Voices from today and yesterday as Off-Ramp marks the 20th anniversary of the Rodney King Riots - which started April 29, 1992 - with a special hour-long program.
Riots20: Stories from the LA Riots
Over the last few months, KPCC has been talking with Angelenos about the 1992 riots, sparked by the acquittals of the LAPD officers accused of beating Rodney King and predicated on the documented historic abuse of blacks and Latinos by the LAPD. Some people, like the current head of the L.A. Chamber of Commerce, were far away, some were in the middle, like a little girl who remembers how hot the windows of her apartment got as riots burned a nearby building.
Our photos come from Gary Leonard, archived online at the L.A. Public Library. Leonard documented the riots himself, but also took along his 14-year-old son, who had his own camera. Their photos are featured at a new show that opens April 29th at Leonard's gallery in downtown Los Angeles.
KPCC's Kitty Felde remembers the LA Riots, Watts and Rodney King
I’ve watched this city fall apart twice in my lifetime.
On August 11, 1965, just two days before my birthday, an incident with a cop just a few miles from our house grew into the explosion we now know as the Watts riots.
We lived in Compton, a city that had just experienced white flight – entire neighborhoods changing from white to black in a matter of months, inspired by anonymous fliers under the door that read “sell now before your property values drop.”
During the Watts riots, my folks were out of town and my brothers and I were under the care of the family babysitter. We heard the sirens. And smelled the smoke – a smell that might have been a thousand backyard incinerators from back in the days when most L.A. homeowners burned their trash in the backyard. But it wasn’t. It was homes and businesses going up in smoke.
That smell sticks with me today. I smelled it again in 1992. On April 29th, I was in Simi Valley, covering the trial of the four L.A. police officers who beat Rodney King. When the verdicts came down, I felt a pit in my stomach. I covered the post-verdict press conferences and then went outside for reaction from the many spectators who hung out outside the courthouse. Many people were arguing, fights were breaking out in the parking lot. And I thought, “If people are this angry here, what’s it like back in L.A.?”
Driving back to the city, I was glued to my radio for updates. There were helicopters everywhere, and the same smell of smoke.
Mostly, during the '92 riots, I covered press conferences. The station had one cell phone – in those days it was as big as a shoe box and weighed 30 pounds. Frank Stoltze got the phone and covered the front lines. I got the press conferences. I remember one on the top of what was then the Transamerica tower on 9th Street. Some official was talking, and about halfway through, reporters drifted away to the windows, watching the city burn all around – from south L.A. to Hollywood to the Valley.
It was the feeling of “not again.” And questions that haunt me: Why does neighbor turn against neighbor almost overnight? How do we miss the signs? Can we prevent it from happening again?
I think my own answer is that it’s that sense of powerlessness. That the promise of “justice for all” is a crock. That the promise of the American dream isn’t for everybody.
It’s probably the reason I covered war crimes trials – again, neighbor turning against neighbor almost overnight in far flung places like Bosnia and Rwanda. It was easy there to say it was ancient tribal divisions or ethnic rivalries. But it was the same as L.A.: When the scales of “fairness” are tipped too far, you just get angry.
Mom, activist, & LA trial junkie Linda Jay hopes to get her own justice in the courtroom
High-profile court cases can suck a lot of us in - heck, there's even a whole television channel devoted to broadcasting trials. We're drawn to lawyers' fiery words, jurors' sympathetic faces and the judge's strong voice echoing over them all, deciding a person's fate.
One woman goes as far as to call herself a "trial junkie." She doesn't just watch trials on T.V., she goes to see them in person.
Linda Jay is 55 and she lives in South Central Los Angeles. She’s been going to high-profile court trials for 20 years.
“I’m a mother and just, your everyday housewife - or, I shouldn’t say that. Wait, I’m gonna take that back - every day person," she said.
Jay has lived most of her life in L.A. She was a court clerk, and loved the “judge shows” on T.V.
“I like Judge Mathis. I like Judge Maybelline. I like Judge Judy - all of ‘em," she said. "Basically, I’m hooked on anything having to do with the justice system.”
It didn’t take long before Jay’s enthusiasm for all things justice led to her first court trial as a spectator.
It was the case of the state of California versus Lawrence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno and Stacey Koon - four Los Angeles police officers charged in the beating of motorist Rodney King.
Jay said she followed the L.A.P.D. officers’ trial for months on T.V. and wanted to see it in person.
“I was just trying to see, were they going to give Rodney King justice this time because so many times in the neighborhood, back in the 90’s, we had police brutality. People were telling the community leaders and the politicians that we have injustice going on in our community, but nobody was listening," she said. "This was one time we had a tape to prove it. With the Rodney King tape, we felt we would be vindicated.”
Jay said she packed up her mom, sister and daughter to drive up to the courthouse in Simi Valley. Weeks of testimony were about to wind down.
“As soon as we got to the courthouse, we saw reporters run out there, coming to their cars, saying ‘we got a verdict, we got a verdict, the verdict is in, we’ve got a verdict!’ My heart starting pumping, adrenaline rushing and I said ‘I want to be in that courtroom, just to see what was going to go down,'" she said.
The jury ultimately found the four officers - Powell, Wind, Briseno and Koon - not guilty. Those verdicts weren’t just hard for Jay to swallow. They were the fuel that sparked the L.A. riots.
“Right after that verdict was read, when I walked out of that courtroom, I was so despaired, I felt so discouraged – dismayed -about the whole system that I didn’t want no one talking to me," Jay said. "I felt like me, being a black lady with young children, what do I have to tell my children?”
Jay said she didn’t let her experience at the L.A.P.D. officers’ trial stop her from attending more in the future.
“Just because one jury made a mistake or did not rule on a verdict that I believed in, I didn’t hold it against the whole justice system - even though that was a really infamous time and it was well known and the world got to see that verdict, I still like trials it doesn’t stop me from wanting to go to trials," she said.
Jay didn’t attend another trial for a few years. But when she did, she picked another biggie. It was the murder case of O.J. Simpson in 1995. A jury found him "not guilty" of murder.
You can see Jay in old T.V. broadcast reports of the trial. She wore a sparkly gold and black top hat and shook up and down in the back row.
Next up, she sat in on Snoop Dogg’s murder trial in 1996, and then Michael Jackson’s molestation trial in 2005.
Jay said she stood in a screaming crowd outside the courthouse where a woman released doves every time a "not guilty" verdict was read.
The last time Jay attended a trial was last year’s trial of Conrad Murray, the doctor found responsible for Michael Jackson’s death.
“He has absolutely no sense of remorse. Absolutely no sense of fault and is -and remains - dangerous," said Judge Michael Pastor after the jury read their verdict.
Jay says she remembers Pastor's words vividly.
“When the judge was kinda chastising Conrad Murray, 'you was negligent' and this and all. I enjoyed being there, listening to him, looking at him - not through a television - just looking at him pretty much give him the third degree and I could just look around the courtroom and see the looks on people’s faces, and that, to me, that was exciting," she said.
Jay said she probably won’t be going to any more high profile cases any time soon because she has to attend the trial of the man accused of killing her daughter, Brittany.
“She was murdered in 2007 - gang violence, my 16-year-old. And they just found the murderer, four or five months ago," she said. "So that’s coming up and that’s going to take a lot of me, but I’m gonna be there.”
The trial’s set for this summer and Jay hopes a jury will help her get her own piece of justice.
Historian Joe Domanick: The LAPD's culpability in the LA Riots
Journalist and historian Joe Domanick takes Off-Ramp listeners to Parker Center, the L.A. Times building, and the new LAPD Headquarters building – three places he sees as crucial to understanding why the 1992 L.A. Riots happened.
According to Domanick, author of "To Protect and To Serve," a narrative history of the LAPD and the forthcoming "Road to Reckoning: the Collapse and Reformation of the LAPD," says Parker Center embodied the glory years for the force, which Chief Darrell Gates viewed as America's police force. But it was through the back door of Parker Center that Gates slipped out on the night the riots started. Astoundingly, so he could attend a Brentwood fundraiser aimed at fighting an initiative to limit the chief's power. But, Domanick says, Gates had no plan to implement that day; he didn't seem to think the people would rise up against him.
The L.A. Times used to back the police department, but slowly, after groundbreaking work by other outlets, notably the late Herald-Examiner, began to document the LAPD's abuses.
The new HQ is a symbol of the new force, reformed by former Chief Bill Bratton and now headed by Charlie Beck. Domanick says the signs, so far, are very good that the bad old days are over.
Excerpt from "Road to Reckoning: The Collapse and Reformation of the LAPD" by Joe Domanick
Joe Domanick is associate director of the Center on Media, Crime, and Justice at John Jay College, City University of New York.
Wait Wait's Peter Sagal: Guess who I met during the LA Riots?
(Excerpts from a story Peter Sagal told at an "Audible Feast” benefit for Chicago Public Radio at the Rubloff Auditorium of the Art Institute of Chicago, which he retells on this week's Off-Ramp to KPCC's John Rabe.)
On April 29th, 1992, I was at a reading of one of my plays in a theater in Santa Monica. People showed up for the reading saying, Wow, I heard people are very upset, they’re burning cars in South Central. I remember driving home that night, along that dividing line the Santa Monica freeway, and seeing the fires, stretched out in a warm line across the basin.
By the next morning, the fires had not gone out. They continued to move north. I sat frozen on my couch, and watched, on my TV, the Los Angeles Riots begin. I saw live video of looters ransacking and burning a Circuit City store, that was three blocks from my house.
Finally, a friend of mine had had it. He said, "I’m going outside, going to find out what the hell is going on." I said, without thinking about it overmuch, “I’ll go too…” We walked down to the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Wilton, just east of the Hollywood Freeway. There was nothing. There was silence. The stores and homes around us were dark.
Then, two cars roared up out of the east. They were late model American sedans, dark blue in color. They screeched to a halt, and all eight doors flew open, and out came uniformed police officers, each of them with a hand to their weapons. The nearest officer was right in my face. He looked familiar.
“What are you guys doing out here?” asked Captain Daryl Gates.
Riots imprinted on a 6-year-old girl, KPCC producer Bianca Ramirez
One of the things you have to remember when you cover a story like the LA Riots is that 95% of the people in even the worst neighborhoods didn't riot, didn't loot, didn't do anything but keep their heads down.
Bianca Ramirez, one of KPCC's producers, was 6 when the riots broke out at Florence and Normandie, just a couple miles from her house, and they quickly spread to her neighborhood. She remembers coming home from school on April 29, 1992, and watching Reginald Denny being savagely beaten. She remembers the gunshots, the sirens, the helicopters, and the smell of smoke. She remembers her father riding his bicycle five miles to Huntington Park just to get groceries for the family.
She remembers that one set of neighbors were "gangsters," and that they looted the neighborhood furniture store and got themselves a brand new livingroom. Other neighbors were African-Americans who huddled together with her Mexican-American family to wait out the chaos and violence.
The riots are a significant part of her growing up. So why does she live today just a couple blocks from Florence and Normandie? "It's home," Bianca says.
Look for Angels: Local artist Jill D'Agnenica's attempt to heal Los Angeles with surprise and inspiration
On April 29, 1993 – one year after the L.A. Riots began – artist Jill D'Agnenica embarked on an extremely ambitious art project.
"Look For Angels" commemorated the anniversary by placing 4,687 magenta angel sculptures all around Los Angeles, including highways, parks, buildings, and the Sunset Strip.
Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson talked with D'Agnenica about her experience during the Riots, the angels, and how she looks back on the project:
On how she experienced the L.A. Riots
"The first night when I got home, I was watching the news and it was surreal watching things happen in my city in places where I had been, I know L.A. It sort of looked like a half a world away. But then I would walk outside on the loading dock outside my studio and I saw the helicopters and I could smell the smoke, and hear the sirens.
The next morning, another friend of mine and I went down to South Central to see if we could help and there were hundreds of people down there from across the city doing the same thing. There were people there with food baskets, baskets, I think that day we cleaned up some graffiti and did some clean up around the neighborhood. We came down I think four days in a row. The thing was I would go home at night and turn on the news again and all I was seeing over and over again were the same clips of the violence, I wasn't seeing any of those hundreds and hundreds of people that were trying to be of service. I was perplexed, it wasn't any new information they were replaying the same information.
At some point after the riots there was a lot of soul searching in the city of Los Angeles – people, residents in the city, and also a lot of media coverage continued. The magazine cover, I can't remember if it was Time or Newsweek [...] said, 'Has the city of Angels gone to hell?'
That struck me at the time, it's that feeling of, you're so disconnected from this. You're not here the city is going on and there's good and bad every day."
On how she came up with the "Look For Angels" project
"I had purchased a little plaster garden cherub from an art store that I thought was cute and I painted it magenta on a whim and I had it in my studio and I kept moving it around the studio and no matter where I put it, it sort of brightened up the space and made me laugh. And I kept thinking, 'gosh, this angel looks good everywhere.' One night i was driving in toward downtown L.A. on the 10 Freeway and I saw the city in front of me, and it hit me that the angels belonged all over the city of Los Angeles.
I had gotten back to my studio and i was writing down what I wanted to do and it was at least 20 minutes before I realized, oh, because the city is called the City of Angels. I didn't even get it myself, that I had made this pun.
So then I realized that the first anniversary of the civil unrest, I think it was 10 weeks, from when this idea hit me. The first night what I thought that I would do, I would put 4,687 angels throughout the city in one night. In my artwork in general, I'm very concerned with numbers and how many, and in this case I did a little bit of research and figured out that Los Angeles is 4,687 square miles. I thought that 10 angels per square mile was the minimum I could do to make an impact, and it was probably the most that I could physically place."
On the meaning behind the angels
"My idea was to put these angels out in the city, and leave them for people to find and potentially take, and that the random and chaotic appearance of angels throughout the city would be a catalyst for personal and communal reflection. So I decided with this funky, funny little symbol to try and create a symbol that united everyone."
"It was beyond my wildest imagination of what something could do. It was incredible. That's exactly what a really smart friend of mine asked me, she said there's no way you can do it in one night and in failing you won't do the project at all. If you start putting them out a little at a time, people will start to potentially talk about them."
On the status of the project today
"The angels got taken pretty quickly, even when they were placed in places where you would think people wouldn't take them, like up on a roof somewhere. One day I walked into the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Larchmont and I looked up and one of the angels was up in the rafters there by the espresso machines. I was kind of delighted and shocked and surprised and thought, 'Oh that must be what people felt like when they were looking for them and found them.' That was about five years after the project, so it's been a while since I've seen one in the street.
Someone told me they found a few if them at a yard sale at one point and they had been painted gold. So the person who found them had taken them, painted them gold and was giving them up in a hard sale. It was great, that was the whole point, that people in encountering these angels would have that experience they had, whatever that may be."
Former Mayor James Hahn remembers '92 (and '65) LA Riots
In a long interview recalling both the 1965 and 1992 LA Riots, James Hahn brings important perspective to the 20th anniversary of the L.A. Riots.
Hahn was the son of L.A. icon Kenny Hahn, the longtime L.A. County Supervisor, and grew up in an all-black neighborhood. He was City Attorney in 1992, later becoming Mayor for one term, and now serves as L.A. Superior Court Judge. As kid, he remembers how the atmosphere suddenly changed after the Watts Riots: Fear entered the equation.
On April 29, 1992, he was driving down Florence on his way to his parents' house. On the radio, he heard about the rioting and diverted to side streets. When he got to his folks' house, he turned on the TV and realized he would have beaten Reginald Denny to Florence and Normandie by 5 minutes.
Hahn says he tried to reach police stations to urge them to keep people away from the riot areas, so swelling crowds wouldn't lead to more rioting. He says he urged someone from the L.A.P.D. to go on TV to reassure the public that police hadn't abandoned the city, since that's what it looked like on the TV.
"We don't have a TV in the station house," one officer told him.
He called the mayor's office to advise them that they might want to impose a curfew. He remembers the response: "If we impose a curfew, that might hurt restaurant business." Nobody's going to be going out tonight, he thought.
It wasn't just the L.A.P.D. that didn't act, Hahn says. Many city officials were afraid of taking an action that might be the wrong one. They were paralyzed, too.
And he reminds us that the jury in Simi Valley saw more of the Rodney King beating videotape than was broadcast around the world; they saw the first 15 seconds, in which King gets up and charges the cops.
R.H. Greene - Los Angeles Year Zero
In 1992, writer, documentarian, filmmaker, and Off-Ramp contributor R. H. Greene was working as an essayist for a now-defuct weekly newspaper called the LA Village View. He spent the night of the riots alone and cut off in his apartment in Hollywood, watching the horror unspool on TV, and trying hard to figure out what it all meant. The resultant essay is a kind of a prose poem called "Los Angeles Year Zero."
Sonny Kang reflects on his experience during the LA Riots
During April of 1992, Sonny Kang, a Korean-American from Koreatown, was in his college dorm room in San Diego when he first heard about the LA Riots. He turned on his TV and saw his hometown in a chaotic state.
When he heard Koreans specifically were being targeted, he called his friend, Tim Lee, whose parents owned a dry cleaning store in South Central. Kang asked “is everything okay?” and his friend said, “they got everything.” Lee told him the store was burned to the ground, but if he wanted to help out, Radio Korea announced that they needed Koreans to come and protect the community.
Kang immediately jumped on the opportunity. He and his friends drove to downtown LA equipped with guns. They arrived at a hotel where Korean volunteers were assembling. Kang said he saw that “in the lobby, there were mostly gang members and men in their 30’s and 40’s.” And remembered “everyone running around, loading up shotguns.”
The volunteers were assigned teams to patrol Koreatown. They would listen to Radio Korea to hear distress calls from shop and business owners whose businesses were being looted. Kang and his team would go and help out in anyway they could. I asked Kang several times what exactly he and his team had to do to protect the businesses, and Kang was reluctant to answer the question.
After the riots, Kang hated everyone, “and eventually I had hatred towards Koreans. When the report came out that we needed Koreans, on the first night, there were only 40 of us.”
Over time, Kang learned to forgive others and wanted to build bridges among all communities of Los Angeles. Just last year, Kang started to volunteer at an elementary school in Watts. Kang said he wanted to volunteer because he believed if “I could go into this community in Watts, and change one person’s mind on how they view Korean Americans, then I feel like I’ve done my job.”
After reflecting on the riots, Kang believes there is still work to be done to improve the community of Los Angeles, but he feels that “we are moving forward in the right direction.”
Music on this week's Off-Ramp
Below you'll find a playlist of all the music featured on this week's episode of Off-Ramp:
Also featured was Peter Gabriels' "Of These, Hope" from the soundtrack for The Last Temptation of Christ: