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BOOK REVIEW                           JONES

DOCUMENTING THE WATTS STORY

RIVERS OF BLOOD, YEARS OF DARKNESS. By Robert Conot. Bantam Books, New York. 479 pages. 95¢.

AMONG THE MANY BOOKS and essays dealing with the ghetto rebellions of recent years, Conot's work on the first Watts explosion stands head and shoulders above the others as an honest attempt to uncover the real causes, instead of being an apologia for the police, the power structure, and other vested interests in the status quo. Sources and references for each chapter are detailed and an extensive bibliography is provided.

Using the narrative technique, Conot has taken the personal experiences and backgrounds of many blacks and whites, showing how the inflammatory situation surrounding Watts developed to the point of the explosion. He shows how middle-class black people like Warner and Marian O'Seyre were discriminated against.

There were the racist employers like the local utility company who refused to hire Marian because she was "over-qualified," and a finance company which had bought his furniture contract, adding an extra $100 for service charges and interest. Warner was arrested when he broke the manager's nose, after a bill collector abused Marian, causing her to hemorrhage and lose her baby.

Conot's documentation of the culpability of the Los Angeles police is a contribution to the understanding of today's black rebellions. He shows how thousands of black boys and girls are taken into custody, verbally and physically abused and then turned out with police records that forever doom them, thus adding fuel to the smoldering fires of discontent.

The record of scores of recent uprisings has proved this to be typical of urban police procedures against minority group youths. Moreover, the hated police practice of stopping and questioning "suspicious" persons was a cause of ghetto bitterness.

Evidence of extreme anti-Negro and anti-democratic sentiment of white policemen is documented by Conot, such as "bulletin boards in the administration building and throughout stations in Los Angeles" which "sprouted such material as 'is the civil rights struggle a prelude to class conflict Khrushchev style,' and a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt with the caption, 'Nigger Lover.'"

Thus, the incidence of the police throw-away knife in Los Angeles
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