US race relations: From Watts 65 to Ferguson

The systemic concentrated poverty and police oppression that triggered the Watts rebellion in 1965 still marks the US, from Ferguson to Maryland, writes James Braxton Peterson 

The Watts uprising was a harbinger of things to come.

Ignited 50 years ago on August 11, 1965, the Watts rebellion still challenges whether the US has made the progress that has been easily symbolised but rarely realised in the movement for equal justice under the law. With Ferguson, Missouri, locked down in its second state of emergency on the anniversary of a white police officer killing Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, the possibility of progress over a half-century arc remains in doubt.