Journalist Karl Fleming was nearly beaten to death in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts during a racial protest in the summer of 1966. Fleming's new book, Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir, details his time reporting on the civil rights movement during the turbulent 1960s.
In the summer of 1966, Fleming was the Los Angeles bureau chief for Newsweek magazine. He was reporting on a flare-up of protests in the Watts area of south L.A. when about 20 black youths attacked him and another white man, beating them with boards.
Ten days before, a white cop had shot dead an unarmed black man rushing his wife to the hospital to have a baby. A year earlier, the Watts riots had torn the area apart, and tensions between police and residents were still strained to the breaking point.
Fleming recently returned to the site where the beating took place, and says little has changed to ease racial tensions.
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