BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  MAY 10, 2024

I still remember lying awake in my bed for a long time, no air conditioning, only a slight breeze coming from a small window near the ceiling on a hot August night.

But it wasn’t the heat keeping me awake. It was the pop-pop-pop of gunfire that seemed to be coming from the San Diego Freeway just a mile or so away from where I was living on Evergreen Street in Inglewood, CA.

It was 59 years ago, August of 1965. A section of Los Angeles called Watts was up in smoke.
I’ve forgotten yesterday, but I remember yesteryear.

I was a tall, skinny 18-year-old kid fresh from my first year of college and my second time that far away from the Great Plains of South Dakota. I was working as a sheet metal apprentice on construction jobs around LA that summer with my dad, who I hadn’t seen in more than a decade and didn’t really know. Much to the unspoken dismay of my mother, who had devoted her life to getting my sister, brother, and me reared and educated in his absence, I had gotten on a TWA plane and headed West, so I could get to know my dad and stepmother and the big wide world outside Sioux Falls.

The experience that summer left me much older than my age. My notions of the glitter, glitz, and glam of the City of Angels were forever shattered. It was the first time I had been exposed to gun violence and the intense anger and hatred now boiling over in the long-simmering cauldron of social injustice—inequities in schooling, housing, health care, and employment. But more to the point, I came face-to-face with the incendiary racial tension of which I knew very little.

There were race riots before Watts, in Rochester, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, but not like this one. Thirty-four people died. More than 1,000 were injured. More than 1,400 arrests were made and more than $40 million in damages done. When some of the smoke cleared and the relentless sirens quieted a week or so after it started, Dad and I climbed into the company’s 1954 Chevy pickup truck for the drive through Watts to the construction site. We drove down streets strewn with the wreckage of the riots and the burned-out businesses on both sides, except for the few untouched with “black owned” spray-painted on the window.

There were many more protests after Watts, stretching through the early 70s as the Vietnam War replaced racial discord as the ignition switch for more violence and destruction.

I recalled those experiences over the past weeks as the protests against the Israeli attacks in Gaza multiplied and became more hostile. I thought how fortunate it was that these protests were not riots and could not–should not–be looked upon as a carbon copy of those 60 years ago.

I should have known better. The hyperbole and drama that began defining the protests was building exponentially, out-pacing reality, well out of proportion to what appeared to be what was actually taking place. The early media coverage zoomed in on the more defiant protestors, the abusive language, and the belligerent behavior without the context of actual numbers of universities affected or the number of students and nonstudents involved. It would serve up an open invitation for more protests on more campuses and more professional agitators to infiltrate the protests.

Clarence Page, the venerable columnist for the Chicago Tribune, who was a witness to events 60 years ago did point out one similarity:

“Unfortunately,” he wrote recently, “we are seeing much of the same anger and outrage over the relentless bombing of Gaza and the cruel hostage dramas of Hamas that led to mass arrests and graduation cancellation that some of us old-timers easily and unhappily recall from the Vietnam era.”

To me there is little more that compares, viewed on a larger scale. Protests are not riots. When you elevate incidents out of proportion, make them something they are not—at least yet—the result is not good. The public is taught nothing and the protests accomplish little or nothing, and maybe even detract from their legitimate purpose.

The protests thus far have not resulted in death and destruction. They have not tugged at the national conscience nearly as much as those decades ago, if at all. It is doubtful they are a harbinger of what’s to come as the Watts riots were back then. They do not have the intensity or depth to spark the kind of transformational social and political change the race and anti-war riots and protests did.

The issues woven into the uprisings six decades ago and those woven into the Gaza protests do not share the same gravity. Gaza protests don’t seem to be about the war as they are about man’s inhumanity to man in time of war. Their focus is almost entirely on the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and not the Hamas barbarism that triggered it all, a fact that diminishes credibility.

Our nation doesn’t need more stimulation of angry emotions or inciteful incidents that snuff out insightful discourse. Nor does the nation need more loud and angry voices citing problems without workable solutions. We need a break; some quiet and reflection that will enable us to find the right path forward.

Thomas Friedman, another venerable and older journalist, knows the Middle East and its complex and confounding history better than most.

“I find the whole thing very troubling because the dominant messages from the loudest voices and many placards reject important truths about how this latest Gaza war started and what will be required to bring it to a fair and sustainable conclusion,” he wrote in the New York Times May 8. “The only just and workable solution to this issue is two-nation states for two indigenous people.

“If you are for that…you are part of the solution. If you are not for that, you’re part of the problem. And from everything I have read and watched too many of these protests have become part of the problem.” Friedman cites three reasons:

1. History has a reservoir of perspective on current events that offers greater clarity and insight for our own belief structure and the conclusions we draw from it.
2. History is a sedative for instant and angry conclusions and a stimulant for intellectual growth.
3. History, not hysterics, can get us to the kind of long-term solutions the likes of which Friedman advances.

It was once said that we have reached an era when we learn, but must relearn what we thought we knew. When it comes to the Mideast, the need for constant learning and relearning never slows.

It seems many of the sincere student protestors, and I assume there are many, have not learned or relearned the lessons of Middle East history. If they had, they probably would be looking differently at the risks they are taking and the disruptions they are causing for thousands of students whose lives they are affecting, especially those fellow students of Jewish heritage.

A friend wrote recently that we must constantly revisit the past in our mind’s eye to gauge, balance and temper the comparisons we make and the conclusions we draw. That keeps the mind open to a better understanding of what is unfolding around us and how we should react. Maybe the protestors should fold their tents for a time, the media should breakdown their cameras and join all of us in more thought and talk about the incomprehensible complexities of what is occurring and why.

Read Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a new book, Fixing Congress: Restoring Power to the People and an earlier book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is co-founder and former Board chair of the Congressional Institute. Johnson is retired. He is married to Thalia Assuras and has five children and four grandchildren.