The novelist Walter Mosley, who was thirteen years old and living in Watts at the time, would later write, in the voice of his fictional character Easy Rawlins: But if you come from down in Watts or Fifth Ward or Harlem, every soul you come upon has been threatened and beaten and jailed. If you have kids they will be beaten. And no matter how far back you remember, there’s a beatin’ there waiting for you. And you see some man stopped by cops and some poor mother cryin’ for his release it speaks to you. You don’t know that woman, you don’t know if the man bein’ arrested has done something
...more
