Thinking Around Watts, 50 Years Later

Half a century after the Watts uprising, "we still haven't learned," says The New York Times. But in the wake of the 50th anniversary of Watts is some important conversation--mostly coming from Los Angeles. Poet and writer Tisa Bryant has pointed us to an NEA article about the Watts Writers' Workshop, started in 1965 by screenwriter Budd Schulberg "in response to the devastation of the infamous riots."

More about this decade-long program:

The workshop's early participants included poets Quincy Troupe and John Eric Priestley. Another of the first participants was Johnie Scott, now director of the Pan-African Studies Writing program at California State University, Northridge. "Writing saved my life," says Scott. "The two-way exchange of opinions at the workshop was vital to me, just having the opportunity to hear other voices and to know I wasn't alone, that I was part of a serious dialogue taking place that would have impact nationwide." On the recommendation of National Council on the Arts member John Steinbeck, the Watts Writers' Workshop applied for a grant from the fledgling National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA awarded the Workshop $25,000, which enabled the group to establish Douglass House. The Workshop's new home served as a meeting space for its writing programs as well as housing for some of the Workshop's members, many of whom were homeless. "The NEA provided tremendous assistance, no question about it," says Schulberg. "It was like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, and it helped us gain additional private support and also obtain help from the film industry." A year later the Arts Endowment awarded the organization a second grant of $25,000 in support of expanding the Workshop's programs. The Watts Writers' Workshop quickly attracted national and international media attention; in 1966 it was the subject of an hour-long NBC TV documentary. Writing from the Workshop was also collected in the 1967 anthology From the Ashes: Voices of Watts. "The Watts Writers' Workshop allowed us to voice what urban, black America was thinking, feeling, and seeing and to get that out to he rest of the country," observes Scott. "Before that, we had no voice; no one was listening." Though the Watts Writers' Workshop lasted less than a decade, its legacy endures.

Bryant will be at the Hammer Museum on Tuesday, August 18, talking with critic Ernest Hardy about "the evolution of Black representation in popular culture, from issues of class, gender, and sexuality, to the way vocabularies of speech and the body shifted as the soul music soundtrack gave way to hip-hop’s beats and grooves."

We're also reading the Los Angeles Public Library blog--they've recently found an original copy of an LAPL booklist produced in the months after the riot; and two scanned versions are available to the public here.

There is so much more at the LAPL--they suggest you visit their Research and Homework page. "The African American Experience is a comprehensive database to explore the history and culture of African-Americans. It contains full-text articles from over 400 reference sources, plus scholarly essays, primary source documents and papers, photographs, maps, images, and audio clips. In the search box, type in watts riot."

We'd also recommend listening to the special #Watts50 program on LA's KPCC, which also touches on the Writers' Workshop.

Images of the booklist from the Los Angeles Public Library.