In August 1965, in the first few days after the rebellion in the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, while the last fires still smoldered, a reporter interviewed two Black teenagers about why the riots had happened. “We live in a two-bedroom apartment,” one of them said. “The rent is too high and rats, they are big. You open the back door and one of them jumps over your foot from the back porch. But we still have to live here.”