Watts in the 1960s

In this video from Periscope films, we see an interview with black families in Los Angeles in the 1960s and what it was like to live in a racial ghetto at the time. In a series of candid interviews, we see young people evaluating their circumstances, and we can see the squalid conditions under which people worked and lived. Although things are much improved now, most people don’t know that an entire generation of black people grew up this way and that this is what the civil rights movement was about. In an age where people could be discriminated against for nearly anything, this film stands out as it shows us the real-life consequences of these policies and the barriers that people had to overcome to escape those situations. For those who didn’t escape their children and grandchildren are still living in the bad parts of town with the bad schools and worse.