Watts Writers Workshop

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The Watts Writers Workshop was a creative writing group initiated by screenwriter Budd Schulberg in the wake of the devastating 1965 riots in South Central Los Angeles (now South Los Angeles). The group was comprised primarily of young African Americans in Watts and the surrounding neighborhoods. The group expanded its facilities and activities over the next several years with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Government files later revealed that the Workshop had been the target of covert operations by the FBI. Well-known writers to emerge from the Workshop include Quincy Troupe and Stanley Crouch.

Harry Dolan was the director of the Watts Writers Workshop when the workshop was burned down he had taken his own hard earned money and kept the workshop going after federal funding had been cut.

[edit] Further reading

  • David Widener, "Something Else: Creative Community and Black Liberation in Postwar Los Angeles," (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2003).