IT WAS EXACTLY 40 years ago today that I, a WASPy, Southern-bred Newsweek reporter in a Brooks Brothers suit and a crew cut, was attacked and almost beaten to death by angry blacks in a melee on a smoggy street in South-Central Los Angeles.
I'd been in Watts all that day, reporting on protests over the fatal shooting by a white L.A. cop of a 25-year-old black man speeding to the hospital with his pregnant wife. The man, Leonard Deadwyler, had been slain at the wheel of his car several days earlier, but anger was growing; that morning, a Los Angeles Times headline read: "Bitter Negroes Mourn Man Killed by Policeman's Bullet." It was nine months after the Watts riots.
Earlier in the day, a march on the 77th Street Precinct station had been turned back by cops on the roof pointing guns. Seething frustration finally ignited into violence when somebody heaved a brick through the window of a white-owned liquor store at 84th and Manchester. That's when I ran back to my car to put away my camera, which was always a lightning rod in these situations.
Suddenly, it was lights out for me. A blow to the back of my head knocked me unconscious. A crowd gathered around, I was later told, using their fists and feet in an apparent attempt to stomp me to death.
Coming to on the hot pavement, with blood running down my arm from my split-open head, I saw a bloody chunk of a 4-by-4 wooden post beside me and angry black faces above me, voices growling and cursing at me. An ambulance finally got through, and some men pulled me out of there and took me to Daniel Freeman Hospital, where I was treated for two broken jaws, a fractured skull and many bruises and cuts.
The physical damage was pretty serious, but it was the psychic shock that stayed with me the longest. I had spent the previous five years in the South, reporting on the major flashpoints of the civil rights struggle. There, black people had been my friends and my sometimes protectors, and it was always white people angered by the black struggle who I'd had to fear. I had been threatened and tailed, had my phone tapped and been beaten and even shot at while working as a reporter.
I'd seen whites do things to black people that filled me with shame and rage -- in the South and out of it -- including overt acts of racism and violence by Los Angeles Police Department cops just as raw as what I'd seen in Alabama and Mississippi. I also knew about the lack of jobs, poor education, broken homes and lack of healthcare that young black men experienced in South-Central.
