Budd Schulberg on Watts

By Budd Schulberg, July 2, 1967: Johnie Scott, coming home from Stanford for this summer's vacation, returns to a world bordered by 92nd Street and Imperial Highway on the north and south, by Central Avenue and Alameda on the west and east, a ghetto within a ghetto, where more than 450 of the 550 who left Edwin Markham Junior High School with him never made it through high school and where those who did finished with a D-minus average and a 6th-grade reading level.

White Los Angeles and her middle-class Negro allies nod contentedly and ask, What do they want? Are they never satisfied? "What the white people call improvement is nothing but tokenism. It's like the patient is in danger of bleeding to death and all the Man can think of is to apply another Band-Aid."