The New York Times Magazine 37the looting, to scoop up all the ‘‘free
stuff ’’ available in the city. But their
mothers forbade their teenage sons
to leave home. Dolores Villalvazo
remembers her father working at
a Long Beach grocery store called
Los Panchitos — despite its Spanish
name, it was owned by a Korean
family. The owners summoned
her father to the store to defend it
against looters. ‘‘They gave him a
gun,’’ she says. ‘‘They all had guns.’’
On Friday, two days after the ver-
dict, several hundred Marines and
National Guard troops arrived in
Long Beach to help restore order.
The students of Wilson High lived
two versions of the Los Angeles
riots and their aftermath: the one in
their neighborhoods that refl ected a
fragmented city attempting to cope
with rage at injustice, and the one
at school that upended the delicate
balance of the relative racial harmo-
ny that they’d come to know.The tension was still palpable at
Wilson when the students returnedto campus the following week. Tim-
ica Godbolt remembers attending a
school meeting at which staff and stu-
dents discussed both the hurt caused
by the Rodney King verdict and the
anxiety of students frightened by the
boilover on campus and in the city
beyond. One of her English teachers,
who was white, invited his students
to talk about the violence and the
confl ict, in class or in private.
Young people who had been
brought together by Long Beach’s
demographic changes, and by the
attempts of school offi cials to create
integrated schools, now confront-
ed the harrowing injustices around
them. Sterling Perry says he was
embarrassed by the violent acts he
saw his fellow students commit, but
he understood their roots: He him-
self had faced the barrel of a police
offi cer’s gun more than once. Terry
Moseby felt that the Rodney King
verdict transported him back to the
intolerant South of his youth. Her-
man Rodriguez, whose dream was
to be a police offi cer, and who wouldlater join the L.A.P.D., understood
the anger of the Black young peo-
ple around him; he, too, had been
stopped by the police, while driving
his 1979 Oldsmobile with his immi-
grant father. But the resentments
that fueled the tension at school
were, as far as most of the students
I spoke with expressed, fl eeting.
Campus life returned to normal
that spring. The senior-night cruise
for the class of 1992 took place as
scheduled, on a ‘‘party boat’’ that set
off into the waters off Long Beach
harbor. Graduating seniors went
to the prom and took pictures with
their caps and gowns at gradua-
tion. ‘‘The whole football stadium
was packed, standing room only,’’
Rodriguez says. ‘‘No tension. It was
long and gone. People moved on.’’The media coverage of the events
at Wilson amounted to not much
more than a paragraph in The Los
Angeles Times and an article in The
Long Beach Press-Telegram. Ster-
ling Perry was frustrated by whathe saw in the media, which didn’t
capture what happened there. ‘‘It
wasn’t as full out of control as they
reported,’’ he says. ‘‘But it wasn’t
nothing either.’’
Burnight says he was deeply
off ended by the media coverage
spurred by the riots and other vio-
lent incidents in Long Beach. He
remembers receiving calls about
gang warfare in the city from
reporters at Newsweek and other
national magazines. ‘‘There was a
kernel of truth, but it was so blown
out of proportion,’’ he insists.
In this, I felt a sense of recog-
nition from my time in working
in a newsroom. That ultimately
whether we’re talking about a
national outcry or a scuff le on a
high school campus, there would
always be those who lived through
the trauma or the chaos and thoseThe New York Times Magazine 37The quad at Woodrow Wilson
High School. After the riots, Black,
white and Latino students kept
to their own distinct groups there.Times, via Getty Images; David Longstreath/Associated Press.
Photograph by Lenard Smith for The New York Times