Prelude to a Riot: A View of Urban America from the Bottom

Written in the wake of the 60's riots in Los Angeles, this book is about the relationships between government and the poor, particularly the non-white poor.  The author discusses the experiences of minorities with the police, employment, housing, health care and education and how they vastly differ from the white middle class experience of the same institutions.  Those differences, he argues, were the fuel for the fire that was the riots.  Though based on the writer's work as a journalist in Los Angeles, he believes his observations and conclusions can be extrapolated to apply to any major American urban canter of the late 1960s.