reading a 600 page book is a commitment to not reading other books but boy was this worth it

God what a beautiful book, going deeply into the roots of so many struggles in the last great radicalisation. It traces so many threads of radicalisation, from media and culture, to the civil rights to black power to collapse arc, to the contradictory labor movements in the US of the period that were often on the wrong side of segregation and rank and file struggles against union bureaucracies. The writers do an amazing job of connecting all of these threads and balancing personal anecdotes that give texture to the struggles with a zoomed-out perspective on the change overall. My main criticism is a political one, where the low level of class conciousness of the period is not addressed, and the decay of radical movements stemming from a lack of clarity around this is misinterpreted or glossed over. If we want the next radicalisation to go further and to provide a stronger platform to build from, we have to be honest about the mistakes of our heroes of the past, and sober about the limitations of their political orientation. Overall it's absolutely worth reading.

First 1/2.

This is a history of left-wing political activism in 1960s Los Angeles. Davis and Weiner are both accomplished writers on Los Angeles and political activism. This is a political and institutional history.

They cover a huge swathe of causes, including the fights to end employment and educational discrimination, to guarantee civil rights for the Gay community, to stop the Vietnam war, to end racism and to overturn the capitalistic system. They focus on the multiple groups, committees, societies and organizations that lead the demonstrations, boycotts, teach ins, nonviolent and violent protests.

It is striking that the LA protest scene, unlike most cities, was not led by students. UCLA and USC were not very politically active campuses. The community colleges in the area were more active.

This is the most honest discussion I have seen of the role of the Communist Party in 1960s activism. The police and right-wing politicians liked to claim it was all a commie plot. The left wing liked to argue that this was nothing but McCarthyism and that the CP barely survived and had no role. Davis and Weiner show that many of the leaders and organizers of the various groups had been active in the CP in the 1950s and the party continued to have influence through the 1960s. At the same time, the CP was a small and not very influential part of the scene.

Weiner and Davis do a very useful job on reminding us of how bad it was in the 1960s. The LAPD was a paramilitary occupying force. They routinely beat black citizens. They killed citizens without fear of punishment. Chief Parker knew who the real victims were. "The police in this country are the most downtrodden, oppressed, dislocated minority in America."

One interesting point they make is that the LAPD was worse than most police forces because they were not corrupt. In most cities gay bars, local card games, after hour bars were usually not harassed because of payoffs. In LA, the cops hassled everyone.

Housing discrimination was accepted. Up until the 1950s over 90% of Los Angeles homes had restrictive covenants that forbid sales to blacks. Don Wilson was the biggest home developer in California. In 1963 he was building three developments. "Torrance, (white only), Compton (the "Jim Crow" tract for blacks) and Dominquez Hills (Whites, Mexican Americans, Asians but no blacks.) "

They tell the story of the slow transformation from MLK's nonviolence and mass demonstrations to the Black Muslims black nationalism to the Black Panthers embracing violent confrontation. They attribute the increasing toughening of tactics to the failure of lesser tactics to lead to any real change.

The chapter on the Watts riots is particularly well done. It was mishandled, lied about and used as an excuse for over-reaction. They also make a point of showing that the gay rights movement in Los Angeles was successful and visible well before the Stonewall Inn demonstrations in NYC.

Another theme is the squabbling and bickering between the various organizations. Building a coalition is always difficult. People get into the struggle for many motives in addition to the desire for justice. The desire for attention and glory, the need to feed a fragile ego, the unbending believe that only I am correct and the desire to lead without following are all challenges to a coalition. It is amazing that they got as much done as they did.

This is a history of 1960s America in one city from one point of view. It is a wonderful way to understand the times. I read the first half of this long book for now. I suspect that things will not get better in the second half.

amazing

This is an eye opening book for me. I have not lived through the 60s. I do live in Los Angeles. Seeing a fairly exhaustive account of what happened in Los Angeles, from how this city grew up, with the names of the parks, the development of the neighborhood, the names of civic buildings, the names of streets, schools and the history of certain neighborhoods... there was tons of social unrest, much of it intensified by the use of police brutality in support of authoritarian individuals in positions of power exerting their authority over those who would want equal treatment by institutions.

Much of the content in this book is over African American civil rights, but there are also feminists, Chicanos rights, Gay rights, and some Asian-American rights. This book covers the Watts Riots (and events leading to it, and after), various events in academia (like those surrounding Angela Davis), the Black Panthers, the NAACP, the Los Angeles Mayoral race (to name a few). Davis and Weiner don't go deep into theory; this is a history. They spell out events in detail, showing how the media, public figures, and the police work in concert to paint a picture justifying their authority all while claiming victimhood and enforcing oppression.

This is a good book to read, simply because of the content, its history gets into some of the nitty-gritty as to how Los Angeles survived the 60s, how the roots of civil rights emerged, and how many things have stayed the same, even while much of it has changed.

Timely? Indeed! Mike Davis is an accomplished historian of Los Angeles. Davis and co-author Jon Weiner have returned to 1960s Los Angeles and its profound problems of racial injustice, economic inequality, and other forms of discrimination. The subject matter of this book is political activism - the reaction to these realities, the struggle to overcome them, to transform not only individual lives but the city and all of America. They refer to it as "the movement" - left/radical/revolutionary. The actors are diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender. What was the legacy of the movement? To what extent were the goals, strategies, and tactics successful? To what extent were individual lives, the city, and America transformed? Was Los Angeles a kind of crossroads city? Were seeds planted? I remember Zhou Enlai's response (I think in the 1970s or 80s) to a question about the legacy of the French Revolution in world history. He said it was too soon to tell. Perhaps.
The structure of the book is encyclopedic (or Wikipedia-ish). Chapters are relatively short - each with a narrative arc. There were times when I wanted more in the way of analysis, evaluation, or interpretation. For example - gender. A photograph (on the last page of the photo section) shows the women on the staff of the Japanese-American monthly newspaper "Gidra." The caption quoting Laura Pulido states that the photo demonstrated "'a higher level of collective feminist consciousness' than existed in either the Chicana movement or the Black Panthers." Yes, Angela Davis, Dorothy Healy, and NOW have their chapters, but I don't recall discussions about collective feminist consciousness (or the lack thereof) in the book. I guess that's a criticism. Overall, four stars, not five. Here are a couple of book recommendations. If you want to read more about the 1965 Watts Uprising, check out Gerald Horne's book "Fire This Time." On political activism - I was very, very impressed by Micah White's book "The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution" - enlightening and provocative in the best sense of those terms. It is very timely too.

Kinetic, beautiful in its detail, and full of extremely relevant history. Reads almost like a memoir without the ego (there’s just a sprinkling of the authors’ personal experience), like a more present and more focused People’s History. I wish it were even longer.

4.5

Wow the LAPD sucks more than I’d ever given them credit for sucking.

This was dense, but not in a bad way, with so much information, from student uprisings, school betterment walkout, the Watts Rebellion, Black power, Civil Rights, Black Panthers, the gay movement, women, Asians, anti Vietnam, youth, community activism, Chicano movement, etc. From all over the LA area, Santa Monica to South LA, Downtown to the Valley.

This was beyond fascinating, just how much happened in such a transformative decade. Well worth reading for anyone interested in US history, focusing on LA, the second largest city in the nation.

Forget Hollywood, Rodeo Drive, and sun-kissed surfers. Davis and Wiener’s Los Angeles of the 1960s is a city where Quakers shelter draft resisters, the LAPD attacks Chicano anti-war protesters, a Catholic nun refuses to be beaten down by the church hierarchy, the Watts uprising is followed by a flowering of Black artistic expression, gay men organize to demand their rights, and the Communist Party remains relevant long after it ceased to be a force elsewhere on the American Left.

This ambitious history of the movement in LA covers a lot of ground, not always successfully. The chapters on the women’s movement and the Asian American movement are brief and lack depth. They read as though they were added as afterthoughts.

What Davis and Wiener excel at is examining LA’s racial faultlines. Their sections on the Nation of Islam, the Watts uprising, the LAPD’s multi-pronged assault on the Black Panthers, and the campaign to free Angela Davis are thoughtful and largely well-considered. (I say “largely” because I felt the authors were a little too sympathetic towards Ron Karenga and US, but I acknowledge that my pro-Panther sympathies have influenced me here.)

I was unfamiliar with much of the history of the Chicano movement presented in this book, from high school and college strikes over conditions on campus to anti-war protests and Chicana feminism. Davis and Wiener’s discussion of Latinx pride and activism is illuminating.

Set the Night on Fire is a deeply researched account of LA in the 1960s, written by two people whose commitment to an anti-racist future rooted in economic and social justice is evident on every page.

This exhaustive and at times exhausting look at the scene in L.A. in the 60s, from the perspective of two scholars who really were there and part of it, is worth the time it takes to read. There is so much to learn about a movement that was/is many movements, and the failures are perhaps more instructive for the movement's inheritors than its successes. That is, at least, what I think after reading this. If you are a fan of going deeper than the 600 pages of text, this book is thoroughly endnoted with another 200 pages of sources for you to discover - a nerd's dream.

Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide amazingly deep, but thoroughly wide coverage of Los Angeles during the 1960s. As I was reading it, I was wondering to myself whether this would quickly become a standard reference work for Los Angeles political movements during the 1960s.

Also has some really great musical and cultural insights into the counterculture that is seemingly what most mainstream analysis of the United States during the period focus on, or use to paper over the genuine diversity of the period's activism.

I mean the writing isn't exactly scintillating, but this is an encyclopedia of the time. For that it is worthwhile. (As a historian I do believe we can -- and I do -- write about history with an original voice. Take Mike Davis as just one example).