Is A Civil War Brewing in America?
Apr 30, 2017 15:13:15 #
Riots that tell the future By Lisa Alvarez
I n late April when the jacarandas bloom, I recall the 1992 riots. Back then, I saw the purple flowering trees as if for the first time, their blooms bright against L.A.’s ashy streets.
I spent the evening that April 29th downtown, across from Parker Center with first hundreds, then thousands who gathered, outraged at the acquittal of four LAPD officers charged in the beating of Rodney King.
Two weeks later, I interviewed for a teaching position at a little community college in the orange groves of Irvine. Driving down the 405, I couldn’t help but consider the white flight that had followed that route after the 1965 Watts riots.
I am neither especially white nor especially flighty. But there that history was, like worrying smoke in the rearview mirror. I got the job. I made the move.
In the quarter-century since, I have taught a generation of students freshman composition. Even such basic classes must be about something. Mine have been about California, and how we live in this place together, for better and worse. In those first years, I taught the riots; I taught Rodney King. Many students had seen the smoke with their own eyes, as had their counterparts in ’65, as a distant urban wildfire, visible from their suburban backyards.
For a few years, the students recognized the name Rodney King, remembered the televised turmoil. Today, not so much. Now the college is bigger, the orange groves thinner. It’s not unusual for me to teach children of former students. As always, some have never visited Los Angeles. Imagine that.
But they recognize new names, new flashpoints. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Florida, Ferguson, NYC. Closer to home, in a new textbook, they read about the 2011 beating death of Kelly Thomas — homeless, mentally ill — at the hands of Fullerton police officers who, as in the King beating, were acquitted. They are shocked, moved, curious. Prompted, they discover more names, more outrages: Caesar Cruz, Monique Deckard, Manuel Diaz all dead in Orange County.
When you’ve seen jacarandas in bloom against a fireline, you don’t forget it. Just like you don’t forget, once seen, the footage of King’s beating or the last moments of Garner’s life or Thomas begging for his. Riots are, to be sure, an L.A. story. But Los Angeles, like California, it is said, tells the future for the rest of the country. My students are living in that future today, the past reliably, vividly, embarrassingly blossoming.
Lisa Alvarez was a graduate student in 1992 and working at Beyond Baroque in Venice. She is an English professor at Irvine Valley College.
What fed the fury only gets worse By Michael Krikorian
O n April 29, 1992, I had a big-time hankering for my favorite hot dog. Just as I was about to roll out to Art’s Famous Chili Dogs, at Florence and Normandie, my cousin Greg called. “I’m going to Art’s,” I told him. Greg yelled at me: “Do not go to Art’s! Turn on the TV.”
I did, and what I saw was Reginald Denny a brick’s throw from Art’s, getting stomped. As I watched, one of his attackers, Henry Keith “KeeKee” Watson, stood, almost casually, on Denny’s neck.
Twenty-five years later, I’m at a pizzeria with KeeKee, now 52, talking about the riots. He can be an imposing man; big, wide, capable of a frightening sneer. But on this day, he’s charming. The two female servers smile when he raves about his three-cheese pizza. His glowing review of butterscotch pudding could not be printed here. (The servers ask him to write it on a comment card.)
Watson remembers the mayhem of 1992 as cathartic — a furious release — and yet it had no lasting impact on his neighborhood, three blocks from the Florence and Normandie flashpoint. What fed the fury, he will tell you, only gets worse.
“Twentysomething years ago they was beating guys like Rodney. Now they’re shootin’,” Watson says. In 2016, he witnessed a police shooting in an alley near 107th and Western Avenue. “Half the time they ain’t traffic stops. They are assassinations.”
Watson acknowledges his pivotal involvement in the ’92 riots, but he puts the overall onus on the police.
“The LAPD is 99% to blame. When I first saw the Rodney King beating, we were kind of excited because it was like, finally, this was caught on tape.
“Just about any black man in Watts, Green Meadows, any South-Central neighborhood — getting your ass kicked by the police was not news. It was a matter of fact. We thought finally, finally, finally they caught them on video.”
Then the verdict came in.
“I was shocked. I was in disbelief. I was pissed off,” Watson says. “On 69th Street everyone was upset. It was like validation that it was OK for the LAPD to beat black men. The turmoil was kicking up. Minute by minute it was getting turned up.”
In court a year later, Watson would escape felony conviction; he was found guilty of misdemeanor assault and released for time already served. In his defense, his lawyer said, he got caught up in “crowd contagion.”
This is the way KeeKee explains it now: “It’s like if you told me you had an extra Garth Brooks ticket, I’d say, ‘Brother Mike, I’m gonna have to pass on that.’ But if you were able to convince me to go, hell, 30, 40 minutes into the concert, I’d be do-si-doing. That’s what happened at Florence and Normandie.”
Michael Krikorian, author of the crime novel “Southside,” was a freelance writer in 1992. Henry Keith Watson apologized to Reginald Denny in court and on television in 1993. He has been a limousine driver since 1996.
No community can tolerate such loss By Brenda Stevenson
W hat has not changed in the past 25 years is that people demand equality and are willing to fight for it. African Americans have been part of this battle from the beginning — as heroic patriots during the American Revolution, abolitionists in the quest to end slavery or marchers in the civil rights movement. They have been undeniably crucial to the evolution of our society toward its founding ideals.
And race, perhaps more than any other variable, continues to divide us all. If that were not true, how could we tolerate the manifest differences in resources, well-being and protections that place black people in such an unenviable and vulnerable position in our society?
Today, as 25 years ago, black unemployment in Los Angeles is more than triple that of the national average. More than one-third of households in South-Central Los Angeles are below the poverty line — two times the percentages in California and the nation. South-Central, the focus of the unrest a quarter of a century ago, still has the county’s largest concentration of liquor stores, the smallest percentage of green space, the lowest proportion of medical facilities and healthcare professionals, and the largest share of deficient K-12 public schools. These structural deficits were foundational to the civil unrest in 1992, and they will be just as foundational the next time.
Blatant evidence of inequality before the law also looms large as fodder for discontent that ignites the fires of destruction. In 1992, the catalysts for the unrest were the beating of Rodney King and the killing of Latasha Harlins. But it is not just unanswered violence that indicts our systems of policing and justice.
The black community is subject to inexcusably high incarceration rates (40% overall of those incarcerated, although we are only 13% of the national population). A black person will be sentenced more harshly than a white one. The incarceration rate of black children hovers at five times that of whites; more than 50% of juveniles tried and sentenced as adults are black. Even school suspension rates are lopsided (3.5 times as many blacks get kicked out of school as whites).
These daunting statistics disable families, stall individual and community progress, and spawn protest and unrest. There remains too much injustice, too much indifference to the loss of black life. No community can tolerate so much loss. We could not 25 years ago. We cannot today or tomorrow. America’s cities, including Los Angeles, will erupt again.
In 1992, Brenda Stevenson was a new assistant professor at UCLA. She currently is Nickoll Family Endowed Professor of History and African American Studies at UCLA and the author of “The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the L.A. Riots.”
I n late April when the jacarandas bloom, I recall the 1992 riots. Back then, I saw the purple flowering trees as if for the first time, their blooms bright against L.A.’s ashy streets.
I spent the evening that April 29th downtown, across from Parker Center with first hundreds, then thousands who gathered, outraged at the acquittal of four LAPD officers charged in the beating of Rodney King.
Two weeks later, I interviewed for a teaching position at a little community college in the orange groves of Irvine. Driving down the 405, I couldn’t help but consider the white flight that had followed that route after the 1965 Watts riots.
I am neither especially white nor especially flighty. But there that history was, like worrying smoke in the rearview mirror. I got the job. I made the move.
In the quarter-century since, I have taught a generation of students freshman composition. Even such basic classes must be about something. Mine have been about California, and how we live in this place together, for better and worse. In those first years, I taught the riots; I taught Rodney King. Many students had seen the smoke with their own eyes, as had their counterparts in ’65, as a distant urban wildfire, visible from their suburban backyards.
For a few years, the students recognized the name Rodney King, remembered the televised turmoil. Today, not so much. Now the college is bigger, the orange groves thinner. It’s not unusual for me to teach children of former students. As always, some have never visited Los Angeles. Imagine that.
But they recognize new names, new flashpoints. Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Florida, Ferguson, NYC. Closer to home, in a new textbook, they read about the 2011 beating death of Kelly Thomas — homeless, mentally ill — at the hands of Fullerton police officers who, as in the King beating, were acquitted. They are shocked, moved, curious. Prompted, they discover more names, more outrages: Caesar Cruz, Monique Deckard, Manuel Diaz all dead in Orange County.
When you’ve seen jacarandas in bloom against a fireline, you don’t forget it. Just like you don’t forget, once seen, the footage of King’s beating or the last moments of Garner’s life or Thomas begging for his. Riots are, to be sure, an L.A. story. But Los Angeles, like California, it is said, tells the future for the rest of the country. My students are living in that future today, the past reliably, vividly, embarrassingly blossoming.
Lisa Alvarez was a graduate student in 1992 and working at Beyond Baroque in Venice. She is an English professor at Irvine Valley College.
What fed the fury only gets worse By Michael Krikorian
O n April 29, 1992, I had a big-time hankering for my favorite hot dog. Just as I was about to roll out to Art’s Famous Chili Dogs, at Florence and Normandie, my cousin Greg called. “I’m going to Art’s,” I told him. Greg yelled at me: “Do not go to Art’s! Turn on the TV.”
I did, and what I saw was Reginald Denny a brick’s throw from Art’s, getting stomped. As I watched, one of his attackers, Henry Keith “KeeKee” Watson, stood, almost casually, on Denny’s neck.
Twenty-five years later, I’m at a pizzeria with KeeKee, now 52, talking about the riots. He can be an imposing man; big, wide, capable of a frightening sneer. But on this day, he’s charming. The two female servers smile when he raves about his three-cheese pizza. His glowing review of butterscotch pudding could not be printed here. (The servers ask him to write it on a comment card.)
Watson remembers the mayhem of 1992 as cathartic — a furious release — and yet it had no lasting impact on his neighborhood, three blocks from the Florence and Normandie flashpoint. What fed the fury, he will tell you, only gets worse.
“Twentysomething years ago they was beating guys like Rodney. Now they’re shootin’,” Watson says. In 2016, he witnessed a police shooting in an alley near 107th and Western Avenue. “Half the time they ain’t traffic stops. They are assassinations.”
Watson acknowledges his pivotal involvement in the ’92 riots, but he puts the overall onus on the police.
“The LAPD is 99% to blame. When I first saw the Rodney King beating, we were kind of excited because it was like, finally, this was caught on tape.
“Just about any black man in Watts, Green Meadows, any South-Central neighborhood — getting your ass kicked by the police was not news. It was a matter of fact. We thought finally, finally, finally they caught them on video.”
Then the verdict came in.
“I was shocked. I was in disbelief. I was pissed off,” Watson says. “On 69th Street everyone was upset. It was like validation that it was OK for the LAPD to beat black men. The turmoil was kicking up. Minute by minute it was getting turned up.”
In court a year later, Watson would escape felony conviction; he was found guilty of misdemeanor assault and released for time already served. In his defense, his lawyer said, he got caught up in “crowd contagion.”
This is the way KeeKee explains it now: “It’s like if you told me you had an extra Garth Brooks ticket, I’d say, ‘Brother Mike, I’m gonna have to pass on that.’ But if you were able to convince me to go, hell, 30, 40 minutes into the concert, I’d be do-si-doing. That’s what happened at Florence and Normandie.”
Michael Krikorian, author of the crime novel “Southside,” was a freelance writer in 1992. Henry Keith Watson apologized to Reginald Denny in court and on television in 1993. He has been a limousine driver since 1996.
No community can tolerate such loss By Brenda Stevenson
W hat has not changed in the past 25 years is that people demand equality and are willing to fight for it. African Americans have been part of this battle from the beginning — as heroic patriots during the American Revolution, abolitionists in the quest to end slavery or marchers in the civil rights movement. They have been undeniably crucial to the evolution of our society toward its founding ideals.
And race, perhaps more than any other variable, continues to divide us all. If that were not true, how could we tolerate the manifest differences in resources, well-being and protections that place black people in such an unenviable and vulnerable position in our society?
Today, as 25 years ago, black unemployment in Los Angeles is more than triple that of the national average. More than one-third of households in South-Central Los Angeles are below the poverty line — two times the percentages in California and the nation. South-Central, the focus of the unrest a quarter of a century ago, still has the county’s largest concentration of liquor stores, the smallest percentage of green space, the lowest proportion of medical facilities and healthcare professionals, and the largest share of deficient K-12 public schools. These structural deficits were foundational to the civil unrest in 1992, and they will be just as foundational the next time.
Blatant evidence of inequality before the law also looms large as fodder for discontent that ignites the fires of destruction. In 1992, the catalysts for the unrest were the beating of Rodney King and the killing of Latasha Harlins. But it is not just unanswered violence that indicts our systems of policing and justice.
The black community is subject to inexcusably high incarceration rates (40% overall of those incarcerated, although we are only 13% of the national population). A black person will be sentenced more harshly than a white one. The incarceration rate of black children hovers at five times that of whites; more than 50% of juveniles tried and sentenced as adults are black. Even school suspension rates are lopsided (3.5 times as many blacks get kicked out of school as whites).
These daunting statistics disable families, stall individual and community progress, and spawn protest and unrest. There remains too much injustice, too much indifference to the loss of black life. No community can tolerate so much loss. We could not 25 years ago. We cannot today or tomorrow. America’s cities, including Los Angeles, will erupt again.
In 1992, Brenda Stevenson was a new assistant professor at UCLA. She currently is Nickoll Family Endowed Professor of History and African American Studies at UCLA and the author of “The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the L.A. Riots.”
Apr 30, 2017 15:15:39 #
In Trump age, she’s become ‘Auntie Maxine’
Longtime Rep. Waters has endeared herself to millennials for publicly rebuking a president who himself doesn’t hold back
“I OFTEN GET a feeling most people don’t know who I am, or have a clue, and I live with that,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, who’s serving her 14th term. “I don’t try to prove anything by talking.” (Paul Sancya Associated Press)
By Sarah D. Wire
R ep. Maxine Waters knows what “throwing shade” means now. She urges people to “stay woke.”
In the past few months, young people have embraced 78-year-old Waters and her acerbic comments about President Trump, bringing the Los Angeles Democrat national fame in her 14th term, and a new nickname: Auntie Maxine.
“It’s unusual for elected officials to step outside of the box,” Waters said in an interview. “The millennials keep telling me for the most part they’ve never heard someone talk like that before.”
Since refusing to attend Trump’s inauguration, Waters, the longest-serving black woman in the House, has achieved icon-level status. Her image and quotes appear on T-shirts and posters. Twitter and Facebook are full of people rubbing their virtual hands in glee at what she might say next.
“When I grow up, I want to be @MaxineWaters. Thank you, Rep. Waters, for being unafraid to speak the truth,” Crystal Webb, a young Twitter user, posted.
“On a different note, @MaxineWaters clap black game is sooooo strong!! #goals,” said another .
“Anyone think Auntie @MaxineWaters is a hero?” asked another .
Young black activists in particular see a powerful and familiar figure in the impeccably dressed older woman expressing her opinion, even if it might be painfully honest, said Rashad Robinson, who leads Color of Change, a progressive civil rights group in New York.
“Maxine Waters has given us the viral videos to go along with our rants,” Robinson said. “People are shaking their heads when she talks, and they are saying, ‘Thank God someone said that.’
“I think for many young black folks, they have that sort of auntie or matriarch in their family that sort of says it like it is,” Robinson said.
The congresswoman’s sudden popularity has led to interview after interview in the likes of Teen Vogue, Jet, Elle, Essence, Cosmopolitan and millennial-focused news sites such as Mic and BuzzFeed, with headlines like, “Maxine Waters Is Back and She’s Not Here to Play.”
Southern Californians have long been familiar with Waters, who lives in the Vermont Knolls section of South Los Angeles and is not known for holding her tongue.
In 1994, she was gaveled off the House floor when she refused to stop loudly criticizing a Republican member she felt had badgered a female witness during a hearing. In 2011, she accused President Obama of neglecting black communities, then a week later, said the tea party could go “straight to hell.”
“Nobody should be surprised about me,” she said.
But her derision of Trump goes far beyond previous criticism of political foes, and the new, norm-breaking president has energized her in a way other Republicans she’s opposed have not. In an age when the call from many on her side of the aisle is “Resistance,” Waters has become a de facto leader of the charge.
She couldn’t fathom Trump’s rise during the election, she said, pointing to his insulting comments about former presidential rivals Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton, the lewd “Access Hollywood” video in which he bragged about grabbing women and his mocking imitation of a disabled reporter.
“I can’t get it out of my head,” she said. “I’ve never seen anybody as disgusting or as disrespectful as he is.”
The attention began when Waters refused to go to the presidential inauguration. She also stayed away when Trump gave his first speech to Congress , telling the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t honor this president. I don’t respect this president. And I’m not joyful in the presence of this president.”
She has been saying she thinks Trump is headed for impeachment since even before he was sworn in. At an anti-Trump tax march in April, she said she’ll “fight every day until he is impeached.” She refers to his staff as the “Kremlin Klan” and has pushed for an independent investigation into Russian interference in the election and possible collusion by the Trump campaign.
Waters has made it clear she doesn’t want to be in the same room with Trump, much less extend the courtesies commonly afforded the president, regardless of party. She has put politeness aside.
“Newsflash to Trump: Republicans control Washington. Russians control you,” she tweeted in late April.
Waters has always been a target of conservative media, but the attacks have increased since she began in January to speak of impeachment. Last month, the far-right news magazine American Thinker called her unhinged and the “poster child for Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Now-ousted Fox News host Bill O’Reilly joked this month that he was too distracted by her “James Brown wig” to hear her comments on the House floor about patriotism under Trump. He later apologized.
Waters responded on MSNBC: “Let me just say this: I’m a strong black woman, and I cannot be intimidated. I cannot be undermined. I cannot be thought to be afraid of Bill O’Reilly or anybody.” Her comments quickly went viral.
The congresswoman says she’s just being herself.
“Some people see me as a rabble-rouser. Some people see me as someone who does not care about what other people think about me. Some people see me as someone who makes other people look bad.… I often get a feeling most people don’t know who I am, or have a clue, and I live with that,” Waters said. “I don’t try to prove anything by talking.”
Amid a black population that has receded in Los Angeles, Waters is one of the last powerful black politicians in Southern California and is known for her ability to rally South L.A. voters. Her endorsement has long been sought by seasoned and novice politicians alike, and she’s played a leadership role in the national Democratic Party for decades.
Jewett Walker, who ran the campaigns of several South Los Angeles politicians and is now a Baptist pastor at a church near the border of Waters’ district, said he expects her endorsement to carry even more weight in 2018 because of the attention she’s getting now.
“You don’t walk up to Auntie Maxine and ask for an endorsement without having some really important things to say about what you hope to accomplish and what qualifies you to run at this time,” Walker said. “When Maxine gets on board and the community realizes that she is supporting a particular candidate, that brings a lot of sway to a particular race, if everything else is equal.”
Waters, the fifth of 13 children raised by a single mother in St. Louis, began working in factories and restaurants at age 13. After high school, she moved with her family to Southern California, where she began her career in public service as a teacher and a volunteer coordinator of the newly created Head Start program. She earned a bachelor’s degree at what is now Cal State L.A. and served as chief deputy for then-City Councilman David S. Cunningham.
She won her first election for a state Assembly seat in 1977, where she became longtime Speaker Willie Brown’s right hand. Waters led the drive to force the state pension system to divest billions of dollars in shares of companies with business in South Africa. She also helped pass legislation ending police strip searches for nonviolent misdemeanors and sponsored legislation to create a state program to help keep children safe from sexual assault.
“In the state Legislature, she could get anything through, anything done,” said Fernando Guerra, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles. “Some people try to depict her as a left-wing bomb-thrower. She’s also the ultimate insider, knowing how to move things.”
Guerra said that in South Los Angeles, Waters’ endorsement remains second only to that of Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Waters was elected to Congress in 1991. The following April, her district was besieged by riots triggered by the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. She brought food and diapers to the area and said it wasn’t right to characterize what happened as riots.
“I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion,” she said at the time.
Waters has been criticized because her daughter charged candidates a fee to appear on Waters’ sample ballots — mailers she sends to hundreds of thousands of residents listing candidates she supports. She came under fire in 2009 when the House Ethics Committee investigated allegations she helped a bank in which her husband owned stock receive bailout money during the financial crisis. The committee unanimously decided Waters did not break any rules, clearing the way for her to become the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee in 2013, a position she’s held since.
Controversy has not hurt her standing in the district she’s championed over the past four decades. She has consistently been reelected with more than 70% of the vote.
In the district, she’s helped found organizations that promote black women and provide job training to young people in public housing. A technical and adult education center serving Watts bears her name.
A former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Waters spent the 1990s calling for investigations into whether U.S. intelligence agencies contributed to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, and helped create funding to treat the spread of HIV in minority communities.
She also helped write the Dodd-Frank act, which instituted broad new oversight of the banking industry after the 2008 market collapse.
Her time on the Financial Services Committee has given her the chance to work on homelessness, housing and poverty. Waters has said she often stops along skid row when she’s at home, a consistent reminder of why she’s in Congress.
“I’ve seen a lot of poverty — coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that,” Waters said.
Rep. Karen Bass, a Democrat who represents the district next door to Waters’, isn’t shocked her colleague’s forthrightness seems to have made her a millennial darling.
“She’s been consistent, and it’s playing a very important role right now,” said Bass, who met Waters when she organized marches in Los Angeles in the 1980s to oppose South African apartheid. “She’s a fighter, and that’s what people are looking for: the resistance. People want to see somebody fight.”
Waters said they’re just looking for someone who speaks honestly. “For them, it’s quite refreshing,” she said.
At a time when many progressives are looking for the next head of their movement, Waters said she’s hoping to use the surge in attention to act as a magnet for the Democratic Party.
“I’m not their leader,” she said. “I’m an enabler.”
sarah.wire@latimes.com
Twitter: @sarahdwire
Longtime Rep. Waters has endeared herself to millennials for publicly rebuking a president who himself doesn’t hold back
“I OFTEN GET a feeling most people don’t know who I am, or have a clue, and I live with that,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, who’s serving her 14th term. “I don’t try to prove anything by talking.” (Paul Sancya Associated Press)
By Sarah D. Wire
R ep. Maxine Waters knows what “throwing shade” means now. She urges people to “stay woke.”
In the past few months, young people have embraced 78-year-old Waters and her acerbic comments about President Trump, bringing the Los Angeles Democrat national fame in her 14th term, and a new nickname: Auntie Maxine.
“It’s unusual for elected officials to step outside of the box,” Waters said in an interview. “The millennials keep telling me for the most part they’ve never heard someone talk like that before.”
Since refusing to attend Trump’s inauguration, Waters, the longest-serving black woman in the House, has achieved icon-level status. Her image and quotes appear on T-shirts and posters. Twitter and Facebook are full of people rubbing their virtual hands in glee at what she might say next.
“When I grow up, I want to be @MaxineWaters. Thank you, Rep. Waters, for being unafraid to speak the truth,” Crystal Webb, a young Twitter user, posted.
“On a different note, @MaxineWaters clap black game is sooooo strong!! #goals,” said another .
“Anyone think Auntie @MaxineWaters is a hero?” asked another .
Young black activists in particular see a powerful and familiar figure in the impeccably dressed older woman expressing her opinion, even if it might be painfully honest, said Rashad Robinson, who leads Color of Change, a progressive civil rights group in New York.
“Maxine Waters has given us the viral videos to go along with our rants,” Robinson said. “People are shaking their heads when she talks, and they are saying, ‘Thank God someone said that.’
“I think for many young black folks, they have that sort of auntie or matriarch in their family that sort of says it like it is,” Robinson said.
The congresswoman’s sudden popularity has led to interview after interview in the likes of Teen Vogue, Jet, Elle, Essence, Cosmopolitan and millennial-focused news sites such as Mic and BuzzFeed, with headlines like, “Maxine Waters Is Back and She’s Not Here to Play.”
Southern Californians have long been familiar with Waters, who lives in the Vermont Knolls section of South Los Angeles and is not known for holding her tongue.
In 1994, she was gaveled off the House floor when she refused to stop loudly criticizing a Republican member she felt had badgered a female witness during a hearing. In 2011, she accused President Obama of neglecting black communities, then a week later, said the tea party could go “straight to hell.”
“Nobody should be surprised about me,” she said.
But her derision of Trump goes far beyond previous criticism of political foes, and the new, norm-breaking president has energized her in a way other Republicans she’s opposed have not. In an age when the call from many on her side of the aisle is “Resistance,” Waters has become a de facto leader of the charge.
She couldn’t fathom Trump’s rise during the election, she said, pointing to his insulting comments about former presidential rivals Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton, the lewd “Access Hollywood” video in which he bragged about grabbing women and his mocking imitation of a disabled reporter.
“I can’t get it out of my head,” she said. “I’ve never seen anybody as disgusting or as disrespectful as he is.”
The attention began when Waters refused to go to the presidential inauguration. She also stayed away when Trump gave his first speech to Congress , telling the Los Angeles Times: “I don’t honor this president. I don’t respect this president. And I’m not joyful in the presence of this president.”
She has been saying she thinks Trump is headed for impeachment since even before he was sworn in. At an anti-Trump tax march in April, she said she’ll “fight every day until he is impeached.” She refers to his staff as the “Kremlin Klan” and has pushed for an independent investigation into Russian interference in the election and possible collusion by the Trump campaign.
Waters has made it clear she doesn’t want to be in the same room with Trump, much less extend the courtesies commonly afforded the president, regardless of party. She has put politeness aside.
“Newsflash to Trump: Republicans control Washington. Russians control you,” she tweeted in late April.
Waters has always been a target of conservative media, but the attacks have increased since she began in January to speak of impeachment. Last month, the far-right news magazine American Thinker called her unhinged and the “poster child for Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
Now-ousted Fox News host Bill O’Reilly joked this month that he was too distracted by her “James Brown wig” to hear her comments on the House floor about patriotism under Trump. He later apologized.
Waters responded on MSNBC: “Let me just say this: I’m a strong black woman, and I cannot be intimidated. I cannot be undermined. I cannot be thought to be afraid of Bill O’Reilly or anybody.” Her comments quickly went viral.
The congresswoman says she’s just being herself.
“Some people see me as a rabble-rouser. Some people see me as someone who does not care about what other people think about me. Some people see me as someone who makes other people look bad.… I often get a feeling most people don’t know who I am, or have a clue, and I live with that,” Waters said. “I don’t try to prove anything by talking.”
Amid a black population that has receded in Los Angeles, Waters is one of the last powerful black politicians in Southern California and is known for her ability to rally South L.A. voters. Her endorsement has long been sought by seasoned and novice politicians alike, and she’s played a leadership role in the national Democratic Party for decades.
Jewett Walker, who ran the campaigns of several South Los Angeles politicians and is now a Baptist pastor at a church near the border of Waters’ district, said he expects her endorsement to carry even more weight in 2018 because of the attention she’s getting now.
“You don’t walk up to Auntie Maxine and ask for an endorsement without having some really important things to say about what you hope to accomplish and what qualifies you to run at this time,” Walker said. “When Maxine gets on board and the community realizes that she is supporting a particular candidate, that brings a lot of sway to a particular race, if everything else is equal.”
Waters, the fifth of 13 children raised by a single mother in St. Louis, began working in factories and restaurants at age 13. After high school, she moved with her family to Southern California, where she began her career in public service as a teacher and a volunteer coordinator of the newly created Head Start program. She earned a bachelor’s degree at what is now Cal State L.A. and served as chief deputy for then-City Councilman David S. Cunningham.
She won her first election for a state Assembly seat in 1977, where she became longtime Speaker Willie Brown’s right hand. Waters led the drive to force the state pension system to divest billions of dollars in shares of companies with business in South Africa. She also helped pass legislation ending police strip searches for nonviolent misdemeanors and sponsored legislation to create a state program to help keep children safe from sexual assault.
“In the state Legislature, she could get anything through, anything done,” said Fernando Guerra, director of Loyola Marymount University’s Center for the Study of Los Angeles. “Some people try to depict her as a left-wing bomb-thrower. She’s also the ultimate insider, knowing how to move things.”
Guerra said that in South Los Angeles, Waters’ endorsement remains second only to that of Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Waters was elected to Congress in 1991. The following April, her district was besieged by riots triggered by the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. She brought food and diapers to the area and said it wasn’t right to characterize what happened as riots.
“I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion,” she said at the time.
Waters has been criticized because her daughter charged candidates a fee to appear on Waters’ sample ballots — mailers she sends to hundreds of thousands of residents listing candidates she supports. She came under fire in 2009 when the House Ethics Committee investigated allegations she helped a bank in which her husband owned stock receive bailout money during the financial crisis. The committee unanimously decided Waters did not break any rules, clearing the way for her to become the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee in 2013, a position she’s held since.
Controversy has not hurt her standing in the district she’s championed over the past four decades. She has consistently been reelected with more than 70% of the vote.
In the district, she’s helped found organizations that promote black women and provide job training to young people in public housing. A technical and adult education center serving Watts bears her name.
A former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Waters spent the 1990s calling for investigations into whether U.S. intelligence agencies contributed to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, and helped create funding to treat the spread of HIV in minority communities.
She also helped write the Dodd-Frank act, which instituted broad new oversight of the banking industry after the 2008 market collapse.
Her time on the Financial Services Committee has given her the chance to work on homelessness, housing and poverty. Waters has said she often stops along skid row when she’s at home, a consistent reminder of why she’s in Congress.
“I’ve seen a lot of poverty — coming up as a young child, lost hopes and dreams and people that never had a chance to have a decent quality of life. I believe we can do a lot greater than that,” Waters said.
Rep. Karen Bass, a Democrat who represents the district next door to Waters’, isn’t shocked her colleague’s forthrightness seems to have made her a millennial darling.
“She’s been consistent, and it’s playing a very important role right now,” said Bass, who met Waters when she organized marches in Los Angeles in the 1980s to oppose South African apartheid. “She’s a fighter, and that’s what people are looking for: the resistance. People want to see somebody fight.”
Waters said they’re just looking for someone who speaks honestly. “For them, it’s quite refreshing,” she said.
At a time when many progressives are looking for the next head of their movement, Waters said she’s hoping to use the surge in attention to act as a magnet for the Democratic Party.
“I’m not their leader,” she said. “I’m an enabler.”
sarah.wire@latimes.com
Twitter: @sarahdwire
Apr 30, 2017 15:45:58 #
Venice neighborhood saw city’s only residential looting
As gentrification came to a black community, some used the King verdict to push back.
COUSINS Petronia Dabbs and Mary McElmore in the Oakwood section of Venice, where they grew up. Both women own homes they refuse to sell. (Robin Abcarian Los Angeles Times )
By Robin Abcarian
Not too many commutes stick out in my memory, but I will never forget the drive from downtown Los Angeles to Venice Beach the evening of April 29, 1992, hours after a Simi Valley jury acquitted four white officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King.
Before I’d left the newsroom, I’d already seen on TV a trucker brutally yanked from his semi-truck at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. Among the indelible images provided by a news helicopter: a man executing a flying kick to Reginald Denny’s face while he was down on all fours.
As I drove west on the Santa Monica Freeway, I saw columns of black smoke, from dozens of blazes, twisting into the sky. Reporters in helicopters said they were reminded of the burning oil wells of Kuwait. Palm trees on fire near the downtown tangle of interchanges flickered like tiki torches at an apocalyptic luau.
I was six months pregnant, my husband was out of town and I just wanted to get home. When you’re pregnant, you tend to amplify fears, but I don’t think my fear was exaggerated. I had a sickening, hollow feeling that nothing could protect me — from a stray bullet, perhaps, or a rock tossed from an overpass.
When traffic slowed to a crawl in the Mid-City area, I was weirdly nervous about catching the eye of other commuters. My impulse was to look a fellow human in the eye, and raise a brow as if to say, “This is crazy, right?” But I didn’t want to provoke someone with a glance.
By the way, this was not unfounded fear. People were being pulled out of their cars and beaten. Randomly shot and killed. And not just in South Los Angeles and Koreatown.
On April 30, in Beverly Hills, in the middle of the day, a young African American dancer named Donna Simon was shot in both legs on Wilshire Boulevard as she came to the aid of a white man being attacked by a woman wielding a crowbar. I interviewed her a few days later and was eventually deposed by lawyers for her health insurance company, which she had to sue to cover her medical bills.
::
That night when I got home, I drank two glasses of wine and lay alone in bed, watching TV, listening to sirens, trying to stay calm.
Two blocks from my house, looters on Lincoln Boulevard smashed the plate glass windows of the Wherehouse music and video store.
Less than a mile to the west, the only residential looting that occurred in the city was happening in the Oakwood section of Venice, a traditionally black enclave.
Tiny Oakwood, a 1.1-mile-square neighborhood, had been the only Los Angeles beachside community where black people were allowed to purchase homes after Venice was built in the early 20th century. It became a place where generations of black families passed their homes down to their children.
By 1992, the neighborhood’s gentrification, which began in earnest in the ’80s, had put working-class blacks and Latinos on a collision course with the upscale whites who were displacing them.
On April 29, people chucked bricks through the windows of some of Oakwood’s fancy new homes and broke the windows of modest homes owned by relatively recent white arrivals, including the late Phil Raider, a general contractor who had bought a place at 5th and Vernon in 1989.
“I’m not in favor of all the development here,” a disheartened Raider told me. “The only thing I need to see changed in Venice is the violence and the poverty.”
In a particularly disturbing attack, a live-in caregiver alone with her 5-year-old charge on Indiana Avenue, blocks from Raider’s house, had cowered in a locked laundry room while a mob two dozen strong destroyed the home’s interior.
The next day, I visited the place. A marble dining room table was smashed to pieces, and custom walnut kitchen cabinets — made by the father, Alan Smith — were scorched.
A local activist named Mildred Reynolds, who died in 1994, told me the Rodney King verdict was not to blame for what happened in Oakwood. “This was just an excuse,” she said. “I think they are upset about the new people coming in.”
Robert Shipp Jr., then-pastor of Oakwood’s New Bethel Church, echoed her. African American tenants affected by skyrocketing rents, he said, “worry that they will have to move to Watts. If that happens, they will definitely burn down other places here. They will try to scare the developers away.”
::
Let’s be honest; nothing can scare a developer away from prime real estate near the beach. In fact, if you want to see gentrification in its most naked form, drive around Oakwood. It’s bordered by Lincoln on the east, Abbot Kinney on the west, Rose on the north and California on the south.
There is nothing subtle about what’s going on.
Tiny bungalows cower beside looming mansions trying to hide their grandeur behind industrial-looking fences or impenetrable hedges. Small homes that seemed pricey at a quarter-million dollars in 1992 now routinely go for six times that. It’s not uncommon for buyers to pay more than $1,000 a square foot. In another blow to the modest neighborhood, in 2012, GQ magazine named Abbot Kinney Boulevard, once a street of shoe repairs and mom-and-pop stores, “the coolest block in America.”
On Thursday, I bumped into first cousins Mary McElmore, 83, and Petronia Dabbs, 71, who have spent much of their lives on the 500 block of Brooks Avenue.
“This whole street was black when I came here,” said McElmore, who moved from Texas when she was 19. “This was the only place we could live!” She and her late husband, a trash collector, bought a home she still owns on Brooks in 1960 for $12,500.
Both women have fiercely hung on to their Oakwood homes. Neither needs the million-plus dollars that they are constantly offered by developers, though they are at peace with the idea that their kids will probably sell after they are gone.
“I can remember my dad and mom going to meetings in Oakwood, before the Santa Monica Freeway and the 90 Freeway ever came in,” said Dabbs, a retired schoolteacher. “They were talking about ‘the plan’ for Venice. We knew what was going to happen. This was the last poor man’s beach, and they were going to take it away from us.”
In 1992, the Wall Street Journal mocked me for calling what happened in Oakwood “the wages of gentrification, ” as if I was excusing, rather than trying to grasp, the root of the violence.
But you know, I believed that then, and I still believe it now.
robin.abcarian@latimes.com
As gentrification came to a black community, some used the King verdict to push back.
COUSINS Petronia Dabbs and Mary McElmore in the Oakwood section of Venice, where they grew up. Both women own homes they refuse to sell. (Robin Abcarian Los Angeles Times )
By Robin Abcarian
Not too many commutes stick out in my memory, but I will never forget the drive from downtown Los Angeles to Venice Beach the evening of April 29, 1992, hours after a Simi Valley jury acquitted four white officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King.
Before I’d left the newsroom, I’d already seen on TV a trucker brutally yanked from his semi-truck at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. Among the indelible images provided by a news helicopter: a man executing a flying kick to Reginald Denny’s face while he was down on all fours.
As I drove west on the Santa Monica Freeway, I saw columns of black smoke, from dozens of blazes, twisting into the sky. Reporters in helicopters said they were reminded of the burning oil wells of Kuwait. Palm trees on fire near the downtown tangle of interchanges flickered like tiki torches at an apocalyptic luau.
I was six months pregnant, my husband was out of town and I just wanted to get home. When you’re pregnant, you tend to amplify fears, but I don’t think my fear was exaggerated. I had a sickening, hollow feeling that nothing could protect me — from a stray bullet, perhaps, or a rock tossed from an overpass.
When traffic slowed to a crawl in the Mid-City area, I was weirdly nervous about catching the eye of other commuters. My impulse was to look a fellow human in the eye, and raise a brow as if to say, “This is crazy, right?” But I didn’t want to provoke someone with a glance.
By the way, this was not unfounded fear. People were being pulled out of their cars and beaten. Randomly shot and killed. And not just in South Los Angeles and Koreatown.
On April 30, in Beverly Hills, in the middle of the day, a young African American dancer named Donna Simon was shot in both legs on Wilshire Boulevard as she came to the aid of a white man being attacked by a woman wielding a crowbar. I interviewed her a few days later and was eventually deposed by lawyers for her health insurance company, which she had to sue to cover her medical bills.
::
That night when I got home, I drank two glasses of wine and lay alone in bed, watching TV, listening to sirens, trying to stay calm.
Two blocks from my house, looters on Lincoln Boulevard smashed the plate glass windows of the Wherehouse music and video store.
Less than a mile to the west, the only residential looting that occurred in the city was happening in the Oakwood section of Venice, a traditionally black enclave.
Tiny Oakwood, a 1.1-mile-square neighborhood, had been the only Los Angeles beachside community where black people were allowed to purchase homes after Venice was built in the early 20th century. It became a place where generations of black families passed their homes down to their children.
By 1992, the neighborhood’s gentrification, which began in earnest in the ’80s, had put working-class blacks and Latinos on a collision course with the upscale whites who were displacing them.
On April 29, people chucked bricks through the windows of some of Oakwood’s fancy new homes and broke the windows of modest homes owned by relatively recent white arrivals, including the late Phil Raider, a general contractor who had bought a place at 5th and Vernon in 1989.
“I’m not in favor of all the development here,” a disheartened Raider told me. “The only thing I need to see changed in Venice is the violence and the poverty.”
In a particularly disturbing attack, a live-in caregiver alone with her 5-year-old charge on Indiana Avenue, blocks from Raider’s house, had cowered in a locked laundry room while a mob two dozen strong destroyed the home’s interior.
The next day, I visited the place. A marble dining room table was smashed to pieces, and custom walnut kitchen cabinets — made by the father, Alan Smith — were scorched.
A local activist named Mildred Reynolds, who died in 1994, told me the Rodney King verdict was not to blame for what happened in Oakwood. “This was just an excuse,” she said. “I think they are upset about the new people coming in.”
Robert Shipp Jr., then-pastor of Oakwood’s New Bethel Church, echoed her. African American tenants affected by skyrocketing rents, he said, “worry that they will have to move to Watts. If that happens, they will definitely burn down other places here. They will try to scare the developers away.”
::
Let’s be honest; nothing can scare a developer away from prime real estate near the beach. In fact, if you want to see gentrification in its most naked form, drive around Oakwood. It’s bordered by Lincoln on the east, Abbot Kinney on the west, Rose on the north and California on the south.
There is nothing subtle about what’s going on.
Tiny bungalows cower beside looming mansions trying to hide their grandeur behind industrial-looking fences or impenetrable hedges. Small homes that seemed pricey at a quarter-million dollars in 1992 now routinely go for six times that. It’s not uncommon for buyers to pay more than $1,000 a square foot. In another blow to the modest neighborhood, in 2012, GQ magazine named Abbot Kinney Boulevard, once a street of shoe repairs and mom-and-pop stores, “the coolest block in America.”
On Thursday, I bumped into first cousins Mary McElmore, 83, and Petronia Dabbs, 71, who have spent much of their lives on the 500 block of Brooks Avenue.
“This whole street was black when I came here,” said McElmore, who moved from Texas when she was 19. “This was the only place we could live!” She and her late husband, a trash collector, bought a home she still owns on Brooks in 1960 for $12,500.
Both women have fiercely hung on to their Oakwood homes. Neither needs the million-plus dollars that they are constantly offered by developers, though they are at peace with the idea that their kids will probably sell after they are gone.
“I can remember my dad and mom going to meetings in Oakwood, before the Santa Monica Freeway and the 90 Freeway ever came in,” said Dabbs, a retired schoolteacher. “They were talking about ‘the plan’ for Venice. We knew what was going to happen. This was the last poor man’s beach, and they were going to take it away from us.”
In 1992, the Wall Street Journal mocked me for calling what happened in Oakwood “the wages of gentrification, ” as if I was excusing, rather than trying to grasp, the root of the violence.
But you know, I believed that then, and I still believe it now.
robin.abcarian@latimes.com
Apr 30, 2017 15:48:24 #
After racial unrest, groups preach unity
African American and Korean leaders mark anniversary with a message of progress.
By Sarah Parvini and Victoria Kim
Jackie Broxton remembers the day the riots swept through her city, when the only way to get back to her car after church was to brave the flames and plumes of smoke that had engulfed the surrounding streets of South L.A.
She needed to get her daughter home to Ladera Heights, and for a moment she thought she would have to walk from the First African Methodist Episcopal Church down rubble-ridden West Adams Boulevard. Luckily, a fellow parishioner offered to drive her around the corner.
“You came out of church with a sense of hope, but you got outside and it was chaos,” she said.
Broxton, 69, was among about 100 others who gathered across the street from the church at the Allen House gardens Saturday afternoon to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1992 riots. City officials and members of the African American and Korean communities gathered at the home of the oldest black congregation in L.A. to promote a single message: unity.
“If we don’t find a way to work together, it could happen again,” Broxton said.
Leaders from both communities pledged to work together in what they described as a special day — the event marked the first time the two groups came together to commemorate the riots, said Laura Jeon, president of the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles.
“Twenty-five years ago, Koreatown was in chaos, its buildings charred and its community in ruins,” Jeon told the crowd. “If the Korean community and the African American community had been communicating back in 1992, the pain, agony, anger felt by both communities might have been avoided.”
The riots are considered the “greatest injury and tragedy to the Korean community” in the history of Korean immigration, she added.
The event was among many in a week recalling the riots, which left 63 people dead, another 2,000 people injured and roughly $1 billion in property damage across the city.
In an unscheduled moment Saturday at another event at a Koreatown church, L.A. City Councilman David Ryu enthusiastically dragged a man by his arm up to the stage.
Ryu, the first Korean American to serve on the council, recounted how he and the man, Nathan Redfern, had worked together more than 20 years ago following the riots. Ryu, then a fresh college graduate, and Redfern, a former Crips gang member, worked at a Koreatown nonprofit’s dispute resolution center.
Ryu recalled how the two would go out to businesses in East and South L.A. to help resolve conflicts between Korean store owners and their customers, defusing the types of tense situations that led to the riots.
Later, they worked on a citizenship project, Ryu teaching classes in English as a second language and Redfern giving mock citizenship exams at the Korean American Coalition, the councilman said.
“We used to go out together, arm in arm,” Ryu said at the event organized by the Korean Churches for Community Development. “The L.A. riots was not a black-Korean issue. It was a poverty issue; it was an issue of language barriers.”
The day’s program included a joint choir performance of Korean, black and Latino groups singing “We Shall Overcome.” Congressional candidate Robert Lee Ahn, former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and state Treasurer John Chiang — the latter two poised for the governor’s race — also made an appearance.
On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, a jury in Ventura County acquitted four white Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, after a high-speed pursuit. The incident, caught on amateur videotape, had sparked national debate about police brutality and racial injustice. The verdict stunned L.A., where angry crowds gathered on street corners across the city.
The flashpoint was a single intersection in South L.A. — Florence and Normandie avenues — but it was a scene eerily repeated in many parts of the city in the hours that followed.
Mayor Tom Bradley called a local state of emergency later that day, and Gov. Pete Wilson, at Bradley’s request, ordered the National Guard to activate 2,000 reserve soldiers.
The riots had causes beyond the not-guilty verdicts — including grinding poverty and hopelessness in South L.A., and a police force with a reputation for treating minorities poorly.
City officials who spoke at the First AME Church event Saturday lauded the progress Los Angeles institutions have made since 1992, including a more diverse police force and a City Council that is more representative of the city it serves.
“In some ways we are much better and stronger, more resilient,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told the audience. “We’re not cocky anymore; we know what our faults are.”
“We still have a long way to go,” he added.
Still, he said, L.A.’s progress in the last 25 years points to the city’s resilience.
“We survive,” Garcetti said. “We always do get through the most difficult of days.”
Some at the commemoration acknowledged that the relationship between African Americans and Korean Americans in South L.A. has gotten better but still needs work.
Meanwhile, the Latino community keeps growing, forming the majority in most of the area’s neighborhoods. Although there’s black and Latino tension, diversity is a strength, they said.
The Rev. Barbara Brooks, associate minister at First AME Church, said remembering the civil unrest together serves as a vehicle to better relations and fight “complacency.”
“It’s like when you have a goal of losing 50 pounds, and when you reach your goal you say, ‘OK, I don’t have to do to do this anymore,’ ” Brooks said. “But to maintain what you’ve lost, you’ve got to do something different.”
For the African American and Korean communities, Brooks said, that “something different” is teamwork.
Kieja Kim, president of the Victor Valley Korean American Assn., wasn’t in Los Angeles during the riots, but she came Saturday to show solidarity and support.
“Community relationships are important,” said Kim, 60. “We aren’t different. Black, Korean, Asian — we’re human.”
As the event came to a close following afternoon prayers, the crowd made their way inside, where they sat down for that other common symbol of unity: breaking bread.
sarah.parvini@latimes.com
victoria.kim@latimes.com
African American and Korean leaders mark anniversary with a message of progress.
By Sarah Parvini and Victoria Kim
Jackie Broxton remembers the day the riots swept through her city, when the only way to get back to her car after church was to brave the flames and plumes of smoke that had engulfed the surrounding streets of South L.A.
She needed to get her daughter home to Ladera Heights, and for a moment she thought she would have to walk from the First African Methodist Episcopal Church down rubble-ridden West Adams Boulevard. Luckily, a fellow parishioner offered to drive her around the corner.
“You came out of church with a sense of hope, but you got outside and it was chaos,” she said.
Broxton, 69, was among about 100 others who gathered across the street from the church at the Allen House gardens Saturday afternoon to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1992 riots. City officials and members of the African American and Korean communities gathered at the home of the oldest black congregation in L.A. to promote a single message: unity.
“If we don’t find a way to work together, it could happen again,” Broxton said.
Leaders from both communities pledged to work together in what they described as a special day — the event marked the first time the two groups came together to commemorate the riots, said Laura Jeon, president of the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles.
“Twenty-five years ago, Koreatown was in chaos, its buildings charred and its community in ruins,” Jeon told the crowd. “If the Korean community and the African American community had been communicating back in 1992, the pain, agony, anger felt by both communities might have been avoided.”
The riots are considered the “greatest injury and tragedy to the Korean community” in the history of Korean immigration, she added.
The event was among many in a week recalling the riots, which left 63 people dead, another 2,000 people injured and roughly $1 billion in property damage across the city.
In an unscheduled moment Saturday at another event at a Koreatown church, L.A. City Councilman David Ryu enthusiastically dragged a man by his arm up to the stage.
Ryu, the first Korean American to serve on the council, recounted how he and the man, Nathan Redfern, had worked together more than 20 years ago following the riots. Ryu, then a fresh college graduate, and Redfern, a former Crips gang member, worked at a Koreatown nonprofit’s dispute resolution center.
Ryu recalled how the two would go out to businesses in East and South L.A. to help resolve conflicts between Korean store owners and their customers, defusing the types of tense situations that led to the riots.
Later, they worked on a citizenship project, Ryu teaching classes in English as a second language and Redfern giving mock citizenship exams at the Korean American Coalition, the councilman said.
“We used to go out together, arm in arm,” Ryu said at the event organized by the Korean Churches for Community Development. “The L.A. riots was not a black-Korean issue. It was a poverty issue; it was an issue of language barriers.”
The day’s program included a joint choir performance of Korean, black and Latino groups singing “We Shall Overcome.” Congressional candidate Robert Lee Ahn, former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and state Treasurer John Chiang — the latter two poised for the governor’s race — also made an appearance.
On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, a jury in Ventura County acquitted four white Los Angeles police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, after a high-speed pursuit. The incident, caught on amateur videotape, had sparked national debate about police brutality and racial injustice. The verdict stunned L.A., where angry crowds gathered on street corners across the city.
The flashpoint was a single intersection in South L.A. — Florence and Normandie avenues — but it was a scene eerily repeated in many parts of the city in the hours that followed.
Mayor Tom Bradley called a local state of emergency later that day, and Gov. Pete Wilson, at Bradley’s request, ordered the National Guard to activate 2,000 reserve soldiers.
The riots had causes beyond the not-guilty verdicts — including grinding poverty and hopelessness in South L.A., and a police force with a reputation for treating minorities poorly.
City officials who spoke at the First AME Church event Saturday lauded the progress Los Angeles institutions have made since 1992, including a more diverse police force and a City Council that is more representative of the city it serves.
“In some ways we are much better and stronger, more resilient,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told the audience. “We’re not cocky anymore; we know what our faults are.”
“We still have a long way to go,” he added.
Still, he said, L.A.’s progress in the last 25 years points to the city’s resilience.
“We survive,” Garcetti said. “We always do get through the most difficult of days.”
Some at the commemoration acknowledged that the relationship between African Americans and Korean Americans in South L.A. has gotten better but still needs work.
Meanwhile, the Latino community keeps growing, forming the majority in most of the area’s neighborhoods. Although there’s black and Latino tension, diversity is a strength, they said.
The Rev. Barbara Brooks, associate minister at First AME Church, said remembering the civil unrest together serves as a vehicle to better relations and fight “complacency.”
“It’s like when you have a goal of losing 50 pounds, and when you reach your goal you say, ‘OK, I don’t have to do to do this anymore,’ ” Brooks said. “But to maintain what you’ve lost, you’ve got to do something different.”
For the African American and Korean communities, Brooks said, that “something different” is teamwork.
Kieja Kim, president of the Victor Valley Korean American Assn., wasn’t in Los Angeles during the riots, but she came Saturday to show solidarity and support.
“Community relationships are important,” said Kim, 60. “We aren’t different. Black, Korean, Asian — we’re human.”
As the event came to a close following afternoon prayers, the crowd made their way inside, where they sat down for that other common symbol of unity: breaking bread.
sarah.parvini@latimes.com
victoria.kim@latimes.com
Apr 30, 2017 16:14:11 #
Retrospective
‘A bad game and a bad night for L.A.’
SMOKE RISES from buildings during the 1992 riots. Many of the thousands of fans who attended the Dodgers’ April 29 home game against the Phillies were initially unaware that the city was descending into chaos. (Ken Lubas Los Angeles Times)
BENJAMIN ORESKES
The Dodgers were having a bad game in an already bad season, but it was a typically nice spring evening to catch a baseball game in Chavez Ravine.
More than 36,000 fans packed into Dodger Stadium to watch the home team take on the Philadelphia Phillies.
Hours earlier and miles away in a Simi Valley courtroom, a jury had already rendered not-guilty verdicts for the four LAPD officers caught beating a prone Rodney King on videotape.
But for those entering the stadium for the 7 p.m. game, it was like stepping into a kind of bubble. There were no smartphones or Twitter in 1992. There was no device to tell them in the fast scrawl of social media that Los Angeles was quickly devolving into chaos.
Still, there were signs: a public address announcement and a message on the video boards telling fans that disturbances had started across the city and that authorities were recommending alternate routes to the 110 Freeway.
Bill Foltz, the team’s director of finance at the time, kept his eyes glued to the television in the press box. He saw helicopter footage of truck driver Reginald Denny being pulled from his vehicle and beaten at the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues.
From his perch above the upper deck, he saw orange flames and smoke rise above the city.
“We could see the glow running all along. We could see as far south as the 10 Freeway,” said Foltz, who is now chief financial officer of the Anaheim Ducks. “Even at night we could see the smoke. It was surreal.”
But inside, the bliss of a lazy spring game against the Phillies prevailed, at least for while, even if the Dodgers seemed plainly headed toward a season of losing. By the fifth inning they were down by five runs. Orel Hershiser, the team’s Cy Young Award-winning pitcher, had been chased from the game.
After the 7-3 loss, Hershiser said: “It was a bad game and a bad night for L.A. I have nothing else to say.”
The King video, taken by George Holliday, showed officers delivering repeated baton blows and kicks on March 3, 1991, as King rolled on the ground. A year later, on April 29, at 3:15 p.m., a jury acquitted Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and Officers Laurence M. Powell, Theodore J. Briseno and Timothy E. Wind.
At Dodger Stadium, players would take batting practice. Some watched the TV news. But once the game began, people in the stadium were initially shielded from the scope of what was unfolding in many L.A. streets.
“You’re not getting much of anything as a fan inside of the stadium that was telling you what was happening in the outside world,” Foltz recalled. “Unless you had your transistor radio and were listening to [Vin Scully], you may not know what’s going on in the city.”
Dale Sveum, now a coach with the Kansas City Royals, was a journeyman infielder on that 1992 Phillies team. He played first base that night and said in an interview with ESPN that after the disturbances were announced on the scoreboard, the stadium began to clear out.
“By the time the game was in the seventh, eighth inning, there was hardly anybody in the stands at all,” he said. “Then, of course, when the game got over, all hell was breaking loose all over the city.”
When the game ended, the Phillies boarded a bus that came onto the field and pulled right up to the dugout. It was escorted by the LAPD, and one officer told Sveum to bring a bat, he recalled. The parking lot behind the stadium would become a staging area for local authorities and the National Guard.
In a 2012 blog post, former sportswriter Jon Weisman asked two Dodgers who are inextricably connected to those neighborhoods where the riots took place about that night. Eric Davis and Darryl Strawberry were childhood friends in South L.A. Strawberry attended Crenshaw High School, and his older brother Michael was a police officer. Davis and Strawberry owned a store, All-Star Custom Interiors, at 84th and Broadway.
“At the end of the game, the sheriffs came into the clubhouse [and told us] that the city was in an uproar and they kind of routed us home, as far as what freeways to take,” Davis recalled.
The Dodgers’ chief financial officer at the time, Bob Graziano, was in a window seat on a flight back from Chicago that afternoon. He knew the verdict was coming, but airlines didn’t have Wi-Fi or in-flight streams of CNN. As his plane banked into LAX, he saw more than a half-dozen fires burning across the city.
“They must have announced the verdict,” he recalled thinking.
The next day he joined Foltz, who had driven in from Redondo Beach, at the office. The commute on the 110 Freeway had been eerily easy.
Mayor Tom Bradley and the LAPD asked the Dodgers to cancel the next day’s game and three more. The team considered shifting the games to Albuquerque and even tried to play in San Diego.
“Sports oftentimes brings people together,” said Graziano, who later served as team president. “It was so bad that we really had to end up canceling the games.”
For Strawberry, who was struggling with a herniated disk, the destruction of the city was even more personal. The day after the verdict, Davis and Strawberry headed to their store. The looters had spared All-Star Custom Interiors, in which the two players had each invested $50,000 several years before.
Early in the morning on May 1, Michael Strawberry, Darryl’s brother and a former Dodgers minor leaguer, was grazed in the head by a bullet when his patrol car was ambushed. Strawberry’s mother told The Times that the shooting left her son with severe headaches and metal fragments in his head.
The Dodgers’ attendance dropped precipitously that year. Graziano said the team’s performance probably was a larger factor in that than the riots. In 1991, the team won 93 games. In 1992, they would go on to lose 99 games.
The Los Angeles Police Academy sits behind the stadium and often used the Dodgers’ parking lots for training exercises. Both Foltz and Graziano recall a change in what they saw from the authorities. Before, one would see officers learning how to drive or approach vehicles, they recalled.
“What you saw after that,” Graziano said, “was larger groups of police officers who were training for larger disturbances.”
benjamin.oreskes@latimes.com
‘A bad game and a bad night for L.A.’
SMOKE RISES from buildings during the 1992 riots. Many of the thousands of fans who attended the Dodgers’ April 29 home game against the Phillies were initially unaware that the city was descending into chaos. (Ken Lubas Los Angeles Times)
BENJAMIN ORESKES
The Dodgers were having a bad game in an already bad season, but it was a typically nice spring evening to catch a baseball game in Chavez Ravine.
More than 36,000 fans packed into Dodger Stadium to watch the home team take on the Philadelphia Phillies.
Hours earlier and miles away in a Simi Valley courtroom, a jury had already rendered not-guilty verdicts for the four LAPD officers caught beating a prone Rodney King on videotape.
But for those entering the stadium for the 7 p.m. game, it was like stepping into a kind of bubble. There were no smartphones or Twitter in 1992. There was no device to tell them in the fast scrawl of social media that Los Angeles was quickly devolving into chaos.
Still, there were signs: a public address announcement and a message on the video boards telling fans that disturbances had started across the city and that authorities were recommending alternate routes to the 110 Freeway.
Bill Foltz, the team’s director of finance at the time, kept his eyes glued to the television in the press box. He saw helicopter footage of truck driver Reginald Denny being pulled from his vehicle and beaten at the corner of Florence and Normandie avenues.
From his perch above the upper deck, he saw orange flames and smoke rise above the city.
“We could see the glow running all along. We could see as far south as the 10 Freeway,” said Foltz, who is now chief financial officer of the Anaheim Ducks. “Even at night we could see the smoke. It was surreal.”
But inside, the bliss of a lazy spring game against the Phillies prevailed, at least for while, even if the Dodgers seemed plainly headed toward a season of losing. By the fifth inning they were down by five runs. Orel Hershiser, the team’s Cy Young Award-winning pitcher, had been chased from the game.
After the 7-3 loss, Hershiser said: “It was a bad game and a bad night for L.A. I have nothing else to say.”
The King video, taken by George Holliday, showed officers delivering repeated baton blows and kicks on March 3, 1991, as King rolled on the ground. A year later, on April 29, at 3:15 p.m., a jury acquitted Sgt. Stacey C. Koon and Officers Laurence M. Powell, Theodore J. Briseno and Timothy E. Wind.
At Dodger Stadium, players would take batting practice. Some watched the TV news. But once the game began, people in the stadium were initially shielded from the scope of what was unfolding in many L.A. streets.
“You’re not getting much of anything as a fan inside of the stadium that was telling you what was happening in the outside world,” Foltz recalled. “Unless you had your transistor radio and were listening to [Vin Scully], you may not know what’s going on in the city.”
Dale Sveum, now a coach with the Kansas City Royals, was a journeyman infielder on that 1992 Phillies team. He played first base that night and said in an interview with ESPN that after the disturbances were announced on the scoreboard, the stadium began to clear out.
“By the time the game was in the seventh, eighth inning, there was hardly anybody in the stands at all,” he said. “Then, of course, when the game got over, all hell was breaking loose all over the city.”
When the game ended, the Phillies boarded a bus that came onto the field and pulled right up to the dugout. It was escorted by the LAPD, and one officer told Sveum to bring a bat, he recalled. The parking lot behind the stadium would become a staging area for local authorities and the National Guard.
In a 2012 blog post, former sportswriter Jon Weisman asked two Dodgers who are inextricably connected to those neighborhoods where the riots took place about that night. Eric Davis and Darryl Strawberry were childhood friends in South L.A. Strawberry attended Crenshaw High School, and his older brother Michael was a police officer. Davis and Strawberry owned a store, All-Star Custom Interiors, at 84th and Broadway.
“At the end of the game, the sheriffs came into the clubhouse [and told us] that the city was in an uproar and they kind of routed us home, as far as what freeways to take,” Davis recalled.
The Dodgers’ chief financial officer at the time, Bob Graziano, was in a window seat on a flight back from Chicago that afternoon. He knew the verdict was coming, but airlines didn’t have Wi-Fi or in-flight streams of CNN. As his plane banked into LAX, he saw more than a half-dozen fires burning across the city.
“They must have announced the verdict,” he recalled thinking.
The next day he joined Foltz, who had driven in from Redondo Beach, at the office. The commute on the 110 Freeway had been eerily easy.
Mayor Tom Bradley and the LAPD asked the Dodgers to cancel the next day’s game and three more. The team considered shifting the games to Albuquerque and even tried to play in San Diego.
“Sports oftentimes brings people together,” said Graziano, who later served as team president. “It was so bad that we really had to end up canceling the games.”
For Strawberry, who was struggling with a herniated disk, the destruction of the city was even more personal. The day after the verdict, Davis and Strawberry headed to their store. The looters had spared All-Star Custom Interiors, in which the two players had each invested $50,000 several years before.
Early in the morning on May 1, Michael Strawberry, Darryl’s brother and a former Dodgers minor leaguer, was grazed in the head by a bullet when his patrol car was ambushed. Strawberry’s mother told The Times that the shooting left her son with severe headaches and metal fragments in his head.
The Dodgers’ attendance dropped precipitously that year. Graziano said the team’s performance probably was a larger factor in that than the riots. In 1991, the team won 93 games. In 1992, they would go on to lose 99 games.
The Los Angeles Police Academy sits behind the stadium and often used the Dodgers’ parking lots for training exercises. Both Foltz and Graziano recall a change in what they saw from the authorities. Before, one would see officers learning how to drive or approach vehicles, they recalled.
“What you saw after that,” Graziano said, “was larger groups of police officers who were training for larger disturbances.”
benjamin.oreskes@latimes.com
Apr 30, 2017 16:22:57 #
At the intersection of past, future
Marchers at the site where 1992 riots began recall history while vowing to do more to improve South L.A.
EDWARD JOHNSON joins hundreds of other residents, activists and community leaders gathered at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, the flashpoint of the 1992 L.A. riots. “From this corner [the unrest] went all the way through L.A.,” one resident said. (Eugene Garcia European Pressphoto Agency) THE SOUTH L.A. march marked the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, but it was also “a celebration of the future ... and the work that we all hope to do to improve South L.A.,” said one community organizer. (Warrick Page Getty Images)
By Brittny Mejia
Hundreds of residents, activists and community leaders marched through the streets of South Los Angeles on Saturday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
The day began with a rally at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, where the riots began exactly a quarter-century ago. The crowd then marched east on Florence, before turning south on Vermont Avenue to 81st Street, where participants gathered for Future Fest.
“Future Fest is a celebration of our resilience, of our history, but more so it’s a celebration of the future and looking forward to the next 25 years and the work that we all hope to do to improve South L.A.,” said Eric Ares, a community organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network. “The work’s not done.”
Ares was 9 when the riots broke out. For the first two nights of the violence and looting, his family huddled inside their home, even when the electricity went out, he said. When he finally did leave his house, Ares remembered seeing plumes of smoke rising from different parts of the city.
On Saturday, residents gathered at a nearby park and talked about the riots, which were spurred by the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers in the roadside beating of Rodney King, a black motorist.
“I have a vivid memory of people gathering at the park saying, ‘We’re not going to let them do this to us anymore. We have to fight back to protect our lives and our families,’ ” Ares said. “It planted a seed of consciousness.”
William Holloway stood near his purple lowrider bike at the infamous intersection. The longtime South L.A. resident was in his 30s during the riots.
The unrest in the community had been building over the years, so it was not a surprise when rioting erupted after the verdicts, he said.
“It was expected to the degree that there was a whole bunch of issues that hadn’t been resolved in the community,” said Holloway, 59. “Lack of funding, education-wise, the policing — a whole lot of other stuff that boiled down to making this particular uprising stand out more than normal.”
Holloway recalled going to his uncle’s beauty college on Manchester Avenue, waiting for the jury’s decision in the case.
“You could feel the tension in the air,” he said. “You could feel it, that if this verdict wasn’t going to be a verdict of guilt, something wasn’t going to be right.”
Still, Holloway knew what was coming.
“I knew in my heart of hearts that they were going to let them police go,” he said, pounding his hand against his chest.
The intersection where he now stood now had been the focal point of everything 25 years earlier, he recalled.
“From that point on it just spread like a wildfire,” he said. “To go back 25 years, I can see all the smoke, I can see the people getting jumped on, I can see the stores getting looted ... I can see where the people were tired of being suppressed.”
He remembers walking to the corner of Manchester and Vermont after the verdict was announced and saying, “It’s fixing to go down.”
“It was a boiling pot, and it just boiled over,” he said.
Eugene Jenkins, 44, another longtime South L.A. resident, said he was 19 and lived on Normandie at the time of the riots.
“It was crazy right here,” he said, looking at the intersection where crowds gathered Saturday. “It was all bad on this corner.” When the verdicts were announced, he said, it stunned the community.
“L.A. all went up in flames,” said Jenkins, who still lives nearby. “From this corner it went all the way through L.A.”
Jenkins remembers store owners with guns on the roofs of their businesses protecting their property.
“They were burning buildings; you couldn’t even really breathe,” he said. “Police sirens everywhere, all you heard was sirens everywhere. Everything was on fire…. It was something unrealistic to see.”
At the afternoon festival, Lora Dene King helped release dozens of white balloons up into the sky — to commemorate those who lost their lives during the riots.
Afterward, the daughter of Rodney King joined the crowd in raising her right fist above her head for 10 seconds of silence.
When she spoke earlier to the crowd, she emphasized the importance of building the self-esteem of the community’s young people and working together with others.
“My question to all of you guys is, ‘Can we get along?’ ” she asked the crowd, echoing the famous words of her father. “That means not being prejudiced against any religion, race, whatever. It means solutions ... solutions are the main thing and the youth.
“Yes I’m angry — with a smile — because we’re still at the same place,” she concluded. “But we’re gonna make it.”
brittny.mejia@latimes.com
Marchers at the site where 1992 riots began recall history while vowing to do more to improve South L.A.
EDWARD JOHNSON joins hundreds of other residents, activists and community leaders gathered at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, the flashpoint of the 1992 L.A. riots. “From this corner [the unrest] went all the way through L.A.,” one resident said. (Eugene Garcia European Pressphoto Agency) THE SOUTH L.A. march marked the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, but it was also “a celebration of the future ... and the work that we all hope to do to improve South L.A.,” said one community organizer. (Warrick Page Getty Images)
By Brittny Mejia
Hundreds of residents, activists and community leaders marched through the streets of South Los Angeles on Saturday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
The day began with a rally at the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, where the riots began exactly a quarter-century ago. The crowd then marched east on Florence, before turning south on Vermont Avenue to 81st Street, where participants gathered for Future Fest.
“Future Fest is a celebration of our resilience, of our history, but more so it’s a celebration of the future and looking forward to the next 25 years and the work that we all hope to do to improve South L.A.,” said Eric Ares, a community organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network. “The work’s not done.”
Ares was 9 when the riots broke out. For the first two nights of the violence and looting, his family huddled inside their home, even when the electricity went out, he said. When he finally did leave his house, Ares remembered seeing plumes of smoke rising from different parts of the city.
On Saturday, residents gathered at a nearby park and talked about the riots, which were spurred by the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers in the roadside beating of Rodney King, a black motorist.
“I have a vivid memory of people gathering at the park saying, ‘We’re not going to let them do this to us anymore. We have to fight back to protect our lives and our families,’ ” Ares said. “It planted a seed of consciousness.”
William Holloway stood near his purple lowrider bike at the infamous intersection. The longtime South L.A. resident was in his 30s during the riots.
The unrest in the community had been building over the years, so it was not a surprise when rioting erupted after the verdicts, he said.
“It was expected to the degree that there was a whole bunch of issues that hadn’t been resolved in the community,” said Holloway, 59. “Lack of funding, education-wise, the policing — a whole lot of other stuff that boiled down to making this particular uprising stand out more than normal.”
Holloway recalled going to his uncle’s beauty college on Manchester Avenue, waiting for the jury’s decision in the case.
“You could feel the tension in the air,” he said. “You could feel it, that if this verdict wasn’t going to be a verdict of guilt, something wasn’t going to be right.”
Still, Holloway knew what was coming.
“I knew in my heart of hearts that they were going to let them police go,” he said, pounding his hand against his chest.
The intersection where he now stood now had been the focal point of everything 25 years earlier, he recalled.
“From that point on it just spread like a wildfire,” he said. “To go back 25 years, I can see all the smoke, I can see the people getting jumped on, I can see the stores getting looted ... I can see where the people were tired of being suppressed.”
He remembers walking to the corner of Manchester and Vermont after the verdict was announced and saying, “It’s fixing to go down.”
“It was a boiling pot, and it just boiled over,” he said.
Eugene Jenkins, 44, another longtime South L.A. resident, said he was 19 and lived on Normandie at the time of the riots.
“It was crazy right here,” he said, looking at the intersection where crowds gathered Saturday. “It was all bad on this corner.” When the verdicts were announced, he said, it stunned the community.
“L.A. all went up in flames,” said Jenkins, who still lives nearby. “From this corner it went all the way through L.A.”
Jenkins remembers store owners with guns on the roofs of their businesses protecting their property.
“They were burning buildings; you couldn’t even really breathe,” he said. “Police sirens everywhere, all you heard was sirens everywhere. Everything was on fire…. It was something unrealistic to see.”
At the afternoon festival, Lora Dene King helped release dozens of white balloons up into the sky — to commemorate those who lost their lives during the riots.
Afterward, the daughter of Rodney King joined the crowd in raising her right fist above her head for 10 seconds of silence.
When she spoke earlier to the crowd, she emphasized the importance of building the self-esteem of the community’s young people and working together with others.
“My question to all of you guys is, ‘Can we get along?’ ” she asked the crowd, echoing the famous words of her father. “That means not being prejudiced against any religion, race, whatever. It means solutions ... solutions are the main thing and the youth.
“Yes I’m angry — with a smile — because we’re still at the same place,” she concluded. “But we’re gonna make it.”
brittny.mejia@latimes.com
Apr 30, 2017 19:34:09 #
L.A. RIOTS | THE MEDIA
Fury on film
In 1992 local newscasts covered the eruption like a family tragedy
LAPD officer watches buildings burning unabated at Central and 46th Street during violence that exploded across the city in April 1992. (Gary Friedman Los Angeles Times)
Lorraine Ali television critic >>>
Plumes of smoke blew in from Hollywood Boulevard, sending ash across Franklin Avenue in dirty flurries, depositing a thick dusting of gray silt on our window sills. ¶ Even though the burning and looting was happening just down the street, most everyone in our East Hollywood apartment complex — and the buildings on either side of us — was following news of the 1992 L.A. riots via local broadcasts. ¶ CNN was still a luxury meant for those who could afford cable. Digital news wasn’t a thing yet. And social media? Nonexistent. Cellphones were still car phones, and none of my broke, barely twentysomething friends had those. ¶ A cacophony of broadcasts in English and Spanish blared out of apartment windows, the voices of KTLA’s Stan Chambers and KTTV’s Hal Eisner echoing between buildings, amplifying the chaos and adding to the terrifyingly surreal nature of what was happening. ¶ Race relations had hit a boiling point and Los Angeles had exploded, the TV announcers said. Angry mobs were setting businesses on fire, attacking motorists, looting. People were dying. The LAPD was nowhere to be found.
Places we recognized — the Sears on St. Andrews and Santa Monica, that shoddy car stereo/LoJack shop on La Brea — became alienating scenes of chaos and violence, while a thick layer of smoke settled oppressively atop the entire city.
Local newscasters we’d grown up with appeared just as shocked. It was Angelenos talking to Angelenos — reporters whose names you knew, covering a city they knew, with an army of camera crews. This was a family tragedy.
Chopper Bob hovered above Florence and Normandie for KCOP, desperately asking where the police were as Reginald Denny was beaten (neighborhood citizens saved him) in perhaps the uprising’s most iconic moment. KCBS’ seasoned anchor Kent Shocknek fell uncharacteristically silent as he reported on an LAPD cruiser that was being flipped on its roof by protesters who then set it on fire right in front of Parker Center, the downtown LAPD command center.
Rumble of tanks
For anyone who lived through the riots of 1992, who was close enough to live under curfew, feel the rumble of tanks rolling through the city, witness national guard patrol their neighborhood with machine guns, today’s Los Angeles seems like nothing short of a miracle.
This must sound dramatic, maybe even absurd, for those who arrived here after the city and police force were rebuilt. It means reconciling those old images of citywide looting, Koreatown gunfights and motorists pulled from cars and beaten with today’s L.A. of high rents, lower crime and luxury condo complexes radiating outward from downtown.
But it happened, 25 years ago, on April 29. L.A. was on fire for four days, ignited by a fury so intense it produced one of the most deadly, destructive and widespread riots in American history. And because of where it took place — the media and entertainment capitol of the world — the anarchy was not only televised, it was shot, professionally, from every angle possible.
Even in a time of deep crisis, Los Angeles knew how to capture its own downfall for a national audience.
But just as the physical world of L.A. and its culture has changed over the last 25 years, so has the media environment that is the city’s stock in trade.
If there were a riot today (and according to a new poll, a majority of those asked believe there will be another one within five years), it would surely be covered through the prism of social media and citizen journalism.
Shaky clips shot on cellphones, posted on Facebook, picked up by CNN, played on loop. Local news would of course be there, but like most forms of journalism in the digital age, they have a fraction of the resources they did back when L.A. exploded.
This isn’t to say the local news back then was filled with insightful analysis — “if it bleeds, it leads” was a popular phrase about the 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts. But they did have reporters and photographers on the ground and in the air who knew the city, and that made all the difference.
“L.A. was known for having the best local news teams in the nation,” says Zoey Tur, known in 1992 as one of the city’s premier reporters from the air, Chopper Bob. “Unlike Chicago or New York, we’d covered earthquakes, floods, fires, car chases. We knew how to move across a huge city. We knew how to cover L.A.”
Local news footage of the unrest is now the backbone of multiple documentaries commemorating the riot’s 25th anniversary: ABC’s “Let It Fall,” National Geographic’s “LA 92,” A&E’s “L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later,” Showtime’s “Burn … Burn.”
That there are so many riot documentaries — at least a half dozen — airing on television this month and that each film features predominantly different material is a testament to the sheer volume of footage shot during an uprising that took at least 60 lives, destroyed more than 1,000 buildings and amassed more than $1 billion in damages.
Even those of us who remember the acrid smell of burning buildings and the terrifying, nonstop sound of vigilante gunfire can’t help but experience the riots from several new angles while watching the films.
Interspersed in all the footage and imagery are indelible scenes of the uprising — Rodney King clubbed, kicked and tased by white LAPD officers near the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne, sobs and cries of outrage outside of the Simi Valley courthouse when those same officers were acquitted, prayers and anger at the First AME Church just off the 10 Freeway, Denny dragged out of his truck by an angry mob in South L.A.
For a lifelong Angeleno with deep roots in the city, it’s hard to watch ... and even more difficult to stop watching. There’s no turning away when L.A. is part of your DNA.
My 101-year-old aunt grew up in Highland Park. My mom in Leimert Park. I was shaped by the smoggy, drab San Fernando Valley of the 1970s and ’80s (explains a lot, but that’s for another story).
We always knew L.A. as a layered and complex place, evident through the family’s successes, failures and hardships. But I didn’t understand how truly flawed it was until the ’92 riots.
The idea of L.A.
The newscasts were at odds with ideas the rest of the country had always had about Los Angeles.
L.A. was shorthand for movie magic, year-round sunshine and hot blonds playing volleyball in bandage-sized bikinis. It was considered neutral space, free of the baggage of slavery and segregation that plagued the South or the old-money caste system of the East Coast.
No matter where or what you came from, anyone could reinvent themselves in Los Angeles. It was the closest one could come to an even playing field, even if it is vapid, shallow and obsessed with its weight.
The anger, rage and injustice captured on national news clips during the L.A. riots didn’t fit that picture. St. Louis or Detroit? Maybe. But not L.A.
As an Angeleno, watching similar footage 25 years later isn’t so much therapeutic as it is an affirmation: This indeed happened.
You can view it as the second wave of the Watts riots or a precursor to the uprisings in Ferguson or Baltimore. All were spurred by the same endemic problem America just can’t shake — a double standard based on race.
But what that old news footage can’t capture is the sick, eerie silence of Los Angeles on the first day of the riots. It was a city void of sirens (the police, fire department and paramedics were grounded), traffic jams, leafblowers, school kids. Streets emptied.
It was a stunned silence alien to L.A., except in those rare, few frozen seconds after a major earthquake. And we’d have one of those within two years, hardly enough time to heal.
Here’s the part where I’m supposed to say Los Angeles is way better off than it was, but we still have a long way to go. There’s still glaring inequity, racial division, police shootings of unarmed civilians.
My teenage son knows L.A. as a different city than I do: cleaner, safer, a place seemingly too advanced to devolve into such chaos.
Thank God the cameras were there to remind us of what we should never forget.
lorraine.ali@latimes.com
Fury on film
In 1992 local newscasts covered the eruption like a family tragedy
LAPD officer watches buildings burning unabated at Central and 46th Street during violence that exploded across the city in April 1992. (Gary Friedman Los Angeles Times)
Lorraine Ali television critic >>>
Plumes of smoke blew in from Hollywood Boulevard, sending ash across Franklin Avenue in dirty flurries, depositing a thick dusting of gray silt on our window sills. ¶ Even though the burning and looting was happening just down the street, most everyone in our East Hollywood apartment complex — and the buildings on either side of us — was following news of the 1992 L.A. riots via local broadcasts. ¶ CNN was still a luxury meant for those who could afford cable. Digital news wasn’t a thing yet. And social media? Nonexistent. Cellphones were still car phones, and none of my broke, barely twentysomething friends had those. ¶ A cacophony of broadcasts in English and Spanish blared out of apartment windows, the voices of KTLA’s Stan Chambers and KTTV’s Hal Eisner echoing between buildings, amplifying the chaos and adding to the terrifyingly surreal nature of what was happening. ¶ Race relations had hit a boiling point and Los Angeles had exploded, the TV announcers said. Angry mobs were setting businesses on fire, attacking motorists, looting. People were dying. The LAPD was nowhere to be found.
Places we recognized — the Sears on St. Andrews and Santa Monica, that shoddy car stereo/LoJack shop on La Brea — became alienating scenes of chaos and violence, while a thick layer of smoke settled oppressively atop the entire city.
Local newscasters we’d grown up with appeared just as shocked. It was Angelenos talking to Angelenos — reporters whose names you knew, covering a city they knew, with an army of camera crews. This was a family tragedy.
Chopper Bob hovered above Florence and Normandie for KCOP, desperately asking where the police were as Reginald Denny was beaten (neighborhood citizens saved him) in perhaps the uprising’s most iconic moment. KCBS’ seasoned anchor Kent Shocknek fell uncharacteristically silent as he reported on an LAPD cruiser that was being flipped on its roof by protesters who then set it on fire right in front of Parker Center, the downtown LAPD command center.
Rumble of tanks
For anyone who lived through the riots of 1992, who was close enough to live under curfew, feel the rumble of tanks rolling through the city, witness national guard patrol their neighborhood with machine guns, today’s Los Angeles seems like nothing short of a miracle.
This must sound dramatic, maybe even absurd, for those who arrived here after the city and police force were rebuilt. It means reconciling those old images of citywide looting, Koreatown gunfights and motorists pulled from cars and beaten with today’s L.A. of high rents, lower crime and luxury condo complexes radiating outward from downtown.
But it happened, 25 years ago, on April 29. L.A. was on fire for four days, ignited by a fury so intense it produced one of the most deadly, destructive and widespread riots in American history. And because of where it took place — the media and entertainment capitol of the world — the anarchy was not only televised, it was shot, professionally, from every angle possible.
Even in a time of deep crisis, Los Angeles knew how to capture its own downfall for a national audience.
But just as the physical world of L.A. and its culture has changed over the last 25 years, so has the media environment that is the city’s stock in trade.
If there were a riot today (and according to a new poll, a majority of those asked believe there will be another one within five years), it would surely be covered through the prism of social media and citizen journalism.
Shaky clips shot on cellphones, posted on Facebook, picked up by CNN, played on loop. Local news would of course be there, but like most forms of journalism in the digital age, they have a fraction of the resources they did back when L.A. exploded.
This isn’t to say the local news back then was filled with insightful analysis — “if it bleeds, it leads” was a popular phrase about the 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts. But they did have reporters and photographers on the ground and in the air who knew the city, and that made all the difference.
“L.A. was known for having the best local news teams in the nation,” says Zoey Tur, known in 1992 as one of the city’s premier reporters from the air, Chopper Bob. “Unlike Chicago or New York, we’d covered earthquakes, floods, fires, car chases. We knew how to move across a huge city. We knew how to cover L.A.”
Local news footage of the unrest is now the backbone of multiple documentaries commemorating the riot’s 25th anniversary: ABC’s “Let It Fall,” National Geographic’s “LA 92,” A&E’s “L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later,” Showtime’s “Burn … Burn.”
That there are so many riot documentaries — at least a half dozen — airing on television this month and that each film features predominantly different material is a testament to the sheer volume of footage shot during an uprising that took at least 60 lives, destroyed more than 1,000 buildings and amassed more than $1 billion in damages.
Even those of us who remember the acrid smell of burning buildings and the terrifying, nonstop sound of vigilante gunfire can’t help but experience the riots from several new angles while watching the films.
Interspersed in all the footage and imagery are indelible scenes of the uprising — Rodney King clubbed, kicked and tased by white LAPD officers near the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne, sobs and cries of outrage outside of the Simi Valley courthouse when those same officers were acquitted, prayers and anger at the First AME Church just off the 10 Freeway, Denny dragged out of his truck by an angry mob in South L.A.
For a lifelong Angeleno with deep roots in the city, it’s hard to watch ... and even more difficult to stop watching. There’s no turning away when L.A. is part of your DNA.
My 101-year-old aunt grew up in Highland Park. My mom in Leimert Park. I was shaped by the smoggy, drab San Fernando Valley of the 1970s and ’80s (explains a lot, but that’s for another story).
We always knew L.A. as a layered and complex place, evident through the family’s successes, failures and hardships. But I didn’t understand how truly flawed it was until the ’92 riots.
The idea of L.A.
The newscasts were at odds with ideas the rest of the country had always had about Los Angeles.
L.A. was shorthand for movie magic, year-round sunshine and hot blonds playing volleyball in bandage-sized bikinis. It was considered neutral space, free of the baggage of slavery and segregation that plagued the South or the old-money caste system of the East Coast.
No matter where or what you came from, anyone could reinvent themselves in Los Angeles. It was the closest one could come to an even playing field, even if it is vapid, shallow and obsessed with its weight.
The anger, rage and injustice captured on national news clips during the L.A. riots didn’t fit that picture. St. Louis or Detroit? Maybe. But not L.A.
As an Angeleno, watching similar footage 25 years later isn’t so much therapeutic as it is an affirmation: This indeed happened.
You can view it as the second wave of the Watts riots or a precursor to the uprisings in Ferguson or Baltimore. All were spurred by the same endemic problem America just can’t shake — a double standard based on race.
But what that old news footage can’t capture is the sick, eerie silence of Los Angeles on the first day of the riots. It was a city void of sirens (the police, fire department and paramedics were grounded), traffic jams, leafblowers, school kids. Streets emptied.
It was a stunned silence alien to L.A., except in those rare, few frozen seconds after a major earthquake. And we’d have one of those within two years, hardly enough time to heal.
Here’s the part where I’m supposed to say Los Angeles is way better off than it was, but we still have a long way to go. There’s still glaring inequity, racial division, police shootings of unarmed civilians.
My teenage son knows L.A. as a different city than I do: cleaner, safer, a place seemingly too advanced to devolve into such chaos.
Thank God the cameras were there to remind us of what we should never forget.
lorraine.ali@latimes.com
Apr 30, 2017 19:46:06 #
NEW RELEASES
James Baldwin’s words remain powerful force
By Noel Murray
New on Blu-ray
I Am Not Your Negro
Magnolia DVD, $26.98; Blu-ray, $29.98; also available on VOD
One of the most popular documentaries to hit art-house theaters in years, Raoul Peck’s provocative, probing work turns an abandoned James Baldwin writing project into a far-reaching essay about the history of American race relations.
With Samuel L. Jackson narrating the late author’s essays and letters, the film jumps around from Balwin’s thoughts on the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to his memories of growing up in — and eventually fleeing — a country with which he had a complicated, love-hate relationship.
Foot-age from ’60s civil rights marches and modern Black Lives Matter protests help illustrate both Baldwin’s and Peck’s ideas, in a movie that’s experimental and accessible — entertaining and challenging.
VOD
Loev
Available May 1 on Netflix
James Baldwin’s words remain powerful force
By Noel Murray
New on Blu-ray
I Am Not Your Negro
Magnolia DVD, $26.98; Blu-ray, $29.98; also available on VOD
One of the most popular documentaries to hit art-house theaters in years, Raoul Peck’s provocative, probing work turns an abandoned James Baldwin writing project into a far-reaching essay about the history of American race relations.
With Samuel L. Jackson narrating the late author’s essays and letters, the film jumps around from Balwin’s thoughts on the deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to his memories of growing up in — and eventually fleeing — a country with which he had a complicated, love-hate relationship.
Foot-age from ’60s civil rights marches and modern Black Lives Matter protests help illustrate both Baldwin’s and Peck’s ideas, in a movie that’s experimental and accessible — entertaining and challenging.
VOD
Loev
Available May 1 on Netflix
Apr 30, 2017 19:47:47 #
They needed to tell stories themselves
Believing their community had been portrayed wrongly, Korean American filmmakers took charge.
By Jen Yamato
Edward Jae Song Lee was a month away from celebrating his 19th birthday when he was killed in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, caught in a crossfire of bullets reportedly while attempting to defend a Koreatown pizza parlor from looters on the second day of chaos and confusion that followed the April 29 acquittal of four LAPD officers for the beating of Rodney King.
Lee’s mother saw her son’s body, lying on the sidewalk in a black-and-white photograph in the Korea Times the next day. But as she told filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, in the seminal 1993 documentary “Sa-I-Gu,” she clung to the hope that it wasn’t him.
“This couldn’t be my son,” Jung Hui Lee said in the film, named for the Korean term for that fateful day, Sa-I-Gu, or April 29. Eddie had left the house that day in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, but the man in the photo wore a black shirt.
It wasn’t until Lee saw the full image in color, taken by Los Angeles Times staff photographer Hyungwon Kang, that she knew: “What looked black in the Korean newspaper was my son’s blood.”
Twenty-five years later, few films have been made about that devastating moment in Los Angeles history. Even rarer is the film that goes beyond stereotypes to tell the stories of the people caught up in the violence from all of the city’s diverse communities. Among the least well-known stories are those of Korean American business owners who found their American dreams in the sights of looters over the course of several lawless days that led to the ransacking and burning of more than 2,200 Korean-owned businesses.
Kim-Gibson, 79, still remembers hearing Lee’s heartbreak as she documented the devastated mother’s story, one of several Korean women whose personal tragedies lend “Sa-I-Gu” its enduring power — and a rare window into the Korean American experience of the L.A. uprising.
“I was dumbfounded,” the filmmaker told The Times recently ahead of the 25th anniversary of the riots. “I was speechless. God, what can you say to a story like that? If it really touches you at the core of your soul, you can’t talk. All I could do was sit there in complete silence, with my heart and with my soul pounding.”
The Korean-born Kim-Gibson was living in Washington when the riots broke out.
“The mainstream media made it sound as if the 1992 L.A. riots were caused by black-Korean conflict,” she said. “That boiled my blood. Black-Korean conflict was one symptom, but it was certainly not the cause. The cause of that riot was black-white conflict that existed in this country from the establishment of this country.”
Media reports that pitted the African American community against their Korean immigrant neighbors, Kim-Gibson felt, “were tremendously wrong. So I decided I could not have the mainstream media tell our stories. We had to go and tell it ourselves.”
Borrowing camera equipment and $5,000, she traveled to Los Angeles with two fellow female filmmakers, Christine Choy and Elaine H. Kim, seeking the untold perspective on the aftermath of the riots from Korean women. “Sa-I-Gu,” released a year later in 1993, tells a side of the riots absent from depictions in traditional films of and about those six days in April and the tinder box of clashing racial tensions and economic pressures that left scores dead, 2,000 injured and caused an estimated $400 million in damage to Korean-owned businesses.
Ten years later, Kim-Gibson returned to Los Angeles with Charles Burnett, director of the definitive Watts film “Killer of Sheep,” to document the legacy of the riots from a wider spectrum of people living in the ethnically diverse enclave. In their 2004 documentary “Wet Sand,” the filmmakers spoke to Korean Americans, African Americans and Latinos. To her dismay, Kim-Gibson found that certain tensions remained.
“It made me very sad. Koreans were oppressed, and when their businesses started flourishing they hired a lot of Latinos and then they did not treat those Latinos as well as they should have. Koreans should have learned better,” the documentarian said.
Filmmaker Justin Chon was 10 when the riots broke out. The “Twilight” actor, who wrote, stars in and directed the upcoming drama “Gook,” inspired by the events of the L.A. uprising, remembers watching news reports of looting on television from his home in Irvine. But it wasn’t until many years later that he fully grasped the situation his Korean immigrant father faced as the owner of a shoe store on the border of Paramount and East Compton.
“We didn’t get hit until the last day,” Chon said recently in Los Angeles. “As soon as it happened, he was there. People had seen it just spread. I was home watching the news, my dad was there, but it wasn’t like I thought, ‘My dad can die.’ I wondered, what does this mean for our family?”
“Gook,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will be released in August by Samuel Goldwyn Films, stars Chon as Eli, one of two Korean American brothers who run their late parents’ store selling shoes to a mostly black clientele.
“The overarching message is, ‘Look what happens when we don’t talk to each other,’ ” Chon said. “When we don’t have open discussion we lose what’s most precious to us and we lose sight of what’s important — what we stand for.”
“My film is a metaphor for now. It was all simmering. [Koreans] were just trying to survive. But so was the African American community.”
Greater understanding of all communities touched by the riots is what filmmaker Grace Lee is after with her new interactive documentary “KTOWN92,” which is part of the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival, along with “Wet Sand” and “Gook.” An offshoot of a feature documentary about contemporary Koreatown, the project gives voice to the people who lived through the tumultuous uprising — beyond the iconic images of looters and vandals, shopkeepers on rooftops with guns, and mayhem in the streets from angry mobs destroying their own city.
“I have always been interested in the story of the L.A. riots [and] who gets to tell that story,” Lee said. “I was interested in seeing if I could both critique some of the media coverage that was really disturbing at the time and at the same time amplify and uplift other stories and perspectives that haven’t really been shared with most people.”
Lee grew up outside of Los Angeles and remembers watching shocking images of the riots on the news, the rare depiction of Asian American life in the media dominated by sensational footage of conflict and hysteria.
She’s now called Koreatown home for eight years; her latest films were born out of witnessing a vibrant multiethnic melting pot in her own neighborhood — far removed from the war zone of April 1992 and yet indelibly shaped by the legacy of the riots.
“To me it’s the beating heart of L.A. It’s still this immigrant enclave,” she said of Koreatown. “It’s a really vibrant community that to me reflects how much this experience that we have is informed by the immigrant experience. And to me, that immigrant experience really informs not just Los Angeles but California and also, I think, is a stand-in for where America is heading — or already is.”
jen.yamato@latimes.com
Twitter: @jenyamato
Believing their community had been portrayed wrongly, Korean American filmmakers took charge.
By Jen Yamato
Edward Jae Song Lee was a month away from celebrating his 19th birthday when he was killed in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, caught in a crossfire of bullets reportedly while attempting to defend a Koreatown pizza parlor from looters on the second day of chaos and confusion that followed the April 29 acquittal of four LAPD officers for the beating of Rodney King.
Lee’s mother saw her son’s body, lying on the sidewalk in a black-and-white photograph in the Korea Times the next day. But as she told filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, in the seminal 1993 documentary “Sa-I-Gu,” she clung to the hope that it wasn’t him.
“This couldn’t be my son,” Jung Hui Lee said in the film, named for the Korean term for that fateful day, Sa-I-Gu, or April 29. Eddie had left the house that day in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, but the man in the photo wore a black shirt.
It wasn’t until Lee saw the full image in color, taken by Los Angeles Times staff photographer Hyungwon Kang, that she knew: “What looked black in the Korean newspaper was my son’s blood.”
Twenty-five years later, few films have been made about that devastating moment in Los Angeles history. Even rarer is the film that goes beyond stereotypes to tell the stories of the people caught up in the violence from all of the city’s diverse communities. Among the least well-known stories are those of Korean American business owners who found their American dreams in the sights of looters over the course of several lawless days that led to the ransacking and burning of more than 2,200 Korean-owned businesses.
Kim-Gibson, 79, still remembers hearing Lee’s heartbreak as she documented the devastated mother’s story, one of several Korean women whose personal tragedies lend “Sa-I-Gu” its enduring power — and a rare window into the Korean American experience of the L.A. uprising.
“I was dumbfounded,” the filmmaker told The Times recently ahead of the 25th anniversary of the riots. “I was speechless. God, what can you say to a story like that? If it really touches you at the core of your soul, you can’t talk. All I could do was sit there in complete silence, with my heart and with my soul pounding.”
The Korean-born Kim-Gibson was living in Washington when the riots broke out.
“The mainstream media made it sound as if the 1992 L.A. riots were caused by black-Korean conflict,” she said. “That boiled my blood. Black-Korean conflict was one symptom, but it was certainly not the cause. The cause of that riot was black-white conflict that existed in this country from the establishment of this country.”
Media reports that pitted the African American community against their Korean immigrant neighbors, Kim-Gibson felt, “were tremendously wrong. So I decided I could not have the mainstream media tell our stories. We had to go and tell it ourselves.”
Borrowing camera equipment and $5,000, she traveled to Los Angeles with two fellow female filmmakers, Christine Choy and Elaine H. Kim, seeking the untold perspective on the aftermath of the riots from Korean women. “Sa-I-Gu,” released a year later in 1993, tells a side of the riots absent from depictions in traditional films of and about those six days in April and the tinder box of clashing racial tensions and economic pressures that left scores dead, 2,000 injured and caused an estimated $400 million in damage to Korean-owned businesses.
Ten years later, Kim-Gibson returned to Los Angeles with Charles Burnett, director of the definitive Watts film “Killer of Sheep,” to document the legacy of the riots from a wider spectrum of people living in the ethnically diverse enclave. In their 2004 documentary “Wet Sand,” the filmmakers spoke to Korean Americans, African Americans and Latinos. To her dismay, Kim-Gibson found that certain tensions remained.
“It made me very sad. Koreans were oppressed, and when their businesses started flourishing they hired a lot of Latinos and then they did not treat those Latinos as well as they should have. Koreans should have learned better,” the documentarian said.
Filmmaker Justin Chon was 10 when the riots broke out. The “Twilight” actor, who wrote, stars in and directed the upcoming drama “Gook,” inspired by the events of the L.A. uprising, remembers watching news reports of looting on television from his home in Irvine. But it wasn’t until many years later that he fully grasped the situation his Korean immigrant father faced as the owner of a shoe store on the border of Paramount and East Compton.
“We didn’t get hit until the last day,” Chon said recently in Los Angeles. “As soon as it happened, he was there. People had seen it just spread. I was home watching the news, my dad was there, but it wasn’t like I thought, ‘My dad can die.’ I wondered, what does this mean for our family?”
“Gook,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will be released in August by Samuel Goldwyn Films, stars Chon as Eli, one of two Korean American brothers who run their late parents’ store selling shoes to a mostly black clientele.
“The overarching message is, ‘Look what happens when we don’t talk to each other,’ ” Chon said. “When we don’t have open discussion we lose what’s most precious to us and we lose sight of what’s important — what we stand for.”
“My film is a metaphor for now. It was all simmering. [Koreans] were just trying to survive. But so was the African American community.”
Greater understanding of all communities touched by the riots is what filmmaker Grace Lee is after with her new interactive documentary “KTOWN92,” which is part of the L.A. Asian Pacific Film Festival, along with “Wet Sand” and “Gook.” An offshoot of a feature documentary about contemporary Koreatown, the project gives voice to the people who lived through the tumultuous uprising — beyond the iconic images of looters and vandals, shopkeepers on rooftops with guns, and mayhem in the streets from angry mobs destroying their own city.
“I have always been interested in the story of the L.A. riots [and] who gets to tell that story,” Lee said. “I was interested in seeing if I could both critique some of the media coverage that was really disturbing at the time and at the same time amplify and uplift other stories and perspectives that haven’t really been shared with most people.”
Lee grew up outside of Los Angeles and remembers watching shocking images of the riots on the news, the rare depiction of Asian American life in the media dominated by sensational footage of conflict and hysteria.
She’s now called Koreatown home for eight years; her latest films were born out of witnessing a vibrant multiethnic melting pot in her own neighborhood — far removed from the war zone of April 1992 and yet indelibly shaped by the legacy of the riots.
“To me it’s the beating heart of L.A. It’s still this immigrant enclave,” she said of Koreatown. “It’s a really vibrant community that to me reflects how much this experience that we have is informed by the immigrant experience. And to me, that immigrant experience really informs not just Los Angeles but California and also, I think, is a stand-in for where America is heading — or already is.”
jen.yamato@latimes.com
Twitter: @jenyamato
Apr 30, 2017 19:52:43 #
‘Rodney King’ without artifice
Roger Guenveur Smith brings his one-man study to a Netflix audience, with help from Spike Lee.
By Steven Zeitchik
Roger Guenveur Smith recalled that he had a deeply emotion reaction when he heard Rodney King had died in 2012. And he couldn’t understand why.
“Here is someone I didn’t even know, had never met,” the actor and monologuist said. “I kept asking, ‘Why did his death affect me so much?’ ”
The answer isn’t simple. But Smith has long been trying to figure out just what has been so compelling about King. He began seven years ago, when the victim of police brutality was alive, and explores the question from complex facets in his one-man show “Rodney King.”
Smith was speaking by phone from Portland, Ore. After nearly five years of serious road time, he was just a few minutes away from taking the stage for the last-ever performance of his searing piece. (He gave it one final go-round at Los Angeles’ Bootleg Theater, where he’d workshopped it years ago, in March.)
Thanks to Netflix, though, “Rodney King” will live on — and be available to a much wider audience than the people that since 2012 have packed small theaters around the country to see it. Spike Lee shot a performance in New York one recent summer, applying Spike-ian directorial touches, and Netflix began streaming it last Friday to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the L.A. Riots.
As television prepares to mark those dark days with sweeping historical pieces, “Rodney King” goes the other way: It asks, in ways journalistic and imagined, who the man at the center of it all really was. King does serve here as a kind of blank slate for our notions of victimhood, resistance and harmony. But he also transcends all of those things.
“We don’t want to make Rodney King a symbol of the oppressed black man,” Smith said. “We want to portray him as a human being — a man who loved to fish, a man who was listening to De La Soul when he was pulled over, a man who was a second-generation alcoholic drowning victim.”
Smith’s piece is a grounded depiction, rich in unexpected detail: the Bob Marley wig he donned to observe the riots incognito; the father who alternately bonded with and beat him; that he actually knew Reginald Denny, the white truck driver nearly killed in the riots, from a moment they shared at a construction site.
Smith delivers the material sweatily, breathily, pulsatingly, with a musicality to his voice and a meter to his patter. (“You wanna reminisce / it goes something like this / 91, 92 / Come on, Rodney King, you know what to do / It was a Saturday night / Right? / And you were chilling at your boy’s crib watching the fight.”)
The tone can go from confrontational to plaintive and back again. Smith starts with an invocation of the Geto Boys’ accusation of the subject as an Uncle Tom (“… Rodney King”) — unattributed to throw us off balance — and ends by recounting, in its entirety, the beautiful tentativeness of King’s landmark speech (”People, I just, I just want to say, you know, can we, can we all get along?”).
In between, in segments he’s improvised and honed over the years — years in which King’s legacy loomed over high-profile incidents of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement — Smith explores the man himself. The performer is often filling in the details of King’s life, challenging and provoking him, but really, challenging and provoking the many assumptions we’ve made about him, his reduction into a symbol.
“Rodney King was not somebody who tried to be somebody he was not,” Smith said. “They tried to give him courses in black history; they wanted him to be a spokesperson. But he was a spokesperson for nothing but his own agenda.”
The filmmaker and performer had teamed on nine projects, including “Do the Right thing” and “Malcolm X.” In the mid-1990s they also worked on Smith’s one-man show “Huey P. Newton.”
“What Roger is doing, like Mark Twain and many of our best storytellers, is humanizing someone who’s been made into a demon, an animal, into less of a human being,” Lee explained. The director shot the piece with more than a dozen cameras, often going close-in on the performer, sometimes trailing down his body to match a point Smith was making. At the end the lens pulls back on Smith, giving a sense of both loneliness and cosmic-ness.
Because of its tone, “Rodney King” can have an odd effect. One can feel provoked and placated, unsettled and in harmony — often at the same time.
This, Smith said, is by design. “The audience is alternatively seduced and indicted. Is it an angry piece or a conciliatory piece? Those are cliches.”
Right before March’s Bootleg performance, Smith heard from Juan King, asking if he could get a ticket to see the show. Rodney King’s brother had a dramatic back story in his own right, and the request reminded Smith of all the tales that have gone untold.
“Rodney King was without artifice, without pretense,” Smith said. “In him I have — the audience has — recognized someone we know.”
steve.zeitchik@latimes.com
Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT
Roger Guenveur Smith brings his one-man study to a Netflix audience, with help from Spike Lee.
By Steven Zeitchik
Roger Guenveur Smith recalled that he had a deeply emotion reaction when he heard Rodney King had died in 2012. And he couldn’t understand why.
“Here is someone I didn’t even know, had never met,” the actor and monologuist said. “I kept asking, ‘Why did his death affect me so much?’ ”
The answer isn’t simple. But Smith has long been trying to figure out just what has been so compelling about King. He began seven years ago, when the victim of police brutality was alive, and explores the question from complex facets in his one-man show “Rodney King.”
Smith was speaking by phone from Portland, Ore. After nearly five years of serious road time, he was just a few minutes away from taking the stage for the last-ever performance of his searing piece. (He gave it one final go-round at Los Angeles’ Bootleg Theater, where he’d workshopped it years ago, in March.)
Thanks to Netflix, though, “Rodney King” will live on — and be available to a much wider audience than the people that since 2012 have packed small theaters around the country to see it. Spike Lee shot a performance in New York one recent summer, applying Spike-ian directorial touches, and Netflix began streaming it last Friday to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the L.A. Riots.
As television prepares to mark those dark days with sweeping historical pieces, “Rodney King” goes the other way: It asks, in ways journalistic and imagined, who the man at the center of it all really was. King does serve here as a kind of blank slate for our notions of victimhood, resistance and harmony. But he also transcends all of those things.
“We don’t want to make Rodney King a symbol of the oppressed black man,” Smith said. “We want to portray him as a human being — a man who loved to fish, a man who was listening to De La Soul when he was pulled over, a man who was a second-generation alcoholic drowning victim.”
Smith’s piece is a grounded depiction, rich in unexpected detail: the Bob Marley wig he donned to observe the riots incognito; the father who alternately bonded with and beat him; that he actually knew Reginald Denny, the white truck driver nearly killed in the riots, from a moment they shared at a construction site.
Smith delivers the material sweatily, breathily, pulsatingly, with a musicality to his voice and a meter to his patter. (“You wanna reminisce / it goes something like this / 91, 92 / Come on, Rodney King, you know what to do / It was a Saturday night / Right? / And you were chilling at your boy’s crib watching the fight.”)
The tone can go from confrontational to plaintive and back again. Smith starts with an invocation of the Geto Boys’ accusation of the subject as an Uncle Tom (“… Rodney King”) — unattributed to throw us off balance — and ends by recounting, in its entirety, the beautiful tentativeness of King’s landmark speech (”People, I just, I just want to say, you know, can we, can we all get along?”).
In between, in segments he’s improvised and honed over the years — years in which King’s legacy loomed over high-profile incidents of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement — Smith explores the man himself. The performer is often filling in the details of King’s life, challenging and provoking him, but really, challenging and provoking the many assumptions we’ve made about him, his reduction into a symbol.
“Rodney King was not somebody who tried to be somebody he was not,” Smith said. “They tried to give him courses in black history; they wanted him to be a spokesperson. But he was a spokesperson for nothing but his own agenda.”
The filmmaker and performer had teamed on nine projects, including “Do the Right thing” and “Malcolm X.” In the mid-1990s they also worked on Smith’s one-man show “Huey P. Newton.”
“What Roger is doing, like Mark Twain and many of our best storytellers, is humanizing someone who’s been made into a demon, an animal, into less of a human being,” Lee explained. The director shot the piece with more than a dozen cameras, often going close-in on the performer, sometimes trailing down his body to match a point Smith was making. At the end the lens pulls back on Smith, giving a sense of both loneliness and cosmic-ness.
Because of its tone, “Rodney King” can have an odd effect. One can feel provoked and placated, unsettled and in harmony — often at the same time.
This, Smith said, is by design. “The audience is alternatively seduced and indicted. Is it an angry piece or a conciliatory piece? Those are cliches.”
Right before March’s Bootleg performance, Smith heard from Juan King, asking if he could get a ticket to see the show. Rodney King’s brother had a dramatic back story in his own right, and the request reminded Smith of all the tales that have gone untold.
“Rodney King was without artifice, without pretense,” Smith said. “In him I have — the audience has — recognized someone we know.”
steve.zeitchik@latimes.com
Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT
Apr 30, 2017 19:57:53 #
He’s laying down a marker
During the 1992 unrest, 23 people died in unsolved cases. Artist Jeff Beall is mapping where they fell.
JEFF BEALL returns to the scene of one of the 23 unsolved homicides during the 1992 L.A. riots in front of Heaven Bail Bonds. (Photographs byMark Boster Los Angeles Times) A POLYPROPYLENE sheet is placed where one of those 23 people died. “I think of them as gravestone rubbings,” Beall says. ()
By Carolina A. Miranda
Jeff Beall was on his way to a basketball game when Los Angeles began to crackle and burn in wake of the Rodney King verdict.
It was a warm Wednesday afternoon, April 29, 1992, and four LAPD officers had just been acquitted by a Ventura County jury in the excessive force case surrounding King’s beating a year earlier in Lake View Terrace. Beall, his girlfriend and a couple of friends were making their way to Inglewood to watch the Los Angeles Lakers take on the Portland Trailblazers in a playoff game at the Forum.
Listening to the news in the car, says Beall, “We were talking about how outrageous it was. We were saying things like, ‘L.A. is going to burn.’ ”
Little did they know the significance of their words — which became all too evident just minutes after they exited the 110 Freeway at Manchester Boulevard. At Figueroa Street, where they stopped for a red light, a restive crowd had gathered. In the middle of the intersection lay something that resembled a piece of engine block.
“I see a guy go pick it up and I see that it’s really heavy, he’s really struggling with it,” says Beall. “He finally picks it up. Then he locks eyes with us and I see that he is going to smash it right through our windshield.”
At that moment, Beall advanced his car into the intersection to avoid the projectile — which nonetheless smashed the car’s A pillar, the metal beam that supports the roof and holds the windshield in place.
“After that, we just blew through the red light,” Beall says.
The experience is one he has been turning over in his mind for 25 years.
“At that point, we could turn around ... and go back through the chaos and try to head home,” he recalls. “Or we could just go straight on and continue onto the Forum. We went straight on.”
On a cloudy morning this week, Beall stands at the corner of 120th Street and Central Avenue in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Green Meadows, just four miles from the place where he and his girlfriend (now wife) dodged a piece of engine.
It’s an unremarkable piece of L.A. urbanscape, with a liquor store, a taco stand and a car wash. On the northeastern corner is a bail bonds agency with the improbable name of Heaven.
At this corner, on the same Wednesday in 1992 that Beall encountered the angry crowd at Figueroa and Manchester, a 23-year-old Latino man named Arturo C. Miranda (no relation) was fatally shot as he was riding home from a soccer game. No one was ever charged in the crime.
Miranda’s death is one of 23 unsolved homicides that took place over the six days of the Los Angeles riots.
For much of the spring, Beall has been traveling to disparate parts of Los Angeles to visit the sites where those 23 people were killed. At each site, Beall has draped the ground with a polypropylene sheet (a synthetic material that resembles vellum) and used a black oil stick to create a rubbing of the approximate place where each person fell.
Once the drawing is done, he takes a picture of it in that setting — photos that he refers to as “portraits.” Over the course of the project, he has snapped portraits in front of liquor stores, automotive shops, convenience stores and Heaven Bail Bond.
The rubbings and photographs are for the exhibition “Unsolved: 1992 LA Uprising @ 25 Years” at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica, a show that will run for just six days — marking the same time frame as the riots, from the day the violence broke out April 29 to the moment, on May 4, when Mayor Tom Bradley lifted the curfew.
“I think of them as gravestone rubbings,” Beall says of the pieces. “I am not a historian. I’m not a sociologist. I just see this as an interesting way to document the memories of these 23 people.”
More than 60 people lost their lives in the ’92 riots, according to a Times staff report from 2012. But Beall is interested in only the 23.
“It made sense to focus on the ones that are unsolved, that haven’t found that quota of closure,” he says. “And to use that as a focus to make that present for people.”
Like those deaths, many of the social issues that led to the ’92 riots remain unresolved.
Green Meadows , the neighborhood in which we stand, is a community of roughly 30,000. It is also one of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, with a median household income of a little more than $31,000 a year, according to 2008 census estimates, and a population that is largely black and Latino. In the six-month period from Sept. 5, 2016, to March 5, 2017, there were 360 violent crimes, according to LAPD statistics compiled by The Times. That’s an average of two per day.
These are conditions that Beall has encountered throughout the project.
He did the first rubbing in Pomona, at the site of a drive-by shooting where a 35-year-old black man named Meeker Gibson was killed on May 1, 1992.
“It was my first one, my debut for myself,” Beall recalls. “As I roll up to park, there’s a police action going on at the intersection. There are two cars at an angle and they have someone down in the street.”
Beall is tall and rugged, with a self-effacing manner. He was born in Santa Ana and received his master’s in fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts.
Over the course of his career, he has made work that is about using materials to reveal and conceal and disguise.
In the 1980s, he created a series of paintings that featured photographs mounted on wood panels veiled in gauzy layers of wax. In the ’90s, he created an installation out of paper bags stiffened and hardened with layers of gesso.
“The wall of bags from across the room, they feel like an architectural mass, but when you get up close, they’re just empty paper bags,” he says. “Then you step back and it still retains its power.”
The “Unsolved” series, as he calls the new pieces, nod to a series of abstract works by minimalist Richard Serra , which feature deep layers of black oil stick on paper.
“I’ve always loved those drawings, loved that work,” says Beall. “It did not go unnoticed by my mind that these might carry some reference to that.”
By and large, his pieces have tended toward the abstract, making the “Unsolved” series, as he calls the new rubbings, a bit of a departure in that they are quite literally connected to specific places and events.
But Beall wants his drawings to carry not just the weight of their stories but also of their pattern and texture and paint — memento mori employed to create a chapel of abstract reflection. (The photographs will be shown separately from the rubbings so they can stand on their own.)
While the work reflects Beall’s long-running preoccupations as an artist, the basis for the series was launched when one of his son’s 14-year-old friends casually asked him if he’d been in Los Angeles during the riots.
“I told her our story, which was more than she expected,” he says. “I could see that it was really very interesting to her, and very affecting. … And I started digging up the memories and doing research.”
That research led him to conversations with a curator at the California African American Museum and a police report that listed the 23 unsolved deaths. (Deaths that were mapped by The Times in 2012 .)
Beall, based in Santa Monica, approached the project as a journey — “a personal pilgrimage,” he says — one that has taken him to Koreatown, Culver City, the San Fernando Valley and South Los Angeles, where we stand.
“Santa Monica is only a 20-minute drive away from here,” he says. “We are much closer than anyone seems to feel. Yet it’s so easy to be in the Silver Lake hipster bubble or the Westside bubble or the Hollywood bubble, and you forget how close we really all are.
“This project, for me, in some small way has fostered conversations with folks with which you wouldn’t otherwise talk.”
Here, for instance, on this corner at 120th and Central, Beall met an older African American man who was not only a witness to the ’92 riots but also remembers the chaotic moments after Miranda was shot that first day.
The man, who declines to provide his name when I arrive there, describes Beall’s project as “a blessing.”
“Over the years, there’s been a death on every corner here,” he says with a sweep of the hand. “[This project], that’s the only way it’s going to get out.”
Beall is aware that being white may open him to criticism for taking on a theme that comments on race and inequity. (Of the 23 unsolved deaths, 16 were of minorities, primarily black and Latino men.)
“I do realize that I’m putting myself out there like that,” he says. “But this feels important.… We were there and experienced it.”
Ultimately, the project has also allowed him to chew on that defining moment on the corner of Manchester and Figueroa in 1992 as well as the long journey home (he lived in Silver Lake at the time) as entire neighborhoods were aflame.
“We never really did take it personally,” he says of the incident. “It was awful and terrible and completely [messed] up. But it was also arbitrary and not personal in the least. We were all victims of circumstance.”
carolina.miranda@latimes.com
Twitter: @cmonstah
During the 1992 unrest, 23 people died in unsolved cases. Artist Jeff Beall is mapping where they fell.
JEFF BEALL returns to the scene of one of the 23 unsolved homicides during the 1992 L.A. riots in front of Heaven Bail Bonds. (Photographs byMark Boster Los Angeles Times) A POLYPROPYLENE sheet is placed where one of those 23 people died. “I think of them as gravestone rubbings,” Beall says. ()
By Carolina A. Miranda
Jeff Beall was on his way to a basketball game when Los Angeles began to crackle and burn in wake of the Rodney King verdict.
It was a warm Wednesday afternoon, April 29, 1992, and four LAPD officers had just been acquitted by a Ventura County jury in the excessive force case surrounding King’s beating a year earlier in Lake View Terrace. Beall, his girlfriend and a couple of friends were making their way to Inglewood to watch the Los Angeles Lakers take on the Portland Trailblazers in a playoff game at the Forum.
Listening to the news in the car, says Beall, “We were talking about how outrageous it was. We were saying things like, ‘L.A. is going to burn.’ ”
Little did they know the significance of their words — which became all too evident just minutes after they exited the 110 Freeway at Manchester Boulevard. At Figueroa Street, where they stopped for a red light, a restive crowd had gathered. In the middle of the intersection lay something that resembled a piece of engine block.
“I see a guy go pick it up and I see that it’s really heavy, he’s really struggling with it,” says Beall. “He finally picks it up. Then he locks eyes with us and I see that he is going to smash it right through our windshield.”
At that moment, Beall advanced his car into the intersection to avoid the projectile — which nonetheless smashed the car’s A pillar, the metal beam that supports the roof and holds the windshield in place.
“After that, we just blew through the red light,” Beall says.
The experience is one he has been turning over in his mind for 25 years.
“At that point, we could turn around ... and go back through the chaos and try to head home,” he recalls. “Or we could just go straight on and continue onto the Forum. We went straight on.”
On a cloudy morning this week, Beall stands at the corner of 120th Street and Central Avenue in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Green Meadows, just four miles from the place where he and his girlfriend (now wife) dodged a piece of engine.
It’s an unremarkable piece of L.A. urbanscape, with a liquor store, a taco stand and a car wash. On the northeastern corner is a bail bonds agency with the improbable name of Heaven.
At this corner, on the same Wednesday in 1992 that Beall encountered the angry crowd at Figueroa and Manchester, a 23-year-old Latino man named Arturo C. Miranda (no relation) was fatally shot as he was riding home from a soccer game. No one was ever charged in the crime.
Miranda’s death is one of 23 unsolved homicides that took place over the six days of the Los Angeles riots.
For much of the spring, Beall has been traveling to disparate parts of Los Angeles to visit the sites where those 23 people were killed. At each site, Beall has draped the ground with a polypropylene sheet (a synthetic material that resembles vellum) and used a black oil stick to create a rubbing of the approximate place where each person fell.
Once the drawing is done, he takes a picture of it in that setting — photos that he refers to as “portraits.” Over the course of the project, he has snapped portraits in front of liquor stores, automotive shops, convenience stores and Heaven Bail Bond.
The rubbings and photographs are for the exhibition “Unsolved: 1992 LA Uprising @ 25 Years” at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica, a show that will run for just six days — marking the same time frame as the riots, from the day the violence broke out April 29 to the moment, on May 4, when Mayor Tom Bradley lifted the curfew.
“I think of them as gravestone rubbings,” Beall says of the pieces. “I am not a historian. I’m not a sociologist. I just see this as an interesting way to document the memories of these 23 people.”
More than 60 people lost their lives in the ’92 riots, according to a Times staff report from 2012. But Beall is interested in only the 23.
“It made sense to focus on the ones that are unsolved, that haven’t found that quota of closure,” he says. “And to use that as a focus to make that present for people.”
Like those deaths, many of the social issues that led to the ’92 riots remain unresolved.
Green Meadows , the neighborhood in which we stand, is a community of roughly 30,000. It is also one of the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, with a median household income of a little more than $31,000 a year, according to 2008 census estimates, and a population that is largely black and Latino. In the six-month period from Sept. 5, 2016, to March 5, 2017, there were 360 violent crimes, according to LAPD statistics compiled by The Times. That’s an average of two per day.
These are conditions that Beall has encountered throughout the project.
He did the first rubbing in Pomona, at the site of a drive-by shooting where a 35-year-old black man named Meeker Gibson was killed on May 1, 1992.
“It was my first one, my debut for myself,” Beall recalls. “As I roll up to park, there’s a police action going on at the intersection. There are two cars at an angle and they have someone down in the street.”
Beall is tall and rugged, with a self-effacing manner. He was born in Santa Ana and received his master’s in fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts.
Over the course of his career, he has made work that is about using materials to reveal and conceal and disguise.
In the 1980s, he created a series of paintings that featured photographs mounted on wood panels veiled in gauzy layers of wax. In the ’90s, he created an installation out of paper bags stiffened and hardened with layers of gesso.
“The wall of bags from across the room, they feel like an architectural mass, but when you get up close, they’re just empty paper bags,” he says. “Then you step back and it still retains its power.”
The “Unsolved” series, as he calls the new pieces, nod to a series of abstract works by minimalist Richard Serra , which feature deep layers of black oil stick on paper.
“I’ve always loved those drawings, loved that work,” says Beall. “It did not go unnoticed by my mind that these might carry some reference to that.”
By and large, his pieces have tended toward the abstract, making the “Unsolved” series, as he calls the new rubbings, a bit of a departure in that they are quite literally connected to specific places and events.
But Beall wants his drawings to carry not just the weight of their stories but also of their pattern and texture and paint — memento mori employed to create a chapel of abstract reflection. (The photographs will be shown separately from the rubbings so they can stand on their own.)
While the work reflects Beall’s long-running preoccupations as an artist, the basis for the series was launched when one of his son’s 14-year-old friends casually asked him if he’d been in Los Angeles during the riots.
“I told her our story, which was more than she expected,” he says. “I could see that it was really very interesting to her, and very affecting. … And I started digging up the memories and doing research.”
That research led him to conversations with a curator at the California African American Museum and a police report that listed the 23 unsolved deaths. (Deaths that were mapped by The Times in 2012 .)
Beall, based in Santa Monica, approached the project as a journey — “a personal pilgrimage,” he says — one that has taken him to Koreatown, Culver City, the San Fernando Valley and South Los Angeles, where we stand.
“Santa Monica is only a 20-minute drive away from here,” he says. “We are much closer than anyone seems to feel. Yet it’s so easy to be in the Silver Lake hipster bubble or the Westside bubble or the Hollywood bubble, and you forget how close we really all are.
“This project, for me, in some small way has fostered conversations with folks with which you wouldn’t otherwise talk.”
Here, for instance, on this corner at 120th and Central, Beall met an older African American man who was not only a witness to the ’92 riots but also remembers the chaotic moments after Miranda was shot that first day.
The man, who declines to provide his name when I arrive there, describes Beall’s project as “a blessing.”
“Over the years, there’s been a death on every corner here,” he says with a sweep of the hand. “[This project], that’s the only way it’s going to get out.”
Beall is aware that being white may open him to criticism for taking on a theme that comments on race and inequity. (Of the 23 unsolved deaths, 16 were of minorities, primarily black and Latino men.)
“I do realize that I’m putting myself out there like that,” he says. “But this feels important.… We were there and experienced it.”
Ultimately, the project has also allowed him to chew on that defining moment on the corner of Manchester and Figueroa in 1992 as well as the long journey home (he lived in Silver Lake at the time) as entire neighborhoods were aflame.
“We never really did take it personally,” he says of the incident. “It was awful and terrible and completely [messed] up. But it was also arbitrary and not personal in the least. We were all victims of circumstance.”
carolina.miranda@latimes.com
Twitter: @cmonstah
Apr 30, 2017 20:37:02 #
ON THE SHELF
Shaming a nation of drinkers
“DRUNKENNESS Won’t Be Tolerated!” is among the propaganda posters issued by the Soviet Union in its effort to stem drinking. (Images from Fuel Publishing) THE POSTER “Brought to the Hospital” was directed at Ukrainians. () “THIS Is a Shameful Union — a Slacker + Vodka!” reads poster. () “DON’T Drink Your Life Away” is among the posters in “Alcohol.” ()
By Liesl Bradner
Vodka and Russia. The former is so ingrained in the identity of the latter, it’s hard to imagine restrictions on its sale and production. But in 1985, the Soviet Union’s newly appointed general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, did just that when he ramped up a nationwide campaign against alcohol.
Artists were tasked with creating propaganda posters to sober up citizens, warning them of the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption. Now, 260 of those previously unpublished posters from the 1980s as well as others dating to the 1960s have been collected in the new book “Alcohol: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Posters” by Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell of Fuel Publishing.
Vibrant images show hung-over, bleary-eyed boozers trapped in a bottle or being hauled away to an institution. One poster shows a bottle morphing into scissors, cutting a family photo in two.
Russian historian Alexei Pluster-Sarno outlines a history of Soviet drinking and the proliferation of illegal home brewing in the book. Some bootleggers distilled organic waste or contaminated their brew with toxic oils; addicts resorted to dangerous substitutes, in some cases chugging perfume, drain cleaners and brake fluid. Distillers and breweries — forced to manufacture nonalcoholic beverages — eventually shut down.
“It was a failure,” Pluster-Sarno said. “The results of Gorbachev’s campaign were the disintegration of the country’s economy and the mass drinking that followed.”
calendar@latimes.com
Shaming a nation of drinkers
“DRUNKENNESS Won’t Be Tolerated!” is among the propaganda posters issued by the Soviet Union in its effort to stem drinking. (Images from Fuel Publishing) THE POSTER “Brought to the Hospital” was directed at Ukrainians. () “THIS Is a Shameful Union — a Slacker + Vodka!” reads poster. () “DON’T Drink Your Life Away” is among the posters in “Alcohol.” ()
By Liesl Bradner
Vodka and Russia. The former is so ingrained in the identity of the latter, it’s hard to imagine restrictions on its sale and production. But in 1985, the Soviet Union’s newly appointed general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, did just that when he ramped up a nationwide campaign against alcohol.
Artists were tasked with creating propaganda posters to sober up citizens, warning them of the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption. Now, 260 of those previously unpublished posters from the 1980s as well as others dating to the 1960s have been collected in the new book “Alcohol: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Posters” by Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell of Fuel Publishing.
Vibrant images show hung-over, bleary-eyed boozers trapped in a bottle or being hauled away to an institution. One poster shows a bottle morphing into scissors, cutting a family photo in two.
Russian historian Alexei Pluster-Sarno outlines a history of Soviet drinking and the proliferation of illegal home brewing in the book. Some bootleggers distilled organic waste or contaminated their brew with toxic oils; addicts resorted to dangerous substitutes, in some cases chugging perfume, drain cleaners and brake fluid. Distillers and breweries — forced to manufacture nonalcoholic beverages — eventually shut down.
“It was a failure,” Pluster-Sarno said. “The results of Gorbachev’s campaign were the disintegration of the country’s economy and the mass drinking that followed.”
calendar@latimes.com
Apr 30, 2017 20:49:18 #
CANVASSING THE CITY
Significant ‘Faces’ of the community
LOCAL RESIDENTS and sustainable landscapes are given tribute in the installation “Faces of Elysian,” created by Greenmeme’s Freyja Bardell and Brian Howe. (Mariah Tauger For The Times)
By Deborah Vankin
The nine egg-shaped sculptures are the faces of local residents captured in 3-D scans and then water-jet-cut out of granite sourced from a Yosemite-area quarry. There’s a different person represented on both sides of each sculpture, so 18 faces in all.
“Faces of Elysian,” which debuted in February, pays homage to the diversity flowing through the site, a bustling roundabout near the intersection of three neighborhoods: Elysian Valley, Cypress Park and Lincoln Heights. For a new Times feature on public art — the story behind the murals, sculpture and other works you may drive past or walk by — we talked with Freyja Bardell and Brian Howe, the artists behind “Faces” and the art studio Greenmeme . Their installation, which took more than seven years to complete, is landscaped with native plants and used stone left over from the faces to make the surrounding barrier.
Where: In a roundabout at the entrance to the Riverside Drive Bridge over the Los Angeles River at Figueroa Street and San Fernando Road, near where the 110 and 5 freeways meet.
Commissioned by: The Los Angeles Department of Transportation in partnership with the Bureau of Engineering.
The artists say: “We wanted to capture an image or time stamp of this diverse community and celebrate or memorialize it,” Bardell says. “We chose to use regular people in the community, inter-generational, people who aren’t necessarily elevated to the status of being a statue, but who are all incredibly significant and important in the community. They’re sort of guardians watching people come in and out of this intersection of freeways, rivers, railways and three or four neighborhoods.”
Adds Howe: “Sustainability was very important from the beginning, so it’s also a storm-water retention roundabout. There are three kinds of bioswales that trap the water, keep it there, help irrigate. Part of the design is also things you don’t even see.”
deborah.vankin@latimes.com
Significant ‘Faces’ of the community
LOCAL RESIDENTS and sustainable landscapes are given tribute in the installation “Faces of Elysian,” created by Greenmeme’s Freyja Bardell and Brian Howe. (Mariah Tauger For The Times)
By Deborah Vankin
The nine egg-shaped sculptures are the faces of local residents captured in 3-D scans and then water-jet-cut out of granite sourced from a Yosemite-area quarry. There’s a different person represented on both sides of each sculpture, so 18 faces in all.
“Faces of Elysian,” which debuted in February, pays homage to the diversity flowing through the site, a bustling roundabout near the intersection of three neighborhoods: Elysian Valley, Cypress Park and Lincoln Heights. For a new Times feature on public art — the story behind the murals, sculpture and other works you may drive past or walk by — we talked with Freyja Bardell and Brian Howe, the artists behind “Faces” and the art studio Greenmeme . Their installation, which took more than seven years to complete, is landscaped with native plants and used stone left over from the faces to make the surrounding barrier.
Where: In a roundabout at the entrance to the Riverside Drive Bridge over the Los Angeles River at Figueroa Street and San Fernando Road, near where the 110 and 5 freeways meet.
Commissioned by: The Los Angeles Department of Transportation in partnership with the Bureau of Engineering.
The artists say: “We wanted to capture an image or time stamp of this diverse community and celebrate or memorialize it,” Bardell says. “We chose to use regular people in the community, inter-generational, people who aren’t necessarily elevated to the status of being a statue, but who are all incredibly significant and important in the community. They’re sort of guardians watching people come in and out of this intersection of freeways, rivers, railways and three or four neighborhoods.”
Adds Howe: “Sustainability was very important from the beginning, so it’s also a storm-water retention roundabout. There are three kinds of bioswales that trap the water, keep it there, help irrigate. Part of the design is also things you don’t even see.”
deborah.vankin@latimes.com
Apr 30, 2017 21:07:55 #
Book Reviews:
New nonfiction that lands with force
the national book review
Some great nonfiction for spring about race, politics and adversity.
Locking Up Our Own
Crime and Punishment in Black America
James Forman Jr.
James Foreman Jr. — a Yale Law School professor and one-time public defender in Washington, D.C. — is a child of the civil rights movement. His parents met on the front lines of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and his father became one of the movement’s most prominent leaders. While Foreman appreciates what was accomplished in that era, his new book focuses on what was left undone. “The nation’s prison population was growing darker,” he writes. “In 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education, about one-third of the nation’s prisoners were black.” Four decades later, that number approached 50%. Foreman digs down deep on the racial politics of crime and punishment in Washington, D.C., and notes a stark reality: A large percentage of the lawmakers and law enforcement officials were themselves black. In this important book, Foreman asks, “How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 320 pp., $27)
A Colony in a Nation
Chris Hayes
In this smart history, the host of MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” provides a new perspective to the fight for social justice. His last book, “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy,” was about the implosion of powerful American institutions; now Hayes takes on criminal justice in America, which has the world’s highest incarceration rate. He draws from his own experiences — he was caught with marijuana, for instance, with no consequences — and blends them with the political commentary and social analysis for which he is known. Hayes argues that America can be divided into two parts: the “Nation,” the affluent, white elite, and the “Colony,” largely urban, overwhelmingly black, brown and poor, with an increasing number of poor white people mixed in, who lead lives of discrimination and subjugation. (W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $26.95)
New nonfiction that lands with force
the national book review
Some great nonfiction for spring about race, politics and adversity.
Locking Up Our Own
Crime and Punishment in Black America
James Forman Jr.
James Foreman Jr. — a Yale Law School professor and one-time public defender in Washington, D.C. — is a child of the civil rights movement. His parents met on the front lines of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and his father became one of the movement’s most prominent leaders. While Foreman appreciates what was accomplished in that era, his new book focuses on what was left undone. “The nation’s prison population was growing darker,” he writes. “In 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education, about one-third of the nation’s prisoners were black.” Four decades later, that number approached 50%. Foreman digs down deep on the racial politics of crime and punishment in Washington, D.C., and notes a stark reality: A large percentage of the lawmakers and law enforcement officials were themselves black. In this important book, Foreman asks, “How did a majority-black jurisdiction end up incarcerating so many of its own?” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 320 pp., $27)
A Colony in a Nation
Chris Hayes
In this smart history, the host of MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes” provides a new perspective to the fight for social justice. His last book, “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy,” was about the implosion of powerful American institutions; now Hayes takes on criminal justice in America, which has the world’s highest incarceration rate. He draws from his own experiences — he was caught with marijuana, for instance, with no consequences — and blends them with the political commentary and social analysis for which he is known. Hayes argues that America can be divided into two parts: the “Nation,” the affluent, white elite, and the “Colony,” largely urban, overwhelmingly black, brown and poor, with an increasing number of poor white people mixed in, who lead lives of discrimination and subjugation. (W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $26.95)
May 1, 2017 14:06:37 #
**people are starting to unravel....I guess we'll all need to be armed. This is what people like ao talks about....shooting people**
Woman fatally shot, 7 hurt at pool
Shooter apparently targeting blacks is killed by officers at San Diego apartment complex, police say.
By Matt Hamilton
One woman was killed and seven people were wounded, several critically, when a man opened fire Sunday at a San Diego apartment complex swimming pool where a number of adults were attending a birthday party.
Police rushed to the apartment building in the University City area and fatally shot the man after he pointed his gun at officers, San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman said.
Authorities received several calls just after 6 p.m. about the shooting at the La Jolla Crossroads apartments, an upscale complex in the 9000 block of Judicial Drive.
The reports were grim: a white man wearing brown shorts was armed with a gun and shooting at what two witnesses described as approximately 30 people around the pool, most of them African American.
A police helicopter reached the area first and, from above, authorities could see a shooter near the pool who appeared to be reloading his weapon, Zimmerman said.
Three officers arrived and went to the pool area. There, the gunman pointed what was described as a large-caliber handgun at police, and all three officers opened fire. The shooter, whom police have not identified, was pronounced dead. The gunman, identified as Peter Selis, 49, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Seven people, all adults, were hit by gunfire: four black women, two black men and a Latino man. A black woman later died at the hospital. Her name was not released. A black man broke his arm while fleeing the shooting, Zimmerman said.
It was unclear what motivated the shooting and police were still interviewing witnesses, including the responding officers. Zimmerman said the gunman and at least one of the partygoers lived at the apartment complex.
A resident at the complex told KFMB-TV, the CBS affiliate in San Diego, that he was in his apartment about 6 p.m. when he heard gunshots followed by yelling and screams. He said he ran to his building’s clubhouse, where he could see the pool.
The shooter seemed at ease, he said, while bloodied victims struggled.
“He had his beer in one hand and his gun in the other,” said the witness, who provided only his first name, John. “There were two victims lying on the ground, one trying to crawl toward the other one to help.”
Amberjot Riat, 22, and Kaela Wong, 20, were in the jacuzzi at the complex when the gunfire erupted. Riat said they stayed in the water in hopes of avoiding the shooter’s attention. They heard the gunman speak to young women who were attending to a wounded friend. “You can either leave or you can stay here and die,” he reportedly told them.
matt.hamilton@latimes.com
Woman fatally shot, 7 hurt at pool
Shooter apparently targeting blacks is killed by officers at San Diego apartment complex, police say.
By Matt Hamilton
One woman was killed and seven people were wounded, several critically, when a man opened fire Sunday at a San Diego apartment complex swimming pool where a number of adults were attending a birthday party.
Police rushed to the apartment building in the University City area and fatally shot the man after he pointed his gun at officers, San Diego Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman said.
Authorities received several calls just after 6 p.m. about the shooting at the La Jolla Crossroads apartments, an upscale complex in the 9000 block of Judicial Drive.
The reports were grim: a white man wearing brown shorts was armed with a gun and shooting at what two witnesses described as approximately 30 people around the pool, most of them African American.
A police helicopter reached the area first and, from above, authorities could see a shooter near the pool who appeared to be reloading his weapon, Zimmerman said.
Three officers arrived and went to the pool area. There, the gunman pointed what was described as a large-caliber handgun at police, and all three officers opened fire. The shooter, whom police have not identified, was pronounced dead. The gunman, identified as Peter Selis, 49, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Seven people, all adults, were hit by gunfire: four black women, two black men and a Latino man. A black woman later died at the hospital. Her name was not released. A black man broke his arm while fleeing the shooting, Zimmerman said.
It was unclear what motivated the shooting and police were still interviewing witnesses, including the responding officers. Zimmerman said the gunman and at least one of the partygoers lived at the apartment complex.
A resident at the complex told KFMB-TV, the CBS affiliate in San Diego, that he was in his apartment about 6 p.m. when he heard gunshots followed by yelling and screams. He said he ran to his building’s clubhouse, where he could see the pool.
The shooter seemed at ease, he said, while bloodied victims struggled.
“He had his beer in one hand and his gun in the other,” said the witness, who provided only his first name, John. “There were two victims lying on the ground, one trying to crawl toward the other one to help.”
Amberjot Riat, 22, and Kaela Wong, 20, were in the jacuzzi at the complex when the gunfire erupted. Riat said they stayed in the water in hopes of avoiding the shooter’s attention. They heard the gunman speak to young women who were attending to a wounded friend. “You can either leave or you can stay here and die,” he reportedly told them.
matt.hamilton@latimes.com
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