Commentary: Fifty-five summers have gone by since the Watts rebellion. How far have we traveled?
In the summer of 1965, my birthday cake was stuck at a bakery across town. My mother couldn't get to it because Watts was on fire, which sent surrounding cities, like ours in the South Bay, into lockdown.
No way could she have known when she placed the order for my fifth birthday that a white highway patrol officer would soon pull over a young Black man for reckless driving and, in the ensuing chaos, arrest him, his brother and his mother. It was a sequence of events that played poorly in a
