Chapter 15: Watts

At the very top of Robert Richardson's stories, above the headlines and in bold letters, the editors put two words: Eyewitness Account. They were making sure that readers of the Los Angeles Times understood.

The Negro district of the south Los Angeles area that would come to be known as Watts was exploding with some of the fiercest rioting ever in the United States. Those two words -- Eyewitness Account -- signaled that with Richardson, the Times had a person on the inside to see firsthand and to report in detail exactly what was going on in the Negro district.

Just below Richardson's byline, in much smaller type, was an editor's note: "Robert Richardson, 24, a Negro, is an advertising salesman for the Times...." That was the newspaper's way of admitting that it did not have a single reporter who was black. And that to effectively cover what was happening just a few miles from its newsroom, it had to grab a guy who wasn't a reporter and had no training but who was black and could get on the inside in Watts when it mattered.

Robert Richardson did not get a battlefield commission. Much as he wanted it, he never became a staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times. What eventually did happen to him was a story so incredible that 25 years later, it was told to a national audience in Heat Wave, a made-for-television movie.

But in August of 1965, in those days of the event that became known as the Watts riots, the contribution to journalism by Robert Richardson was enormous. His stories ran on Page 1 day after day for a reason: He brought back a ton of significant detail. He was one who grabbed the readers and pulled them inside so that they would know what it was like to be in the middle of fierce rioting.

In a first-person account (telephoned to a veteran staffer who did the writing), he related: "It was the most terrifying thing I've ever seen in my life.... It's a wonder that anyone with white skin got out of there alive.... Every time a car with whites in it entered the area, the word spread like lightning down the street: 'Here come Whitey, get him!'" Whitey was soon to become the preferred term of derision in the ghettos.

Richardson brought back a lot of the language from the streets. He told of crowds racing through the streets, hurling Molotov cocktails into store after store, and repeatedly shouting the slogan, "Burn, baby, burn!" -- another phrase that framed the vocabulary.

Watts was different. It was open warfare. The blood of a lot of blacks was spilled, but whites died too. Even white law enforcement officers were killed, and that hadn't happened in any of the places where riots erupted in the summer of 1964. Watts was a turning point; Richardson's reporting was a part of bringing that to the public.

In the summer of 1965, Bill Thomas was the young city editor at the Los Angeles Times. He says, "The whole surprise aspect [of what happened] is totally overdrawn. The year before, we had reporters out there [in the Negro district of south Los Angeles], and we had a six-part series saying that there could be trouble. But the truth is, nobody wanted to read it, and they didn't. We had the stories -- stories about the police brutality, the poor education, the dismal living conditions, all of that, all of the complaints. Some of us knew that something was going to happen. But people didn't want to read of those things. People said that we had too many stories about [black problems] in the paper."

Before the riots, Thomas said, the south Los Angeles area was seldom referred to as Watts. Newsweek started that, he said. "They had a piece, and when they called it Watts, everybody else just picked it up."

"He [Richardson] didn't live there. When the riots broke out, he came to me. He knew some people in the newsroom. He volunteered to go in and do what he could. He came to me raw. He could have been a writer. He had a feel.... It was too bad he couldn't get over."

In 1990, 25 years later, Irv Letofsky, a Times staff writer, found Robert Richardson on the set of the film in which the actor Blair Underwood portrayed him. In an interview, Richardson told Letofsky that after 1965 everything went downhill for him. He said that he had not been an advertising salesman when he riots broke out. He was a $145-a-week messenger in the classified department. He said that after reporting in Watts, he was made a trainee and promised a crack at making the staff.

Letofsky wrote:
"Richardson's life didn't go so well [after Watts]. His $99-a-week reporting job (versus the $145 he'd been making as a messenger in classified) had him working nights on the 'disaster desk' which involved, as he describes it, hanging with some other staffers at a popular bar near the Times waiting for a fire or some catastrophe. He'd go to the scene and call in details.

"'I was incapable of doing anything in depth,' he said, 'I really wasn't trained for that. I was scared to death every night.'

"Richardson, with an exuberant, wry personality, is most candid about his alcoholism. He related that within a year, he was fired from the Times for drinking, among many such dismissals he has endured over the last 25 years.

"'I wound up on Skid Row,' Richardson admitted. 'And I was down there for maybe a year. I became a connoisseur of good cardboard (his mattress).'"

Letofsky continues:
"His resume is the stuff of the incredible: the Army (a sharpshooter), Kelly Girl temp typist, ditch digger, welfare work, truck driving, insurance, private investigation (including bounty hunting), dish washer in Phoenix, disc jockey in Houston, selling tamales out of a pushcart in New Orleans, three months at the California Institution for Men at Chino for check forgery, plus various assignments on local radio and TV.

"'This movie is re-creating my life,' Richardson said. 'Nine months ago, when we first started this, well, once again I was sitting on a curb, sleeping on cardboard in shelters and once again the Salvation Army was there and put me to work in a chapel, gaining my self-respect back, starting playing piano in the chapel and working as a tutor, reading, writing and math skills. And getting spiritual guidance.'

"How long since he's had a drink?

"'You know, I don't like to discuss time. I do this one day at a time. I didn't drink yesterday. I'm not drinking today.'

"He doesn't know what he'll do next.

"'It'll be revealed to me,' Robert Richardson said."

Despite our best efforts, we were unable to find Richardson in the Los Angeles area.

As it happened, for its coverage of the Watts riots, the Los Angeles Times won journalism's highest award, the Pulitzer Prize. And six years later, Bill Thomas became editor of the newspaper.

Maybe Richardson's legacy was this: early in 1966, within a year of the riots, Ray Rodgers became the first black reporter on the staff of the Los Angeles Times.