WGBH Educational Foundation

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Episode Number: 3This is the third episode in an eight-part series on contemporary urban problems. Samuel Yorty, 59, is preparing this year to seek a third four-year term as mayor of Los Angeles, the nation's third largest city. He is questioned on "City Makers" by Larry Allison, former city editor of the Long Beach (Calif.) Independent-Press-Telegram, who is on a leave of absence from the paper while studying as a Niemen Fellow at Harvard University. Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, host for "City Makers," join in questioning Yorty. The black community of Watts is a major topic of conversation. Yorty refers to the area as "a ghetto problem, not a slum problem" and tries to draw a distinction between the riots in Watts and those that have taken place in the black neighborhoods of other major cities. Yorty concedes there is a serious public transportation problem for the residents of Watts, many of whom have no access to good jobs elsewhere in the Los Angeles area. However, he puts much of the blame for the 1965 civil disorders there on television news coverage, which he says inflamed Negroes by showing them acts of brutality against civil rights demonstrators. Yorty decries what he calls the communist "strategy of moving in on anything that they classify as a struggle," and asserts that radical youth movements, both black and white, have been infiltrated and are being exploited by communists. The mayor also discusses his on-going dispute with the Los Angeles Times and his relationship...

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