Verdict. From the Latin verum dictum, a true word, something truly spoken.
Wednesday, April 29, 1992
It is an unusually warm and clear spring afternoon, the kind on which you can actually see the beautiful San Gabriel mountains. It is the kind of day typically portrayed on L.A. Law and L.A. Story and every manufactured fantasy of the City of Angels. The kind on which you'd rather be at the beach.
I'm at the American Friends Service Committee office, staring out the window and lost in a reverie. A colleague pokes his head in my office and announces, "They're about to read the verdict in Simi Valley." The daydream shatters, and a chill begins to grip the hollow of my stomach.
For months it has been called the "Rodney King case," a cruel misnomer since it is four Los Angeles police officers who are standing trial, not King. Yet ironically the misnomer in the end proves to be more accurate. It was in fact King who was prosecuted, the jury concluding incredibly that he was responsible for the officers' behavior.
I look up at the television. Defendants Koon, Briseno, Wind, and Powell are greeting the news of their acquittal with stoic triumph; their lawyers are declaring that justice has been done while waving the press away from their clients. Powell, liable to be retried on the one deadlocked count of assault, confidently asserts, "Now I know I'm innocent." The jury is whisked away by a predetermined secret route.
It strikes me that the jury's verdict is indeed "speaking truly." It articulates the truth not about what happened to Rodney King, but about this essential, intractable gulf in American society between the privileged and the poor, between those whose voice is everywhere reproduced and those whose voice is heard distortedly only when there is a riot.
Throughout the rest of the afternoon we murmur to each other inchoate fears about "the reaction." We are on edge, sensing the calm before the storm; but all of us underestimate the spontaneous combustion to come. Around 5 p.m. the radio news is giving sketchy, alarming reports about people being pulled out of their cars and beaten in South Central Los Angeles (outbursts of brutal indignation that will soon enough become the media icon of the riots, replayed repeatedly, invoking the disgust of some, feeding the rage of others). Now it begins. Beneath the adrenaline of exhilaration and dread, my soul braces for a whirlwind.
By the time I get to my home in northeast LA, it is clear that, as the young gangsters say, "It's on." Friends report that the demonstration at police headquarters turned crazy. The rampage commenced with fires, looting, and everywhere scrawled the instant slogan of the rebellion: "No Justice, No Peace." It is almost the exact route we walked two weeks earlier in a Good Friday public Stations of the Cross liturgy. Tonight, it is truly revealed as the Via Dolorosa.
Late into the night the TV images, engineered to convey maximum fear and chaos, flood the senses: unattended fires, unchallenged looting, everywhere the wail of sirens but nowhere a sign of police in control. The grim analogies begin: Saigon, 1975; Beirut, 1983; Kuwait City, 1991. The three networks and three independents are all giving round-the-clock coverage, cutting back and forth between helicopter views hovering above the apocalypse and City Hall, where damage control strategies have kicked in.
Thursday, April 30
Northwest Pasadena, where we in AFSC work, is not unlike South Central LA--a traditionally black neighborhood that in the last decade has become 50 percent Latino. All the same social conditions apply here; just on a vastly smaller scale.
Early this day we receive numerous reports and rumors concerning what had happened the night before, what would happen tonight. Still the day drags on, surreal; when I have the heart I glance at the television, already weary of the moralizing. But what is particularly maddening is the "us/them" discourse that both reflects and deepens the anxiety of the dominant culture the media serve. Columnist Peter King captured it best in an overheard Simi Valley lunchcounter conversation: "Look at them," said one, "they're just burning out their own." "I heard," countered another, "they're coming over the hill to burn us."
Television journalists are everywhere freely editorializing, publicly scolding the affected communities as "only hurting themselves." Such paternalism would only fuel the fires of anger and resentment if the poor were watching, but of course they aren't; this discourse is playing to the suburbs.
The media's predictable attempt to frame everything in terms of race is betrayed by the images themselves: This is, if anything, the most multicultural riot in history. (Case in point: a spread in the May 11 Newsweek showing a police car being flipped is captioned: "Frustration turned into fury. Justice was beyond their reach, many blacks believed--but revenge could be taken nearer at hand." In the picture, however, all but one of the persons are Latino.)
Yet the networks press on with race-baiting. The most dramatic image of Thursday evening, immediately picked up around the country, is that of a shoot-out between armed Korean store-owners and unshown assailants. In an instant, years of painstaking work by the LA County Human Relations Commission's Black-Korean Alliance is blown away.
If it is clear that the majority of the looters are not black, nor gang members, it is equally evident that they are poor. There are too many images of women and children scurrying away with armfuls of milk, toilet paper, bread, and shoes--hardly luxury items. Congressperson Maxine Waters, who represents South Central LA and is one of the few politicians to refuse to condemn the rebellion, bristles at the suggestion that this is simply gratuitous petty theft. We know, she fumes, that poor women who are caught looting $10 worth of Pampers will do more jail time than white-collar males caught looting millions from the Savings and Loans. We know, she continues, that it always takes this to get people to pay attention to the realities of life in South Central.
The point was echoed by Columbia University professor Charles Hamilton on the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour. If we would have had a verdict and not a riot, he asked, would politicians suddenly be falling over themselves to talk about issues of urban poverty? Again, the truth of the verdict. White America won't listen until white lives and property are lost; the dominant culture thus renders inevitable the violence it so piously reprimands.
The big news today is not that this uprising has now surpassed Watts in scope; it is that it has "spread north." This means north of the Santa Monica freeway, the traditional boundary to South Central, into the Salvadoran district of Pico-Union, into Koreatown, and finally, up into Hollywood. It has also spread south, of course, down to Long Beach; but the media focus suddenly spins away to fixate on Hollywood. This is, after all, their neighborhood; the burning buildings now have meaning to the reporters.
By midday it is already clear that the rage is far from burning out, and fearful thoughts and desperate strategies focus on the "coming darkness." Middle-class Angelenos around the city are panic-buying, trying to beat curfew. There are reports that people of color are being turned away from stores in Santa Monica and Westwood.
One can sense the creeping panic in residential neighborhoods; long before dusk the streets are empty. While it is understandable, this aspect of the dread is unfounded: No matter where the violence is occurring, it is being directed at commercial districts, not residences. (The few apartment buildings that were burned were collateral damage.) This powerful middle-class fear for one's home is, however, being used by the politicians to gain instant support for drastic law-and-order measures.
The reporters are wrong again: "They" are not "destroying their own homes." The focus of the destruction is the business districts. True, the pattern of arson does not support the claim that only commercial establishments owned by "outside" forces were targeted. But the riot does have a distinct overall design, however unconscious. The rage is directed at market symbols of an economic system that is simply not working, one of which most of those who burned (and many who did not) do not feel a part.
Friday, May 1
Mayday, indeed. Is the city going down? The fires still burn, but the sense is that things are on the wane. The press is portraying the community at arms. The pictures of South Central are devastating. The mayor of Beverly Hills announces that there was no damage in his city.
Bush has ordered 4,000 federal troops (7th Light Infantry Division coming down from Ft. Ord in northern California, trained in urban warfare) and 1,000 federal law enforcement personnel (including Border Patrol, Drug Enforcement Agents, and FBI) to stand by. At this stage, it is at least a day late; this show of force is purely political. It will only deepen resentment in the affected communities.
This is particularly true of the INS agents, who are cynically using the opportunity to conduct deportation sweeps. The focus of official racism shifts from blacks to Latinos. LAPD Chief Daryl Gates announces that the majority of the looters are "illegal aliens." A TV newsanchor asks a helicopter cameraperson filming a store being cleaned out by a predominately Latino crowd: "Can you see if they are illegals?" Tell us, what does an undocumented person look like?
In Pasadena it seems community policing worked. Only sporadic incidents of assault, looting, and a little burning occurred overnight. The winds have shifted, clearing the skies of much of the smoke. In the afternoon our office staff again gather around the television, this time to watch Rodney King's poignant plea for peace. Again it is silent, but this time because we are deeply moved. King obviously abandoned the prepared statement of his lawyer and spoke with the truly human voice of his anguished heart. As media analyst Tom Carson later points out, "In the 60-some hours since the riot had begun, Rodney King was the first person to express grief for the dead."
A short time later my own emotions finally catch up with me. It is 48 hours after the first rock was thrown--the same delayed reaction I experienced after the start of the Gulf war. I get home at dusk, walk back of my apartment, and look toward downtown. It all hits me, all the staved-off feelings: my home town torn up, burned out, divided, and under military occupation; nationally paraded and reproached and dissected--but never understood. From Desert Storm until now it has seemed like an endless parade of death and dying, personal and political. The tears just keep coming, the raw torment at last released. "We can get along here. We've just got to. Let's just try to work it out."
Aftermath
Saturday morning broke beautiful and summer-like. We headed for Koreatown, having heard through the grapevine that there was to be a community clean-up effort. But even at 10 a.m. we couldn't get there for the traffic; it turns out that 20,000 people were marching for peace. So we headed to South Central, stopping by First AME church to see where help was needed. "Just go down to Crenshaw and Slauson, and take it from there," they said.
What an extraordinary experience that day was. Strangers of all races, from all over the county, middle class and poor, those who had rioted and those who had watched on television, converged on the "war zone" (as the paper called it), armed only with brooms and shovels. Carloads of amateur demolitionists roamed around the whole of devastated South Central LA, looking for dangerously listing facades to tear down and messes to clean up. And the wreckage was everywhere, on almost every block of every major street, sometimes entire blocks charred. Viewing the destruction stopped me cold; it was far worse than one could have imagined, despite television. Yet for this one day the people took back the streets--not from the gangs or "thugs and hooligans," but from the National Guard and the politicians, and above all from the fear of South Central.
We directed intersections in the absence of traffic lights, dispatched each other in wonderful ad hoc disorganization from site to site, labored together until we were covered with soot and sweat. To be sure it was cosmetic, clearing sidewalks and parking lots, helping store owners sort through rubble.
But the real point of it was catharsis; we all knew that we were there working feverishly to exorcise some collective demon. I remember one Korean woman in tears when we pulled away from her skeleton of a store; not because of what she'd lost, but because people she didn't know had worked side by side with her for a few hours. It was, I believe, a moment of spontaneous utopian politics if there ever was one.
That day, and the three preceding it, seem long ago now. In the aftermath, the real struggle has been joined: to refuse to cede the interpretive ground to the powers of government and media. So much depends upon how we understand what happened, and whether we even try at all. As one black businessperson told me in South Central, "I hope something can come out of this. A year from now I want to look back and say, 'I lost my store for a good cause.' "
It remains for those committed to peace and justice to press the hard questions concerning police brutality, the interwoven issues of race and class, and a reconstruction wherein the poor design and control their own neighborhoods. It remains to preserve the many stories of community solidarity and compassion that did not get told. Most of all, it remains to confront the real verdict, the truth about ourselves and our system.
Ched Myers, a fifth-generation Californian, was program director for the AFSC in the Pacific Southwest when this article appeared.
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