The Watts Writers Workshop was among the most visible community arts projects to develop in Southern California after the 1965 Watts riot. The brainchild of author, screenwriter, and Hollywood personality Budd Schulberg, the workshop sought to develop creative writing talent as an antidote for black social alienation. As an effort in interracial urban reform through artistic expression, the workshop found strong initial support among liberal celebrities, government officials, and private foundations. The increasing salience of the black power movement, however, raised serious internal questions regarding the workshop's avowedly integrationist mission. The Watts Writers Workshop thus offers an important window into the 1960s-era conflict between liberal and radical forces.
Stanley Crouch, "When Watts Burned," in Voices in Our Blood: America's Best on the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Jon Meacham (New York: Random House , 2001), 346-8.
2.
James Thomas Jackson, "Watts: From Ashes to Crucible of Black Writing," Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1970 , N10.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Robin D.G. Kelley, "Dig They Freedom: Meditations on History and the Black Avant-Garde ," Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interartistic Inquiry3 (1997): 18.
5.
For an overview of the black arts movement and its connections with black power activism in postwar Southern California, see Daniel Widener, "Something Else: Creative Community and Black Liberation in Postwar Los Angeles" (PhD diss., New York University, 2003).
6.
The most complete examination of Bradley's mayoral tenure is found in Raphael Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in Los Angeles ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press , 1993).
7.
Taylor Branch , Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965 (New York: Simon & Schuster , 1998), 3-20; and Frederick Knight, "Justifiable Homicide, Police Brutality, or Governmental Repression? The 1962 Los Angeles Police Shooting of Seven Members of the Nation of Islam," The Journal of Negro History79, no. 2. (Spring 1994): 182-96.
8.
A number of examples serve to underscore the severity of the conflict between the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Los Angeles police officers accounted for more than half of all BPP members killed by police nationwide. Local police developed the nation's first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team as a part of local anti-Panther policies. On at least one occasion, LAPD officers launched a dawn raid that featured armored cars, dynamite blasts, and a helicopter assault on the BPP Central Avenue headquarters. On a federal level, Los Angeles was a showcase region for FBI counterintelligence efforts, including infiltrations and propaganda work undertaken under the auspices of the COINTELPRO (a secret program of the FBI that sought to disrupt the operations of organizations or individuals deemed subversive; COINTELPRO operations included numerous illegal activities). See Ward Churchill, "`To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy': The FBI's Secret War Against the Black Panther Party," in Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas ( New York: Routledge, 2001), 80-83, 104-5.
9.
Founded in Los Angeles, the cultural nationalist US Organization of Ron Karenga served as the primary ideological opposition to the BPP. Although the US Organization had scant presence outside of Southern California, Karenga's extensive links with like-minded activists allowed the group to maintain a national profile. For a history of the US Organization, see Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
10.
For an exception to this gap, see Jeanne Theoharis, "`Alabama on Avalon:' Rethinking the Watts Uprising and the Character of Black Protest in Los Angeles," in The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, ed. Peniel Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 27-54.
11.
Kobena Mercer , "Black Art and the Burden of Representation ," in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 233-58. For an incomplete, bare-bones, basic introduction to a multidisciplinary black arts criticism that omits far, far more than it includes, please see the following: on visual art, Richard Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century (London/ New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997); Sharon Patton, African American Art ( Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998); Samella Lewis, Art: African American ( Los Angeles: Hancraft Studios, 1990 ); and David Driskell, African American Aesthetics: A Postmodernist View (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995). On music, see Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition ( Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press , 2003); Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); George Lewis, "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives," Black Music Research Journal16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 91-122; Jason Stanyek, "Transmissions of an Interculture: Pan-African Jazz and Intercultural Improvisation," in The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble ( Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 87-130; Lorenzo Thomas. "Ascension: Music and the Black Arts Movement," in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 256-74; and Alexander Weheliye, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). For an important recent overview dealing with literature, theater, and community arts, see James Smethurst , The Black Arts Movement ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). On literature, see Aldon Lynn Nielsen , Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Aldon Nielsen, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation ( Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004); Lorenzo Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth Century American Poetry (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press , 2000); Fahamisha Brown, Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999 ); Stephen Henderson , Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (New York: Morrow, 1972 ); and Eugene Redmond, Drumvoices (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976). For comparative, cross-generic analyses, see Kimberly Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African American Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2000); Mike Sell, Avant-garde Performance & the Limits of Criticism: Approaching the Living Theatre, Happenings/Fluxus, and the Black Arts Movement ( Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press , 2005); Melba Joyce Boyd, Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (New York : Columbia University Press, 2003 ); and Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
12.
Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle Jr. (New York : Doubleday, 1971), 272-90; and James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 14.
13.
The call for a "collective, committed and functional" art came from Ron Karenga. See James Cunningham, "Ron Karenga and Black Cultural Nationalism ," Negro Digest (January 1968): 76-78.
14.
Redmond, Drumvoices, 402.
15.
See Jeanne Theoharis's introduction in Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1-17.
16.
James Patterson, America's Struggle against Poverty in the Twentieth Century ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 2000), 112-21.
17.
Michael Katz , The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 16; and Oscar Lewis, "The Culture of Poverty," Scientific American, no. 215 (October 1966): 19-25.
18.
Budd Schulberg, "Introduction," in From the Ashes: Voices of Watts, ed. Budd Schulberg (New York : Meridian Books, 1967), 1-2.
19.
Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown blamed "hoodlums." See Spencer Crump, Black Riot in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Trans-Anglo Books, 1966), 90; The most thoughtful and comprehensive work on the 1965 riots is Gerald Horne's. See Gerald Horne, Fire this Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s ( Charlottesville /London: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 3, 326-27. Montague's signature call phrase, "Burn, Baby, Burn," was widely used by rioters. Failing to note the irony, multiple official sources suggested that the otherwise "leaderless" crowds were acting on the instructions of a radio personality. See, for example, "Burn, Baby, Burn," Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1965.
20.
Antipoverty efforts in Los Angeles began inauspiciously. As elsewhere, concerns regarding juvenile delinquency provided the initial impetus for joint efforts linking city, county, state, and school board officials. With multiple bodies coordinated by politicians distrustful of each other's motivations, coordination of local efforts remained elusive. Concern about requirements that mandated local matching funds for federal assistance led Mayor Sam Yorty to oppose the selection of Los Angeles as a site for federal aid. This position generated widespread opposition from local African American politicians, including City Councilman Tom Bradley and Congressman Augustus Hawkins. Concern over control of antipoverty funds rapidly expanded into a struggle over the terms of popular participation, the inclusion of Mexican Americans as program staff members and as aid recipients, and the type of programs to be supported. As in other cases, growing fissures between elites provided an opening for the development of more popular protest. For an overview of antipoverty efforts in Los Angeles, see Dale Marshall, The Politics of Participation in Poverty: A Case Study of the Board of the Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency of Greater Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); see also Alan Bauman, "Race, Class, and Political Power: The Implementation of the War on Poverty in Los Angeles" (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1998), 12, 257-60.
21.
Joseph Califano , Jr., The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The Presidential Years (Simon & Schuster, 1991), 62.
22.
Considered an open racist by many black Californians, Parker was a vocal opponent of civil rights with little complimentary to say about the social policies of the Johnson administration. Califano, Triumph and Tragedy, 61. See also John T. Donovan, "`I Have No Use for this Fellow Parker': William H. Parker of the LAPD and His Feud with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI ," Southern California Quarterly87 (Summer 2005): 171-98.
23.
"Get Out of Here, Dr. King," New York Times , August 19, 1965; and "Dr. King Hears Watts Protest over Heckling," Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1965.
24.
Lisa McGirr , Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 188, 199-202.
25.
On the proliferation of black militancy in the aftermath of the riot, see Horne, Fire This Time, 185-212; see also Bruce Tyler, "Black Radicalism in Southern California, 1950-1982" (PhD diss., University of California , Los Angeles, 1983); and Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003).
26.
Forming a constitutive element of the Johnson administration's Great Society experiment, the federally funded War on Poverty had its genesis in anti-juvenile delinquency funding originally earmarked by the presidential administration of John F. Kennedy. See Ira Katznelson, "Was the Great Society a Lost Opportunity?" in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 196.
27.
For a contemporary account of the relationship between the black power and black arts movements, see Neal, "The Black Arts Movement."
28.
Rockefeller Reports, "Watts Towers Art Center," October 3, 1967; October 4, 1967; January 23, 1968 , Rockefeller Archives Center/Watts Writers Workshop collection (hereafter RAC/WWW), Box 469, Folder 4010; and " Watts: From Ashes to Crucible of Black Writing," Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1970.
29.
"Accomplishments of Douglass House," n.d., RAC/ WWW, Box 469, Folder 4010; Voicepoint, directed by Allan Muir (1967, Watts Writers' Workshop/KCET, Los Angeles); and The Angry Voices of Watts, produced by Stuart Schulberg (1966, NBC-TV; 16mm film in possession of author).
30.
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (New York : Pantheon, 1992), 149-51.
31.
Stanley Crouch, liner notes, West Coast Hot, featuring the John Carter & Bobby Bradford Quartet and the Horace Tapscott Quintet, Novus Records, 1969; reissue BMG, 1991. The former wife of free jazz avatar Ornette Coleman, Jayne Cortez was cofounder of the Studio Watts workspace, a combination gallery, rehearsal, and exhibition space for local black artists. Cortez and Crouch worked together on a repertory project the former had founded, the Watts Repertory Theater. Jayne Cortez, letter to the author, August 20, 2001.
32.
Schulberg, From the Ashes, 14. Given the group's nationalist orientation and frequent residence in the Watts Happening Coffee House site, the hostile percussionists may well have been members of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, although this is impossible to state with certainty.
33.
Jayne Cortez , letter to author, August 20, 2001.
34.
Elaine Brown , A Taste of Power; Stanley Crouch, telephone interview with author, May 15, 2001, New York; and Horace Tapscott, Songs of the Unsung: The Musical and Social Journey of Horace Tapscott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press , 2001), 112-3.
35.
Stanley Crouch , telephone interview with author, May 15, 2001, New York.
36.
"Excerpt from HK's diary," April 30, 1968, RAC/WWW, Box 470, Folder 4011, p. 1; "John Carter and Bobby Bradford," interview by Frank Kofsky, rpt. in The Black Giants, ed. Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin (New York: World Publishing , 1970), 42. During this interview, neither Bradford nor Carter seemed particularly interested in the reasons why the Watts Writers Workshop attracted greater attention than other community-based jazz institutions. When pressed, Carter indicated that he thought it had more to do with the difficulty in finding audiences for "out" jazz than any particular bias on the part of media or philanthropic organizations.
37.
Nicholas Beck, ed., "Budd Schulberg, House Un-American Activities Committee testimony, May 23, 1951 ," Appendix A. Budd Schulberg: A Bio-Bibliography ( Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001 ), 77-133.
38.
Senate Committee on Government Operations, Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, Hearings on Federal Role in Urban Affairs (hereafter Federal Role in Urban Affairs), 89th Cong, 2nd session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966-1968 ), 2457, 2477-83.
39.
Robert Semple Jr., "Ghetto Described at Senate Inquiry," New York Times, December 10, 1966.
40.
Amde Hamilton , telephone conversation with author, May 15, 2000.
41.
See Rockefeller Reports, "Watts Towers Art Center," October 4, 1967; "Account RF 67082-Arts," March 13, 1968; and " Watts Writers Workshop," January 23, 1968, RAC/WWW, Box 469, Folder 4010.
42.
Constance Holden, "Arts and Humanities: Federal Money Is Benefiting Culture," Science170, no. 3963 (December 11, 1970): 1181.
43.
Schulberg, From the Ashes, 20-21; and Jackson, "From Ashes to Crucible."
44.
Gerald Freund , "Los Angeles Trip Report," October 3, 1967, RAC/WWW, Box 469, Folder 4010, p. 1.
45.
Freund, "Los Angeles Trip Report," p. 2.
46.
The Rockefeller foundation funded the American Negro Theater between 1941 and 1965. Grants were made to the Cleveland-based Karamu House between 1940 and 1953, while the Free Southern Theater received assistance from 1967 to 1973. See RockefellerArchive Center letter, August 12, 1971, RAC /WWW, Box 469, Folder 4010. See also Freund, "Los Angeles Trip Report," p. 1. Although critics commonly cited waste and fraud in attacking both the goals and operation of the varied antipoverty programs of the time, Sar Levitan and Robert Taggart contend that the programs operated with "reasonable efficiency" given their scope, adding that detractors advanced "unreasonable criteria or mistaken, if not purposely distorted, judgments" regarding the conceptualization and operation of government programs. See Sar Levitan and Robert Taggart, The Promise of Greatness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 8-9, 275-82. For a sartorial gloss on allegations of misappropriation of poverty program funds, see Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). 47. Beck, "Budd Schulberg," 41-44.
47.
The Inner City Cultural Center (ICCC) is worthy of a monograph in and of itself. In existence between 1965 and 1986, the ICCC trained thousands of actors, set designers, technical personnel, and playwrights. The early commitment to cast plays without regard to race and the selection of material from obscure playwrights of color made the theater a pioneer in developing multiculturalism within American theater. Finally, the theater also developed important relationships with both the Teatro Campesino of Luis Valdez and the Asian American East/West players, thus providing a rare interethnic moment linking black, Latino, and Asian American community theater. ICCC, "Inner City Cultural Center Articles of Incorporation," April 15, 1966, California Arts Commission Records, F3719:228, California State Archives, Sacramento, California.
48.
Sanid Sheffey-Stinson, "The History of Theater Productions at the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center, 1965-1976" (PhD. diss., Kent State University, 1979), 25.
49.
Gregory Peck, Fund Raising Letter, October 1966, ICCC Collection . Los Angeles Theater Center. Los Angeles, California.
50.
Cecil Smith , "New Repertory Company for the Underprivileged ," Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1967. See also Victor Walker , "The Politics of Art: A History of the Inner City Cultural Center" (PhD diss., University of California -Santa Barbara, 1989), 18-20.
51.
James Thomas Jackson, "On Chino, San Bernardino, Altadena and Other Places," n.d., RAC/ WWW, Box 469, Folder 4010, p. 1.
52.
United States Senate, Federal Role in Urban Affairs, 2481.
53.
Strategies for helping the poor often turned on the tasks of identifying, measuring, and otherwise assessing the poor. The War on Poverty thus involved social scientists in no small measure. For an introduction to this literature, see Katz, The Undeserving Poor, 79-123; Sar Levitan, Programs in Aid of the Poor for the 1970s (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 1-18; and Judith Russell, Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty ( New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). For two works that treat the specific issue of social scientific research, poverty, and public policy, see Henry J. Aaron, Politics and the Professors: The Great Society in Perspective (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1978); and Daniel P. Moynihan ed., On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (New York : Basic Books, 1969). For three very different critiques of the politics of knowledge production as they relate to power, poverty, and race, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 16-18; Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press , 1982); and Michel Foucault, "Governmentality ," trans. Rosi Braidotti and rev. Colin Gordon, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon , and Peter Miller ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104. Kelley's critique centers on the methodological problems that attended contemporary social scientific examinations of the inner city. Wolf notes the deep political history and consequent biases of social scientific inquiry, particularly its formative hostility to Marxism. Foucault, finally, offers an examination of how social science and government utilize knowledge in the creation of regulatory social structures.
54.
Johnny Scott , "Chaos in a Ghetto Alley," in Schulberg, From the Ashes, 127.
55.
Harry Dolan , "The Sand-Clock Day," in Schulberg , From the Ashes, 36-39.
56.
James Thomas Jackson, "On Chino, San Bernardino, Altadena and Other Places," n.d., RAC/WWW, Box 469, Folder 4010.
57.
"Grant in Aid to Douglass House Foundation," March 13, 1968, RAC/WWW, Box 469, Folder 4010, p. 2.
58.
Freund, "Los Angeles Trip Report."
59.
Freund, " Los Angeles Trip Report"; and Budd Schulberg, "Progress Report from Douglass House Foundation: April 1 thru July 31, 1968," May 21, 1969, RAC/WWW, Box 470, Folder 4011.
60.
Watts Writers Workshop, Watts Writers Workshop [pamphlet] (Los Angeles, California, 197-?), Daphne Muse Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley .
61.
Schulberg, " Progress Report from Douglass House Foundation."
Michael Flamm , Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
64.
Interoffice correspondence, October 20, 1967 , RAC/WWW, Box 369, Folder 4010; Freund, " Los Angeles Trip Report"; "Watts Area-Watts Happening Coffee House and Budd Schulberg's Writers Workshop at the Douglass House," April 30, 1969, RAC/WWW, Box 470, Folder 4011; and "Watts Area," excerpt from WLB diary, April 6, 1970, RAC/ WWW, Box 470, Folder 4011, p. 1.
65.
The concept of maximum feasible participation emerged as among the most contested legacies of the Johnson administration antipoverty crusade. A major critique, authored by Senator DanielPatrick Moynihan, can be found in his Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty ( New York: Free Press, 1969). For a contrary view, see Adam Walinsky, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding," New York Times, February 2, 1969.
66.
Beck, Budd Schulberg, 68.
67.
The Mafundi Institute was a community arts center in operation from 1967 to 1973. "Watts Area," excerpt from WLB diary; and Watts 13 pamphlet, n.d., RAC/ WWW, Box 470, Folder 4011, p. 1.
68.
Watts 13 pamphlet.
69.
Watts 13 pamphlet, p. 1.
70.
"New Watts Group Stages Black Culture Evening," Hollywood Reporter, October 30, 1968; and "Watts 13 Founding Holding Benefit Tonight," Daily Variety, November 1, 1968.
71.
Milton McFarlane, "To Join or Not to Join," in Watts Poets: A Book of New Poetry and Essays, ed. Quincy Troupe (Los Angeles: House of Respect, 1968), 1.
72.
McFarlane, "To Join or Not to Join," 1-4; Jayne Cortez, Pisstained Stairs and the Monkey Man's Wares (New York: Phrase Text, 1969); Stanley Crouch, Ain't No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight (New York: R. W. Baron , 1972); Redmond , Drumvoices, 402-8; Nielsen, Black Chant, 62; and Julius Thompson, Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 142.
73.
A wealth of recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the rising politicization of black mass culture during the 1950s and 1960s. For an introduction to this literature, see Waldo Martin, No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics and Postwar America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); William Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Amy Bass, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 2002); and Mark Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (London : Verso, 1999).
74.
Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, a former Slauson gang leader, directed a teen post through which prospective Panther cadre were screened. Fellow Panther leader John Huggins meanwhile was a member of Horace Tapscott's Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, a link that helps explain a further dimension of the crossover between South Los Angeles's leading black radical political and cultural organizations . For a multigenerational analysis of the politics of black gang life in which Huggins and Carter appear, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990), 297-8. See also FBI, SAC [special agent in charge] Files, "Black Hate Groups ," 157-7195, 157-8502 ( Mafundi Institute, Los Angeles), copy in possession of author.
75.
Daniel Widener , "Way Out West: The Black Arts Movement in Southern California," Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and Composite Cultures9, no. 2 (1999): 271-89.
76.
Although episodic performances using the workshop name continued throughout the 1970s, theatrical performances, writing classes, and poetry readings became increasingly intermittent after this time. External funding ceased after 1973 as well.
77.
Watts Writers Workshop, " A Choice of Positions," Vertical File, 1960s Watts Collection , Southern California Library for Social Research. Los Angeles, California.
78.
Roger Rapoport , "Meet America's Meanest Dirty Trickster: The Man the FBI Used to Destroy the Black Movement in Los Angeles," Mother Jones (April 1977): 21-23.
79.
Schulberg, From the Ashes , 8.
80.
On the relationship between social scientific knowledge production, racism, and African American culture, see Kelley, Yo' Mama's DisFUNKtional, 16-18. See also Michael B. Katz, ed., The Underclass Debate: Views from History ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
