On August 11, 1965, riots ignited in Watts, a predominantly black section of Los Angeles, after the arrest of a 21-year-old black man for drunk driving. The violence lasted five days and resulted in 34 deaths, 3,900 arrests, and the destruction of over 744 buildings and 200 businesses in a 20-square-mile area. The riots shocked the nation and raised awareness of the struggles urban blacks faced outside the South. Martin Luther King Jr. told a New York paper that "The non-violent movement of the South has meant little to them, since we have been fighting for rights that theoretically are already theirs." The riots were one of the events that helped convince King and some other civil rights activists to join the ongoing Chicago Freedom Movement in combating the widespread "de facto" segregated conditions across the country.