Place / Q&A

“No Matter How Different the Movements Were, the LAPD Targeted Every One of Them”

From the Black Panthers to the Communist Party, radical Los Angeles in the ’60s was a seething cauldron of unrest, united by the brutal repression of the LAPD.

by Mike Davis, Jon Wiener, Meagan Day via Jacobin on May 29, 2020

...winner of the mayoral election, Sam Yorty, was a very strange populist of a sort who won on a coalition of San Fernando Valley homeowners and black people, to whom he had promised to bring Parker to book. But Parker had his infamous files, and sooner than later, Yorty was in Parker’s pocket.

So in 1963, during the monumental civil rights struggle in Birmingham, groups popped up outside the South, and many of them decided to follow the Birmingham model. In Los Angeles, you had a United Civil Rights Campaign, which brought together everyone from people who were close to the Communist Party to the NAACP.

They demanded action on all fronts: education, housing, jobs. They were, of course, immediately opposed by the LAPD whenever possible. Their tactic was mass demonstrations, but the LAPD was there at all times to arrest people. It became almost impossible to maintain a focus on the real power in Los Angeles, the biggest banks and corporations and other elites who profited from segregation, when people were getting systematically hammered and sent to prison by the LAPD.

All their energy was absorbed in desperate defensive struggles rather than taking the offensive to demand change from those who were actually responsible, at the end of the day, for segregation. Ultimately, the most major frontal attempt to bring about a civil rights revolution in an ultrasegregated city was a failure.

JW: It wasn’t just black LA that was targeted by the LAPD under Parker. Gay life was subject to repression, and gay people were subject to frequent raids and arrests.

Venice Beach was constantly a target of police sweeps, who were looking for countercultural things like drum circles and nude bathing. I remember arriving here in the late ’60s, and it became a regular thing on Sundays that hundreds of young people would go down to fight the cops on Venice Beach.

When the women’s movement got organized, Los Angeles was one of the first to get a women’s self-help health clinic on South Crenshaw. They were busted by the LAPD and charged with practicing medicine without a license. Carol Downer was famously put on trial for the crime of prescribing yogurt for a yeast infection. This was the work of the LAPD.

This is a theme of our book: no matter how different or unconnected these different movements were, the LAPD targeted every single one of them. And this made unity between these movements necessary, where otherwise it might have been impossible.