The Watts Workshop

It was black friday, the 13th of August, 1965. Like millions of other dazed or complacent Angelenos, I was watching an unscheduled "spectacular," the damnedest television show ever put on the tube. Not long before, I had written an introduction for a new edition of The Day of the Locust, in which Nathanael West projects a Hollywood art director whose masterwork is an apocalyptic canvas entitled The Burning of Los Angeles. West's painter saw his vapid, vicious city consuming itself in angry flames. Here, on television, in prime time--in fact, around the clock for eight days that shook not only Los Angeles but the entire country--was Nathanael West's nightmare vision as if it had leaped from the canvas and was coming live from Watts.

Fires broke out not only in Watts but in most of southeast and central Los Angeles. Television cameras hanging from helicopters brought the action into our living rooms. Flames from the supermarkets were licking the sky. Crowds were looting pawnshops, drugstores, liquor stores, radio-TV stores, clothing stores and all the other establishments that had been quietly looting the community on the installment plan over the years.

An effervescent Negro disc jockey, Magnificent Montague, had popularized the phrase "Burn, baby, burn!" for a platter that sizzled on his turntable. Now his innocent zest became a battle cry--not burn with musical fire but with real, live, crackling, dangerous, revolutionary fire. To the frightened Caucasians living in their white ghettos far to the north and west of the barricades, "Burn, baby, burn!" was an ominous and threatening invocation. But to the black people who finally had taken possession of their own streets, "Burn, baby, burn!"--expressed in the symbol of three fingers raised jubilantly into the humid summer air--was charged with revolutionary zeal. It was the "Don't tread on me" and "Damn the torpedoes--full speed ahead" of the rebellion of Watts.

We at home were watching no less than the on-the-scene front-line television coverage of civil war. For make no mistake about it: This was no riot. A riot it may have been in its first, spontaneous hours; but as the hated Los Angeles Police Department now tried to contain what they had triggered, it transformed itself into a full-scale revolt that had been years in the making in the festering black ghettos of Los Angeles, a rebellion the affluent city of the white man was unaware of because he was looking north and west while hundreds of thousands were sweating out poverty, hunger, unemployment, the lack of education and recreation, and hurting with the humiliation of it all, to the south and east.

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Abruptly, the "dramatic" pabulum spoon-fed to us happy vidiots by our patronizing sponsors was flung from our trays. Into our living rooms raged an element that is usually forbidden on television--life, and its dark, red underbelly, death. Not spurious, TV--gun-smoke death but the undignified red hole in the flesh and the unrehearsed crumple of the wasted corpse--the real thing. A ragged army of thousands was surging through the burning streets spewing its hatred of white cops and "white devils" in general. The angry black braves found excitement and release in the fires lighting up the skies over the city they considered their enemy.

A guest in my house for this impromptu television show was a New York columnist who had come to write funnies on Lotusland, the hippies of Sunset Strip and topless waitresses serving luncheon pizzas to pie-eyed patrons of the arts. Los Angeles is a "pigeon" at point-blank range for visiting humorists. But this time our guest had a serious question: "What the hell is going on down there?"

I didn't know. The more I watched, the more I realized that I had no idea what was going on down there. Or if I knew the what, I could make only an educated guess at the why. But I knew it only in my head. And it wasn't something one could read up on in books. I had read my share, from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass to Dr. Clark's Dark Ghetto, the angry essays of Baldwin and the abrasive Autobiography of Malcolm X.

What was I to do? As an American writer still oriented toward social fiction, I felt an itch, an irresistible urge to know. I held to the old-fashioned notion that an author has a special obligation to his society, an obligation to understand it and to serve as its conscience. Melville and Whitman had known this. So had Twain and Howells, Norris and London, Sandburg and MacLeish, Sinclair and Dos Passos, Wright and Steinbeck. The responsible American writer makes it his duty to report on his corner. I was raised there. I had gone to Watts in my youth to hear T-Bone Walker and other local jazzmen in the honky-tonks of what was then a small rural chunk of the South tossed into the outskirts of the crazy-quilt sprawl that was and is Los Angeles. In the Sixties, Watts was no longer 6000 but 30,000; the black ghettoland of south Los Angeles had leaped to 320,000 in an exploding county population of 6,000,000, but was still the bottom-dog tenth.

I was there in Los Angeles. I was self-appointed to go to Watts while the fires were still smoldering. So out of lush, plush, white, bright Beverly Hills, my New York--columnist friend and I drove south to the Santa Monica Freeway and east to the Harbor Freeway, and turned off on Century Boulevard, which runs from the 21st Century silhouette of the International Airport on the west to the dilapidated railroad station of Watts on the east. The first cliché reaction of the traveler to Watts is: Why, what's all the complaining about? This looks a hundred percent better than Harlem or the Negro slums of any Eastern city. Look at the nice wide, tree-lined streets and the attractive little individual houses with their neatly trimmed flower beds and their well-kept lawns. Yes, there are such houses, block after block, and the first impression might be of a comfortable lower-middle-class city in the Midwest. We found sunshine in Watts, and a deceptive suburbia, with small palm trees. But when we took a harder look, we could see that the palm trees were growing like the people, as if they really did not have their hearts in it. Then, moving on beyond Success Street, we also found 103rd Street, the mainstream of Watts that had won notoriety a few days before as Charcoal Alley Number One. I had not seen such devastation since, as a member of an OSS team in World War Two, I had driven into German cities to collect incriminatory documents. Burned-out supermarkets were smoldering. Pawnshops and liquor stores were piles of rubble and shattered glass. There hung over the heart streets of Watts that terrible silence that descends on battlegrounds the day after a truce has been declared.

Just off embattled, embittered 103rd Street stood a pale-green two-story stucco building. It stood alone now, because everything around it had been burned to the ground. This was the Westminster Neighborhood Association, a social-service agency founded by the Presbyterian Church. There were a few shabby offices and some bare classrooms and a recreation room that looked more like a forlorn pool hall. Troubled young men were being encouraged to come in off the hot streets, where there was nothing to do but grumble about the Man and how he finally had thrown more firepower at the brothers than they could handle. Westminster was offering classes for illiterates, teenage and adult. There was a dancing class, lacking instruments or a record player, and some basic English and Negro history. In an unadorned assembly hall, kids banged on an old out-of-tune piano and formed spontaneous singing groups and put on haphazard variety shows. There was some psychiatric help and some efforts to assist severely depressed families in the nearby housing project, and that was about it, a far cry from the great settlement houses teeming with self-improvement in the old East Side Jewish ghetto of New York.

An energetic, plain-talking young socialworker from Harlem and CCNY guided this first tour of Miseryland, the dark side of the shimmering Los Angeles moon. In the poolroom, I tried to shake hands with young men whose eyes would roam the floor and the walls when mine tried to meet theirs and who would not put out their hands in the somewhat meaningless gesture of greeting our white civilization cultivates.

"Most of these brothers have just gotten out of jail," our spirited escort from CCNY explained. "Some of them were leaders in the revolt. Others were just standing on corners watching when they were handcuffed and dragged in. Even before the revolt, it was a miracle if a young man on the streets without a job could avoid building up a record. Once they've got a record, it's practically impossible to get a job. Not that there are jobs to get--in rich, beautiful L. A., we've got an unemployment problem worse than the country had in the Depression thirty years ago."

One of the teenagers, very shabby and very black, missed his shot at the lumpy pool table and growled at me, "I was on a motherfuckin' chain gang in the South. Every goddamn day, the Man takes me out and beats my ass. Finally I get away and hitchhike to L. A. New scene. Another chance. Two days later, I'm busted here. Not doin' nothin', jus' huntin' me a place to sleep. The Man picks me up and whops on me jus' like back home. Sheeit, man, I had it with Whitey." He glared at me as if I were all the white Kluxers whose gauntlet he had been running all of his 17 years, and turned back to his game of pool.

"I didn't mean to get you insulted," said our bustling guide from Westminster. "But if you come down here, you might as well see it like it is. I don't have to tell you these kids are hostile. They feel so trapped and frustrated they're almost going out of their minds. We don't want to turn off their hostility and turn them into Uncle Toms. But we want to guide them so they can turn those energies into constructive works. It's discouraging. Every day there are a hundred human crises. I figure if we help one in a hundred, we're doing something."

I sat down on a box behind a group of young teenagers who were staring dully at daytime television on a set that looked like a throwback to the middle Fifties. I squirmed when the commercials came on. Like most upper-middlebrows, I am conditioned against commercials. The cigarette sells and the instant relief from body odors that introduce you to a whole new world of romance and acceptance--it's all too much and we laugh at it, put reverse American on it (continued on page 164)Watts Workshop(continued from page 162) and, with smug superiority, accept it as part of the game. It's Camp to comment on how much more you enjoy the wayout commercials than the so-called entertainment sandwiched in between. You can have your easy chuckle at the expense of Marlboro and Right Guard and Mr. Clean. But I said squirm. My first afternoon in Watts, I knew I had never watched TV that way before. It was eerie to watch these men-children watching the promised land held up to them through the magic of the television tube. So near and yet so far. Look but don't touch. Catch a glimpse of the water, but don't you dare take off those ragged clothes! They were dropouts and they were jobless and some of them slept in doorways and in the backs of cars, prey to police harassment and the vices that seem to offer momentary escape. And what was the commercial offering them? An opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new real-estate developer's dream--Holiday Hills (or something like that), each individual split-level home facing the golf course--and, of course, each with its own swimming pool, "no longer a millionaire's prerogative, but within reach of even the budget-minded homemaker."

I watched those black kids watching this white real-estate nirvana. I felt their anger, expressed in soft epithets and compressed humor. "Sheeit, man!" "I think I'll buy me two of 'em, one f' my white maid." They broke themselves up. They were laughing, but it wasn't good-natured, easy laughter. It was their own, stylish way of reacting to a challenge, a brutal challenge of a society that was selling swimming pools and golf courses and, at the same time, warning them to keep off the grass.

I remember feeling, as I watched them watch that absurd American dream of a commercial, that if they walked out of that crummy pool hall and went down the block to the one supermarket still standing there (and still offering substandard meats and vegetables at prices higher than Beverly Hills')--if you had been with me in that scaly "recreation" room and felt the vibrations from those kids who had dropped out or had been dropped out of our society--the burning of a supermarket would have seemed, if not forgivable, more understandable.

From the pool hall, we walked over to the Jordan Downs Housing Project. The units are adequate for young married couples who can afford $85 per month. But God or Allah help you if you have four, five or six children, or frequently eight, nine or ten. Walking back to the beat-up Westminster building, the crude beginning of what may one day become a thriving settlement house, I heard myself asking the inevitable question of the concerned white visitor: "Is there anything I can do? Is there anything one person--not an organization, but just a single person--can do?"

"Don't send Johnny Roseboro or this year's star quarterback. Just because our kids are mostly high school dropouts doesn't mean they're dumb. I can show you dropouts with I. Q.s of 140. These kids are so frustrated they're going out of their minds--some of them literally. They need motivation, stimulation--you said you were a writer--maybe you could start a writer's class."

How did I begin? These days, I receive letters from ghetto neighborhood groups in Cincinnati and San Francisco and Philadelphia asking that question, as if there were some special magic we bottled to launch our Watts Writers Workshop. I simply posted a notice on the Westminster bulletin board--"Creative Writing Class--All Interested Sign Below." Simple as that. It would be pleasant to add that a dozen aspiring young writers signed immediately and we were off and writing. But it didn't happen that way. The truth was, nobody signed up. Nobody came. Week after week, I sat there like an idiot shepherd without a flock, shuffling my notes and idly reading the community papers, the Sentinel and the throwaways scattered around the small cluttered room that actually was a kind of pantry for the Westminster kitchen. Sometimes I wandered down Beach Street to 103rd. People glared at me. I felt unwanted. I could catch the tone of angry muttering. "Dig the gray beast! What the fuck you think he's up to?" Sometimes I'd be confronted directly. "The white man's heaven is the black man's hell!" a lean, ragged youngster who looked and sounded like a teenage Malcolm would challenge me as I passed.

What to do? Give up? Admit that a white man, no matter how altruistic he believes his motives to be, has no place in a black ghetto? I decided to tough it out--at least to try it not for three weeks but for three months--or longer--if necessary. But I thought I would try new tactics. Nobody knew me on Beach Street. Nobody could figure out what I was up to. It was still only a month or so after the curfew had been lifted and the National Guard withdrawn; 103rd Street was still suffering from a sense of psychological siege. Whitey was fuzz. Whitey was power structure. Whitey was "Travelin' Sam Yorty," the mayor, and his police chief, Parker, against whom the people of Watts seemed to feel a hatred similar to the feeling of the Jews for Hitler and Himmler. White was the color of the enemy that held you in and blocked you off and put you down and held you there at the business end of the billy club and the bayonet point.

I thought I would try, as a calling card, the film On the Waterfront that I had written and made with director Elia Kazan. Since the street kids who were my prospective students had no money to go to the movies, I suggested to some staff members at Westminster that I might talk to the manager of a local theater--get him to run the picture for us at some hour that would not compete with commercial showings. My suggestion trailed off. I could see the Westminster workers looking at one another and shaking their heads. Across the narrow street was a temporary office of the McCone Commission that was spending some $300,000 on a report on the whys and wherefores of the riot. But I found myself a committee of one getting a firsthand lesson in the realities of Watts, a lesson without end.

"Don't you know there's no such thing as a movie theater in Watts?" one Westminster staff member said.

"You've got to go all the way up to midtown, ten or twelve miles, about two dollars round trip," said the other.

So I borrowed a sound projector and a 16mm print of Waterfront and we ran the picture in the makeshift Westminster assembly hall. It was mid-September 1965. It was like a midsummer night, suffocatingly hot. There was no air conditioning, not even fans. Our audience consisted of 30 restless teenagers, some of them from Westminster's Youth Training and Employment Program, some of them hard-core trouble kids, troubled and troublemaking, some of them on glue and dropping red devils, thrill-seeking some escape from what the halfhearted McCone Report later called "the dull, devastating spiral of failure."

All of a sudden, there was a commotion across the street. A crowd was forming in front of the prosperous two-story building across from our center. "This place is in a worse depression than the country as a whole was in the early Thirties," said an angry staff worker. "But that shop over there does the best business in town." He was referring to the mortuary.

I looked around and realized that I had lost my audience. I followed them to the street and learned the nature of the competition. A six-month-old baby had died. The mother's grief was intensified by the bitter knowledge that the prompt arrival of an ambulance and a hospital closer than the County General Hospital a dozen miles away might have saved her child.

So, outside the mortuary on Beach Street, while my movie was running in an empty room, I was learning another important lesson about Watts. Nearly all the things that we take for granted uptown as part of the comforts of city living are brutally missing in Watts. In an area of large families and inadequate housing, prone to accidents and the illnesses of undernourishment, there are fewer doctors and substandard medical care. The laying out of that infant during the "premiere" of On the Waterfront in Watts still burns in my mind as image and symbol of the true meaning of medical deprivation.

You may read in the bloodless language of the McCone Report that "the Commission believes that immediate and favorable consideration should be given to a new, comprehensively equipped hospital in the area." What the authors of the McCone Report have achieved is masterful in a negative way. They have succeeded in describing an urgently critical situation in the comfortable language of bureaucratic polysyllables.

In Watts, I have heard it said over and over again, "You know what the real trouble is--nobody cares. You white people uptown don't give a damn about us. Hell, even our own middle-class Negroes who move out to Compton or west of the Freeway don't care about us. That's why we don't have a hospital and we don't have a moviehouse and we don't have hot meals and libraries in our schools and we don't have a bus system that'll take us to the jobs and we don't have--well, you name it and we don't have it."

One tries to assure the protester that actually there are thousands in the comfortable and cozy white neighborhoods who care. But one of the tragedies is that there has been no communication between Watts and the more prosperous communities. In the beginning was the word, and despite Field Marshal McLuhan, I refuse to lose faith in the word. In those early months in Watts, I continued to hope that we would find some communication through the words put together meaningfully to express frustrations, feelings, thoughts, ideas.

At last my first recruit arrived. I shall always be grateful to him. His spirit, his determination to rise from the ashes inspired all of us. Charles Johnson. Nineteen years old but looking a dozen years older. Round-faced, pudgy, but, you felt, not a man you'd like to mess with. A veteran of the county jail during the revolt. A veteran of a lot of things. I had met him on that first visit to the pool hall. He had told me how the police had busted him while he was standing on a corner watching the fires. "I don't have to tell you what they did to me--I can show you the marks," he had said quietly.

At that first visit to my nonexistent class, Charles Johnson talked with me for almost three hours. Just the two of us. Starting very slowly. Feeling each other out. Groping. Searching. After the first hour, it got easier. I think both of us were a little surprised that we could talk to each other as honestly as we did. He asked me what my purpose was in setting up this class. "Nothing up my sleeve," I said. "It's just that I'm sick of people talking about the problem--the Negro problem, as the whites call it, the white problem, as Ebony calls it--and not doing something personal about it. I'm not the antipoverty program. I'm not the N Double-A CP. I'm just me, a writer, here to see if I can find other writers."

"Now I'll tell you the truth," Charles said. "Some of the brothers didn't like the sight of you. In fact, some of them wanted to stomp you. But I told 'em, 'Lemme see what the cat is up to first.' "

Thus, Charles Johnson became the charter member of the Watts Writers Workshop. "I got things to write about," he said, "only I don't know if they're stories."

He told me a few. I said, "Stories aren't fancy things like the Arabian Nights. They're the things you've been doing, what you did in the uprising last month, what you're thinking about now--that's what writing is."

Our first textbook was Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown. Charles Johnson and I read some of it out loud together. By the time he was nine years old, Claude Brown was a man-child, a respected thief and full-fledged member of The 40 Thieves. At 13, when the white kids of suburbanland were playing Little League baseball and going on cookouts with their dads, Claude was lying on the dirty floor of a fish-and-chips house in Harlem with a bullet in his gut.

I read these paragraphs from Man-child out loud to Charles:

I went around the corner to Butch's house. After I convinced him that I was alone, he opened the door. He said that Kid and Danny were in the kitchen. I saw Kid sitting on the floor with his hand stuck way down in a gallon jar of pickled pigs' ears. Danny was cooking some bacon at the stove, and Butch was busy hiding stuff. It looked as though these guys had stolen a whole grocery store. While I joined the feast, they took turns telling me about the riot. Danny and Kid hadn't gone home the night before; they were out following the crowds and looting.

My only regret was that I had missed the excitement. I said, "Why don't we have another riot tonight? Then Butch and me can get in it."

Danny said there were too many cops around to have a riot now. Butch said that they had eaten up all the bread and that he was going to steal some more. I asked if I could come along with him, and he said that I could if I promised to do nothing but watch. I promised, but we both knew that I was lying.

Kid and Danny and Butch were ten years old, four years older than Claude. To the outside world, they were little hoodlums; in fact, already sophisticated criminals. To Claude Brown's inside world, they were valiant soldiers on the battle streets of Harlem, fighting for survival.

Charles Johnson's first reaction to Manchild was, "Wow! That's a real tough book. I didn't know you could put words like that in a book. Sounds just like we talk on 103rd Street. Everything he puts in that book, that's just like what's going on here in Watts. I could tell a hundred stories just like it."

Sometimes Charles would bring a friend with him, a gangly, homeless teenager who is considered retarded. Call him Luke. I had been warned that Luke could become violent and that unaccountably he had attacked a Westminster staff worker. Sometimes Luke would wander into the empty little classroom and sit down beside me and, with his dark, sad, sensitive face only a few inches from mine, would stare at me while Charles and I were discussing a possible story. It was unnerving, but somehow Luke and I got used to each other. He did not write, although Charles said he had interesting ideas, but he sketched surprisingly well.

And this derelict, whom some considered a village idiot, was strangely dependable. As the Westminster youth training program absorbed hundreds of jobless teenagers, our original cubbyhole was pre-empted and we would often be shunted to some other makeshift classroom. A sign would have to be posted telling prospective members where to find us. Luke would take off on his long, cranelike legs and the notice was posted impeccably and punctually. Luke was not writing, but he seemed proud of the writing class. He seemed pleased to have these little jobs to do. In order to understand Watts and the creative element so alive in Watts, it may be necessary to understand Luke. When the police pulled him out of the back of a parked car that was his bedroom of expediency and locked him in the hated 77th Street Precinct on the usual charge of suspected armed robbery, a crowd of many hundreds marched on the jailhouse. They were trying to tell the police something about Luke. They were trying to say that Luke needs more than an overcharge of robbery and a hard time in jail. The police did not get the message. They spoke to the protesters with shotgun butts. That is the present state of communications between the people of Watts and the defenders of law and order and the status quo.

The writing class was growing. There was a mysterious 18-year-old who had dropped out of Jordan High School in his junior year and had left the home of his stepmother and ten half-brothers and sisters, living thereafter from hand to mouth. He looked like a shy, unathletic, unkempt, underdeveloped Cassius (What's-My-Name?) Ali. He handed me a poem, on a small scrap of paper, in longhand. By Leumas Sirrah. It was titled Infinite. I paused after the first line: "Never know a begin of me." My immediate reaction was, "Begin? You can't use begin as a noun." But something whispered to me, "Wait a minute, before you begin to destroy this shabby, withdrawn, suspicious man-child with improvements, say the line again." Never know a begin of me. It may be one of those original lines that go on beating in your head long after the impeccably Victorian lines have died like cut flowers. Every week after that, Leumas Sirrah handed me three or four new poems, Godandman, You and I, Me I'm Black, One Two Three--he would hand them to me and say: "Criticism." But they were the kind of poems I would have to take home and sleep on and ponder. With Leumas came another teenage high school dropout, Ernest Archie Mayhand, Jr., who shared with Leumas the chancy, marginal life of the child in search of his manhood, his identity in the dark ghetto. He listened and indulged in long, philosophical discussions with the mysterious Leumas Sirrah regarding the latter's abstract, metaphysical poetry questing for God, unity and identity.

Our young poet's corner on Beach Street was joined by older prose writers who found their way to us by word of mouth: Roly-poly, half-defeated Harry Dolan, in his middle 30s, in the process of being retrained as a glass blower to support his four children, arrived with a battered briefcase full of unfinished manuscripts. He had been everything from city-hall janitor and a porter at Filene's in Boston to a weekly Negro-newspaper reporter. Time was running out for Harry Dolan. But he still wanted to prove to himself and hopefully to the outside world that he should be a writer and not a glass blower or a janitor. Since this was a workshop, my job wasn't to teach Harry Dolan how to write or even what to write--the real stuff of ghetto life beat strongly in all the scraps and false starts and incomplete rewrites he had to show. The job was simply for Harry Dolan to organize himself, his material, his talent. He seemed to have everything but self-confidence. Pick the piece you like best, concentrate on it, don't stop until you know it is the best you can do with it, get a clean, finished copy and move on to the next. That was about all the teaching I had to offer Harry Dolan, and from this gentle nudge flowed essays such as Will There Be Another Riot in Watts?, short stories such as I Remember Poppa, plays like Losers Weepers.

There was also Birdell Chew, a lady in her 50s; like so many Watts residents, a migrant from the rural South, a philosophical veteran of the hard life, active in the struggle of the community to pull itself up from the depths of despair and neglect and apathy and a tragic sense of alienation from the white overlords. She took it as personal affront that the mayor was more concerned with dropping the nuclear bomb on the Vietnamese than with coming to grips with the fearful pressures of a decomposed inner city, where male unemployment was one third, where two thirds of the teenagers were doomed never to finish high school, where the old winos went muttering through the vacant lots still strewn with rubble from the revolt of 1965.

Like Harry Dolan, Birdell Chew had been wanting to write all her life. My first reaction to the first chapter of her novel in progress--years in progress--was similar to my impulsive response to Leumas Sirrah's first line of Infinite: "Looks hopeless--can't spell or punctuate--trips over her own syntax--semi-literate." But I took it home and made only the most necessary, simple, grammatical adjustments. Our secretary--by then we needed a special secretary for the Workshop writing alone--typed a clean copy. When I read the first chapter of Birdell's book again, it was like looking through a window that had been cleaned after gathering dust and crust for years. Suddenly everything was clear and beautiful in its simplicity. Her two little swamp children caked with mud and ignorance, who make a profound discovery at the far end of their glades, say something about the meaning and impact of education in a fresh and original way. I had read nothing like it before. When Birdell read that first chapter aloud to our growing Workshop group, you could dust off that old showbiz saw: There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Birdell Chew took literally our Workshop maxim: "Write only what you know." A lady had dropped off a fetching, shy six-year-old child at Birdell's modest house in Watts, asking Birdell and her daughter to baby-sit for the day. The mother never returned. Birdell loved this "adopted" daughter and decided to write a story about her. In her first version, it was a three-page sketch of a story. Class by class, the story evolved until it became the full-length Lady Linder. At one Workshop session, we read all four versions, from its brief, tentative beginning to its final copy, to study how a story grows.

Other would-be and should-be writers came, people who had been working at it all their lives and were yet to be published, such as James Thomas Jackson, from Temple, Texas, who had drifted into Watts from Houston, by odd coincidence, on the first night of the uprising. His greeting from Los Angeles was to be stopped by police without his having the faintest idea of what was going on. Since then, James Jackson had been trying to hold himself together by sweeping out the hoary Eagle Café on South Western Avenue. His class conferences were sprinkled with references to Melville and Hawthorne; and once when he mentioned Fitzgerald, he added: "I'm talking of Scott now, not Edward, though I dig a lot of Edward FitzGerald, too." Mr. Jackson has written a dozen chapters of a novel about a Negro Army unit in World War Two--Shade of Darkness. I had only to read a few chapters to know we had another genuine writer in our group.

And then there was Sonora McKeller, born and raised in Watts, known all over the area as "Aunt Fanny," a militant community-action worker recognized for her cleanly written and strongly delivered speeches to antipoverty groups. Sonora is also a human melting pot or a one-woman League of Nations, part Afro-American, part German, part Apache Indian, part Mexican. She has been everything from a chorus girl to a south Los Angeles Joan of Arc.

Then there was 20-year-old Johnie Scott, who drank wine and dropped red devils with the most abandoned of the desperate black children of 103rd Street, but who survived, miraculously, to become one of the few of his generation in Watts to graduate from Jordan High School and to find his own eloquent voice as a kind of poet laureate of ghetto Watts.

And Jimmy Sherman, high school dropout, who had also gone through a period of personal rebellion, turning to wine, marijuana, gang fighting, but who was now a reformed GI teaching boxing at a Teen Post, who filled out his application for the Workshop with the significant phrase, "I had made up verses since I was a little boy, but taking part in the revolt of Watts and thinking about what it had meant to me for days afterward that made me realize that what I really wanted to be was a writer, not just for myself but for all of us who want justice in America."

By the spring of 1966, we had outgrown the small offices and classrooms we had been using at Westminster. Westminster itself was bursting at the seams as its various antipoverty, self-development programs multiplied. So we moved up to 103rd Street, on good old Charcoal Alley Number One, into the Watts Happening Coffee House, an abandoned furniture store that the young people of the area had transformed--industriously and ingeniously--into an art center. There were homemade paintings on the walls, a few of them fascinating, a lot of them promising, some of them god-awful. There is a stage where poetry readings and self-propelled plays such as Jimmy Sherman's Ballad from Watts and musical entertainments are performed weekly. There are Happenings and political discussions that lean toward extreme black nationalism, and a record player that swings everything from the Supremes and Lou Rawls to grand opera. If the Westminster Neighborhood Association had been the first beacon of hope I had been able to find in Watts, the Watts Happening Coffee House was an oasis of self-improvement and self-expression.

The Watts Writers Workshop was adding new members at every meeting. Young poets Alvin Saxon, Jr. ("Ojenke"), and tall, willowy, vague and deep Emmery Evans. A 40-year-old from Indianola, Mississippi, Harley Mims. Our first Mexican contributor, warm, enthusiastic Guadulupe de Saavedra. Young black militant and talented Vallejo Ryan Kennedy. A 20-year-old product of 103rd Street who stammers badly but whose words pour out on paper with a "deep blue feeling," Edna Gipson. Young matrons in their early 30s who tend toward the Ebony-reading middle class but who seemed to find new life in brushing shoulders with the troubled or angry kids of the Watts ghetto--Jeanne Taylor and Blossom Powe.

By summer 1966, the Watts Writers Workshop was becoming a kind of group celebrity. Los Angeles magazine published the poetry of Johnie Scott, Jimmy Sherman and Leumas Sirrah and they found themselves attracting national attention. Irving Stone called to express his enthusiasm and suggested I come to a dinner of a local authors' circle to read more of the works of Scott, Sherman and Sirrah and to describe the activities of the Workshop. Edward P. Morgan broadcast several of the poems by Leumas on his radio program and a special advisor to Sargent Shriver called from Washington to say that Mr. Shriver had been tremendously impressed. Vice-President Humphrey seemed to dig Leumas also, and could we come to Washington and perhaps discuss cultural possibilities in the antipoverty field? Time magazine reprinted the poems from Los Angeles magazine with an article in the "Education" section on new approaches to school dropouts in the ghetto. Finally, NBC-TV devoted an hour of prime time to The Angry Voices of Watts--Johnie Scott, Harry Dolan, Leumas Sirrah, James Thomas Jackson, Birdell Chew and Sonora McKeller reading their poems, essays and stories under the imaginative direction of my brother, Stuart Schulberg, whose camera roamed the streets of Watts, from the soaring Simon Rodia towers to the grubby back streets, as the writers of Watts became their own narrators.

A moving poem such as Johnie Scott's Watts,1966 could be brought to life realistically on brooding, blistering 103rd Street. But the abstract, metaphysical poetry of Leumas Sirrah was a puzzling challenge. "How would you illustrate your poem Infinite? Stuart asked Leumas. Leumas, high school dropout, on probation, police-harassed, penniless, living the desperately marginal life of the man-child in the unpromised land of Watts, went off to meditate. In a few moments he returned. His answer was a question: "Are you able to photograph a teardrop?"

Stuart promised to try. For weeks, he and his integrated camera crew, guided by our Workshop writers, roamed the main streets and the back alleys of Watts photographing and recording what had been considered dangerously unphoto-graphable--the angers and the fears and the frustrations and the teardrops of the inner ghetto. The program was presented on the first anniversary of the holocaust and the national reaction exceeded the most sanguine expectations. The reviews from coast to coast sounded as if they had been written by Stuart Schulberg or Harry Dolan or Johnie Scott. NBC monitors reported that there were more phone calls and letters for this program than for any since the Huntley-Brinkley telecast of the Goldwater Election Night debacle.

I do not mean to suggest that everything was hunky-dory. There was many a hard day's night in the Coffee House. The Man was still a target for abuse and I was the only one available. Young angries would walk up to our large circle and heckle, "Absurd! A white man trying to teach black men! What can a white cat tell the brothers about art? We've got soul, man. You ain't got no soul. You got white shit in your heart!" Other angries would bang the piano or the bongos to drown out the poets or would turn up the hi-fi until it sounded as loud as the sirens of the police cars forever screaming up and down 103rd Street, the shrill and ever-present voice of the enemy.

One day we tried a writing exercise: to choose the one word that would sum up the aspirations of Watts, with a 500-word explanation. Harry Dolan said, "A chance." Birdell Chew said, "Justice." Ernest Mayhand said, "Respect." Leumas Sirrah said, "Identity." Jimmy Sherman said, "Dignity, or pride."

Some young painters and musicians on the periphery of our group burst in with fierce impatience:

"Why fool around with a lot of fancy words for what we want? We all know what we want--freedom. It's the one word. The one true thing. We're tired of all the maybes. We're tired of talking about hopes. Without freedom, we aren't alive. We're walking dead men. We can't wait for your President's Great Society..."

They were interrupted by a young man who had taught himself to play moving jazz on the clarinet and flute: "What's the use of writing what we want? We've been trying to say what we want for years, but who listens to us? We're not people. If you really thought we were human beings, you wouldn't allow us to live like this. Just look up and down this street. The rubble hasn't even been cleared away. It's full of rats. All of us have been raised with rats. Uptown, you're sleeping two in a king-sized bed and we're sleeping four in a single bed. A game of checkers or setting up little Teen Posts won't solve this. If we were some foreign country like the Congo, you'd be worried that we might go Communist and you'd send us millions of dollars to keep us on your side; but here at home, you just take us for granted. You think you've got us on the end of your string like a yo-yo. Well, we're not going to hang on that string anymore.... I tell you, we're ready to take our stand here and to die for our freedom in the streets of Watts."

Do these words frighten and shake you? I heard them week after week. I saw a young artist hang on the wall an effective charcoal sketch dedicated "To my brother, a Marine--put to death by the white man's war in Vietnam." I must confess that many evenings I walked out into the oppressive darkness of 103rd Street shaken and frightened by the depth and intensity of the cumulative anger.

A full year had passed since the terrible cost and the resultant creativity of the fires of 1965. Despite the faint claims of the Honorable John McCone, in our debate in the Los Angeles Times, there have been few objective changes in Watts. A year later, there was still no hospital, still no movie theater, still no recreation center, still no transportation, still no jobs, still no day-care nursery and still no genuine concern from the city authorities. And yet there were some unmistakable signs that Watts was not stagnating. It was undergoing some profound psychological change. A local psychiatrist, Dr. Frederick J. Hacker, put it this way:

What the McCone Commission fails to understand is that from the standpoint of the lower-class Negroes living in Watts, the riots...were not riots at all but a revolution. They thought of themselves as freedom fighters liberating themselves with blood and fire. It could be argued that the Negro community was much better after the riots than before. Because the riots served as a safety valve against the feeling of apathy that was the strongest characteristic of life in Watts.

Camus, in his profound essay on man in revolt, might have been writing about Watts 1965 when he said, "Resentment has been defined as an autointoxication--the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence. Rebellion, on the contrary, breaks the seal and allows the whole being to come into play. It liberates stagnant waters and turns them into a raging torrent." And later, "The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality concedes great factual inequalities."

Albert Camus, amen. On a television symposium discussing the implications of Watts, I had said that the black militancy, the feeling that it was too late for integration, that the Blood had had it with the Man, was tragic but understandable, especially in a vast conglomerate city-suburb such as Los Angeles, where it was galling for the black man on the bottom to salute the flag of one city distinctly divisible, with liberty and justice for the affluent white and the complacent middle class. Having shucked apathy for militancy, and subservience for a new pride in Negritude, would the postrevolt Afro-Americans of south Los Angeles express their new attitude and personality through more fires and snipers and Molotov cocktails or through creative acts of self-development and self-fulfillment?

The answer came in late summer 1966, when a new spirit of unity and a fascinating ambivalence toward the white man produced the Watts Summer Festival. The angry young blacks who found their poetic voices in the works of our Workshop writers or through their paintings and indigenous jazz were ready to take to the streets. There was talk that they would celebrate the Six Days That Shook Los Angeles a year before by moving out into restricted neighborhoods and burning Whitey out. Gun stores reported a run on weapons in white communities and black. Sounder (or more creative) heads prevailed. But they were not the city-hall Uncle Toms nor the middle-class Negroes who had "made it" and moved away from Watts and south-central Los Angeles, never to look back or lend a hand to their ghetto-locked brothers. There was a new breed of militant Negro leadership personified by young men of proved ability, such as Stan Sanders, the first Rhodes scholar from Watts (who now serves on the advisory board of our Writers Workshop), who was able to go to Oxford and later to Yale Law School without taking the familiar road to passive, self-serving middle-class values. Stan and a team of young progressive nationalists decided to turn a potential violent outbreak into a peaceful demonstration of community alliance and productivity. I referred to ambivalence because the Watts Summer Festival was a double-edged celebration: If it resisted the temptation to invade the white man's terrain, it was also a joyous celebration of a victory, a victory for lawlessness and disorder in search of identity and freedom. Camus had written the textbook, both on the revolt and on its celebration. Watts was not waging peace to please the white man, as Langston Hughes' telling essay on the Harlem riot of 1964 describes white Manhattan's warning, "Now Harlem, be nice! Harlem, behave yourself! Lie down, Harlem!"

Watts--August 1966--was neither snarling nor trying to play "good dog" and sit up and do tricks for the happy and relieved white man. It was celebrating a new-found sense of power. There was dancing in the streets, dancing such as Los Angeles has not seen since its true Mexican fiesta days. And instead of fires along Charcoal Alley Number One, there were great tents displaying jazz groups, exhibitions of sculpture and paintings. There were street entertainers and street plays that revived the flavor of commedia dell' arte. In the Coffee House, Jimmy Sherman presented his Ballad from Watts. Studio Watts performed its own interpretation of Genet's The Blacks. And our Writers Workshop, now grown to some 20 members, gave a nightly program of readings--a historic literary moment for Watts--the first time its writers were being heard on a stage, reading from their own works.

For three days, this unique arts festival went on; and lo--the miracle, in all that time, even with the bars of 103rd Street going full blast (and that's a blast, baby!), there was not a single incident. With white tourists all over Watts, not a single ugly or dangerous moment. Here at last was law and order. But who's law?

In a rare moment of forbearance, the despised and heavy-handed Los Angeles Police Department had agreed to withdraw completely from "the curfew area," the city-hall euphemism for the ghetto. Instead, the policing was left to the Watts Summer Festival Committee, which drew on the young black nationalists to maintain that magic balance called "law and order." I saw youthful Leroi Lam, foolishly accorded a full page in Life in a story on black extremists, cruising 103rd Street on a motor scooter, courteously directing civilian traffic. White visitors poured in from their comfortable pockets in the enormous pool table of Los Angeles and were greeted not only with hospitality but with unusual efficiency. The young men responsible had created an unprecedented community organization, the Community Alert Patrol. Before and after the Festival, they used cars resembling the feared black-and-white police cars, got hold of cameras and walkie-talkie equipment, and when arrests were being made--always a tense moment when white men are handcuffing and sometimes also cuffing black men in the ghetto--the CAP was on hand to photograph and record any use of excessive force. Their presence produced an unusual atmosphere of calm.

Since there is no border guard who stands on the boundary between life and art, the ingenious self-protection and supervision of the Watts Summer Festival may be as creative as the contents of the Festival itself. When our Workshop readings were presented in the Watts Happening Coffee House, it was suggested that we find an over-all title. Johnie Scott and some other articulate members were critical of The Angry Voices of Watts, because they felt the title was narrow and self-limiting. "Of course we're angry, but we're not only angry," Johnie said. And others chimed in: "It sounds like we're only shouting and screaming, 'Get Whitey!' It seems to us we're also trying to be thoughtful or to remember our childhoods or to be self-critical." "Or maybe even just funny once in a while," Harley Mims added. So it was put to a vote, with various suggestions, and after heated discussions (I can hear Harry Dolan saying, "What other kind do we have in the Watts Writers Workshop?"), there was a landslide victory for From the Ashes. The writers of Watts were expressing the hope not only of their 20-odd voices but of the entire community. From the ashes, out of the rubble, out of apathy, despair, neglect, hopelessness, physical and human ruin might rise a black phoenix. "Our job is nothing less than to rebuild this ghetto from the ground up and from the inside out," Sonora McKeller said. "To regenerate the ghetto as the Jews did when they were in the minority bag on the East Side of New York."

It was in this spirit that Sonora and other writers in the Workshop read proudly from their works at the significant Watts Festival of 1966.

But it was merely an uneasy truce. Once more, the mailed fist of the feared and fearful L. A. P. D. came down on Watts. Watts was marked as the hard pit of the bitter ghetto fruit and there was constant harassment. Young men were picked up for loitering, for being on the streets after midnight, for having no definite address, and on suspicion for all sorts of horrendous crimes. Our Writers Workshop was no special flower standing taller than the weeds of Watts. When the troopers struck, our young poets felt the blows along with the others. The Watts Happening Coffee House was a particular target. To the unemployed, dropout, angry, talented young people of 103rd Street, the Coffee House had special meaning, because it wasn't a Teen Post, a government handout, but theirs, their very own--from the paintings covering the walls to the furniture they had made with their own hands. It was not strictly legal, but three or four of our young writers were sleeping on the sofas of the Coffee House, because they were homeless. Several of them had been living on the streets since they were 15 or 16. Young men emerging from the Coffee House were intercepted by nervous officers of the law and forced humiliatingly to spread-eagle against the wall while they were searched for arms and dope. Young men, including some of our teenage poets, at times wearing yellow Malcolm X sweat shirts, would see the hated police cars and run. The white helmets would assume that flight was a confession of guilt. "I don't think they were arresting us as individuals," said Leumas Sirrah, our homeless poet-philosopher, who reminded some readers of Blake and others of a primitive Rimbaud, "I think they were arresting our sweaters."

On the day the 18-year-old Leumas Sirrah was to receive our poetry award at a presentation in the Westminster assembly hall, he was in jail "on suspicion of armed robbery." Some of his friends from the Workshop were with him when he was busted. They knew he had never carried a gun. We wanted Leumas out of jail to receive his award. And so this unlikely conversation occurred. Talking to a lieutenant in charge of this great armed-robbery case at the 77th Street Precinct, I said, "I don't know whether or not you realize it, Lieutenant, but you have one of our best young writers in there. I'm very impressed with his poetry." To which the lieutenant responded, "And I'm very impressed with his ability to get arrested." (Leumas, at that time, had one previous arrest for trespassing, in search of a place to sleep, when he was 16.) "Is that his ability or your ability?" I asked the lieutenant.

And there you have it. The classic confrontation. The 77th Street Precinct, with which our Workshop seems to be involved in a continuing dialog, looks on Leumas Sirrah as its natural enemy, as a suspected criminal, as a potential menace to society. We look on Leumas as a natural poet, as a potential artist who has survived miraculously the fetid streets of Watts, as a poet of promise, as a young man who may contribute to the enrichment of American life.

We turned to our old friend "Golden Boy" Art Aragon (the greatest boxing attraction in California ring history), who was now a bail bondsman with a card that carried the old Golden Boy touch: "I'll get you out if it takes ten years." The Golden Boy had Leumas out in time to stand up and accept his prize at our first Watts Writers' Awards. Leumas was photographed and interviewed. He shied away from publicity. There were television news cameras that he tried to avoid. "The more the police see me, the more they'll arrest me," he said. I thought he was exaggerating. But the next day, Leumas was arrested again for "armed robbery." It happened that this alleged crime took place exactly at the time Leumas was receiving his parchment at the Westminster assembly. Again I argued with the 77th Street Precinct. I also discussed it with Leumas' probation officer. "This isn't law enforcement, it's clearly harassment," I said. This time, there were hundreds of witnesses to testify as to where Leumas was on the morning of the crime. Even the television cameras. Father Morris Samuel, a swinging white Episcopalian priest on the staff of the almost-100-percent Negro Westminster Neighborhood Association, went over to the 77th Street Precinct himself, and once again, without Leumas ever being brought before a judge, the charges were dropped.

But the arrest record was growing. The 77th Street Precinct's ability to arrest Leumas Sirrah was increasingly impressive. Soon its sheet would be so long that young Leumas would be virtually unemployable or unable to complete his education, despite his ragged dreams of going on to college. Leumas was at our home resting up and catching his breath (and, as usual, writing poetry) for a few days when Edward P. Morgan dropped in. The distinguished news commentator later described Leumas as "a slight, soft-voiced but outspoken dropout." Morgan asked him to what he owed his development as a poet. "Partly to life," Leumas said. "To whoever it is that I am. Partly to Mr. Schulberg and the Writers Workshop. I was one of the first members." He paused, and then added, absolutely deadpan(and I am never quite sure when Leumas is putting us on and when he is putting us off), "I also ought to thank the police department. The police have presented me with an opportunity to put my thoughts in writing."

Captain Tom King of the 77th (who later did an outstanding job of trying to prevent Harry Dolan's nationally acclaimed teleplay Losers Weepers from being produced in its natural locale in Watts), may not realize what a center for the arts he is conducting in his celebrated jail. There is no question but that not only Leumas Sirrah and Harry Dolan but the entire Watts Writers Workshop owe Captain King and his unsmiling lieutenants and sergeants a debt of gratitude for their unusual contribution to the arts of Watts. Any moment now, they may apply, as we have, for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities.

In a real if inadvertent sense, Captain King may also be credited as one of the founders of the Frederick Douglass Writers House that has risen from the ashes at 98th and Beach Streets, a few blocks down from Westminster, in the heart of Watts. For it was after the second, or perhaps the third arrest of Leumas, after a protracted stay in the county jail for some other of our Workshop poets, during a period in which I often found myself roused in the small hours for the latest emergency, that I came to a full awareness of what I had begun. It had been naïve or shortsighted or callow to think that I could go to Watts for three hours of a single afternoon once a week. Johnie Scott had discovered in the course of his creative collapse at Harvard that you can take the boy out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the boy. Seemingly remote in Beverly Hills, I was suffering a related experience. The midnight emergency phone calls. The writer with whom I remonstrated that I could not read a novel in scratchy longhand and who pounded the table in anger and said, "Goddamn it, I had a typewriter, saved up for three months to buy a secondhand portable. But I had to pawn it, goddamn it, to get five dollars to keep from starving." And the unemployed and homeless 18-year-old (not Leumas this time) who started swaying away from his chair in class until he was about to slump to the floor. Was he sick? I asked him. No, he said, it was simply that he had not eaten for two days.

Then it hit me. A creative writing class in Watts was fine, as far as it went, but it didn't go very far if the writers were homeless and hungry and couldn't afford typewriters or even the most basic writing supplies. Most of these young writers would fall apart, break up on the rocks of poverty and prejudice, because they had no address, no base, no center, no anchor. That discovery was the genesis of Douglass House, named in honor of Frederick Douglass, the runaway slave who became one of the most powerful speakers in the cause of abolition, who founded and edited the influential newspaper The North Star and who wrote My Bondage and My Freedom. Frederick Douglass had fought his way up from slavery, from the cruel beatings and heavy chains of a professional slave breaker, to discover the power of the word. A slave of illiteracy, of the cold-blooded system of illiteracy, he had become his own master and a master of the language of his land. It was Frederick Douglass who wrote:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.

The beginnings of Douglass House could not have been more unprepossessing. We drove up and down the streets of Watts looking for vacant houses until we found a nine-room house, literally in ruins, but with possibilities. All the windows were shattered. Glass and unspeakable debris littered every room. It could be rented for $95 per month. I thought I could swing that personally while I worked on some primitive plan to renovate and support the house. The writers themselves cleared away the litter, although we were somewhat shorthanded, because three of our youngest members were off on a month's sabbatical (again, creatively productive) in the county jail. How to raise the money to rebuild the house, furnish it, equip it with typewriters, a reference library and the other tools of our trade, pay the salaries of a resident manager, a secretary and an editorial assistant? For it was both gratifying and alarming to find ourselves becoming a kind of spontaneous institution, with frequent requests for literary contributions, for appearances on TV and radio programs and at creative and educational seminars and conferences, for press interviews with individual writers. The BBC wanted to film readings to be telecast in England. West magazine commissioned a piece by James Thomas Jackson on the founding of Douglass House. Irving Stone had expressed his astonishment at the quality of the poetry of Scott, Sherman and Sirrah. Would he contribute $25 per month or $300 per year to support Douglass House? Yes, he would, and so would associates in his informal writers' circle--Irving Wallace, Professor Stanley Wolpert, of the history department at UCLA, Professor Allan Nevins, historians Mort Lewis and Justin Turner. We began to reach out to friends across the country and the world and, almost magically, it seemed, checks began to pour into our Douglass House account, from James Baldwin in Istanbul, from Irwin Shaw in Klosters, Switzerland, from the Richard Burtons in Rome, from Steve Allen and Ira Gershwin in Hollywood, Herbert Gold in San Francisco, Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Art Buchwald in Washington, Richard Rodgers, Ann Petry, Dore Schary, Paddy Chayefsky and Frank Loesser in New York, Harry Golden in North Carolina, Hodding Carter in Mississippi, Elia Kazan in Connecticut, John Steinbeck in Sag Harbor.

Steinbeck's check was accompanied by an interesting letter:

I saw the product of your project on Channel 13. I was astonished at the quality of the material. Some of it was superb. For one thing, I was impressed with the growth of your people. I am so tired of one-note writing, sad homosexuality is not enough as a working tool for a writer. Your people have learned early that one is not aware enough to scream with pain if one has not had glimpses of ecstasy. And both belong in our craft--else there would be neither.

Then John Steinbeck, ever a practical man, an old-fashioned American who can fix things and make things with his hands, added a paragraph that was characteristically pragmatic. Writing individual appeals to 50 or 60 writer friends must be an enormous personal effort, he empathized. He was a member of the Council for the National Foundation for the Arts. He would recommend to Roger Stevens (who had sent in his own personal check for $300), head of the National Endowment for the Arts, that the Watts Writers Workshop receive a grant from the Foundation. It seemed to Steinbeck that the literary workshop we had going in Watts was exactly the kind of project the National Foundation would want to endorse.

By irony, or signs in the heavens, or crazy luck, which may all amount to the same thing, the day that we were to deliver our written appeal and budget to the Foundation was the same day a delegation from our Workshop was invited to testify before the Ribicoff subcommittee holding hearings on urban dislocation, disorientation, decomposition and everything else that is eating away at the core of the megalopolis: that monster of parental planlessness and city planlessness that Lewis Mumford long ago prophesied would haunt the 21st Century if we did not bestir ourselves to find bold creative solutions in the 20th. Harry Dolan looked at Senator Ribicoff and said: "I will not let you off so easily as the Germans claimed after the slaughter of the Jews, 'We did not know.'" Huntley-Brinkley played back part of Johnie Scott's testimony on the evening of his appearance and The New York Times judged it worthy of two columns of newsprint and a follow-up editorial by James Reston.

Written statements by veteran ghetto antipoverty fighters Sonora McKeller and Birdell Chew were also entered in the Congressional Record and we expressed our regret that all the members of the Frederick Douglass Writers House could not be present, for each one would have had something pertinent, something all-embracing and at the same time individual to contribute. My own testimony came to this conclusion:

"If instead of the creative talents we have begun to tap in Watts--and Watts is everywhere, from south Los Angeles and San Francisco to Hough in Cleveland, the south sides of Chicago and Philadelphia, and Harlem--if, instead of the creative talent to be discovered underground, another kind of treasure was going to waste; if oil was not being brought to the surface but instead was being allowed to seep through the ground and be wasted, then I can hear the business community, the practical business-minded, $olid-citizen$ of America crying, 'Wait! What a waste! We must save it! Channel it! Money is being lost.'

"Well, this is another kind of oil, another natural resource, a human resource seeping down through the earth, through the underground, the subculture. And surely it calls for an equal amount of efficiency, an equal amount of fervor if we are not to continue to squander a part of our wealth, our spiritual wealth, our young manhood, and particularly the black young manhood that not only Scott and Dolan but a score of our writers could testify is going to tragic waste in all the ghettos of America.

"When I first put up that notice, 'Creative Writing Class,' in Watts, I had no idea what I might discover. But I do now. I have no illusions that our Workshop has cornered all the writing talent in Watts. New writers wander into Douglass House with their stories and poems in hand almost every day. Not to mention the musical talent, the painting and sculpture such as Noah Purifoy's imaginative junk put together and re-created literally from the rubble of the revolt. Or the natural acting talent that may be symbolized by Sonora McKeller, an amateur who more than held her own with tremendous effect in the midst of powerful professional Negro actors in Mr. Dolan's Losers Weepers. Deep into my second year with the Douglass House writers of Watts, I am convinced that there are Leumas Sirrahs and Harry Dolans and Johnie Scotts and James T. Jacksons and Harley Mimses and Alvin Saxons all over America, wasting away as janitors or menials or unemployed. I am reminded of Gray's Elegy--often the poem comes back to haunt me--and it may yet come to haunt us all if we do not heed its lesson: Thomas Gray walking through an obscure graveyard and wondering what would have happened if these people unknown in their potters' graves had not been neglected and overlooked, what might have happened if they had been given their full share, their full chance:

Perhaps in this neglected spot islaid

Some heart once pregnant withcelestial fire;

Hands, that the rod of empiremight have sway'd,

Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

"And a few verses later:

Some village Hampden that withdauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood,

Some mute, inglorious Milton, heremay rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of hiscountry's blood."

The writers of Douglass House--and the Douglass Houses waiting to be founded all over America--may or may not be Miltons. But for too long they have been mute and inglorious. My experience convinces me that the young, angry social worker who first greeted me in Watts was telling me the stone truth. There in the poolroom lurks the nuclear physicist, lost to drug addiction through criminal neglect and want of motivation. There on the street corner drifts the young poet who flunked English in the tenth grade. And, finally, who is flunking--he or we? The society, the school is flunking. The substandard ghetto school, the race-ridden society is the biggest dropout of them all. Think about it, but don't think about it too long. The time is too short and the cost too great. Think of finding these young men of mysterious depths, of talents neglected, before the poet or the lute player goes to his pauper's inglorious grave. He may be only one among a thousand, or 10,000. But he may find, like Ralph Ellison, Claude Brown--perhaps now Harry Dolan or Johnie Scott--that he speaks for 100,000 or for 20,000,000. His single candle may light a thousand thousand candles. And the light and warmth of these candles may help redeem and regenerate the core of the ghetto, that decomposed inner city, waiting either for a phoenix to rise from the ashes or for bigger and more terrible fires.

The ambivalence and ferocious complexity that I have found in my two years in Watts are expressed profoundly in the wide range of attitudes and feelings within our Workshop, now grown to 30 members, with 35 recent applicants. There is a young element with deep distrust of the white man and with strong leanings toward black nationalism and separatism. There are older members, no less militant but oriented toward American justice in the form of integration. Some are swayed in both directions. There may even be a few of what old and loving but also firm and fierce Birdell Chew calls "crawling, creeping Uncle Toms." Somehow they have learned to coexist in the Writers Workshop, containing their differences and even their opposite poles.

I have been asked if I am not afraid of the angry young men of Watts who are said to contemplate guerrilla warfare. I am more afraid of the greed and selfishness and the blind intransigence and the appalling ignorance of social dynamics that build concentration-camp walls around enclaves like Watts.