the football fi eld: Wilson defeated
Polytechnic, its longtime rival, for
the fi rst time in 15 years. That night,
Wilson’s students, Black, white and
otherwise, gathered for a postgame
party at the Bruin Den, a recreation
center next to the campus.
‘‘As teammates, we had each
other’s backs,’’ Perry says. But for
most Black and white students
‘‘having a personal relationship
outside sports was a no-go.’’ ‘‘You
always had the little side jokes. The
racial jokes that were supposed to
be funny but weren’t. Back then,
there weren’t repercussions.’’ Some
of those who found themselves on
the wrong end of these divisions
felt the resentment gathering up
inside them, awaiting release.
The not-guilty verdict in the case
against the offi cers charged with
assaulting Rodney King came on
April 29, a Wednesday, at 3:15 p.m.
By the time police received the
fi rst reports of violence and loot-
ing in South Central Los Angeles,
it was 5:25, when Wilson’s students
had already left the campus. Most
of the destruction during the fi rst
night of riots was concentrated in
South Los Angeles. That was the
night when the nation witnessed the
brutal beating of a white truck driv-
er named Reginald Denny by four
Black men, an incident broadcast
live by the crew of a television-news
helicopter. In Long Beach, about 20
miles from the center of the chaos,
the local newspaper would report ‘‘a
few fi res Wednesday night and some
sporadic looting Thursday morn-
ing.’’ By that afternoon, it seemed
to most of us in the newsroom that
the citywide riot might be over.
But at Wilson, as elsewhere
across the metropolis, there was a
sense that things weren’t settled yet.
A strange fever of anger and panic
drifted over the campus. More than
a few Black students were itching
for a fi ght, several people who were
students at the time told me. Ster-
ling Perry, then a junior, heard peo-
ple mutter things like: ‘‘If someone
says something to me.... If one of
them comes up to me... .’’
‘‘You could feel the tension at
school,’’ Herman Rodriguez says.
‘‘You started to think, Man, these
[expletive] rich-ass, spoiled white
kids.’’
‘‘There were all these rumors,
people saying what they were going
to do,’’ says Timica Godbolt, then a
senior. Supposedly, a fi ght was going
to take place between a group of
Black and white students. All around
her, she says, people were hyping
it up. At about lunchtime, Godbolt
decided to head home, a few blocks
away. But even from her house, she
says, she could hear a commotion
growing on the campus.
The accounts of what happened
next that afternoon vary widely.
Burnight, then the principal,
describes the incident as essentiallyhorseplay. ‘‘A bunch of guys chased
after some little white kids,’’ he
says. ‘‘To scare them. And they
were successful. They didn’t hit
them, and they didn’t kick them.’’
It was near the end of lunch period
and created a short-lived sense of
havoc, he says. ‘‘The kids ran into
the hallways and into the class-
rooms. And within a half an hour
it was all over.’’
But many Wilson alumni told
me stories that were a little more
menacing. Many Black Southern
Californians felt they had been
collectively humiliated by theverdict. ‘‘A white kid would look
at a Black kid wrong, and it was
on,’’ Moseby says.
Greg Darling remembers stand-
ing on the campus quad and seeing
‘‘a tornado of people expressing
their anger. They were ripping
stuff down, throwing trash cans.’’
Darling says he didn’t necessarily34 5.1.22
Above, clockwise from top left:
Herman Rodriguez, Timica Jefferson,
Sterling Perry and Terry Moseby in the
1992 Woodrow Wilson High School
yearbook. Right: Rodriguez, Jefferson
(now Timica Godbolt), Perry and
Moseby photographed in April 2022.