We waited outside in the back courtyard. It was off of Robertson near Beverly Hills. Some office building. Newsmen and women, cameramen and women, murmured and exchanged stories of the past few days. Blazes, gunfire, chaos, looting. The L.A riots were being digested, reformed, examined, and mythologized right before my very eyes.
I was at KJLH and KJLH Radio was in the middle of it. You can read about it here and listen to clips of those days here. I was sent to this patch of the Westside for a press conference. To be given by a common man.
The doors opened and, flanked by men in different levels of suit/pay grade distinction, Rodney King stepped beside the mics.
They wanted to know what the man whose ass whippin' stood at the center of this had to say. They wanted him to encapsulate the feelings of a people enraged. Or to speak on the complexities of racial boundaries in our society. They wanted him to proclaim or pronounce or inspire or just explain what was going on. As if he had some special insight. As if he had started it all.
But he didn't. The anger released during the Los Angeles uprisings of '92 was a pressure release valve of class animus that had been built up over years in a racially divided city the borders of which included sky-high walls of economic inequities. Key moments along the way ramped up 'hoods all over LA until the people exploded and turned to fight someone or something -- back.
But this wasn't those days. By the time Carl Nelson of KJLH News sent me to record this moment, the uprising had turned into opportunistic looting, violence, and destruction. A riot. People had been hurt... were getting hurt, and no one really knew what to expect when the National Guard posted up.
And so, we waited. For some words from the man who became synonymous with the "set-off." We waited for an explanation. Some deep reflection. Something to assure us that we'd get through this. After a brief intro from one of the nearby suits, King stepped to the mic and humbly searched for a way to express the nature of what he was seeing from inside the storm. He wasn't a torrent of eloquence. He wasn't a loquacious stream of reasoned articulation. He was Every Guy. He struggled and stuttered and then...
"Can we all get along?"
It was heartfelt. I was there... King meant it. It seemed too little. Banal in comparison to the volumes of words written in those days. Some of our greatest minds in this nation had let loose waves -- oceans -- of thoughtful strategies on how to overcome this infinitely complex and multi-tiered moment tied to human emotion, social constructs, and individual conceptions, predispositions, biases, and ambitions.
"Can we all get along?" didn't rise to the occasion of the chaos in the streets. It seemed ridiculously small to cover the now full-frontal ugliness Los Angeles belched out into the world. "Can we all get along?" was a Band-aid trying to bridge a gushing artery bleeding Los Angeles's golden reputation as a beautiful city filled with beautiful people who all got along.
King said it and, within a month, we (myself included) turned it into a national joke.
But the joke was always on us. King was being what we all claimed to be -- real. He was the common, everyday, average, and sometimes below-average man. He was the little guy who became an icon. Who accepted the love he was given and barely hung on to his sanity through celebrity. He was an addict. He didn't speak from a written speech or from some political soapbox. He didn't employ a deep vocabulary. He just asked a question. Something that would never occur to someone carrying a smoldering TV.
On that day, his simple words crept below our arrogant expectations. And today, in this heated and racially-pitted political arena, it still lingers. Past all of the pronouncements and awards and accolades tossed about in the aftermath of a burnt city. Past all of the back-patting and medallions and scrolls and photo-ops. Past the snickering and side-eyeing of King's speech pattern. He posed the question NONE of us have had the courage to face and, really, honestly, answer in the realness that our jokes and books and columns and articles and blogs and voices would claim to speak with:
"Can we all get along?"
Rodney King. Rest in Peace.
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"May you live in interesting times",
It is reported that it was the first of three curses of increasing severity, the other two being:
"May you come to the attention of those in authority"
"May you find what you are looking for."
Rest in peace Mr. King.
King made no call for a riot. No one rioted when he was brutally beaten. No one rioted when the tape was revealed. No one rioted when the trial began. There are many pieces to the riot.
LAPD's often deadly choke hold policy was sued so may times that, by the King beating, they were apprehending "corral" style. Police reports claimed he constantly charged them...the tape reveals that King was face down and surrounded while still catching hell. The beating was out of the realm of supposed Police professionalism and viewed as racist and reactionary by a population that empathized with King.
Add to that four particular instances of killings where the police/assailants "walked" (namely when a shopkeeper received community service for starting a fight and shooting Latasha Harlins in the back of the head while she still held money for a suspected stolen orange juice in her hand) and the economic crush of those days and the acquittals lead to a spark. Anyone claiming he simply started the riots is lying and trying to, once again, distort the issue with racist fear baiting.
Also every race...Asian, Black, Latino and White, participated in the riot. I was there. I reported on it. People from all parts of LA had skin in the Riots.
20 years later we have an African-American President is that the GOP call "the most divisive president ever". The GOP hatred for Obama has many racial elements no matter how hard they try to deny them, Can we as nation ever really all get along when you have "Billionaire Birthers" being openly courted and supported by Mitt Romney? Should we all get along when GOP political strategists passed very restrictive voting laws to limit, discourage or suppress the vote of young adults and minorities that overwhelming voted for Obama in '08?
Nope! We should not all get along as King said if our voting rights are being stolen or our elections are being bought by racist billionaires. We can all get along after Barack Obama is re-elected. Then all the Obama Haters realize that we have taken another monumental step FORWARD and not BACKWARD like the '92 Riots. Rodney King will hopefully be remembered as a Civil Rights Icon for saying what was in his heart at a moment back then that everyone in LA, the country and world wanted a symbol of hope and change!
Liberals are the party obsessed with race, not Republicans. How do I know? Because I was a registered Democrat for three decades before leaving the party right after the Obama campaign began their attack on Clinton. I can recall all the conversations about race behind closed doors while a member of the left. How Blacks can continually support a party that continues to force-feed this notion that the community can't help themselves without Democrats is beyond me.
Wars are often fought and many innocent get hurt. That's life. It's not right or good, but life nevertheless.
Also, I also want you to understand that it was NOT only the black community involved in the riots. Latinos rioted and looted too. Just saying.
He didn't get beat up because he was black. He got his a** beaten because he (unlike his other BLACK passengers) was higher than a kite, physically attacked the cops, got shot twice by tazers with almost no effect and he was a danger to others. He had a nice, violent record that showed up to the cops on scene and then acted like the two-bit thug that he was. He got his beating because of those factors, not because he was black.
Note that his other passengers (all black by the way) never got mistreated. They didn't get mistreated (even though they were all breaking the law at the time) because they weren't so high that they got violent with the cops.
Should he have gotten beaten like he did? Heck no! But he got what he deserved because he was a violent, high, criminal who attacked the cops.
Rodney King was on the ground face down ready to be arrested when a cop hit him in the head with a metal baton so King got up to try to protect his head .
Although King was no rocket scientist , he wasnt dumb enough to think he could beat up that many cops.
An example: George W. Bush was stopped several times for DUI's and even plead guilty to one charge. He is an alcoholic who says that he only stopped drinking at 40. If that’s true and King was still drinking he only surpassed Bush by 7 years. Would Bush rob someone? Don't know as he was rich and from Yale to Harvard to Arbutso buy-outs to $16mill Ranger buy-ins to a governorship to the Presidency, we will never know all of the nooks and crannies of the damages he laid out because of the magical hand of privilege that guided his destiny.
Meanwhile, Laura Bush was never acquitted for vehicular manslaughter because, after running a red light and getting someone killed, she was never even charged. So yeah...if not being able to have folk look the other way while you engage in reckless behavior and walk away from a death crash without as much as a scratch on paper means one is uncommon...then King was indeed: common. And yet, catching even more hate than exhibited here, he still chose to speak-up when he didn’t have to.
Perhaps though when he asked that now potent question it was a moment of grace in his life; a moment we have all experienced.
The man wasn't common. The moment was.