For my thesis I plan on looking at the 1965 Watts riots and how that civil uprising lead to and paved the way for the 1992 Los Angeles riots and ultimately to what is occurring in the Los Angeles of today, Such as the limited or complete lack of resources for the community as well as in my opinion the demise of the ‘New Negro’. By doing so I will use John T Metzger “Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood Life-Cycle Theory andNational Urban Policy” and Keith Collin Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950 to show how early African American migrants who relocated in the West in hope of economic stability as well as equality was met by Housing restrictions that really put an end to any sort of upward mobility, thus creating the Watts Riots which were not simply a race riot but more so a class riot. Metzger’s life-cycle theory is the deliberate dispersal of urban poor, followed by the eventual reuse of abandoned areas. The life-cycle theory assisted the real estate and financial industries with a mass amount of land needed to counter the movement of white flight. With readily available abandoned property real estate companies did not have to go through the process of redlining property or using mass amounts of government funds to purchase the land. Rather the land was made available form the destruction of the riot as well as foreclosures from land owners who could not afford the increases in mortgage rates. With annual large numbers of African American migrants coming into the city each year, Watts soon became a Black ghetto that had resources that were soon to be exhausted and was overcrowded. The city of Watts
