“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, lawless repression of the LAPD. In a rollicking new book, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener tell the story of a decade of explosions.
Los Angeles police patrol the city’s streets sometime in the 1960s.
The 1960s in Los Angeles were explosive. The LAPD brutally enforced segregation, raided gay bars, policed the counterculture, and repressed radical students and anti-war protestors. But the working class of Los Angeles fought back against the police and the city elite with passion and muscle.
Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Mike Davis and Jon Wiener about their new book, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties (Verso 2020), which covers everything from the causes of the Watts rebellion to the outsize role of the local Communist Party in city politics to the persecution of Venice, “the last poor beach” in Los Angeles.
Meagan Day
The heavy presence of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is felt throughout the entire book. It seems like nearly every left-wing political movement in Los Angeles at the time was acting in response to it. What was the LAPD like under Chief William H. Parker?
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