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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

1968 Assassination of Robert F Kennedy

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3. 1963 Assassination of John F. Kennedy In Frame 375 of the Zapruder film, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy crawls toward the back of the presidential limousine as Secret Service agent Clint Hill scrambles to help her. Photo: Zapruder Film ©, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza - Fifty-eight years ago in Dallas, Texas, Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, but since Oswald himself was killed shortly after the assassination, questions lingered about whether anyone else was involved, feeding conspiracy theories. President Joe Biden ordered the release of the documents in October but it's being done in stages, with thousands remaining secret amid intelligence agency concerns about what they could reveal.
4. 1968 MLK Assassination Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, an event that sent shock waves reverberating around the world. A Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King had led the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, using a combination of impassioned speeches and nonviolent protests to fight segregation and achieve significant civil rights advances for African Americans. His assassination led to an outpouring of anger among Black Americans, as well as a period of national mourning that helped speed the way for an equal housing bill that would be the last significant legislative achievement of the civil rights era.
7. Malcolm X Assassinated After spending a year as a hunted man, Malcolm X was shot and killed during a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York, on February 21, 1965. The assailants, at least three in number, were members of the Black Muslim group the Nation of Islam, the group with which Malcolm X had been a prominent minister for ten years before he split with them in March 1964. Exactly who shot Malcolm X has been hotly debated over the decades. One man, Talmage Hayer, was arrested at the scene and was definitely a shooter. Two other men were arrested and sentenced but were most likely wrongly accused. The confusion over the identity of the shooters compounds the question of why Malcolm X was assassinated and has led to a wide range of conspiracy theories The Assassination On the morning of Sunday, February 21, 1965, Malcolm X woke up in his 12th-floor hotel room at the Hilton Hotel in New York. Around 1 p.m., he checked out of the hotel and headed for the Audubon Ballroom, where he was to speak at a meeting of his OAAU. He parked his blue Oldsmobile nearly 20 blocks away, which seems surprising for someone who was being hunted. When he arrived at the Audubon Ballroom, he headed backstage. He was stressed and it was beginning to show. He lashed out at several people, shouting angrily. This was very out of character for him. When the OAAU meeting was to start, Benjamin Goodman went out on stage to speak first. He was to speak for about a half an hour, warming up the crowd of about 400 before Malcolm X was to speak. Then it was Malcolm X’s turn. He stepped up to the stage and stood behind a wooden podium. After he gave the traditional Muslim welcome, “As-salaam alaikum,” and got the response, a ruckus began in the middle of the crowd. A man had stood up, shouting that a man next to him had tried to pick-pocket him. Malcolm X’s bodyguards left the stage area to go deal with the situation. This left Malcolm unprotected on the stage. Malcolm X sidestepped away from the podium, saying “Let’s be cool, brothers.” It was then that a man stood up near the front of the crowd, pulled out a sawed-off shotgun from beneath his trench-coat and shot at Malcolm X. The blast from the shotgun made Malcolm X fall backward, over some chairs. The man with the shotgun fired again. Then, two other men rushed the stage, firing a Luger and a .45 automatic pistol at Malcolm X, hitting mostly his legs. The noise from the shots, the violence that had just been committed, and a smoke bomb that had been set off in the back, all added to the chaos. En masse, the audience tried to escape. The assassins used this confusion to their advantage as they blended into the crowd—all but one escaped. The one who did not escape was Talmage “Tommy” Hayer (sometimes called Hagan). Hayer had been shot in the leg by one of Malcolm X’s bodyguards as he was trying to escape. Once outside, the crowd realized that Hayer was one of the men who had just murdered Malcolm X and the mob started to attack Hayer. Luckily, a policeman happened to be walking by, saved Hayer, and managed to get him into the back of a police car. During the pandemonium, several of Malcolm X’s friends rushed to the stage to try to help him. Despite their efforts, Malcolm X was too far gone. Malcolm X’s wife, Betty Shabazz, had been in the room with their four daughters that day. She ran up to her husband, shouting, “They are killing my husband!” Malcolm X was put on a stretcher and carried across the street to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. Doctors tried to revive Malcolm X by opening up his chest and massaging his heart, but their attempt was unsuccessful.
8. Malcolm X and Ronald Stokes 1963 - After an altercation where a cop was shot, LAPD officers attacked the Black Muslim temple, a block away, where unarmed members were leaving after evening prayers. The final tally: one Muslim man dead, seven others seriously wounded, fourteen arraigned on felonies, and the temple ransacked. Malcolm, at the funeral, praised LA Black organizations for protesting the attack: "Our unity shocked them and we should continue to shock the white man by working together." (Set the Night on Fire L.A. n the Sixties, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener)
9. Malcolm X and NOI
10. 1964 Malcolm X holding a rifle at the window of his home “Famous photograph that was in “Life” magazine in March of 1964 and again in “Ebony” in September of that same year. In the picture, Malcolm X is holding a M1 Carbine in his right hand, and pulling back the blinds on his window with his left hand, looking outside his Queens, NY, home to keep watch. He had good cause. On Feb. 14, 1965, his house was firebombed. A week later, on Feb. 21, 1965, while giving a speech, with his family in the audience, Malcolm X was assassinated.”
11. 1962 LAPD attack a Black Muslim Temple, killing Ronald Stokes April 27: An altercation leads to police entering the Los Angeles Temple and killing its unarmed secretary, Ronald Stokes. "They're going to pay for it," Malcolm declares, and goes to Los Angeles to eulogize Stokes at a funeral attended by 2,000 people. He says the police shot "innocent unarmed Black men in cold blood" and urges action. But Elijah Muhammad resists calls for an aggressive response. An all-white coroner's jury deliberates about Stokes' killing for 23 minutes and terms it "justifiable homicide." By contrast, 14 Nation of Islam members are indicted for assault in the incident and 11 are found guilty. Later this year, Malcolm confirms that Elijah Muhammad has engaged in repeated adultery and had children with at least three of his young secretaries. "I felt almost out of my mind," Malcolm says. Herbert Muhammad asks Muhammad Speaks to minimize coverage of Malcolm X.

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1. 1961 First Freedom Rides from Washington DC to Alabama
2. Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike 1968
3. 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS For thirteen days in October 1962 the world waited—seemingly on the brink of nuclear war—and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. President Kennedy did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles. He met in secret with his advisors for several days to discuss the problem. After many long and difficult meetings, Kennedy decided to place a naval blockade, or a ring of ships, around Cuba. The aim of this "quarantine," as he called it, was to prevent the Soviets from bringing in more military supplies. He demanded the removal of the missiles already there and the destruction of the sites. On October 22, President Kennedy spoke to the nation about the crisis in a televised address. Click here to listen to the Address in the Digital Archives (JFKWHA-142-001) No one was sure how Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev would respond to the naval blockade and US demands. But the leaders of both superpowers recognized the devastating possibility of a nuclear war and publicly agreed to a deal in which the Soviets would dismantle the weapon sites in exchange for a pledge from the United States not to invade Cuba. In a separate deal, which remained secret for more than twenty-five years, the United States also agreed to remove its nuclear missiles from Turkey. Although the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba, they escalated the building of their military arsenal; the missile crisis was over, the arms race was not. Click here to listen to the Remarks in the Digital Archives (JFKWHA-143-004) In 1963, there were signs of a lessening of tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. In his commencement address at American University, President Kennedy urged Americans to reexamine Cold War stereotypes and myths and called for a strategy of peace that would make the world safe for diversity. Two actions also signaled a warming in relations between the superpowers: the establishment of a teletype "Hotline" between the Kremlin and the White House and the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on July 25, 1963. In language very different from his inaugural address, President Kennedy told Americans in June 1963, "For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
4. 1960 Greensboro Sit-ins "The Greensboro Four were four young Black men who staged the first sit-in at Greensboro: Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil. All four were students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College. They were influenced by the nonviolent protest techniques practiced by Mohandas Gandhi, as well as the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) in 1947, in which interracial activists rode across the South in buses to test a recent Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate bus travel. The Greensboro Four, as they became known, had also been spurred to action by the brutal murder in 1955 of a young Black boy, Emmett Till, who had allegedly whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi store."
5. 1968 MLK Assassination Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, an event that sent shock waves reverberating around the world. A Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King had led the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, using a combination of impassioned speeches and nonviolent protests to fight segregation and achieve significant civil rights advances for African Americans. His assassination led to an outpouring of anger among Black Americans, as well as a period of national mourning that helped speed the way for an equal housing bill that would be the last significant legislative achievement of the civil rights era.
6. 1964 Draft Resistance; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a statement opposing the Vietnam War "On July 4, 1964, the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) wrote a letter to the Vietnamese Front of National Liberation congratulating them on their “victories against U.S. imperialism.” They expressed their commitment to creating “a new world free from exploitation of man by man,” and explained their rejection of U.S counter revolutionary measures against their Third World brothers. Eighteen months later, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a statement opposing the Vietnam War, exposing that the U.S. hid behind the discourse of democracy and freedom to undermine the sovereignty and self-determination of racialized people throughout the Global South and in the United States. Given this deception and hypocrisy, SNCC offered its support to those who refused to be drafted into the service of U.S. imperial aggression, and encouraged Americans to put their energy toward the struggle for civil and human rights, instead of the propagation of war and suffering."
7. 1966 Black Cat Raid Established in 1966, the Personal Rights in Defense and Education (PRIDE) group set out to combat police harassment of homosexuals and provide a social outlet for gay men in Los Angeles. Founded by Steve Ginsburg, co-chair of the 1973 Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco, the gay rights organization existed for only two years but made a profound and lasting impact. On Feb. 11, 1967, PRIDE organized a peaceful demonstration protesting the Los Angeles Police Department’s raid of the Black Cat Tavern, a gay bar in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Undercover vice squad officers beat and arrested gay male patrons on the evening of Dec. 31, 1966, for openly engaging in the traditional New Year’s Eve kiss. PRIDE’s action in response to the Black Cat Tavern incident was one of the earliest organized gay rights demonstrations in the United States. Two years later, the Stonewall Riots, a series of spontaneous demonstrations protesting police raids at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, would usher in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer and transgender/transsexual (LGBTQ) rights movement. Prior to the police raid on the Black Cat Tavern, PRIDE published a single-page monthly newsletter that would become The Los Angeles Advocate. The original newsletter provided legal advice and printed an updated list of gay-friendly bars in the Los Angeles area. The Los Angeles Advocate would later evolve into the oldest and largest LGBTQ publication in the United States. Now known simply as The Advocate, the publication still runs monthly and covers the LGBTQ community. PRIDE also created a small instructional booklet called The Pocket Lawyer for people to carry in the event that they were arrested for homosexual conduct. The booklet made clear an individual’s right to refuse to make a statement or to give personal information, such as employment.
8. 1970 First LA Pride Parade The first L.A. Pride Parade (originally Gay Pride Parade), organized by Rev. Bob Humphries (founder, United States Mission), Morris Kight (founder, Gay Liberation Front) and Rev. Troy Perry (founder, Metropolitan Community Church) and the Christopher Street West Association, was held on June 28, 1970 in Los Angeles. L.A.'s Gay Pride Parade permit did not come easily. No city had, until that time, ever experienced thousands of LGBTQ people marching openly and LAPD Chief Edward Davis did not hesitate to remind organizers that homosexuality was still illegal in California. Rev. Perry recounted that Davis declared to them, “As far as I’m concerned, granting a permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers.” The Los Angeles Police Commission, for their part, claiming to fear violent homophobic counter-reactions, imposed excessive permit requirements, such as $1.5 million in fees. Parade organizers and the ACLU challenged the city in court, taking their fight all the way to the California Supreme Court. The court ended up ordering the city to issue a parade permit without discriminatory add-ons. L.A.’s Gay Pride Parade became the world’s first officially-permitted parade advocating for LGBTQ rights. The parade was moved from Hollywood in Los Angeles to West Hollywood in 1979.
10. 1966 March from to Sacramento organized by the National Farmworkers Association (NFWA)
12. 1965 Delano Grape Strike/Boycott is started by Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOL)
13. 1963 Assassination of John F. Kennedy In Frame 375 of the Zapruder film, first lady Jacqueline Kennedy crawls toward the back of the presidential limousine as Secret Service agent Clint Hill scrambles to help her. Photo: Zapruder Film ©, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza - Fifty-eight years ago in Dallas, Texas, Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, but since Oswald himself was killed shortly after the assassination, questions lingered about whether anyone else was involved, feeding conspiracy theories. President Joe Biden ordered the release of the documents in October but it's being done in stages, with thousands remaining secret amid intelligence agency concerns about what they could reveal.
14. 1965 Watts Writers Workshop
15. The Black Panther Party is founded by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale along with the 10 point program The Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program Written October 15, 1966 1. We Want Freedom. We Want Power to Determine the Destiny of Our Black Community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. 2. We Want Full Employment for Our People. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the White American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living. 3. We Want An End to the Robbery By the Capitalists of Our Black Community. We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over fifty million Black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make. 4. We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter of Human Beings. We believe that if the White Landlords will not give decent housing to our Black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people. 5. We Want Education for Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role in the Present-Day Society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world then he has little chance to relate to anything else. 6. We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service. We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like Black people, are being victimized by the White racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military by whatever means necessary. 7. We Want An Immediate End to Police Brutality and the Murder of Black People. We believe we can end police brutality in our Black community by organizing Black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our Black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all Black people should arm themselves for self-defense. 8. We Want Freedom For All Black Men Held in Federal, State, County and City Prisons and Jails. We believe that all Black People should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. 9. We Want All Black People When Brought to Trial To Be Tried In Court By A Jury Of Their Peer Group Or People From Their Black Communities, As Defined By the Constitution of the United States. We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that Black people will receive fair trials. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical, and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the Black community from which the Black defendant came. We have been, and we are being, tried by all-White juries that have no understanding of the “average reasoning man” of the Black community. 10. We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect of the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
16. 1967 Century City Antiwar Demonstration Protestors fill Motor Ave. as they start marching toward Century Plaza Hotel for an anti-Vietnam War protest. Ten thousand protesters turned out during speech by President Lyndon Johnson.(Ray Graham / Los Angeles Times) . Ten thousand marchers, by most estimates, were assembling across the street from the Century City hotel. Hundreds of nightstick-wielding police — using a parade permit and court order that restricted the marchers from stopping to demonstrate — forcibly dispersed them. The bloody, panicked clash that ensued left an indelible mark on politics, protests and police relations. It marked a turning point for Los Angeles, a city not known for drawing demonstrators to marches in sizable numbers. The significance of the evening lay not simply in the 51 people who were arrested and the scores injured when 500 of the 1,300 police on the scene pushed the demonstrators into, and then beyond, a vacant lot that is now the site of the ABC Entertainment Center. Far more powerfully, the Century Plaza confrontation foreshadowed the explosive growth of the national antiwar movement and its inevitable confrontations with police. It shaped the movement’s rising militancy, particularly among the sizable number of middle-class protesters who expected to do nothing more than chant against Johnson outside the $1,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraising dinner and were outraged by the LAPD’s hard-line tactics. Johnson rarely campaigned in public again, except for appearances at safe places like military bases. Within nine months, opposition to the war grew so strong that he shelved his reelection campaign. White liberals in Los Angeles, meanwhile, began to complain about excessive force by the LAPD, a subject traditionally raised only by black and Latino residents. By the next summer, when Chicago police beat demonstrators in the street outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the country was at war with itself. In retrospect, the Century Plaza demonstration was one of the earliest battlegrounds. …
19. 1965 El Teatro Campesino Founded Since its inception, El Teatro Campesino and its founder and artistic director, Luis Valdez, have set the standard for Latino theatrical production in the United States. Founded in 1965 on the Delano Grape Strike picket lines of Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers Union, the company created and performed “actos” or short skits on flatbed trucks and in union halls. Taking the “actos” on tour to dramatize the plight and cause of the farmworkers, El Teatro Campesino was honored in 1969 with an Obie Award for “demonstrating the politics of survival” and with the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award in 1969 and 1972.