Ingram headed east along a residential street. Three LAPD officers had a Black man spread-eagle in the middle of the road on his stomach, a shotgun pressed to his back. Ingram clicked off several pictures of the image and continued. He came to Hoover, the next major thoroughfare after Vermont, and went south. There was less smoke in the air in this direction, and he wanted to get different types of snaps than what everyone else was getting. He soon came to a liquor store with its windows intact. Along the store’s main aisle sat two men, one colored and one Mexican American. The Black man had a rifle across his lap and the other a handgun tucked into his waistband.

  “Okay if I take a few shots of you gents?”

  “Go on, brother. Sure,” the man with the rifle said.

  Ingram did. Finishing, he said, “Thanks, fellas. Hope everything is cool.”

  “That’s right,” the man with the handgun said.

  Ingram turned as a panel truck rolled by. A Black and white man were riding in it. The stencil lettering on its side read: RESTORATION BUILDING SUPPLY. Ingram noted a ragged hole right between the prongs of the letter Y, likely from a bullet. On the truck went, into danger or away from it, Ingram was unsure. He left. Not half a block from the liquor store was an apartment house circa the 1940s complete with arched windows and an ornate portico. On the flat roof of the three-story building was a bare-chested man holding an artist’s paint brush. The man retreated from the edge of the roof.

  Frowning, his curiosity pinging like radar, Ingram tried the entry door but unsurprisingly it was locked. He walked to the side of the building. There was a fire escape, but the built-in ladder was up and there was no way to reach it from the ground. He considered calling up to the man—but what if he was trying to break in and here Ingram was, a witness announcing himself? On the other hand, if the man was a burglar, would he have pulled the ladder back up? If he’d gone through the front door, then he’d already been inside. What was he up to and would it make an interesting shot? At the rear of the building Ingram found a detached car port. There was no ladder leaning against the apartments, further proof the man on the roof must live here, he concluded.

  At one side of the car port were several pieces of used furniture along with an apparently broken washing machine. Shoving it against the stucco wall and climbing atop, Ingram was able to hoist himself onto the car port’s roof. Standing there he could now see the upper part of the man. Ingram determined he was painting on a canvas propped up on an easel. The one detail he could make out was a floating eye, lightning crackling around it. Ingram didn’t announce himself. He guessed the artist was capturing his impressions of the ongoing riot. From this angle, the shots he took weren’t composed well, but he didn’t want to bother the painter. After several minutes, the soul brother hadn’t noticed him and Ingram dug the fact he was doing his thing. Craziness all around but he was focused.

  A Channel 5 news chopper flew by, then circled back. Ingram watched it for a while, taking snaps of it too. Then he got down from the car port and continued on his way.

  EVENTUALLY INGRAM traveled along Broadway, parallel to Hoover and Vermont but further east. Up ahead he saw a knot of people lined up along one side of a black and tan Chrysler New Yorker, working together to rock it up and down on its leaf springs. Ingram edged closer. Sighting through his viewfinder, he was relieved the car was empty.

  “On three,” the lead car rocker yelled, then began the countdown.

  Everyone bent down to grip the car along the bottom edge. Up they rose on “three” and got the car over on its side, then onto its roof. Those who did the deed cheered.

  “How come you flipped over the car?” Ingram asked the man who’d done the countdown.

  “It belongs to that snake.” He lit a cigarette with a silver-colored Zippo.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Our landlord,” another answered, pointing toward a nearby plain-looking apartment building. “Motherfuckah don’t fix shit in that rattrap. Leaking pipes, roaches crawling out of my kid’s ears. And he had the nerve to jack up the rent again. Bloodsucking vampire is what he is.”

  Ingram winced but had to ask, “You mean he’s a Jew?”

  The smoker grinned lopsidedly at him. “He’s a spade, man. Darker than me and you combined. Sheet. And he’s a Yorty man, sit on some kind of bullshit committee of his ’sposed to help the darkies by telling us constantly how shiftless we are and if we only appreciated the janitor jobs they got lined up for us. Fuck him.”

  Sam Yorty was the Republican mayor of the city. “I see.”

  Another man was unscrewing the gas cap. He got it loose and tossed it over his shoulder. Ingram knew what was coming next and watched as a rag was stuffed in the fuel spout. Calmly the smoker sparked a flame on his Zippo lighter. The rag was lit.

  Like a pyromaniac waiting for the fire to crackle, Ingram stood transfixed, anticipating what was to come. The fiery rag was consumed, its flame whooshing into the car. For several seconds nothing happened, then there was a muffled blast as the fuel in the gas tank combusted with a loud woomph. Everyone reacted, ducking and stepping back. Red and yellow flickered in his lens while Ingram took pictures. Fire consumed other parts of the upended car as unignited gas spread. The windows of the car were up. Lacking oxygen to burn effectively from within, the fire burned quick along the shell, then began to sputter out, leaving blackened remains.

  The others having already departed, Ingram marched away too. He felt let down, as if he expected the torching of the car to signal what, a change? A shift in tactics? But this was no organized revolt. The lumpenproletariat, as his girlfriend Anita called them, were frustrated and lashing out, but to what end?

  Further along, he spotted a familiar face. G. M. “Gerry” Tackwood was a part-time reporter for the hippie newspaper, the Free Press. He was also white, younger than Chambers or Ingram, with a hawkish nose and longer hair, a mod cut it was called. He wore white jeans, a tan short-sleeved shirt and suede boots. His eyes weren’t darting around and he wasn’t fidgeting. Observing the younger man’s apparent calm had Ingram feeling his age, if only momentarily. He supposed to others he appeared that way as well. But his was a practiced state of being while Tackwood’s seemed natural. The Freep’s reporter had a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder strapped across his body. He held the attached microphone before an agitated Black woman wearing an apron.

  “I’m not endorsing us burning down our own neighborhoods,” she was saying. “But you can’t have years of unequal treatment just roll off your back all the damn time like water off a duck. Excuse my French.”

  “I hear you,” Tackwood said into the mic. “What do you think will solve this problem of the racial divide in our society?” He shifted the mic back toward her.

  “That’s too big a question for me to answer, mister. I watched the March on Washington on TV with my grandmother and felt so hopeful, knowing what she had gone through, and her crying when Dr. King spoke.” She shook her head. “But here we are two years later and where are we? Maybe it will take something like this to get the Establishment’s attention.”

  Tackwood nodded and concluded his interview after identifying the woman he’d been interviewing. She walked back into a storefront café called the Honey Catch. A plank of plywood was nailed over the display window. Red lettering spray-painted on the wood read: NEGRO OWNED.

  Tackwood turned and saw Ingram. “Hey, Harry, good to see a friendly face. Give me some skin, man.”

  “You tellin’ me.” They slapped five.

  “You’ve been out since this morning?” Tackwood asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Got this contact over at 77th Division. When he first got on there, them ofays put a rubber shrunken head in his locker with NAACP written on a ribbon tied around it. Anyway, we’re going to meet away from the station house. The idea was to get his insider’s view on what the captains were telling the cops. He didn’t show.”

  “Understandable he’d have cold feet.”

  Tackwood considered his response, instead checked his watch. “I better hustle back to the office and get my transcriptions down. Art wants a special edition out before nightfall.” Art Kunkin, the Free Press’s publisher. The office was in the basement of the Fifth Estate, a coffeehouse on the Sunset Strip. Like the others who toiled for the publication, Tackwood was a part-timer, a euphemism for volunteer. They were down for the cause and not about the money. To pay his rent, Tackwood taught journalism part-time at L.A. City College and was a weekend tape editor at the all-news station KNX.

  “Trying to beat his capitalist competition?” The Times and Herald Examiner were putting out extra editions of riot coverage.

  “The revolution has many fronts, comrade Ingram.”

  “Sí, comandante.”

  The two said their good-byes and Ingram moved further south on Broadway.

  “Burn, baby, burn,” the driver of a lowered Impala yelled from his speeding car. The driver wore sunglasses, his processed hair agleam. Ingram’s picture caught him grinning broadly behind the wheel.

  As he walked, he changed his film roll by touch, scanning for cops and rioters. He was still sweating, breathing through his mouth, but wasn’t panicked. Air in, air out. This was it, his last roll. He passed by a bank with broken-out windows. A little further down was a shoe store and beyond that, at the end of the block, a small market next to a corner Texaco gas station. Several people were running out of the market, carrying armloads of food. Heads of lettuce flew out of their arms and rolled down the street. Shots boomed as cops ran around the gas station’s pumps in pursuit, shooting at those fleeing.

  “Stop, you goddamn assholes,” a cop hollered.

  Instinctively, Ingram ducked, as did those who were running, still clicking away automatically.

  “Hey, be cool, boys in blue, ain’t nobody has to die for a loaf of bread.”

  The speaker was a lanky, broad-shouldered Black youth in blue jeans and a matching denim jacket. He stood on the roof of a car, pointing at the police. His mane of unruly black hair was curly, naturally it seemed, not the result of a chemical treatment like the recently departed Impala driver. Three cops stopped running after the looters and circled back to the young man.

  “Look, baby, this isn’t about greed, this is about need.” The man’s voice took on a cadence, rising and falling as a small crowd gathered around the car. “We the underclass are fed up with the bullshit the white ruling class has been imposing on us for years. It’s time we stood on our own two feet to show we can’t be pushed around no more.”

  The gathered applauded and yelled encouragements.

  “Get off that fuckin’ car and shut up,” a cop commanded.

  “Get out of my neighborhood,” the young man replied to enthusiastic approval. “Take Parker’s occupying army west of La Brea and see how they like it in those neighborhoods. You know what, I’m bettin’ them folks won’t like it no more than we do. What do you good people say?”

  The group cheered. Ingram got closer, counting his snaps on this last roll. He got a great up-angle shot of the youth on top of the car just as the police pushed through the crowd, jabbing with their batons to clear a path. It was then that Ingram recognized the speaker. He’d seen him at a rally for jobs and justice in Exposition Park about half a year ago, which he’d covered for the Sentinel.

  “Let Faraday speak,” said a woman with curlers in her hair.

  “Be quiet, bitch,” a beefy officer replied, shoving her aside as he did so.

  “Hey, watch yourself, man. We know y’all act like this here is the plantation, but you can’t treat our women like that,” Faraday said. He backed away from the cops who were reaching for him. The gathered got involved, trying to get in between. There was about to be a riot within the riot, Ingram considered. This young man, Faraday, was giving shape to the chaos. Beyond the fury, he was talking about what could come afterward. He was a man on the rise—he spoke for something, an inspiration.

  A police officer climbed on the car’s trunk and lunged toward the curly-haired Faraday. The two grappled and both tumbled from the roof, right into the tangled arms of police and civilians.

  Now everyone started grabbing and pulling, forms jostling one another with Ingram in the middle of it, snapping away. A baton cracked him on the side of his face but like a veteran pugilist, he shook off the blow and kept taking pictures. He had to keep his cool. This wasn’t the first time he’d been hit by a nightstick. Faraday was now being manhandled by all three officers who were attempting to pull him free from the enraged residents. The sleeve of his jacket had torn and a welt was forming under one of his eyes.

  “Back, get back,” an officer demanded, holding his baton in two hands, and using the end to jab people hard in their stomachs. Another one joined him and they worked in unison.

  Ingram followed the cops closely as they marched the young man toward a parked police car. The Canon was now strapped across his torso, the Speed Graphic in hand. Several other officers were forming a semi-circle to keep the crowd back. One of them must have gone off to find a call box, Ingram assumed, to request reinforcements—if such were available, given the altercations happening all over this part of Los Angeles.

  “What are you arresting him for?” Ingram demanded.

  “Get the hell away from us, shutterbug,” an officer barked. “Go find a cat up the tree to take pictures of.”

  “You know this interfering coon?” another cop said, his southern accent thick like he’d stepped off the set of Gone with the Wind.

  “He’s nobody that matters,” the other one answered. He lashed out with the butt of his shotgun, striking Ingram in the middle of his chest. Down he went, the Speed Graphic ejecting from his hand and clattering across the asphalt.

  “Now stay down,” he said and went off with the others.

  Sucking in the taste of smoke, doing his best to keep his head clear, Ingram belly-crawled to his camera and took hold of it. Broken pieces, like the track lock, trailed from the Speed Graphic, but the shutter release was working. Like its owner, the camera had taken worse. Akin to when he’d been in a tight spot in Korea, he partially stood up and ran bent over to a location where he had an unobstructed angle on what was unfolding.

  Several of the uniformed officers were now roughing Faraday up. Ingram knew their goal was to beat and subdue the man. Tenderize him, as the cops would say. The other policemen were holding the crowd back, forcing them to bear witness.

  “Stop brutalizing him,” somebody called out. “You dirty cops.”

  “You can’t get away with this,” another said.

  Ingram’s Canon, strap around his neck, was back in hand, having placed his other camera on the ground next to him. Stay calm, he reminded himself. He hadn’t counted how many shots he’d taken but he guessed he had only three or so left on this last roll at best. His third remaining shot captured a knot of cops surrounding Faraday, tugging him this way then that way. The second-to-last framed a baton striking Faraday on his upper shoulder just as he twisted his head away from the blow.

  Before his finger pressed the Canon’s shutter button again, a flatbed truck with a slat-sided bed carrying National Guardsmen screeched around the corner. A guardsman yelled over the bullhorn mounted on top of the vehicle’s cab, “Disperse, disperse.”

  As if responding to a primal urge deep in his cells, he eschewed using the Canon and was now aiming the Speed Graphic from chest level. Nothing happened, then everything happened. A gunshot boomed and a number of Guardsmen pointed their rifles at who knew what. Ingram was sweating, his heart rate thudding. Silence descended until a man in a torn short-sleeved shirt cried out, “You bastards murdered him!”

  Ingram gaped. Faraday lay in the street on his stomach. A gun near him. The officers who’d encircled him stepped back. A Guardsman jumped off the truck.

  “He was armed,” one of the cops declared.

  “That’s bullshit,” someone from the crowd answered. “Y’all planted that gun.”

  The Guardsmen re-formed to protect the police. Ingram had to protect his last picture. He was standing in front of the shoe store when the cops returned their attention to him. The one who’d hit him with the shotgun ran toward him, followed by another officer. The latter leveled his handgun at Ingram.

  “Give us your cameras, Ingram. Now, goddammit!”

  Both weapons were aimed at him now. “You can’t have them.”

  “We can and we will. You got evidence on that film.”

  “Evidence you killed that kid in cold blood you mean.” Voices in agreement went up from the crowd.

  “Shut your lying Black mouth,” a cop said, eyes on the ones witnessing this.

  This time, the barrel of the shotgun swiped upside his head, knocking him back but not down. Preservation overtook him. He lurched forward, cradling his Speed Graphic like a football. He stumbled into the shotgunner cop.

  “That’s your ass now, colored boy,” the struck police officer promised.

  Him, the other one and a third joined in beating Ingram to the sidewalk with fists and batons, followed by an assortment of kicks to the ribs. Lying still and moaning, Ingram felt the officers rip open his coat pockets, hearing his last few loose spent rolls scatter across the pavement. “You can’t take my film,” he yelled. “I’m a reporter, you worthless motherfuckahs.”

  One of the cops crushed a film roll under his heel.

  “I got the one that counts,” another officer said triumphantly. He tossed the film roll he’d removed from the Canon up and caught it in his open palm. Smiling broadly, he ripped the film stock from the metal canister, ruining it in the sunlight. He threw the Canon aside. Roughly, he then opened the back end of the Speed Graphic and frowned.