This inability to grapple with and recognize systemic inequality when there were no “colored only” signs led the public to define what they saw in the North and the West as just Black people’s natural tendency toward theft (looting), arson, and violence. In a 1965 Gallup poll, 64 percent of whites in California believed that the uprising in Watts, an area of Los Angeles, was due to “lack of respect for law enforcement and outside agitators.”
