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On the night of August 11, 1965, a routine drunk driving arrest on Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street escalated into an incident of police brutality, when cops beat down an African American family. Chanting "Burn, baby, burn!” an angry crowd of witnesses erupted, setting off riots that lasted for 5 days. The Watts Rebellion happened at the midpoint of the Sixties, and became the hinge on which the Civil Rights era became the Black Power era. The cultural aftershocks would reverberate for generations.
The Watts Prophets are a living bridge to this time. Contemporaries like the Harlem-based Last Poets have received their props, but the Prophets are just as important to the histories of hip-hop and African American cultural movements. In 2003, Quincy Jones called the Prophets and the Poets "the seminal figures in our culture, just as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were in the bebop revolution of the 1940s."
The story of the Watts Prophets begins shortly after the riots.
Watts had become a hub of political and cultural activity. Money from government, foundations, and Hollywood liberals poured into the area. The Black Panthers and US Organization set up on 103rd Street. The Frederick Douglass House Foundation, the Mafundi Institute, and the Watts Happening Café opened for business.
Watts was the new Black mecca, a space of creative vitality as rich as Harlem had been in the 20s. Thousands of young African Americans came west to Watts to be part of a new age of Black liberation. "Watts, post outrage, was in a heavy state of fermentation," wrote the writer Odie Hawkins, who had moved from Chicago. "Everybody was a poet, a philosopher, an artist or simply something exotic. Even people who weren't any of those things thought they were."
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