Rodney King pleads to the rioters to make peace May 1, 1992 in Los Angeles, CA. Photo by Douglas Burrows/Liaison.
“People Suffered Quietly”
The verdict shocked the city, the nation, the world. How could 12 jurors—none of them black—watch a man kicked, stomped, and whacked with batons by a crowd of cops and decree that police had done nothing wrong?
The explosion that resulted cracked the facade of what had been considered a progressive multicultural city. It laid bare decades of racial injustice and rank inequality.
“The King verdict was not the cause of the riots,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, head of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. “It was the final straw for the hurt, suffering, and frustration that had been building in South L.A. for years.”
Indeed, by the early 1990s, the black community seemed to be collapsing in on itself.
The unemployment rate in South Los Angeles hovered near 50 percent among black men. The crack cocaine epidemic was ripping families apart and fueling deadly gang feuds. Violent crime was at record highs; more than 1,000 people were killed in Los Angeles in 1992, compared to fewer than 300 in 2016.
Police attacked those issues like an occupying force, routinely harassing young black men and using military tanks to bust into residents’ homes in search of drugs and guns.
“People suffered quietly,” recalled filmmaker John Singleton, whose documentary on the riots, “L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later,” which premiered on A&E in April. “They felt they did not have a voice.”
The creators of the documentary L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later discuss why we need to better understand the reasons behind the riots.
In that swath of the city, police brutality had become the norm. A study the summer before the riots confirmed that the LAPD was riddled with racism and bias, poisoned by an outlook skewed against residents and a siege mentality among officers.
The department’s disdain for the community was so profound and ingrained that the shorthand code among officers for crimes involving blacks was NHI.
An Unforgettable Shooting, An Unforgivable Verdict.
To understand the outrage that gripped the city, you have to understand what “justice” looked like to black Los Angeles in April 1992.
If the King verdict represented the death of hope, the Latasha Harlins case from the previous summer was the noose around its neck. There could be no clearer signal that black lives didn’t matter. But that injustice was met with vigils, not a riot.
Latasha, 15, had been shot to death the year before in South Los Angeles by a Korean liquor store owner who accused the girl of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. A video of the encounter showed the teenager trying to pay for the drink just before the shopkeeper pulled a gun.
The merchant, Soon Ja Du, was convicted of manslaughter and could have been sentenced to 16 years in prison. Instead, a white judge let her off with probation and a $500 fine. “It should be a time of healing, not revenge,” the judge told Latisha’s anguished family as she handed the sentence down.
The light sentence heightened tensions with Korean immigrants, who had long been accused of treating black customers poorly in the liquor stores they owned.
Five months later when the riots erupted, revenge won. More than 2,000 Korean-owned businesses were damaged or destroyed and $400 million in commerce and property lost.
To the local Korean community the damage went beyond the physical and financial; it was the collapse of their American Dream.
But others saw it as the sort of collateral damage that warfare exacts. To the soldiers in the streets, setting fires, looting stores, and busting heads was justifiable payback for generations of indignities.
“It was our day,” declared Henry “KeeKee” Watson, one of the men convicted in the beating of a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, at Florence and Normandie, an intersection considered the flashpoint of the riots. “We shut that city up!”
In Watson’s view, things haven’t changed much in 25 years. “I was pissed then and I’m still pissed,” he said. “And if you’re black and you don’t feel that, you’ve got an identity problem yourself.”
