We talk with residents, eyewitnesses, about those dark days ... Journalist Joe Domanick tells us how decades of police brutality - including hundreds of police murders of blacks and Latinos - led to the LA Riots, and he assesses how far the LAPD has come ... How former Mayor James Hahn could have been Reginald Denny ... Why one yougn Latina who lived through the LA Riots is still happy to call South LA “home" ... and Peter Sagal tells Off-Ramp about his bizarre chance meeting with Chief Gates. And we hear in-depth from the man who was reluctantly at the center of the riots, the late Rodney King.
Off-Ramp Recommends: Walk (or stumble) through Brewery Artwalk!
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Twice a year, Los Angeles' largest art space opens up for a free art appreciation event. The building was once the Pabst Blue Ribbon factory, hence the "Brewery" in "Brewery Artwalk," so you know the beer will be flowing. This year, the Brewery Art Association turns 35!
The PBR factory became an art space in 1982, following the passing of the Artist-in-Residence Code, stating artists could rent live/work spaces in industrial zoned warehouses and buildings. Since then, the complex has gathered multi-medium artists: painters, sculptors, architects, photographers, and experimental media.
More than 100 of the Brewery Art Association's resident artists will be opening their studio spaces to share new and original work with you. Art and/or beer lovers are invited to chat with the artists and discover their new favorite pieces within their own community.
The Brewery Art Walk takes place Saturday and Sunday, April 29th and 30th, from 11am-6pm. Admission and parking are free at the complex, located at 2100 North Main Street.
The man who helped save native Bird Singing from extinction
Imagine a sequence of storytelling songs so elaborate it takes more than seven hours to sing them all and you have some idea of the intricacy of Native Southwestern Bird Singing. They are some of the earliest songs sung by human voices in the American Southwest. And, as Bird Singing master Michael Mirelez explains, they have nothing to do with birdsong.
“Bird Singing is a song that the native born people of Southern California and parts of Arizona share,” Mirelez says. “For the Cahuilla, the reason why they’re called ‘Bird Songs’— it was a slang name. There’s a part in the story where the people were lost, they didn’t know where to go, where to turn, what to do. So at that point they looked up into the sky and they saw the birds flying—migrating, in unison. And they decided to follow.”
“The one thing true to its nature are the animals and the plant life. It’s human beings who veered off from their design," Mirelez says. “Bird” is the sacred communal music of the Southwestern desert’s original peoples. According to those who sing them, ‘Bird’ songs are as old as time itself.
R.H. Greene also took us recently to Point Dume to report on sea lion rescue
Among the original people of the desert Southwest, "Bird" is a shared legacy, and a living tradition that came perilously close to extinction. “[The songs] tell us our history. The history of creation. Of the human race. How everything in the world came to be.”
Michael Mirelez is a member of the Torrez-Martinez Band of Desert Cahuilla people, and a "Bird" singer since his late teenage years in the 1990s. He says back then, there was minimal interest in old ways. “On my reservation there was none of the culture that was left. There were no cultural events. And what we call ‘Bird Dances,’ they’re the social dance? There was none of that going on. And you had to wait, hoping you’d hear about something where they were gonna be.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OkbnuEqZzc
Mirelez’s journey with traditional tribal song mirrors the decline and resurrection of Bird Singing itself. Because fatefully, the dying music Mirelez now works to revive is something he first heard at a funeral. It’s strange because culturally those songs are taboo to sing at funerals. [But] Native culture—so much of it has been wiped out. So the little pieces we have left, we cling on to.”
Before the funeral ceremony, Mirelez had felt disconnected from his heritage. Afterward, he was changed—filled with cultural pride and purpose. It helped that a larger shift was underway. Not only among the Cahuilla, but nationally, and within the other Southwestern desert tribes.
Longtime Native organizer Carol Ray remembers how things changed when the baton of the Civil Rights Movement got picked up by Native activists. “All over the United States, but particularly in California, the tribes had been through some very bad times,” Ray says. “The California Natives were held back. And you KNOW what happened during the Gold Rush.
Ray says, “But thinking about history and what’s happened since was a relief of spirit. I think it was somewhat of the beginning of the Native personalities being able to express themselves again.”
Mirelez went looking for the most authentic voices of that expression. He found them in four aged mentors who were among the last authentic embodiments of the bird singing tradition: Mr. Robert Levi, also of the Desert Chuilla from Torrez-Martinez; Mr. Anthony Andreas, lead singer for the Agua Client Band of Cahuilla; Mr. Alvino Siva, a Mountain Cahuilla singer; and Ms. Katherine Siva Saubel—the Desert Cahuilla’s “last ceremonial singer” according to Mirelez.
These four taught Mirelez the origin story of his own desert heritage. “It kind of coincides with what happens in the Bible, where Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden,” Mirelez says. “Well we were kicked out. The people had done something horrible. But they say the Creator had told us that he has created a place for us. A paradise. But we have to go find it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGmWuY49DTI
Asked what the people had done to bring on this indigenous Exodus, Mirelez draws an intriguing parallel. “Again it almost coincides with what happened with Jesus. The people had killed the Creator. There are so many things that coincide with one another. And to me, the truth is the one thing that connects everybody from all sides of the planet.”
Mirelez and others of his generation discovered Bird Singing just in time. All four of Mirelez’s mentors are dead now. He chokes up when he speaks about it. “It was a relationship. It wasn’t just student and master. I became a part of their lives, And I stayed with them. I buried every single one of them. You never leave your teacher. I am who I am because of them. They gave me something to sing about.”
Mirelez is still living out the legacy entrusted to him. He is the founder and emcee of “Singing the Birds,” an annual cultural event sponsored by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians which brings together Bird Singers from all over the Southwest.
And Mirelez is also mentoring another generation of young Bird singers, including Daniel Vega. who is just eight years old, and who made the rattle he uses when he joins in group singing way back in kindergarten. Bird Singing, Vega says, "shows me my culture from my Dad’s side. Like how the beginning of time was created, and how we circled the Earth three times to find our homeland—and hope.”
It’s a hope for the future Mirelez shares. “We’re still on shaky ground,” Mirelez says, “because we’re still trying to hold onto the traditional. Today, nothing’s real. But with us, with our music, it’s still our voices. Our human voices.”
Joe Domanick on one day of rioting, and the LAPD's progress since 1992
Joe Domanick was a reporter for the LA Weekly on April 29, 1992. He'd just secured a contract for his first book, "To Protect and To Serve," a history of the LAPD from the 1930s to the 1990s, his first book on the LAPD. He grabbed a tape recorder and drove around the city during the riots, recording what he saw. (Read his account of April 30 below.) He's since become a respected teacher of journalists who focus on law and order topics, and published "Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing" in 2015.
When I spoke with him in 2012 on the 20th anniversary of the riots, he was unsparing in his assessment of the LAPD and its role in the violence: The often brutal and racist LAPD, under chiefs Bill Parker and Daryl Gates, had killed "hundreds" of unarmed black and brown men, he said. The Rodney King verdicts merely lit the fuse to the powderkeg the force itself constructed. And when even TV stations knew something was going to happen on April 29, Gates made no contingency plans, then blamed the force for his own negligence.
Today, he sees huge progress under chiefs Bratton and Beck, and a force that has significant problems still - especially in its relatively high number of shootings compared to other police forces - but is making a genuine effort at community policing. Also, of course, crime is down. It was sky-high during Gates' tenure, so Gates' policies, whatever you think of them, simply didn't work.
Listen to the audio for my interviews with Domanick about his harrowing days covering the LA Riots, and his assessment of the LAPD, and read Joe's essay, below.
A Morning in South Central during the Los Angeles Riots
I began writing my first book about the Los Angeles Police Department in 1991, just after the bone-breaking, recorded beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers had made the department infamous and reviled around the world.
As it had in LA as well. Black Angelenos had been telling white LA people that sort of brutality happened all the time in their neighborhoods, but few believed them. The King video, opened a lot of peoples’ eyes, and for the next year of waiting for the cops who attacked King to go on trial, you could choke on the racial tension in the air.
Then on April 29th the spark that would ignite the riots came with the announcement that all four officers had been acquitted of all charges. Everybody knew what such an outcome portend. Everybody, that is, except the LAPD and it clueless, frozen-in-time Chief, Daryl Gates.
Amazingly, just as the acquittals came down, Gates deserted his post at a time of the greatest peril to attend a fundraiser! As he left, downtown Los Angeles where filled with angry crowds throwing rocks and slabs of concrete, smashing windows and overturning cars. Gates’ destination was the rich, white, bucolic neighborhood of Brentwood, not many miles away, but a world apart from the chaos enveloping much of the rest of the city. His purpose was to attend a fundraiser to help defeat several amendments to the City Charter that would help force reform on his autocratic, fiercely resistant department. LA was thus left unprotected and rudderless for the next 36 hours as the LAPD -- along with the rest of us -- watched the city go up in flames and soak in bloodshed.
It was an amazing moment, and on the early morning of the first full day of the riots, I set out early to report the book I was writing. I knew exactly where to drive: South Central LA, where the LAPD had fled the scene, and the looting, burning and brutal violence had exploded on a corner where a large crowd had gathered. There they began stopping and pulling out white and Asian motorists, who they viciously beat and then destroyed their cars.
On the areas fringes, I first pulled into a strip mall where a Newberry’s department store had been set ablaze and burned to the ground the night before. Adjacent to it were a Sav-On and a Payless shoe store -- untouched by the fire, but alive with looters. Soon, two long hook-and-ladder fire trucks painted a beautiful red slowly cruised in, lead by three police cars – each packed with five cops in riot helmets. Getting out, they take a quick look around for maybe a minute, not much longer, before they slid back into their vehicles and cruise outed, fire trucks in tow.
Meanwhile, the looting had continued unabated.
A bloated bare-chested man in Bermuda shorts walks out of the Sav-On with all ten fingers entwined around four gallons of burgundy, the pockets of his red nylon shorts against pale white skin bulging with pints of whiskey.
Observing, are a group of black men in their fifties and sixties. Sounding much like Sweet Dick Willie and the corner men in "Do the Right Thing" they shout: “Help yourself. Help yourself.” Then another equally big-bellied Latino wearing a F--- YOU T-shirt, wheels out a shopping cart filled to the brim with double-A batteries and Ramses condoms. “They have to loot,” says someone in the chorus, “They showin’ it on the news, they see it, and most of them don’t have anything.”
The first flash of anger comes from a balding black man about 40 in a gray ski jacket and small, wired gold-rim glasses. Four teenagers – also black – are joyously exiting the Sav-On, carrying bulging suitcases. “I got a calculator, home,” says one. “I got some ice cream,” says another.
The man in the ski jacket walks up to the tallest of the kids and says, “Man, all the shit that you take, it’s gonna’ come back to you. It’s real stupid shit you’re doin’. Leave it and respect yourself.”
For a moment, the young brother looks uncertain, until his friend in a Miami Heat cap looks at him: “Man, if you feel like you need this, then take it.”
“Take it?” says the man. “And give up your respect?”
“F--- respect,” replies Miami Heat, “they don’t give us no respect.”
Meanwhile, a dark, angry-looking man of about 30 drives up in an old Mazda. “F--- ‘em, take everything; f--- ‘em,” he shouts, “take everything.” A wiry-looking black kid, maybe 17, starts doing the Ali shuffle around me, chanting, “You in the wrong neighborhood man, you in the wrong neighborhood.” The guy in the Mazda walks over and says two words, “Get out,” as I hustle away to my car. It’s now just past 8am.
Minutes later I arrive in South Central. Smoke frames the background of the steeple of the Abundant Christian Church. It’s coming from Frankie and Anne’s Beauty Salon. Four other small stores next to Frankie and Anne’s have already burned to the ground. Straight down the long, wide miles of Normandie Blvd., mile after mile -- as far as the eye can see, stores, churches, car lots and anything are ablaze or burned down.
At a back-street stop sign four teenager boys in black pants and T-shirts menacingly look my way. “Hey, yo, what’s up -- what’s up, f--- head?”, one of them shouts.
At Fifty-fifth and Normandie, an elderly Korean woman with a garden hose and bewildered face is busy watering down the embers of the blackened skeleton of what last had been her mini-mart grocery store. “Three times fire department come. I don’t know what happen ... I lose everything.”
Down another street of neat bungalows and craftsmen cottages everything’s remarkably still and calm. Outside one house, two black women are quietly talking. Lisa, who’s heavyset and wears a T-shirt with an old lady sitting in a rocking chair that says, “I’ve still got it but nobody wants it,” the other is Brenda, 34, thin and wearing burgundy sweats.
“It’s not only gang members doing the fires and looting,” says Lisa. “Yesterday evening we’d seen for ourselves. The Crips and the Bloods tied [blue or red due] rags together and said they wuz united. That it was now a black thing. The Crips drove up in cars. And the Bloods, you know, I thought they wuz gonna bust them, but they just started huggin’ each other and sayin’ they wanted to unite.”
“But it wasn’t only Bloods and Crips out there [burning and looting],” Brenda replies, “It’s everybody.” “This was a Blood neighborhood,” Lisa says in a slightly amazed, excited tone. “Now we united. See, the news didn’t get that. They don’t want to get nothin’ like that. They want to keep it [the riot]‘goin.”
On Normandie and Sixtieth, three black men in their thirties and a fourth, who’s in his late teens wearing Raiders gear, stand with a beautiful, young African American woman holding an infant in her arms. Cecil, tall and light skinned, confirms the gang story: “They tied their rags together.” “The red and the blue,” he tells a guy named Kenny who nods his head. “And they held up the power sign. Now they all be wearing black rags. And it was organized.” Everybody starts laughing knowingly. There was generals and soldiers. . .when they started burning down that liquor store, they sent some of them out to the street to direct traffic.” “Uh-huh,” says Kenny, “they all for one purpose.”
Around the corner, Nathaniel, 55, and William, 74, are already into their forty-ounces of Olde English and their reefer. “That verdict, that little girl getting killed; that a wrong verdict,” Nathaniel says of Korean shopkeeper, Soon Ja Du, who had shot and killed a black, 15-year-old girl named Latasha Harlins in her grocery store – as she was about to walk out.
“That Korean woman, she didn’t get as much as they charge a man for drunk driving,” he says of the probation she’d received. And the [Rodney] King beating, man that stuff been goin’ on forever in this city.” “I’m not part of all this [the rioting],” says William, “but the bulls--- that’s going on – well, you got to be black to understand that. You know, I came up in the South, but the youngsters, they ain’t gonna put with the s--- I used to.”
Remembering the 1992 LA Riots with Off-Ramp
On this date in 1992, the LA Riots started when the Rodney King verdict was announced. In 2012, Off-Ramp aired a special edition looking back at the event on the 20th anniversary.
One of the things I'm most proud of is the time we spent setting the context for the riots, in particular the culpability of the LAPD.
As Joe Domanick reminded us, the riots didn't happen just because the cops were cleared of beating Rodney King, they happened because the department had killed scores of unarmed black and brown men with impunity for years (often with choke holds), and the verdict touched off long-simmering and justifiable anger.
And, Domanick said, they happened because Daryl Gates was derelict and did not prepare the department for the violence everyone else expected would erupt. He sent shifts home (and went to a political fundraiser!) while TV stations brought in extra staff.
We also talk with many Angelinos who remembered the day: a then-6-year old who lived in the neighborhood and now works at KPCC; Wait Wait Don't Tell Me host Peter Sagal, who ran into Gates during the riots; former Mayor James Hahn, who only missed being a casualty because he happened to turn on the radio and hear about what was going down at Florence and Normandie; and many others.
We also put together a slideshow of Gary Leonard's photos from the riots.
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.
LAPD Chief Gates dies. “Cop’s cop” or cause of ’92 riots?
Paul Weber, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the police union, called Daryl Gates, who died April 16, "a man of courage and character who had a deep commitment to the rule of law, with a deep pride of the LAPD … Chief Gates was a cop's cop, revolutionizing critical policing tactics and changing the face of modern law enforcement around out the world." Current police chief Charlie Beck called him "one-in-a-million human being (who) inspired others to succeed and, in doing so, changed the landscape of law enforcement around the world."
But Joe Domanick, a journalist who focuses on criminal justice and who has covered the LAPD for decades, told Off-Ramp host John Rabe that Gates and his policies caused the ’92 riots.
COME INSIDE for a link to one of Gates' final interviews -- granted to Patt Morrison.
Joe Domanick holds positions at USC Annenberg’s Institute for Justice and Journalism and the Center on Crime Media at New York’s John Jay College. He’s written extensively about the LAPD, including the book “To Protect and To Serve,” a history of the LAPD.
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."