Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

Abstract

Reviewed by: Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener Bryan D. Palmer Mike Davis and Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (London and New York: Verso 2020) "1966 Was a Grim year for social justice, but it had one bright spot," writes Mike Davis in the conclusion to a chapter addressing the whitewashing of police repression in his recent co-authored book on Los Angeles in the 1960s. "At a testimonial dinner in July and in front of hundreds of guests, Chief Parker keeled over dead." (242) That was as close to police reform as la was going to get fifty some years ago. Police Chief Parker was the Warden of the Ghettoes, an unreconstructed 'law and order' reactionary who winked at those under his command sporting Barry Goldwater badges and distributing John Birch Society literature. He referred to suppressing the Watts Rebellion in 1965 as similar to "fighting the Viet Cong." (220) It was Parker's mission to keep la's disparate dissident demographic constituencies somewhat in line. Like Malcolm X, but with so much more in the way of weaponry and license at his disposal, Parker was a believer in "by any means necessary." As their Chief amassed "intelligence" (known in the racist lingo of Parker's inner circle as the "scalp collection") on subversives and mobsters, civic officials and political opponents, his stormtroopers perfected the chokehold and the no-knock/no-warrant, sledgehammerdriven home invasion. Parker's death occasioned no mourning among those he had long terrorized. Histories of the 1960s are never far removed from the kind of surveillance and police brutality associated with Parker, but la in the decade is undoubtedly a case study in the use of violence and deadly force in the service of an apartheid-like racial order. The conservative carnage revealed in Set the Night on Fire is but the tip of an iceberg, yet it melts the heart. Black lives didn't matter much in la in these years, especially if they were known to castigate authority and demand "Black power." Police attacks on African Americans punctuate the histories of social movements that Davis and Jon Weiner outline in these pages, although Black la was merely first among many constituencies given a taste of Parker's equal opportunity repression. A particularly vicious and deadly program of profiling begins with the 1962 murder of Ronald Stokes (hands in the air, pleading, "Don't shoot any more") and the serious wounding—including permanent paralysis—of seven other Black Muslims, as a temple was ransacked by cops. (70) Of the 34 killed during the Watts explosion of August 1965, all but two were Black, and well over 1,000 suffered injuries. It was the Black Panther Party that really irked law enforcement (from Parker's lapd to J. Edgar Hoover's fbi), getting under its pale blue skin with armed defence [End Page 205] of African American neighbourhoods. Landmarks in the war of extermination against the Panthers included the killing of seventeen-year old Bobby Hutton in a 1968 Oakland shoot-out that may well have been started by Eldridge Cleaver firing on police in an adventurist attempt to spark an insurrection. A concerted campaign of disinformation and provocateur-induced mayhem lead to the deaths of two Black Panthers, Alprentice 'Bunchy' Carter and John Huggins, on the University of California-Los Angeles (ucla) campus in 1969, and an acute and acrimonious fracturing of any unity that might have been constructed among those aligned with oppositional black nationalist camps. These were led by Huey Newton and Ron Karenga, both of whom Davis and Weiner show to be charismatic and insightful, as well as mercurial megalomaniacs capable of almost unimaginable acts of viciousness and abuse. The culmination of what constituted nothing less than a concerted cop campaign to kill off the Black Panthers, was a December 1969 SWAT attack on Party headquarters. Thirteen mostly teen-aged African American youth had the temerity to shoot back in what was a losing battle with the proverbial bull-in-the china-shop police, who broke in on sleeping Panthers guns blazing...