30In the spring of 1991, I was in the
Los Angeles Times newsroom
when word came that a local Black
motorist named Rodney King had
been nearly beaten to death by the
police. Despite the fact that our staff
had been writing about sensational
cases of police brutality for years,
the crisis set off by the videotape
of King’s being assaulted seemed to
catch us by surprise.
I was a 28-year-old L.A. native
who grew up in East Hollywood;
my father, a Guatemalan immigrant,
delivered the paper when I was a
boy. I came of age amid the kalei-
doscopic, unstable diversity that
characterizes life in Los Angeles,
one that defi ed easy representation.
Filipino, Black and Jewish kids lived
alongside the children of Mexican,
Easten European and Middle East-
ern immigrants. Many of us grew
up in modest households, raised by
single parents. I spent my fi rst cou-
ple of years at the paper covering
the city I knew well, writing articles
about poverty, homelessness, the
incarceration of the mentally ill and
the transformation of South Central
Los Angeles.
Now I sat at a computer terminal
glued to a phone, assembling a story
reported by me and a half-dozen
other journalists, writing my news-
paper’s fi rst front-page account of
the incident, one that counted the
number of baton blows that fell
upon King’s body (more than 40)
and described the nationwide con-
demnation of the offi cers and the
Los Angeles Police Department, as
well as the calls for reform. But my
editor, who was white, removed all
references to King’s race from the
story’s opening paragraphs.
Race made my editors nervous.
It stirred up the passions of our
readers, and in a city with a histo-
ry of cyclical race-related violence,
racial passion was no small matter.
I found my editors’ timidity both
amusing and off ensive, but being
both obedient and ambitious, I
never spoke out. It felt to me as if
the media couldn’t consider race
as anything other than the looming
potential for disorder and violence,
a source of division.
A year later, after the four offi cers
who assaulted King were acquit-
ted by a mostly white jury and the
city exploded in anger, the events
seemed to many to confi rm a mon-
strous racial hatred that residents of
Southern California carried within
them. But I knew it was more com-
plicated than that. When the looting
and killing began, a bloom of vio-
lence that lasted fi ve days, I thought
I could explain to our readers why
Black and Latino people partici-
pated in what some residents had
called an ‘‘uprising.’’ I wanted them
to see what I had seen as a reporter:
that Los Angeles was a city of cruel
inequalities whose relative wealth
and comfort were built upon the
labor and the lives of uprooted
peoples — families with roots in the
Jim Crow South, refugees from the
bloody confl icts of the Cold War in
Central America and East Asia. And
that the city was run by a political
class in denial about how truly dys-
functional the city had become.
But I also wanted them to see the
Los Angeles that I knew and lived in,
a city where people lived in tense
coexistence, but coexistence none-
theless. Instead, in the days after
the riots, my editors assigned me a
humbler task: Go fi nd some Latino
looters to interview and hand over
my notes to a more seasoned writer.
It felt to many reporters of color at
the time that we had been sent out to
report in an urban war zone, while a
mostly white staff of editors shaped
what actually appeared in the news-
paper. These complaints had a bitter
historical context: When the 1965
Watts riots struck, The Times had
no Black reporters at all and relied
on the dispatches sent by a Black
member of the advertising staff.
For me, the 1992 riots were a war
I saw unfolding fi rsthand in South
Los Angeles, Koreatown and other
neighborhoods, as crowds raced
across intersections and mini-malls
were consumed in fl ames. For a few
moments, I admit, it was exhilarat-
ing: I thought I was seeing a rev-
olution. ‘‘Finally!’’ I thought. But I
soon realized just how useless and
terrifying it all was. During the days
that the riots lasted, I witnessed the
shooting of a Latino man in front
of a shoe store, and the looting of
a grocery by a group of residents;
they grabbed milk cartons and
diapers, running through aisles
that had turned slushy with spilled
foodstuff s. A pair of police offi cers
stood nearby, watching. When I sawWHAT WERE THE
L.A. RIOTS?
—
By Ismail MuhammadWhen we think of the 1992 riots,
some ready-made images come
to mind: burning buildings casting
billowing clouds of smoke into
the skies above South Los Angeles,
disinhibited crowds rushing into
unguarded storefronts, armed
con
ict between rioters and
Korean American shop owners.
Most of all, we might think of
the intersection of Florence
and Normandie, where a crowd
gathered to vent their frustration
over the acquittal of the four
o cers who beat the Black motorist
Rodney King the previous year.
But unlike the 1965 Watts riots
that engulfed South L.A. a
generation before, the con
agration
that took hold after the King
trial wasn’t constrained to that
neighborhood and was not
restricted to Black Angelenos.
To borrow from and tweak the
words of the journalist Tim Rutten,
who wrote amid that week’s
events, these incidents constituted
the rst multiethnic class
riots in American history, an
eruption of fury at the
socioeconomic structures that
excluded and exploited so many
in Southern California.
To speak of the Los Angeles riots,
therefore, is to speak of dozens of
events involving multiple cities
and counties, an overlapping
but not always congruous set of
memories and perspectives that do
not neatly map onto one another. Beating of Rodney King in Lakeview
Terrace (March 3, 1991, 12:50 a.m.):
After a high-speed chase, Officers
Stacey Koon, Theodore Briseño,
Laurence Powell and Timothy Wind
tried to subdue King. George Holliday,
a nearby resident, filmed the
subsequent beating from his home.
King sustained numerous injuries,
including skull fractures and permanent
brain damage. Holliday’s footage
aired on local television the next day.5.1.22two men pummeling a bystander a
block away, I called out to these offi -
cers to do something; only then did
they rush to help him. For months
afterward, I had a recurring dream
in which I saw traffi c stopped on
the freeway as rioters began pulling
drivers from their cars.
For days, the pages of The Los
Angeles Times were almost entire-
ly devoted to coverage of the riots
and their aftermath. In that time,
before the internet and social media
and smartphones, we, as the city’s
paper of record, were the tribune
that channeled its voices of anger,
recrimination and mourning. We
covered a confl agration that cut
across a wide swath of the metrop-
olis, from the San Fernando Valley in
the north to the port communities
of San Pedro and Wilmington in the
south. A week after the King verdict,
The Times was still summing up the
days of rioting; like accountants, we
tallied burned buildings and arrests,
dutifully recounting the destruction
in one neighborhood after another.
One such article briefl y men-
tioned Woodrow Wilson High in
Long Beach, a suburban school
that usually appeared in the paper
because of the success of its sports
teams. On the second day of the
riots, The Times reported, Wilson
High was the scene of a terrifying
event, in which ‘‘about 200 students
were involved in a racially motivat-
ed brawl’’ on campus. The local
paper, The Long Beach Press-Tele-
gram, called it a ‘‘lunchtime melee.’’
Six students were treated at the
nurse’s offi ce for injuries. The events
at the high school entered the his-
torical record as a violent footnote
to the larger citywide explosion, a
kind of mini-riot in the suburbs.
There was just one problem: There
was no riot at Wilson High.In 1926, the year Wilson High
School opened its doors, 30,000
Ku Klux Klan members marched
down the city’s Ocean Boulevard
while attending a Klan conven-
tion. Long Beach was then an
almost entirely white community.
So many Midwestern migrantsWoodrow Wilson High School in Long
Beach, Calif. It ‘‘wasn’t Orange
County white bread with the crust cut
off,’’ one former student remembers.