Four days that shook the world
By Kevin Uhrich 05/03/2007
CNN last week carried a fairly extensive remembrance of one of the most important moments of the past two decades — the March 3, 1991, videotaped beating of Altadena's Rodney King at the hands of four LAPD officers and the failed prosecution of those men, which the following spring led to the worst urban rioting in American history.
There was some scattered coverage by some other news outlets of those monumental events, which unfolded into four days of unparalleled rage and destruction, much of it occurring in underprivileged neighborhoods of color in Los Angeles that could not very well stand much more physical or psychological abuse.
But burn this city did, baby, in many areas right to the ground, with more than 3,000 separate fires set and more than 1,000 buildings destroyed.
The question is: How did everyone else — including us — lose track of time and not extend at least some coverage to the anniversary of this seminal event?
The final cost of this “uprising,” this “mini-Civil War,” totaled between 50 and 60 dead, some 2,000 injured and up to $1 billion in property damage. There were 10,000 arrests, with prosecutions for riot-related crimes extending well into the next few years.
What many probably don't recall very well were all the “copycat” riots that broke out the day the verdicts were announced — April 29, 1992 — in other cities: San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Fresno, New York, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Tampa and Dallas.
In her only interview with the press days after the beating, Odessa King, Rodney's mom and a devout Jehovah's Witness, told this writer she feared that any opinions expressed to the press would only fan the flames of potential violence, and she stopped talking to reporters after that. A year before the world turned upside down, Odessa clearly saw it all coming down the road.
Here in Pasadena, merchants in the major shopping districts also felt an ill wind blowing, albeit only days beforehand, and braced for the worst, boarding up windows along Colorado Boulevard and installing chain-link fencing around their businesses on the day that the verdicts were to be rendered by a jury in Simi Valley deciding the fate of the four officers.
What started out as people partying on North Los Robles Avenue a few nights later turned ugly, with police officers eventually cordoning off the street. One man, Howard Martin, died in the violent confrontation. Martin was entirely innocent and had nothing to do with the melee, and he and others tried to hide in an apartment near the shooting. But even an apartment wall could not stop a ricocheting bullet fired from the gun of one of the officers, which hit Martin in the head.
Today, 15 years later — after one war-mongering Bush regime, the placating cruelty of Bill Clinton and his faux-liberal positions on the death penalty, law and order and welfare reform, and now another uncaring Bush junta with an eye on everyone's business and an even bloodier war on its hands — all of these events went largely unnoticed by most of the major media, except for CNN and the LA Times.
The Times, to its credit, ran a fairly extensive collection of pieces last week, culminating in coverage of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's visit Sunday to First AME Church in South LA, the epicenter of some of the good things that came out of those troubled days.
Other papers, though, including ours and most other daily and weekly papers, with the exception of our sister paper the VC Reporter of Ventura, offered little coverage last week of this important anniversary.
To this we can only apologize to our readers and offer a sentiment similar to one frequently expressed in 1992 by those who lived through similar events in 1965, when the so-called Watts riots — spawned by the same types of police brutality and lack of opportunity, investment and education — rocked the country: Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it, a fact that Odessa King seemed to know all too well.
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