Digital Watts is a public humanities project that focuses on the lead up to and aftermath of the 1965 uprising in Watts and the surrounding Los Angeles area. The project was launched in summer 2016 by a Loyola Marymount University (LMU) class, The Digital Watts Project. In this course, students digitized and described a variety of rare Watts-related materials provided by the Southern California Library (SCL). The intention is to grow this project by incorporating it into LMU classes and other student-community engagement activities.

The SCL is an archive and community library in South LA dedicated to documenting and making available the histories of anti-racist struggles in Southern California. While the library is not responsible for this project, its efforts to bring marginalized histories and perspectives into public discourse have been a constant inspiration and influence. We owe the library and the members of the South Los Angeles community who have worked with us an enormous debt of gratitude.

Digital Watts is hosted and maintained by the William H. Hannon Library. Copies of the scanned images and metadata have been shared with the SCL for their own digital collections.