media ownership by conglomerates, 2) Advertising as a primary income source, 3) Reliance of news media on “official sources” (i.e., Police and Government), 4) Flak as a means of discipline, and 5) Anti-Communism as a national, religion, and a second discipline mechanism.

Some of these considerations are more relevant than others. The Los Angeles Times was owned by the Times-Mirror Company, which owned several newspapers, and in 1964 became the first newspaper conglomerate to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.10 This problem had not yet morphed into the effective oligopoly of today’s mass media, or indeed that Herman and Chomsky were criticizing in the late 1980s, but conglomerates like the Times-Mirror Company were making the strides that eventually brought about the media moguls of today. The Eagle was owned by a soon-to-be judge during this period named Loren Miller. Both the LA Times and the Eagle, like most newspapers, relied on advertising dollars, which affected letter propriety. The Times coverage of the civil rights movement relied heavily on official sources from the city, state, and federal government in reporting these events. This may seem irrelevant to the Letters column, but Pasternack’s study reinforces this from that angle.11 He finds that people claiming expertise are indeed more likely to have their letters published, which, if true, ought to be reflected in the Eagle as well, and in both letters columns. The fifth of these, anti-communism, seems not especially relevant to the scope of this project, but its influence is unmistakably present.

There were several references to communism in these letters, including one which referred to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s use of the national guard to enforce the Brown decision in Little Rock, Arkansas, as “Stalinlike.”12 and a later one saying that the Nation of Islam was a cult that was almost as dangerous to the United States as “professed communists.”13 Furthermore, the California Eagle’s editorial board had on it at all times emblazoned their platforms. Amongst various matters of racial and economic justice, it included the phrase “We Oppose: 1. Jim Crow in all Forms. 2. Communists and all other enemies of Democracy.”14 This influence on both our publications of note cannot be denied.

The most relevant point of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model is flak, that is to say, massive amounts of complaints such as criticism in other publications, by governments, or indeed in letter-writing. One thing that complicated the interplay of these two pieces works in the media is that criticism is not especially less likely to be published. Herman and Chomsky actually posit that the media treats such heavy criticism well.15 Pasternack does reinforce this to some extent, stating that he thinks it comes from a strategy to give critics “their day in court.”

Pasternack’s contention that race does not play a particular factor in these letters being published is questionable. He compares this to the city of 100,000 that the single newspaper he studies operates in and finds that race is not a factor in publication rates. We do not know that city, but based on the fact that the study was done in the 1980s in a relatively small city with only one major newspaper, we can safely conclude that the city did not have a segregated press. However, during this period, Los Angeles did, if not in law, then in practice. The Times did not have any Black reporters on their staff prior to the Watts Riots.16 The geographical operation and ownership of these newspapers mean that the audiences of those different newspapers had significantly different demographics of race. The division between populace and audience for a newspaper is more relevant if multiple newspapers in a large city target different groups of people, we can expect the letters to the LA Times to feature fewer letters written by Black people and the California Eagle to feature proportionally more letters written by Black people. They are not deciding who gets published based on race, but these rates should reflect the racial demographics of their readership, not the Los Angeles population. The race of these letter writers is not confirmed by the publications unless stated by the authors themselves, which actually happens frequently in these letters. Still, it means this is ultimately speculation.

There is one more problem to note before getting into the source collection, and that is an issue regarding historiography. Letters to the editor are categorized in much the same way most articles are categorized, that is to say, by author, date, and publication. However, whereas for many histories, the publishing journal is one of the central aspects of an article, Letters to the Editor are treated as something that happens to a publication, as opposed to something these publications have a particular stake in. In The Race Beat, for example, this means that letters to the editor are only relevant for showing when a publication is receiving large amounts of flak for something. This is not totally illogical. These letters do not exist unless somebody first writes them to the journal. However, I think this is an incomplete problem. These letters do not have to be published. The fact that they are mean that they really ought to be considered an aspect of wider coverage, albeit with a specific format and dependent on readership. The main problem with letters to the editor, and the reason that they exist as a facsimile of public opinion, is that the fact that these letters are not written by newspaper staff means that they do not have to claim direct responsibility for things they are publishing. This is especially dangerous because Pasternack’s study finds that a desire to influence public opinion is a key motivator for writing such letters. It is for this reason that it’s important to treat these letters as not fundamentally different from the rest of a newspaper’s coverage of these events- It allows one to identify how these letters feed into the larger narrative regarding these events that these newspapers create, and analyze the information readers would receive from these newspapers in more detail. The key difference is simple—letters to the editor do not represent a public. In fact, they construct one.

In 1967, nine Black students were admitted to the previously segregated Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. They were denied entry to the school by Governor Orval Faubus, which caused then-United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send in the National Guard to enforce the desegregation order given by Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka. Both the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Times covered the event extensively.

Many of the letters to the Times were quite positive in favor of Dwight Eisenhower, although not all were. Several trends emerged immediately. There were three letters that mentioned feeling ashamed of being White and having discussions with segregationists and White supremacists. Several letters were written defending President Eisenhower’s decision and further defending the legal and constitutional ability of the President to do so. The letters published in the Times that were critical of Eisenhower hardly mentioned race at all. One simply stated that the President was acting like a dictator. One man made a series of statements that seemed to be positing that it was, in fact, a political ploy to gain votes. One person, as stated earlier in this essay, claimed that Eisenhower was like Stalin. Furthermore, a different woman was very concerned about the Soviet response to the incident and talked at length about how foolish it was to act as though Nikita Kruschev was acting in good faith when he spoke about racial oppression in the United States.

The conversation in these letters continued well into October, although by the end of October, Little Rock had become little more to the letter writers than another political talking point. One man simply wrote about it as something he was disappointed about regarding President Eisenhower and then proceeded to talk for the rest of the letter about a California issue at the time regarding a “right-to-work” anti-union bill. One man spoke at length about history in a way that seemed not totally invested in taking a side in the argument but instead posited that the use of federal troops to enforce racial justice in Little Rock was not new and had also happened in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. By November, the letters column had largely moved on.

In The Eagle, whose letter column was much shorter, the letters were totally different in a surprising way. The letters column in the Eagle is much shorter. The paper had a vastly smaller readership than the Times, so this is not unexpected, but the column in the Eagle fails to mention Little Rock a single time through the end of the year. It is not that the paper did not have the space, although many weeks did not feature a letters column. There is an identifiable trend in this column, with most letters coming from locals thanking the Eagle for their coverage of various events.

This is unlikely not a result of a lack of coverage. The California Eagle did have a stronger focus on local news, but their coverage also followed the Little Rock incident and its aftermath extensively. There are a couple of possible conclusions that can be inferred from this. Firstly: The Eagle is very clearly a much smaller paper than the Times. Assuming the motives of people for writing letters to the editor are the same as those in Pasternack’s study, we can assume that, on some level, people wrote to the Eagle less because there was less of a chance to influence public opinion. There is also the chance that the editors of the Eagle liked using their letters column as a testimonial space at this time. Regardless, the fact of the matter is that in spite of the coverage of Little Rock, there is no discussion of it in the Eagle’s letters column. So with this propaganda model in mind, how does this affect these papers’ wider coverage? For the Eagle, it’s simple. The testimonials stating that the paper is doing good work and thanking them for their coverage of various events reinforce the positions in their coverage and editorials.

That testimonial tone occurs in at least some of the Times letters as well. However, as they have letters that spend a lot of time discussing the Little Rock issue, there is more material for analysis. Firstly, a majority of the letters are in favor of Eisenhower. Of the twelve letters I could identify being at some level about Little Rock in the Times, eight of them defended his decision to send the National Guard into Little Rock. Five of these were against Eisenhower’s decision, but none of them was pro-segregation. They all took a stance on the decision being an overreach of power of the presidential office. The discursive boundary sends the message that there are no segregationists in the letters, and therefore no segregationists in the readership of the Times, and therefore in Los Angeles.

By 1962 in Los Angeles, the matter was a little different. A 1960 survey by the State of California found that Los Angeles was heavily segregated, and the Eagle reported in May of 1962 that Los Angeles had more Black children in all-black schools than there were attending such schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.17 However, at this time there was a much larger and more pressing issue regarding race in the press. On April 27th, 1962, a traffic stop turned deadly when an LAPD officer began firing and killing the unarmed secretary of the Nation of Islam, Ronald Stokes. The police also wounded six other members of the Nation of Islam and then arrested a further seventeen. The Times and Eagle both covered the subsequent trials and protests extensively. The owner of the Eagle, not particularly worried about being accused of bias, helped financially cover the legal defense for the members of the Nation of Islam, thus arrested.18

For the first month after the event, although they covered the protests and the various speeches by figures like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in the wake of the violence, the Eagle published no letters to the editor. Then, on June 7th, they began to publish their letters, which they had held back for space. They published five letters that week about the event. Ultimately, within the first two months after Stokes’ killing, the small weekly published eight letters regarding the event and several more following its earlier trend of publishing praise. These letters took on certain trends. Firstly, a focus on police brutality, which nearly all of them mentioned as a major problem in the Los Angeles Police Department. Two letters made a case for a solution, one for a police review board and one for heightened police training. The author of one letter made it clear he did not care very much for Malcolm X. Lastly, several letters came out either in favor of pluralism and against police brutality or condemned the Nation of Islam, although more so condemned police brutality. These letters create a clear narrative of the Eagle’s readership- one of an angry populace very frustrated with the lack of action on police brutality, which they had been complaining about for years. Direct criticisms are made in these letters against Los Angeles Mayor Samuel Yorty and Los Angeles Police Chief W. H. Parker, although at least one letter seemed to be defending the mayor. Regardless, these letters construct an angry and frustrated public, ultimately sympathetic to the Nation of Islam.

The Los Angeles Times letters column is totally different in immediately identifiable ways. The first and most apparent is that the first letter to the Times published regarding this incident is a man named Mustapha K. Amin complaining that the “true faith” Muslims are being made to share a name with a “Negro Cult” on May 5th, 1962. In the two months after the shooting, the Times published fifteen letters to the editor regarding the shooting, protests, and subsequent trials. Of these letters, six of them could legitimately be described as violently anti-Muslim,19 two as opposed to the Muslims but sympathetic, four as dismissive to the Nation of Islam, five as fearful of the Nation, five as critical of police, nine as supportive of the police, and three of them as “written by the California Attorney General, Mayor of Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Chief of Police” respectively. Mustapha K. Amin, the man who sent in the letter decrying the injustice of Muslims being made to inaccurately share a title with a “Negro Cult,” sent a second letter to the Times titled, “Difference between True Faith of Muslims and Cult” that was also published by the Los Angeles Times a month and a half later. Another man, Rector Lewis P. Bohler, was also published twice in a two-month span. He had the position of not liking the Muslims but was sympathetic to them. His second letter was much more critical and frustrated in tone and less pleased with the Times general coverage.

Hugh R. Manes had a letter published in the Times letters column that was critical of Mayor Samuel Yorty and called for the installment of a police review board. Alongside that letter in the letters column, The Los Angeles Times published a letter from LA Mayor Samuel Yorty that they asked him to write [emphasis added] in response. They gave him a copy of Manes’ letter so that he could respond to it in his letter and published alongside both of them a letter praising Yorty’s positions on the “muslim problem.” In Yorty’s letter, he referred to police review boards as essentially a communist plot and doubted the very existence of a police brutality problem in the LAPD. As time progressed, the Times did publish more letters sympathetic to the Nation of Islam, and in 1963 published letters written by members of the Nation regarding various issues, but that was well after the trial had ended. Although the narrative became more critical of police as the trial turned against them, the Times still thought it prudent to publish a letter from Police Chief W. H. Parker in their letters column, in which he demonized the Muslims and their supposedly brutal attack on the officer that necessitated self-defense. By this time, the court had already proven that Ronald Stokes was unarmed.20

The narrative between these two publications differs dramatically. Whereas the tone in the Eagle was ultimately sympathetic to the Nation of Islam, the tone in the Times was much more hostile to the Nation and sympathetic to the police. The Times narrative was very concerned with law and order.31 Furthermore, several letters, including the letter written by Mayor Samuel Yorty, said that no Los Angeles “negro” could possibly be sympathetic to the Nation of Islam, and specifically, Mayor Yorty’s letter said that Los Angeles “negros” should feel insulted by being equated to the Muslims. It is important to note the complete and total shift from the Times regarding Little Rock and the Times regarding the Stokes killing. There is definitely a sense of “not in my back yard” going on here, but it is unclear how much of that was conscious and how much of that was merely consternation that there would be a disaffected Black populace in California when things were so bad in Alabama.

The public that has been constructed by the Times is simple and straightforward. They are law-abiding citizens that include upstanding people like the Mayor and the Chief of Police, and they think that there is ultimately no police brutality problem, and even if there is such a problem, those Muslims are seditionist cultists anyway. The LA Times is essentially running damage control for the city of Los Angeles during this incident. The position of these letters is important. The Times had run articles on and interviews with both Mayor Yorty and Police Chief Parker. Clearly, there must have been some identifiable and tangible benefit to having both of them also be published in the letters column. This may have been an attempt to construct a public that includes rather than excludes the city government, apart from a moment of intense alienation and racial strife in the city. The ultimate aim is the construction of a cosmopolitan liberal coexistence.

Another vital point needs to be made regarding these letters: just because the positions represented in these journals are constructed does not necessarily make them untrue. What appears in the Letters is probably not an inaccurate gauge of how the readership of the Los Angeles Times felt about the Nation of Islam, or about police violence, or criticism of the LAPD. Similarly, the readership of the California Eagle probably was legitimately quite upset about having to align with the Nation of Islam, and they were genuinely very frustrated about the lack of action on police brutality in the city. By this point, Black activists in Los Angeles had been protesting police brutality for years, and in years to come, the Times would still consider these as isolated incidents. They considered the protests odd, that it was strange that Black people felt a need to protest in a cosmopolitan city like Los Angeles. The public, constructed by the California Eagle after the killing of Ronald Stokes, was angry. In his letter published in the Eagle, Reverend Maurice A. Wawkins pondered in a horrified way how just a year ago, hearing the rage coming from Malcolm X in a Christian church in Watts was unthinkable. He feared that if the city of Los Angeles continued to do nothing about the issue of police brutality, more people would flock to that rage. They were tired. They were unheard.

In 1967, in a speech trying to explain an event that in Los Angeles in 1962 was unimaginable to readers of the Times and inevitable to readers of the Eagle, Martin Luther King told an audience, “I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.”

The California Eagle was sold in late 1964, and its last issue was printed in January 1965. Its voice was, therefore absent, in the event that would finally drag California kicking and screaming into the civil rights movement. That event occurred in several neighborhoods of Los Angeles, but they would collectively become grouped together under the name of just one of them - Watts.21

The Times was doing well before 1965, but Watts made the Los Angeles Times in many ways. The paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the week-long riots. In the August 20th, 1965, issue of The Los Angeles Times, The Times declared that they would be dedicating increased space to the letters column, as they had received roughly seven hundred. The next day’s printing declared the number to be over a thousand.

Letters regarding the Riots that were published by The Times in the month after the inciting incident- the police assault on Marquette Frye and his mother after he was pulled over for driving drunk. In analyzing fifty of these letters, thirteen can be described as sympathetic to the rioters and twenty-seven as hostile.

Rather than the divide between sympathy and hostility towards the rioters, the Times is concerned more with two broad camps, criticism toward and defense of the Los Angeles Police Department regarding their actions and specifically the actions of Police Chief W. H. Parker during this time. Many of these letters can be described very quickly and accurately by saying they praised or defended Parker for his statements and actions during the Riots. Several others called for his resignation.

This is all far from easy to divide; although The California Eagle sometimes got the sense that it was struggling to keep up with the influx of letters, the Times has largely seemed to me to be fully in control of its letters section for the vast majority of the events covered here. This represents the first time the letters to the editor are happening to the Times on some level, although they were very obviously still making specific decisions regarding which ones to publish.

There is one major difference between the letters received by The Times before and in the aftermath of Watts - many more who wrote the letters were listed as being out of state. Two people who identified themselves as working for a European publication in New York praised The Times for their objectivity and specifically praised the LAPD for its work during the riots. A Margaret S. Crumbaugh from Washington D.C. wrote a letter declaring that “negroes needed to be educated on their rights and responsibilities” and that they should not get special treatment as they are not the only ones who have been persecuted in the world.

Several smaller conversations occurred in these letters. One group concerned then California Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown’s commission to identify the central causes of the riots. This group took a largely neutral stance on much of the events, except that it was clearly an issue that needed to be addressed and that the commission should probably have sociologists and psychologists on it. One group of letters specifically praised the Times editorial board from some days beforehand, in which the first two praised one article as structured and well thought-out and then immediately disparaged the articles the other had praised as chaotic and meaningless.

There was a fairly extensive conversation regarding the degree to which talk radio had exacerbated the riots. This argument went on for nearly two weeks, beginning when Maebel Jansen declared that call-in talk radio shows had exacerbated the destructive tendencies of the “lawless mob” wrecking Watts. The other letters regarding this conversation were largely critical of her position on talk radio, one even called her an idiot, although they glanced over any criticism of her referring to the riots as a lawless mob. There was one conversation regarding an editorial published in the Times about whether widespread gun ownership made the riots significantly more dangerous, in which one man declared that when you know the city is burning and you see “young negro men cruising around, the sensible thing to do is to load your guns and hope for the best.” There was one opinion that the article was correct, but most of these were criticisms. It is also worth noting that the letters claiming gun ownership kept them safe during the riots were also likely to praise the LAPD and Police Chief Parker.

Many of the letters are revealing on an individual basis, including one written by a Senator for California and one that suggested all-black courts should try the Black people arrested during the riots. Perhaps the most interesting, well outside the scope of this study, was responding to an editorial printed in late September that called the Police “the first line of civic defense,” The letter was published in the letters column of the Times in the October 1st, 1965 issue. It is notable because Los Angeles Police Chief W. H. Parker wrote it. In his letter, he agreed with the editorial, talked briefly about the role of police, and ended by saying this was important to keep in mind because the police would be there when such violence arose again. The public construction in these letters is haphazard. Several letters called out that the claims of police brutality against the LAPD were probably true, and many debated that claim. There were calls for stronger law and order and demands that Police Chief Parker resign or at least be quiet until this whole thing blew over. There were two clear lines that never got crossed in all the letters examined. Firstly, you could sympathize with the rioters' cause, you could argue that the police crackdown on the riots was too brutal, and you could call for the resignation of the Chief of Police, but you could not say the riots were completely justified. The second line is that you can demonize the rioters all you want, say they deserved the beatdown, that they should clean up the city, ask why anyone would want to hear an interview with them,22 and call into question their legitimacy to civil rights—so long as you did not use a particular slur23 or argue for actual extermination.

As Jeanne Theoharis notes in her book, A More Beautiful and Terrible History, the most identifiable aspect of Times coverage of Watts was shock. The letters column reflects this. Of the fifty letters I read, only one letter suggests that this seemed even remotely predictable, with several declaring riots unpredictable and random. Some letters claimed that it was, in fact, anarchist agitators24 that had started the riots. Others blamed the destruction of the middle class. Some claimed it was police brutality and an uncaring bureaucratic system and that the chance for a riot would always exist so long as such unequal systems remained in place. One man said that “riots are caused by rioters” and that law and order was the only cure, and one man declared that it was because “negroes” had gotten used to getting what they wanted instead of earning it. Regardless, the extent of all of these different possible causes, as connected to Gov. Brown's task force to identify the cause of the Watts Riots, resulted in a very real sense in the public constructed by the Los Angeles Times that nobody had a definitive answer as to what had caused the riots and that it had merely sprung from nowhere.

There was another debate in the letters that is particularly important to the public constructed by the Los Angeles Times. That debate was about how connected these riots were to the civil rights movement. Many defenders claimed that these rioters had nothing to do with that nonviolent movement protesting segregation in the Deep South, and others tried to claim that both movements were the same and that it was an American movement. Regardless of this debate, one thing was clear. This was no longer a group of strange “negroes” fighting for already claimed rights in a cosmopolitan utopia - it was a population of disaffected Black people raging against a system that had possibly actually been beating them down for years. In the letters to the Los Angeles Times, the civil rights movement had, at last, arrived in California.

What should be clear is that the above claim is very obviously false. Not only did the systems that the civil rights movement was fighting against exist for a very long time in California before Watts, but protests against those systems and the press depicting those protests did as well. This became clear in initial research for this project’s original focus when I read The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. The book is generally critical about the role of the press in the movement, although Jeanne Theoharis has criticisms of the book that are particularly salient. Most importantly for this study, The Race Beat hardly covers California. It ends with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1954 and picks up some other aspects of further journalistic coverage in the last chapter. That section starts with Watts, but it really only dips its toes into the deep well of journalistic history that is coverage of the Watts Riots. The only California paper that it mentions aside from the Los Angeles Times is a single mention of an editorial in the San Jose Mercury News. The book mentions the LA Times on only six pages out of its 400+ page length, and it mentions the major Back newspapers of Los Angeles, the California Eagle, and the Los Angeles Sentinel not at all. Other historiography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. confirmed that this is a pervasive problem. California, when mentioned at all in civil rights history, hardly gets a single word until Marquette Frye gets pulled over by the LAPD on August 11th, 1965.

It is said that journalists write the first draft of history. That notion may be reductive, but here it is true. The Race Beat is undeniably mainstream; Theoharis would designate White history of the civil rights movement. It makes sense that the mainstream (White) newspaper of Los Angeles would be the one to inform that history when California becomes relevant. The ultimate effect of the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of the Watts Riots on history is that it constructs a shocked and terrified Los Angeles; this simply is not the Los Angeles of the California Eagle: the one that knew something like Watts could happen. It manufactures a public in which the civil rights movement did not exist in California until Watts.

Furthermore, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times, the civil rights movement didn’t exist in California until Watts: in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Race Beat, California doesn’t exist in civil rights history until Watts.

Chriss, N. C., & Nelson, J. (1968, Apr 05). DR. KING SLAIN BY SNIPER IN MEMPHIS: WHITE MAN SOUGHT IN KILLING OF NOTED CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER DR. KING SHOT TO DEATH AT MOTEL IN MEMPHIS DR. KING SLAYING. Los Angeles Times (1923-1995), 1.
Chriss, N. C., & Nelson, J. (1968, Apr 05). Los Angeles Times (1823-1995), 6
Serling, R., & MRS PAMELA, W. B. (1968, Apr 08). LETTERS TO THE TIMES: 'BITTER SADNESS, SPECIAL IRONY' SEEN IN THE PASSING OF DR. KING. Los Angeles Times (1923-1995).
Miller, A. (1965, Aug 23). Riot cause. Los Angeles Times (1923-1995).
S. Pasternack, Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (71st, Portland, OR, July 2-5, 1988). In The Open Forum: A Study of Letters to the Editor and the People Who Write Them, 5.
Pasternack, 4.
Ibid, 3.
Ibid, 4.
The civil rights movement is not a period well-known for its low density of traumatic events because it had quite a high density of such events, so this is quite relevant.
(Los Angeles Times | History, Ownership, & Facts | Britannica).
Pasternack, 6.
Dorothy L. Geiger, “Tinted Glasse,” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1957, B4.
“No Telephone,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1962, A5.
California Eagle 26 Apr 1962, Page 1.” Newspapers.com. http://www.newspapers.com/image/693430924/.
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent the Political Economy of the Mass Media, (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2002), 28.
Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018).
“California Eagle 17 May 1962, Page 4.” Newspapers.com. http://www.newspapers.com/image/693431554/.
Theoharis, A More Beautiful, 69.
That is to say, anti-Nation of Islam.
"California Eagle 31 May 1962, Page 1.” Newspapers.com. http://www.newspapers.com/image/693431851/.
Theoharis notes in A More Beautiful and Terrible History that the fact that Los Angeles authorities were able to cordon off much of the city’s Black population to these neighborhoods is a testament to the level of segregation present in Los Angeles at the time.
One woman read an interview with one of the rioters and wrote a letter to the Times saying she was “disgusted” that they had interviewed a “Hoodlum.”
I think it’s really clear in several of these letters that the authors really wanted to call the rioters the n-word and perhaps did, and it was edited or edited themselves so that their letter was even remotely publishable.
The most commonly named “anarchist agitator” was Martin Luther King Jr., in so far as that in the three letters that directly mentioned anarchist agitators, he was the only person named as one in any of them, in the letter by Albert Miller of Downey, California that was mentioned at the beginning of this essay.