Triggered by a contested arrest in the Watts district of Los Angeles, six days of unrest in August 1965 left 34 people dead, more than a thousand injured and some 40 million dollars in damage, with nearly 14,000 National Guard troops deployed. Underlying grievances included aggressive policing, employment discrimination, residential segregation and poor housing in a neighbourhood shaped by decades of exclusion. Watts presaged a wave of urban uprisings across the country in the later 1960s. It helped prompt the Kerner Commission, which warned the nation was moving toward 'two societies, one Black, one white, separate and unequal'.
Watts exposed the spatial inequalities of segregated American cities and pushed urban poverty and race to the centre of national policy debate.
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