Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of a spasm of civil unrest that left large swaths of the city in ashes, and tested the boundaries of social order. We'll look back on what happened and what was behind the anger. And this weekend it will be 100 days since President Trump took office. We’ll have a look at his time in office so far, and how its affected California.
Latasha Harlins' death and why Korean-Americans were targets in the '92 riots
The 1992 Los Angeles Riots began with a disturbance at a liquor store near West Florence and Normandie avenues in South Los Angeles.
That's not a coincidence.
A year before the verdict in the Rodney King case, another liquor store only 7 minutes away attracted the wrath of a neighborhood. It was a major reason why Korean-Americans believed they were targeted during the 1992 unrest — the death of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins at the hands of a Korean-American in 1991.
Empire Liquor was a nondescript, blocky white store owned by the Du family near West 91st and South Figueroa streets.
Tensions had been building for years between blacks who lived in South L.A. and Korean-Americans who, like the Dus, ran businesses there.
"Korean-Americans said that African-Americans shoplifted and were dangerous customers," said UCLA historian Brenda Stevenson, author of "The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins." "African-Americans accused Korean-Americans of being racist."
It was Saturday morning, March 16, 1991, when a friend dropped Harlins off at the store following a night out.
"Latasha was coming to buy some orange juice to take home to her family," Stevenson recounted.
Harlins lived just a 5-minute walk away.
"Although her grandmother asked her not to come here, because the store had a reputation — that, as the owners — for accusing neighborhood children of stealing," Stevenson said.
But Harlins didn’t have much choice. The store was one of the few places in the area to get groceries.
So she went to the fridge and put some juice in her backpack. It cost $1.79 back then.
Soon Ja Du, the matriarch of the family that ran the store, was working the cash register.
Harlins approached Du with $2 in her hand.
"But she doesn’t have an opportunity to present the money because as soon as she gets to the counter, Soon Ja Du asks her if she’s trying to steal from her," Stevenson said.
Du, herself, had been on edge. Her family ran several stores, but she rarely worked at this location.
Her son had recently testified in court against gang members in the area because they were stealing from the store and harassing staff, so Du had taken over for him that morning.
Believing that Harlins was stealing from her, too, Du reached over the counter to grab at her backpack.
"And so, you know, a fight ensues," Stevenson said.
Harlins pushed Du back.
But Du got up and tried to grab at Harlins’ backpack again, only to be knocked over one more time.
"When [Du] comes up the second time, she’s got a gun in her hand," Stevenson said. "Then, as Latasha turns around to walk out of the store, she shoots Latasha."
Point blank in the back of the head.
Harlins' body lay motionless in a pool of blood. When the police arrived on the scene, they found $2 in her hand.
(Warning: Graphic content)
Security footage from the March 16, 1991, shooting of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du at Empire Liquor. (Courtesy: KNBC)
Harlins' death, and how Korean-Americans became 'the problem'
Months later in November of that same year, Soon Ja Du was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. But the sentence was light: five years probation.
"The girl was killed and essentially murdered without provocation," said Larry Aubry, an African-American who, in the '90s, was working in his South L.A. community to build bridges with Korean-Americans.
But at the time all he heard from African-Americans was anger.
"They called it a criminal injustice system," he said.
Korean-Americans, meanwhile, had a different take.
"People said that shop owner Mrs. Du was an individual who made a grave mistake," said Angela Oh, a Korean-American civil rights attorney who was working with her own community at the time. "People also prayed for the well-being of the family of the teenager who had been killed."
But they did not see themselves in the middle of a race war.
"They did not see themselves as potential targets," she said.
Korean immigrants and Korean-Americans started businesses in South L.A. because real estate there was cheap and was one of the few places they could afford.
But they did not arrive knowing the country’s racial past. They did not know about the historic struggles of African-Americans.
So in the decades leading up to this moment, Korean-Americans were unaware of how they became part of that struggle too.
But blacks did, Aubry said, and they had a grudge.
"That’s the broader context in which all of this occurred," he said.
African-Americans saw opportunity pass them by.
Many weren’t able to gather up the money or secure a loan to start a business, yet here were Korean-Americans moving to the neighborhood who could.
"And they didn’t hire black people, either, for the most part," Aubry added.
When Latasha Harlins was killed in 1991 and Soon Ja Du got probation, blacks saw it as another example of injustice.
"There’s no question that Latasha Harlins fed right into the community's negative feelings about law enforcement and how black people are treated," he said.
So that anger and frustration simmered before exploding on April 29, 1992, with Harlins’ case at the back of rioters' minds.
That's why Angela Oh thinks the unrest eventually moved from South L.A. to Koreatown.
"Well, the name Koreatown," she said. "There were a lot of things that identified Koreans as the problem."
That's despite that it was the LAPD and city government on trial in the Rodney King case.
"[Rioters] didn’t try to set fire to any state, municipal or federal building. It didn’t happen!" Oh said. "They went after small businesses owned by immigrant families who had a foreign face."
"The Korean thing gets mixed up in the whole thing with law enforcement," Aubry said. "They perceived them as enemies on one side."
The liquor store where Latasha Harlins died never reopened after her death.
It was a shell of a building for years before a Mexican grocery store took it over in the early 2000s.
Angela Oh said Korean-Americans would ask her afterwards, "What have we done? We didn’t do anything wrong?"
The Harlins case and Empire Liquor is the answer, and it had just as much to do with the riots as the anger over Rodney King’s beating.
LA Riots: After the smoke settled, blacks and Korean-Americans faced contrasting realities
The animosity created by the Latasha Harlins shooting, combined with the arson and looting directed against Korean businesses 25 years ago, sparked a shift after the smoke cleared and the broken glass was swept away.
But what changed after the riots in the Korean American and African American communities?
Take Two put that question to Nadia Kim, professor of sociology at Loyola Marymount University, and Erin Aubry Kaplan, a journalist who has written extensively about the riots.
Highlights
Was it possible to emerge without hard feelings?
Kaplan: Hard feelings — that sounds so personal. I was kind of amazed in another way. I'm a native, and I grew up in South Central and I had heard about 1965, and it's interesting to note that we are now roughly the same distance from 1992 as 1965 from 1992, kind of hard to believe. I had heard by whole life that '65, we're still living that legacy. But initially, when this happened, what I call an uprising, I thought it was kind of energizing. I thought, OK, this is a good thing. We're going to express how we feel. We're going to organize and we're finally going to make good on the promise of improvement.
Well, that got out of hand very quickly and I was just kind of ... you know, for the first time sort of fearful to be out in my own community. But I understood everything — I understood the resentment, I understood the rioting, I understood the protests. But I kind of felt ... and I don't mean to sound hard ... but it's almost like it couldn't have happened any other way. People were just really angry and, yes, indiscriminately angry because, you know — Nadia mentioned Koreans feeling invisible prior to this — black folks had felt invisible for a very long time.
What stands out about the Korean American experience?
Kim: It was an awakening. A lot of people from legendary journalist K.W. Lee to all kinds of analysts to organizers, they always describe it as a racial baptism by fire, or it was when Korean America was born. I really believe that to be true. Almost a year after the unrest, only maybe a quarter of the businesses had rebuilt. A lot of them had been uninsured at the time of the burnings and the arson so they could not rebuild. Some of them struggled with repayment because of engaging in high-interest loans ... and then losing their homes because of inability to keep up with mortgages. And so rent and mortgage issues were probably some of the biggest.
And then, of course, we have to talk about the transnational capital that invested in Koreatown. So, taking advantage of depressed real estate values, taking advantage of the globally structured economy, you now have these wealthy entrepreneurs or you have South Korean transnational capital coming in and gentrifying and rebuilding Koreatown. [There were] major opportunities there, and you see Korean Americans taking advantage of those as well.
The story of African Americans turned out a little differently. What happened to the African Americans who had to deal with the aftermath?
Kaplan: Well, nothing. You know, I'm sitting here, listening to you two and being reminded ... it pretty much says it all. Koreatown is booming. There was for Korean merchants — I think sociologists call it the option of exit — who tragically lost their businesses but they can go elsewhere. But the situation in South Central is pretty much the same. I guess the new merchant class would be Latinos who had businesses then. The demographics have changed a lot. We knew this was coming back in '92, so now South Central is something like 30 percent black, 70 percent Latino. Whereas, it was 50 percent [black] back then. So blacks are literally becoming a smaller population but with the same problems as a community, and it's just kind of disheartening.
There has been no economic growth. What the community was looking for was some investment, transnational or otherwise, coming into South Central to finally change things. It didn't happen. There was Rebuild L.A. Everybody might remember it didn't get too far. There was just not the interest. And unfortunately, a lot of people in the black community are not surprised. This is, frankly, what has always happened.
What's it going to take for riots to be unthinkable?
Kaplan: Oh, gosh. Not to sound too pessimistic, but I think that possibility is always there. I think that the conditions that perpetuated it, particularly with black people, because this was framed as sort of a racial incident and it was, are still in place. They just are. I think people have seen, particularly black people have seen, what does work. Rising up doesn't work. Raising our voices doesn't seem to shake the system very much. So, you know, I think it could always happen again. What will set it off? I don't know.
We live in an age now where we have these outrageous videos every day, every week. We see with the Black Lives Matter movement, we see incidents of police brutality all the time. It's difficult to know, when or if something will spark a grassroots expression like 1992 did. That I don't know. It'd be interesting to see.
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State of Affairs: How California fared in President Trump's first 100 days
It's been 99 days since businessman Trump became a public servant, and was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States.
In the time since then, there has been ample disagreement over his effectiveness as a leader.
In mostly-blue California, legislators have drawn up swift rebuttals to Trump's proposed policies, moving both to keep Obama-era environmental regulations in place and hamper Federal deportation efforts.
So, how has the Golden State fared since Trump took office?
That's the subject of a special edition of State of Affairs, Take Two's weekly look at politics in California
Guests:
- Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, professor of public policy at USC
- Jeremy Carl, research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution
- Scott Shafer, senior editor for politics and government at KQED
Press the blue play button above to hear the full interview
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