Rodney King, 20 years after L.A.'s riots

[bemildred]

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Two decades later, what should we think about the beating and the riots?

It was definitely a turning point. Everybody was tired of having these butterflies in their stomach when it comes to the police, so I'm glad what happened to me happened, and that it changed a lot of things. No [police] chief can be guaranteed eight, 15, 20 years no more. Anybody can get bigheaded once they know the seat cannot be pulled out from under them. And it shows people want a change even though some of them may not know how to change. That's why they resorted to the riots, in frustration, but most people just wanted to be treated fairly. A lot of people have come up to me and said, Thanks to you, man, I got a job.

At the price of a beating.

It was a big price for me, and it was also a big price for the ones who lost their lives.

How different are you from the guy in the news 21 years ago?

I'm very different. Age has helped me see things a lot different — more into thinking about family, about what type of legacy I leave. We're all human; we're going to make mistakes, but you've got to think about what you leave behind.

A lot of people who sympathized with you were also unhappy that you sued the department and the officers and got $3.8 million in damages, plus another $1.6 million toward legal fees.

I hear that all the time. People can feel sorry for you one moment and hate you the next moment. If you get in trouble a couple of times, and then find yourself a way out of trouble, they're going to hate that. The criticism gives me strength.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-morrison-king-20120421,0,1264874.column

[xchrom]

1. du rec. nt

[pscot]

2. I had no idea Mr.King got paid

How cool. He seems like a thoughtful guy.

[bemildred]

3. I have a good deal of respect for Mr. King.

All in all. I'd buy him a beer anytime.

[JNelson6563]

4. I respect him too. He seems very thoughtful.

But, considering his financial status (which I can't imagine begrudging one bit!) I think I'd let him buy the beer.



Julie--who is unemployed so has no money for beer

[Herlong]

5. The Rodney King story was front page in Saudi Arabia when I was a soldier in desert storm.

Of all things experienced in that time of my life, that was the most surreal.

[bemildred]

6. Yep.

I was flying into LAX from Seoul, and just as they were putting the wheels down, the Stew says she wasn't sure if they were going to let us land. That's how I found out about the riots. But I expect your experience tops that.

[bemildred]

7. Critic's Notebook: Literature of 1992 L.A. riots is fragmented

One of my favorite pieces of writing to emerge from the 1992 Los Angeles riots is a poem by a writer named Nicole Sampogna, called "Another L.A." In it, the poet traces the odd dislocation of living on the Westside while so much of the city burns. "They send us home early, again," she begins, "supposedly for curfew sake, / but I know it's to beat the traffic." And then: "over there the smoke rises, / horns blare, streets scream, / shoot, loot, / bash windows, bash heads, / lights out / knocked out / by a black & white with a baton. / but, here / will the pizza man deliver after sunset?"

There it is, the dislocation that so often marks Los Angeles, and never more profoundly than when the not-guilty verdicts in the LAPD beating of Rodney King came down 20 years ago. Depending on where you lived or the part of town in which you found yourself, the atmosphere was static or chaotic, suspended or engaged. I remember, on the second afternoon of the conflagration, watching as a Fairfax district neighbor sunned herself on her small front lawn, while in the distance, sirens screamed. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, perhaps in the way it reflects Sampogna's sense of the city as disoriented, in which we connect (or don't) "to the other LA with the flip of a switch." How in such a place do we evoke the larger story? How do we find common ground?

This was the central question raised and left unanswered by the riots — and it remains essential to Los Angeles. But 20 years later, the shelf of books addressing the disaster is threadbare, conditional even, as if we've never figured out how to write about these events. Sampogna's poem appears in a small anthology called "The Verdict Is In," edited by Kathi Georges and Jennifer Joseph and issued by the San Francisco independent publisher Manic D Press. It's long out of print, as is Jervey Tervalon's 2002 collection "Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992," which gathered recollections by 39 writers (disclosure: I am one of them) on the 10th anniversary of the tumult. On my desk are a handful of other titles that deal, in one way or another, with the upheaval: Wanda Coleman's "The Riot Inside Me," with its heartbreaking title essay, Lynell George's "No Crystal Stair: African-Americans in the City of Angels," which opens with the astonishing "Waiting for the Rainbow Sign."

"I've already seen the look," George writes of her passage through a city stunned by violence. "Driving through the Silver Lake hills to avoid Sunset Boulevard's panicked snarl, I climb along the incline. People are out jogging and walking their dogs, even though fires have moved closer, are no longer a distant TV hell. The higher I climb, the more I see residents take note of my car's make and color; they mentally record the license number, but more importantly my unfamiliar deep-brown face, any distinguishing marks. They look at me as if they will at any moment join together to form a human barricade if I make a wrong or abrupt move." In Granta, Richard Rayner offers this self-lacerating perspective: "Los Angeles was a lot like South Africa. The apartheid wasn't enshrined by law, but by economics and geography, and it was just as powerful. In Los Angeles I was afraid of blacks in a way I never had been. I behaved in a way that would have disgusted me in New York or London. I was a racist."

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-david-ulin-20120422,0,1928236.story

[ellisonz]

8. That's a good read!

[bemildred]

9. He makes a good point too.

The literary response to the Watts Riots was both larger and deeper than anything that came out of 1992. I was too young and ignorant back then to really grok what was going on, but I remember reading a number of books about them, particularly "Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness", which was sort of the beginning of my real education about race.

http://www.amazon.com/Rivers-Blood-Years-Darkness-Unforgettable/dp/0688024025

I would have loved to see a long-form treatment of the 1992 riots by Vollmann.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Riots

[ellisonz]

10. I think perhaps...

...that music and cinema have really been substituted for the long form.

I also think that compared to the Watts Riots getting absence to participants in 1992 was much more problematic.

[bemildred]

11. True dat. nt