In 1965 The Watts section of Los Angeles erupted in what many believed was the worst race riot in the history of the United States. This event, which occurred at a turning point in the Civil Rights era, has served to shape scholarly and public understanding of race riots specifically and the development of American race relations generally. Although the Watts uprising is one of the most studied riots in U.S. history there is more scholarly work to be done. The purpose of this study is to employ feminist rhetorical criticism to understand one piece of the Watts puzzle that scholars have ignored: press portrayals of African American women in the uprising.

The study traces portrayals of African American women during and after the riot in Life and Ebony magazines, as well as the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Sentinel, and Los Angeles Herald-Examiner newspapers and addresses three major roles that these publications made rhetorically available to the women of Watts. As cultural authorities, each publication relied on stereotypical and contradictory images of African American women as overly strong and uncontrollable, the moral compass of their community, welfare dependents, and overbearing matriarchs. This study suggests that looking at the portrayals together we see a crucial step in the development of the public image of African American women from strong black women, to “superwomen,” to STRONGBLACKWOMEN. It further suggest that race riot rhetoric is an understudied yet potentially fruitful terrain within which rhetoricians and women’s studies scholars might further develop an understanding of the intersecting nature of oppression and work to disarm its power.