- 5 days ago
A look at Los Angeles, one year after the riots, through the eyes of five people who have thought and written about the city from the perspectives of its different communities, races, and classes.
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00:00:01Frontline is a presentation of the Documentary Consortium.
00:00:08Ten days ago, the city of Los Angeles held its breath,
00:00:12and the national press gathered as a federal jury
00:00:14prepared to hand down its decision
00:00:16in the second Rodney King beating trial.
00:00:22The decision.
00:00:24Two convictions and two acquittals.
00:00:28Many Angelenos felt they had only narrowly averted another disaster.
00:00:35Tonight, in the wake of last year's violence, Frontline revisits Los Angeles,
00:00:40attempting to understand the tensions that segregate its communities.
00:00:44I think some Korean-American immigrants are totally ignorant
00:00:47about sensitivity of race relations in America.
00:00:51We want to have all this black, every story.
00:00:53There was something that led up to this.
00:00:55There was a context, there was a history, there was anger.
00:00:58There is a low-level race war going on,
00:01:00and this happens to be the way it is manifesting itself.
00:01:05L.A. is burning.
00:01:07Five reports from a divided city.
00:01:14With funding provided by the financial support of viewers like you.
00:01:18And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
00:01:26This is Frontline.
00:01:2863 degrees, clear skies here in Hollywood.
00:01:47We're looking for a high of 74 downtown L.A.
00:01:49It's going to be clear all over the Southland after morning low clouds burn off.
00:01:52Clear again tomorrow, highs in the 80s.
00:01:55For almost a year now, Los Angeles has been a city on the edge.
00:02:00The recent federal court decision has brought some relief from the tension.
00:02:05But the memories of what happened here a year ago are still strong and clear.
00:02:09More than 50 people died and at least 800 million dollars worth of property was destroyed during the worst civil disturbance in modern American history.
00:02:21We're in a night out of control in the city of Los Angeles.
00:02:33Terrible, terrible pictures that all this guy did was enter this area.
00:02:38Can we, can we all get along?
00:02:40Can we stop making it, making it horrible for, for the, for the older people and the, and the, and the kids?
00:02:49The question is one that has been asked of Los Angeles many times.
00:02:53The lawlessness that broke out with unbridled fury in the Watts section of Los Angeles.
00:02:58It was asked during the Watts riot nearly 30 years ago.
00:03:01It was asked in March, 1991, after the beating of Rodney King.
00:03:10And then again last April 29th, after the first trial of the police officers in the Rodney King case ended in acquittal.
00:03:16To look for what has happened here and why, Frontline asked five people who have watched and thought about Los Angeles to tell us what they see.
00:03:31John Edgar Weidman, novelist and professor of English literature at the University of Massachusetts.
00:03:37Susan Anderson, Los Angeles based writer and community activist.
00:03:41Edward Chang, professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside.
00:03:46Ruben Martinez, journalist and author.
00:03:49A native born Angeleno whose parents are Mexican and Salvadoran.
00:03:53And Tim Rutten, columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
00:03:56Starting from the same point, the same images of a city divided.
00:04:01They set out on journeys of exploration to very different places.
00:04:05We're not talking a cycle of violence.
00:04:12We're not talking about cycles of urban unrest.
00:04:15And that's the main perception.
00:04:17That's the primary perception.
00:04:19The violence never goes away.
00:04:22South central Los Angeles.
00:04:24The term is code for the inner city.
00:04:26Head south of the Santa Monica freeway.
00:04:28Into its heart, right in the landing path for Los Angeles International Airport.
00:04:33South central is where John Edgar Weidman headed last April.
00:04:40Because I'm a writer.
00:04:41Because I'm curious.
00:04:43I wanted to know what was happening.
00:04:44I wanted to experience it.
00:04:46Things began on Wednesday.
00:04:48I flew out on Thursday.
00:04:49When my plane attempted to land, it was shunted out over the ocean.
00:04:53Because of fire.
00:04:54Because of smoke.
00:04:55Because of danger of sniper fire.
00:04:56Plane lands.
00:04:58And then I'm on Western Avenue.
00:05:00And stores are burning on both sides of me.
00:05:02And there are flares in the middle of the street.
00:05:05And road blocks.
00:05:06And National Guardsmen.
00:05:11But it was inevitable.
00:05:13It was inevitable.
00:05:14And it's been happening.
00:05:16It's just that attention gets called to it every now and again.
00:05:19What we have down here, folks, is a lot of angry people rioting in the street.
00:05:25Around 6 p.m. last April 29th, live television showed images from the corner of Florence and Normandy
00:05:32that have come to be thought of as the flashpoint of the violence.
00:05:36In reality, the seeds had been planted a couple of blocks away, more than two hours earlier.
00:05:42Shortly after the verdicts came down from the Simi Valley courtroom,
00:05:46a Korean American liquor store on Florence Avenue was looted.
00:05:50The store owner's son was hit on the head.
00:05:53Police arrived and chased one young man a couple of blocks to the corner of 71st and Normandy.
00:06:02Well, it's like a day just like it is today right here.
00:06:05Jay Kawana owns an auto body shop one block from 71st and Normandy.
00:06:10He knows and hires some of the young men who began to gather there.
00:06:15I just saw a mass of people walking over that way.
00:06:19So we walked over that way.
00:06:21And about 50 police had blocked off the streets.
00:06:24That quick?
00:06:25Oh, yeah, they were there.
00:06:26You know, they had blocked off the street over there telling everybody to get off,
00:06:30get out of the street and get back up on the side.
00:06:35And the people was hollering.
00:06:36They won't be another Rodney King beating like they had just seen,
00:06:40especially after that verdict that they had just heard.
00:06:42Among the people in the crowd were Damien Williams,
00:06:46who would later be accused of attempted murder in the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny.
00:06:51He witnessed the arrest of his half-brother, Mark Jackson.
00:06:56You know, they had the hands on their billy club and the hands on their guns all at the same time.
00:07:02And so I tried to tell them, get back up on the sidewalk.
00:07:06Don't play until the police end.
00:07:08And which they were doing.
00:07:09The youngster were there.
00:07:18Everybody got back up on the sidewalk.
00:07:19And then you heard a bang over their little squawk boxes that they carried,
00:07:24their little two-way radios.
00:07:25If you get another rock thrown at you, leave.
00:07:29But there was no rocks being thrown in the beginning.
00:07:34So, a rock, then a rock did come in a bottle.
00:07:39So they jumped in their cars and they left.
00:07:42And so the crowd of people then moved up towards Normandy.
00:07:52That's when everything started.
00:07:55Did anybody acknowledge the fact that you were trying to calm things when you spoke to the police over on that corner?
00:08:05What did you just say?
00:08:06A black man.
00:08:08A white man.
00:08:10And you think you're going to ask the black man to help you?
00:08:13That's right.
00:08:14You're going to try to use all the good force that you keep against blacks.
00:08:19At Florence and Normandy, the crowd began to attack white, Asian, and Latino motorists.
00:08:27Tom's liquor store on the corner was looted.
00:08:30Fuck the police!
00:08:31Fuck them!
00:08:32Fuck them!
00:08:33Fuck them!
00:08:34Fuck them!
00:08:40Around 6.45 p.m., truck driver Reginald Denny was pulled from his cab.
00:08:45Media attention turned this one attack into the symbol of them all.
00:08:50Oh, look at that.
00:08:52Terrible.
00:08:53And there's no police presence down here.
00:08:55They will not enter the area.
00:08:58It all happened so fast that the images kind of ran together.
00:09:02They just saw someone generally getting hit, getting beaten.
00:09:05Then the kind of glee.
00:09:07I mean, the body language of the people who were attacking him.
00:09:11There was no recognition that this was another human being.
00:09:15It's such an extreme situation.
00:09:18It's, it's what I see is myself.
00:09:21That's what I see.
00:09:22I see myself.
00:09:24That is, what's taken over in that, in that Denny situation is mob violence, mob psychology.
00:09:33The, the, the, the, if you push people far enough, they go bonkers.
00:09:38They can, they can, we're capable of anything.
00:09:42I'm capable of anything.
00:09:43I'm capable of anything.
00:09:44Under stress.
00:09:45And so are you.
00:09:49As Florence and Normandy erupted, First AME, the most prominent church in South Central,
00:09:56was holding a community meeting to try to contain the anger.
00:10:00Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for responding to the call of the responsible leadership in this community.
00:10:10The speeches by Mayor Tom Bradley and other members of the established leadership received full media coverage.
00:10:16But outside in the church parking lot, this home video footage, obtained by Frontline, recorded a more critical event.
00:10:23The crowd that gathered here represented the force that would drive the unrest outside South Central.
00:10:29They're having church inside, but we're facing the facts out here.
00:10:32That's right.
00:10:33Truth and right.
00:10:34Reality.
00:10:35Truth and right's reality.
00:10:36That's right.
00:10:37We don't want to hurt nobody.
00:10:38Yeah, man.
00:10:39We're going to die.
00:10:40We're going to die.
00:10:41We're going to die.
00:10:42We're going to die.
00:10:43We're going to die.
00:10:44We're going to die.
00:10:45I'm going to tell you right now, if I have to die today for this little African right here to have a future, I'm a dead motherfucker.
00:10:51You're right.
00:10:52I don't think we'll ever forget the images that came out of First AME Church the evening of April 29th.
00:11:00I don't think that will ever go away for the rest of my natural life.
00:11:04Deacon Alexander and the other men at this table represent an older generation of radical African-American leadership.
00:11:11All are former Black Panthers.
00:11:13Last April, they found themselves in part observers.
00:11:17Rebellion.
00:11:18I was right here when they was in the church singing and I was on the outside and the place was burning.
00:11:25And that is what happened is that the system had pressed down on us so much that we exploded.
00:11:30And in that explosion, LA got wiped out.
00:11:34Some people use the word revolt or rebellion to make it clear that they want to distinguish the events of April from a simple outbreak of frustration and anger.
00:11:50But riots suggest the old time notion of just a kind of thoughtless, mindless, angry reaction.
00:12:00And people don't want the events in April to be categorized that way.
00:12:06Man, this is history.
00:12:07Can you go to Westwood?
00:12:08Brentwood?
00:12:09Whitewood?
00:12:10All that.
00:12:11From first AME, part of the crowd headed downtown to police headquarters at Parker Center.
00:12:16That event, it now appears, was partially planned.
00:12:20Our objective was to try to paralyze Parker Center.
00:12:24And in order to, and if you paralyze Parker Center, then most of their force is going to be in that area to protect it.
00:12:33Michael Zinzen, head of the coalition against police abuse.
00:12:37My concern was, is that we didn't want them to begin making the black community an armed camp.
00:12:43Utilizing police from throughout the city to surround our community as they did in Watts and simply allow it to, to burn itself out.
00:12:55What was put forth days before the verdict was, is that if all four found out guilty, we want everybody downtown.
00:13:03We want to surround Parker Center.
00:13:05If anybody got to do any burning or anything, let it be done down there where all the money's at.
00:13:11What we didn't count on was the upsurge being so widespread, we were not prepared to deal with such a large layer of our community, of all races of people rising up.
00:13:25But it was well defined as to what the community's objective was, and that was to get justice.
00:13:31And if we didn't get any justice, L.A. would not get any peace.
00:13:3434 people were dead in what will always be known as insurrection by hoodlums.
00:13:42In Watts, because the riot seemed to be about black people versus white people, the class nature was disguised.
00:13:53In April, it was impossible to disguise the class nature, if one was looking for it, because Asians were involved, and Hispanics were involved.
00:14:06In no way was it, could it be reduced to black and white.
00:14:10You have an exploited class, and you have an oppressive class, and you have constant pressure on the have-nots.
00:14:17Watts told the country, watch out.
00:14:24It started in L.A. again in 1992, and it's, if people will listen, there are messages there that people can get something from.
00:14:33People were speaking to us, and people who had previously been mute, and it's up to us to try to decipher what they're saying.
00:14:46Susan Anderson, writer and media consultant, works in downtown L.A. as an executive with a nonprofit organization that funnels private funding to the inner city.
00:14:56On the afternoon of last April 29th, she left the office to pick up her son at school.
00:15:03One of the thoughts that was uppermost in my mind was what to say to him.
00:15:07I didn't know if he'd heard about it or not, but I was trying to figure out, how do I explain this to him?
00:15:13Because the verdict said to me that the life of a black person has no value.
00:15:24So we got home, and I had the TV on, and things had started happening at Florence in Normandy, and that was my first inkling that something might get out of control.
00:15:36I mean, it was unbelievable. We were watching it while it was happening.
00:15:41You're seeing people, now they're pulling the driver out.
00:15:43I felt sick, and I felt helpless, and I felt even wrong to watch it if there was nothing I could do about it.
00:15:50I still didn't think what my son thought, that there was going to be a war.
00:15:55I still thought that it would just kind of die out after a while, and I was really wrong.
00:16:05I had two bricks in my hand, but I didn't throw them, and somebody had threw a brick and hit the car.
00:16:12They had looked back and had saw me.
00:16:14Shondell Daniels is the boy whose arrest at 71st and Normandy first angered the crowd.
00:16:20He was released within hours uncharged.
00:16:24Everybody, they wasn't thinking, they was just letting their anger control.
00:16:28They was just mad at just getting treated like this, you know, they don't have no money.
00:16:34Now that you look back on what happened, and it's a year later, would you have done something different that day?
00:16:42I would have done something different. I took it in a different way.
00:16:47I think I would have to, you know, protest something, you know, in a peaceful way.
00:16:53Try, you know, make everything better.
00:16:56Because we really need jobs, you know, that's what I like to work on.
00:17:00You know, I don't like why my friend's in jail now, you know.
00:17:04I don't like, you know, it could have been me too.
00:17:08For everybody, the events last April posed difficult choices that all come down to one.
00:17:16The profound moral dilemma between self-interest and the good of the community.
00:17:21You know, I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe it went this far.
00:17:26This is what was going through my mind. Why did it have to go this far?
00:17:29Titus Murphy, Terry Barnett, and Lee Yule were three of four people who left their homes to go rescue Reginald Denny.
00:17:36And I can identify with the fact that people were very angry, but I didn't feel that's the way to, you can't solve anything that way.
00:17:47Taking it out on other people because of the color of their skin. I was angry about that. I mean, I was really angry.
00:17:55I figured God was definitely chose me as well as Terry and Lee and Bobby at the time to do that task.
00:18:05There was no turning back. It was a mission that had to be done.
00:18:10By the time they got to the intersection, Denny had somehow climbed back into his truck and was trying to drive away.
00:18:18The rescuers escorted him to the nearest hospital.
00:18:21The lack of police response has brought several lawsuits against the city.
00:18:27And the police department will not comment on the specifics of what happened at Florence in Normandy.
00:18:32Is this dead?
00:18:33He ain't dead yet, but he gonna die because he's hemorrhaging inside and spray painted his nose, poured oil in his mouth. He gonna die.
00:18:41What was so unreal to me is that this was my neighborhood.
00:18:44Reporter Naomi Bradley, who was hired by Frontline to consult for this broadcast,
00:18:49did several stories for a community paper on the events here.
00:18:53But for her, the verdicts made objectivity difficult.
00:18:57Like, well, what am I gonna do now?
00:18:59Well, at that very moment, that deciding moment on what I'm gonna do now,
00:19:03the only thing you wanna do is hit somebody.
00:19:05I wanted to hit somebody. I instantly became mad at every white face that was in my job.
00:19:11And these are people that I work with all the time.
00:19:13If we feel enraged, and all of a sudden, people around us become objects or become symbols,
00:19:19are we doing the same thing to them that we say they're doing to us?
00:19:23But what you feel at that moment is, they did it, I can't get any recourse, so now I'm gonna do it back to them.
00:19:31It's revenge.
00:19:33People have been in that intersection, first throwing rocks at automobiles.
00:19:38I do think that what happened, the uprising, had within it people rebelling against the established order.
00:19:48I don't think there's any question about that.
00:19:50But I respect the power of political movements and the power of revolutionary change too much to simply define this as a rebellion.
00:20:09What's missing was planning. What's missing was direction.
00:20:15For me, what happened in April of 1992 was a riot, and a rebellion, and an insurrection, and an uprising.
00:20:24It was part bread riot at times. It was at times a Hollywood riot, you know, staged purely for spectacle.
00:20:32And sometimes I see it as one, you know, chaotic piece of performance art that only L.A. could have concocted.
00:20:39It was not a black-white riot. It was an Asian, black, white, Latino riot.
00:20:45On April 30th, the second day of the unrest, the Latino Pico Union area erupted, west of downtown, north of South Central.
00:20:54Most of Pico Union's residents are newly arrived immigrants from Central America, many of them without papers.
00:21:00Latinos were also perpetrators and victims of the violence in South Central, where they are now more than 40% of the population.
00:21:08Citywide, 51% of those arrested were Latino, a fact that even writer and journalist Ruben Martinez did not expect.
00:21:17I guess I didn't want to believe it. I mean, I grew up in this city, and although I knew all the reasons for the anger and what was about to come,
00:21:26I guess I didn't want to believe that it was going to go as far as it did.
00:21:33I went downtown to Parker Center, where there was, I guess, the multicultural mini-riots, I suppose you could call it.
00:21:40I mean, there's a lot of activist people, a lot of people from different political groups in town, from the west side, from the east side,
00:21:50and among the most vocal, because they had the bullhorns, were members of Refuse and Resist, a wing of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA.
00:21:59And so what had first been a fairly unified political voice fragmented into a very violent, very macabre, actually,
00:22:09monster, that was destroying not only other things, but also itself.
00:22:17It didn't occur to me at that moment that this would spread over into the Latino community.
00:22:21I was taken aback by it at first, and then, after I thought about it for about 30 seconds, I realized, of course.
00:22:30First of all, you have to understand that there were anger in both communities, not only in the Afro-American community,
00:22:37but as well as in the Latino community.
00:22:41Arturo Ibarra is a community leader in South Central, where the poverty rate is 30% higher than it was at the time of the Watts Rebellion.
00:22:48Latino, as well as black gangs, are active in this neighborhood.
00:22:52And last April, local stores, both Latino and black-owned, were targeted.
00:22:56Listen, we want to talk to you a little bit about what happened, you know, a year ago.
00:23:01Were you living in this area a year ago?
00:23:03Yeah.
00:23:04What did you see on April 29th last year?
00:23:07Oh, I don't know.
00:23:09Like, what was it about her?
00:23:12A lot of people thought that this was going to be, you know, something that would only affect, like, the black.
00:23:17No, everybody did it.
00:23:19Everybody did it.
00:23:20Mexicans, black.
00:23:24And why, why were Latinos involved?
00:23:26What reasons?
00:23:28I don't know that for fun.
00:23:30For fun.
00:23:31Everybody was doing it.
00:23:33Everybody was doing, like, what?
00:23:34Like, going out to stores?
00:23:36Going to stores.
00:23:38But it's, that's how it is right here.
00:23:41Every, every socioeconomic hill that you can point to in the African-American community is also present in the Latino community.
00:23:49The sense of hopelessness, the sense of despair, the crime, the drugs, the gangs, the police abuse, it was all there.
00:23:56The recipe for the riot existed, that's why it happened.
00:23:59People pouring out of the shoe store, you gotta wonder what's going on in these people's minds.
00:24:02Pequine is a baby of a community.
00:24:06It's been redone in the last 10 years by the immigration from Central America mostly, but also from Mexico.
00:24:13East Los Angeles has been there since the latter part of the 19th century.
00:24:18I went to East L.A., I think Friday or Saturday of the riots, I asked some people, why is it so quiet here?
00:24:24And then one young person told me, you think we're crazy?
00:24:27We're going to burn our parents' stores down?
00:24:29Now, that just wasn't the situation in Pico Union and South Central, where the outsider, quote unquote, owning the store was the norm.
00:24:38This is one of the reasons they, they don't want our presence there, because they would rather do this with impunity.
00:24:46This, this is a very typical L.A. riot media shot.
00:24:49We just heard the anchor person said, use the term they, they are acting with impunity.
00:24:54Of course, and it's an, it's an aerial shot looking down on, you know, these tiny figures that are scurrying around the Sears department store like, like ants.
00:25:02Uh, and the anchor persons are talking over them.
00:25:04It's like, you know, these, these lords looking down on the commoners down below.
00:25:10And the distance is incredible.
00:25:11At, at a certain point, one, uh, one anchor person said, those people look like illegals to me when he saw the, the, the sea of, of brown faces looting a particular store.
00:25:21How did this person know they were illegals?
00:25:23Who knows?
00:25:24Uh, there are all kinds of comments that underscored the distance between, uh, the white media of Los Angeles and what was going on in the streets.
00:25:31Yes, it was a tragedy.
00:25:32Yes, uh, jobs and, and stores that were in people's communities were being lost.
00:25:36But there was something that led up to this.
00:25:38There was a context.
00:25:39There was a history.
00:25:40There was anger.
00:25:41There was disappointment and rage and frustration, and it was coming out in this particular way.
00:25:45If you talk to most Korean immigrants, they just are shocked.
00:25:55Uh, they, they just cannot explain that this kind of things can happen in America.
00:26:02Koreatown lies west of downtown, next door to Latino Pico Union.
00:26:07It's the business center of the Korean American community and a center of research for Edward Chang, professor of ethnic studies.
00:26:14Koreatown, the physical location of a Koreatown is right between South Central L.A. and Hollywood.
00:26:23So it's kind of serves as a buffer between the white community and African American community.
00:26:29The Koreans are on their roofs, evidently armed, we have been informed.
00:26:35The media portray that Korean American merchants were, like, acting like animals,
00:26:43or, like, acting like a vigilantes, gun-toting vigilantes.
00:26:47However, most Korean merchants did not own a gun.
00:26:52So Radio Korea and other Korean language radio stations asked, requested, those Korean Americans who had a gun to come to the Koreatown and try to help your fellow countrymen.
00:27:04Oh, God.
00:27:13That was the image that most Americans saw.
00:27:17And that was shown nationwide, I think, rather than just holding a gun.
00:27:23I have a real war story to tell you about that because I'm a lawyer practicing Koreatown.
00:27:30My office is located right above my brother's store.
00:27:35We guarded the store for three nights and only a block from my brother's store was this Korean-owned shopping center that went, you know, in flames.
00:27:44It was pretty scary.
00:27:45I felt that as if my own building was looted and burned down, so I couldn't help but cry out loud.
00:27:54And that's when I realized that I thought L.A. was my home, and yet I felt like a stranger.
00:28:01I had to call around to get a few guns myself, but there was, like, a pistol.
00:28:06I said, for the first time in my life, I was looking at this thing.
00:28:08This thing actually kills people.
00:28:10And I stayed there for two nights, and I thought, and I thought, and I thought, and I thought.
00:28:17I said, why are these people doing this?
00:28:20These are possibly my employees.
00:28:23I have some Hispanic employees.
00:28:25I have black American employees.
00:28:27They were stealing Reeboks, 100 bucks a pot, that they couldn't normally own.
00:28:32They were stealing baby diapers.
00:28:36And so I don't want to categorize these people as criminal elements.
00:28:41Then I have to think about what made them do this.
00:28:44Just to add my comment about those people who robbed stores who were driven by economic necessity,
00:28:51social and economic condition, I'd say 90% of them are all thugs and crooks, as far as I'm concerned.
00:28:56And I don't know about you, but if they had stepped into my brother's store, without hesitation,
00:29:01now they've blasted them away.
00:29:02I have been an active member of the Black Korean Alliance, which was created in 1986 to prevent these things,
00:29:13to promote harmony and understanding between the two communities.
00:29:18But since the Rodney King incident and the Latasha Harlins shootings, the relationship really broke apart.
00:29:29They say Mrs. Du accused the teenager of trying to steal some orange juice.
00:29:33But Latasha Harlins, they say, had money visible in her hand.
00:29:37She turned, both witnesses said on the stand today, to show Mrs. Du the orange juice in the backpack.
00:29:42Nonetheless, the heated exchange continues.
00:29:45That particular incident happened two weeks after the Rodney King didn't help at all,
00:29:51because we had Korean and African American worsening tension between Korean and African American relations.
00:29:57So we had two images constantly being projected by the mainstream media.
00:30:03A videotape recorded by the store's security camera shows Du grabbing Harlins' sweater.
00:30:08Harlins hits Du. They fight over the backpack. Du throws a stool over the counter at Harlins.
00:30:13Harlins hands the bottle of juice to Du, who shoves it off the counter and picks up a gun.
00:30:18Sometimes they would show Rodney King beating videotape.
00:30:22Some other days, they would show Mrs. Du pulling the trigger on Latasha Harlins.
00:30:27Mrs. Du shoots her in the back of the head. Latasha Harlins lays dying on the floor.
00:30:33That was the first time that Korean American store owners shot and killed African American customers.
00:30:41Before that, many, many Korean American merchants have been shot and robbed and killed.
00:30:49And no one really talked about that.
00:30:51A man we believe to be a business owner can be seen on top of a building with a gun.
00:30:56Korean Americans believe that media definitely favors African American community over Korean Americans.
00:31:04portrayal of riots. Obviously, they covered as if this riot was a direct outcome of a simmering conflict between Korean American merchants and African American customers.
00:31:17I feel like we're victimized twice by this. And we use a scapegoat. Let's forget about all our other problems.
00:31:23Let's just focus it on this and maybe everybody will forget and blame it on these two ethnic groups.
00:31:28What happened here was about two things, one of which Americans don't want to deal with and one of which they refuse to recognize.
00:31:39The thing they don't want to deal with is race and the thing we refuse to recognize is the issue of class.
00:31:45The Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles is an ethnically mixed area lying east of Beverly Hills and north of South Central, more or less at the city's heart.
00:31:55This is home to Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times columnist.
00:32:01The first fires you could see were to the south and east.
00:32:04They moved west along Pico and Olympic turned and began to move Northwood along La Brea.
00:32:12One plume of smoke after another rising.
00:32:15And then finally across through Hollywood until at sunset, as you stood here, you were completely surrounded by fire and smoke.
00:32:23And this is just four blocks from the high rises of Wilshire Boulevard.
00:32:27You had this sense, a sense that was not inaccurate, that anarchy had gripped the city.
00:32:33A sense that in some very fundamental way, boundaries upon which we all rely every day had fallen.
00:32:42And they'd fallen.
00:32:43And they'd fallen for everybody.
00:32:44Never, never gets any easier to look at, I'll tell you that.
00:32:57It's a terrible moment.
00:32:59And of course for many white Angelenos, this is the most compelling image of those three days, just as for many African American people, the beating of Rodney King is the indelible image from this whole sequence.
00:33:21Both of them conform to the worst racial fantasy of both communities.
00:33:30There we just saw, you know, one of the great fantasies of white anxiety acted out for real.
00:33:38The first full day of the rioting following the verdict, the streets were cluttered with people trying to leave.
00:33:48It was like one of those fiction films of a nuclear attack.
00:33:53And this street, Vermont, it was just, you know, it was going down block by block as the terrorism was spreading north.
00:34:02Attorney Sean Steele lives in the hills of Los Feliz above downtown LA.
00:34:06There were no fires, no looting here.
00:34:09But Steele and his wife, Michelle, who is Korean American, felt trapped nonetheless.
00:34:13You know, the rumors were flying around.
00:34:16There was discussions about Beverly Hills was being attacked and, you know, that Century City was going up in fire.
00:34:23I mean, the rumors, you didn't know what to trust, what to believe.
00:34:26We knew that we couldn't drive more than a half a mile away without encountering mobs of young criminals.
00:34:33You know, not old people, not mothers that were hungry, but young men, criminals that were just in a free for all.
00:34:41Soon as we got home here, a lot of the folks had returned from work and neighbors started talking about what to do because from here you can see the growth of the riot zone.
00:34:51We decided to block off this street and we barricaded both ends of the street.
00:35:00The street, you mean the street that's going up behind us now.
00:35:03This is your street, okay.
00:35:05So what kind of barricade did you put up here?
00:35:07We put our automobiles in, we wedged them in between these two walls here.
00:35:11Uh-huh.
00:35:12The idea was that if we could prevent people from coming up in cars and throwing flammables at the homes, at least we had a chance.
00:35:22And we were armed.
00:35:25You were armed with what?
00:35:27Armed with rifles, automatic weapons.
00:35:30Semi-automatic weapons.
00:35:32Semi-automatic weapons, thank you.
00:35:34Shotguns, that's what I think.
00:35:35Shotguns, I see.
00:35:36These were things you all had in your houses to begin with.
00:35:38Correct.
00:35:39Okay.
00:35:40You must have given some thought, too, about what it was that put you guys here at the end of the street that night.
00:35:45What do you think brought you to that point?
00:35:48Brought all of us to that point?
00:35:50You mean to break down society?
00:35:52Yeah, whatever.
00:35:53I mean, what do you think?
00:35:54Well, my personal view is that since I'm in business and I have ex-gangbangers working for me, they told me this was coming.
00:36:05And you see Los Angeles burning.
00:36:08I just feel that what should be done is the government can come in here and put high-intensity labor jobs in the core area.
00:36:16Just hire people.
00:36:17It's the haves against the have-nots.
00:36:20My ex-gangbangers tell me it's going to happen again and next time it's going to be worse because they all have guns now.
00:36:25The violence last April continued for three days.
00:36:32By Saturday, May 1st, the cleanup had begun.
00:36:36Over the past year, much of the physical damage has been erased.
00:36:41The city is filled with empty lots where burned-out stores once stood.
00:36:45The nonprofit organization Rebuild LA says corporations have committed more than $500 million in construction and job training projects for damaged areas.
00:36:54But for many, the gap between promises and reality remains large.
00:37:01Nothing has occurred.
00:37:03The warning bell rang.
00:37:05People were killed.
00:37:07Billions of dollars of property were destroyed.
00:37:10And it's back to business as usual.
00:37:13Rebuild LA.
00:37:14Which LA?
00:37:16If you put LA back together so it looked exactly the way it did on April 28th,
00:37:23who would that benefit?
00:37:26Normal means for some people the impact of the police pressure, no jobs, terrible stores,
00:37:36that package of second-class life and opportunity we call the ghetto.
00:37:42That's normal.
00:37:43This is the corner where, in 1992, all four corners were burnt out.
00:37:50That one was burnt out, that one was burnt out, that one was burnt out, and this one was burnt out.
00:37:55But it's still, it's still not rebuilt.
00:38:00That lot was burnt out in 1965 and there was never any rebuilding.
00:38:06My friend Stan Sanders, an attorney, grew up in Watts.
00:38:11He and I were road scholars together at Oxford University in the 60s.
00:38:16Over there, Dodd, really interesting.
00:38:19This whole area was an industrial built.
00:38:22And it's still pretty much a place where people work.
00:38:29But small businesses.
00:38:31The big industrial companies have left.
00:38:35You know, the GMs and Firestones, Goodyear, they don't have their business.
00:38:40And they were all in this corridor 25 years ago.
00:38:45And that's across the tracks and there's nothing there now but vacant lot.
00:38:49Vaken lot.
00:38:50South Central Los Angeles, in the 25 years prior to 1990, lost a net of 70,000 jobs.
00:39:00Okay, this job is closed.
00:39:02The issue of jobs has triggered protests at construction sites in South Central.
00:39:07African-American groups tried to close down jobs using Latinos from outside the community.
00:39:15All right.
00:39:16Thank you, sir.
00:39:17Thank you very much, sir.
00:39:18The Brotherhood Crusade, headed by community activist Danny Bakewell, led some of the protests.
00:39:24We are not going to go away.
00:39:26We are serious as a heart attack.
00:39:28And we're not about to let our people be turned away with all of these millions of dollars that everybody gives lip service to.
00:39:36And when it comes time to actually put up, everybody wants to put us away.
00:39:42All right.
00:39:43We can't work this.
00:39:44Nobody works.
00:39:45Other demonstrations were organized by a group called the L.A. Unemployed Council.
00:39:50Yeah, say, I got an incident down here at Main Street and Vernon Avenue.
00:39:55Right in the corner of Vernon and Main.
00:39:57You guys threaten to bust my windows out if I don't get off the phone right now.
00:40:00Hey, by the way.
00:40:01You're tearing out all my forms.
00:40:02Tearing out all my plumbing.
00:40:03Kicking my ditches full of dirt.
00:40:04So why do I got to hire five of you guys?
00:40:06Because I said you're in our fucking community, motherfucker, boy.
00:40:09I said that on the question of the rebuild of L.A., that the unemployed, the militant is going to have a voice.
00:40:16That if you come into Los Angeles and you're a white contractor and you do not allow African-Americans to work on that job, I'm going to hit you in your head.
00:40:25All right.
00:40:26I'm going to hit you in your head to blood run down the gutter.
00:40:30Now, maybe some of our church leaders don't want to hear that.
00:40:33But in the meantime, some of these brothers off the corner are going to work on that particular job site.
00:40:38See, that's what April 29th has done for me.
00:40:41The rebellion was just, it wasn't over, Rodney King.
00:40:43It was just so many years of frustration and neglect.
00:40:47These young men live in the Jordan Downs housing project here in Watts.
00:40:52Some Crips, some Bloods, they say the gangs formed a truce before last April.
00:40:57We met in front of a burned out Korean liquor store.
00:41:00All of the burning, that was not the struggle.
00:41:04Right.
00:41:05That was just a response to what had been done to us as a people for years.
00:41:09That's just boom.
00:41:10That wasn't the struggle.
00:41:11The struggle is trying to get back into the mainstream, trying to get people off the backs of young black males.
00:41:17Trying to stop them from locking us up, keeping us out of work.
00:41:20It's our fault, too.
00:41:21What about us?
00:41:22We've been here.
00:41:23We got to be together, man.
00:41:24It's on us.
00:41:25It's really, it's on us.
00:41:26But then, too, we can look at this government because they've been so dirty and treated so bad for so long.
00:41:31They don't want us to have nothing.
00:41:32We see it.
00:41:33We just a culmination of all the historical struggles of this country.
00:41:36But we want equal access to everything.
00:41:38And we want to own our own businesses for a change.
00:41:41This is ours, though.
00:41:42You know what I'm saying?
00:41:43You're going to Simi Valley, you ain't going to see no Koreans on them, no stores.
00:41:45You're going to see them white folks owning their stores, putting their money back into their little sports program for their kids, back into their school.
00:41:51We want to have ours.
00:41:52All this black.
00:41:53Every store you see here, black.
00:41:54All the way up.
00:41:55You know what I'm saying?
00:41:56You know what I'm saying?
00:41:57And that way, we can take our money, put it back into our church, put it back into our kids, which is going to be our next future.
00:42:01You know what I'm saying?
00:42:02You don't get credit for it, is the idea, the sense of the idea.
00:42:06Because that's what I hear.
00:42:07I hear that the idea is you have taken control of.
00:42:11You take control of your mind.
00:42:12It's what they've been pushing us to do.
00:42:13They've been saying this to us for years, you know.
00:42:15Why don't you just take control of your own lives and move your own agenda?
00:42:20They've been saying that.
00:42:21And now that we've done it, they're scared.
00:42:24Certain key words like rage and anger and criminal and gang are associated with the young people.
00:42:33Which means that, which suggests that there is no coherent rational framework in which they're operating.
00:42:43That they're just kind of ticked off and vengeful and egotistical and full of themselves.
00:42:51On the other hand, if one really wants to spend and could spend two minutes talking to some of these young men, you'd find out that there is a framework.
00:43:04There's a logical framework.
00:43:06There's a mind as well as a body.
00:43:09And it's an informed mind.
00:43:12A mind that has a very acute sense of the predicament that it finds itself in.
00:43:18Isn't that right?
00:43:20Isn't that right what you're doing?
00:43:24It's a predicament that's clear even to an established African-American businessman like Art Washington.
00:43:31Last April, he confronted young looters outside his pesticide business.
00:43:36When I first seen my store, it wasn't no big thing to me then, you know, because I understood and I was caught up to it as a Rodney King verdict.
00:43:53But when they took a brick and they busted my windshield of my truck in, now this is when something just collapsed.
00:44:04I mean, it seemed like that was the last straw because that was the truck that I made my living with.
00:44:09And that's when, you know, you just could take so much.
00:44:14Why destroy my truck?
00:44:17Why destroy my computer?
00:44:19I'm trying to make it.
00:44:21Could you understand that?
00:44:23Can't y'all see it?
00:44:25I'm trying to make it.
00:44:27TumbleVision viewers, both black and white, who saw this scene, sent in donations helping Washington to reopen his business.
00:44:34From everything that happened, how do you feel?
00:44:38How do you feel about the people who are in the street now?
00:44:41How do you feel about the people in the street?
00:44:43Did you ever feel threatened personally?
00:44:46No, because it wasn't a gang.
00:44:48It wasn't a gang.
00:44:49It was just ordinary people got here the opportunity to steal.
00:44:55So it wasn't a gang of people walking around with guns.
00:44:59You know, it was just ordinary people stealing, looting.
00:45:02And it's not all that hard to put yourself, when you're not mad at the gut, you're not viscerally mad.
00:45:08You can put yourself...
00:45:09Understood, really.
00:45:10Understood.
00:45:11I mean, things like that have been happening to me all my life.
00:45:15I mean, you know, I understand injustice.
00:45:20And I understand how it feel to be, people look at you less than human.
00:45:27Supposedly, we've come a long way.
00:45:30Supposedly, the mechanisms of official apartheid are gone.
00:45:36The realization that causes, I think, so much anger among the oppressed is that the system of oppression has been internalized within the minds of the majority of Americans.
00:45:55So that what operates is a kind of mental apartheid.
00:45:59Mrs. Dew shoots her in the back of the head.
00:46:04Latasha Harlins lays dying on the floor.
00:46:06Can you tell what's going on there?
00:46:11This is right after Latasha.
00:46:14That was her.
00:46:15That was kind of dark.
00:46:16And the cops finally arrived.
00:46:19But the point is, they never even check her.
00:46:21Yeah.
00:46:22They never even take a pulse.
00:46:24They never do a thing.
00:46:26As if it's a person lying there.
00:46:28Mm-hmm.
00:46:29And that erasure of her is the final indignity.
00:46:34The Korean grocer was put on probation for five years.
00:46:38Soon Ja Du was convicted of manslaughter.
00:46:41But sentenced only to community service.
00:46:44No prison term.
00:46:45Judge Carlin followed every letter of the law in sentencing Soon Ja Du.
00:46:50It reflects the fact that America is making a choice.
00:46:54That is some people count more than others.
00:46:57That choice is still the rule of the land.
00:47:04Some people count more than others.
00:47:07Some are more equal than others.
00:47:09We're becoming more and more like other third world countries.
00:47:13Where there are just a few haves and many, many have nots.
00:47:18Most Korean American merchants in South Central LA do not blame African Americans.
00:47:26Some of them sympathize with African American community who had to endure the hardship and economic deprivation for such a long time.
00:47:36So they tend to blame police and failure of a national guard to protect their businesses.
00:47:45The police say, you don't want to die, you just leave a hurry.
00:47:49He never heard me.
00:47:50He just, he just tell me, you don't want to die, you just get out, hurry.
00:47:55Sung Ho Ju's liquor store was completely burned down last April.
00:48:00Damage to Korean American businesses accounted for almost half of the total property damage during the three days of unrest.
00:48:09Chief targets were swap meets, large Korean style variety stores and liquor stores.
00:48:15This winter, a new city ordinance forced owners of some types of burned down stores, including liquor stores and swap meets, to go through public hearings before they could reopen.
00:48:30The case that I'm taking right now is the city plan case number 920514.
00:48:36The city council acted in response to concerns of the African American community.
00:48:41A big issue is the high number of liquor stores in South Central Los Angeles.
00:48:46My name is Sung Ho Ju, and I am requesting that the city not use my laws as an opportunity to impose additional restrictions and assume additional costs.
00:49:03Personally, I like this man here. I know him, he know me.
00:49:06I have no problem with him coming back in our neighborhood. This is not a racial problem or a racial gathering or not a lynching to go out against the Korean people in our community.
00:49:16No, this is not. This is merely a protest of alcohol being bought into South Central Los Angeles, more particularly of the area of 51st and Avalon where I live.
00:49:27I'm for limiting the number of liquor stores. I think it's healthy for the community. But if you want to do that, you have to apply equally, not just to the victims. It's a pure ethnic politics at worst.
00:49:43I think some Korean American immigrants are totally ignorant about sensitivity of race relations in America.
00:49:57They simply don't have any understanding. They lack knowledge of living in multi-ethnic, multi-racial society. Why?
00:50:19Because Korea is such a homogeneous country. We have one language, one culture. So they were totally ill-prepared to live in this society, this kind of environment.
00:50:33The cause of this whole riot had nothing to do with Korean Americans, Korean merchants, had nothing to do with it.
00:50:42Yes, there were some problems, but was the problem deep enough that actually they come after you with the baseball bats and guns and burn you down? No.
00:50:52No. During the Watts riot of the 60s, a lot of Jewish Americans got hurt in terms of business. And did they cause it? No. I think it's the effect. We're the pawn.
00:51:04They are the symbol of oppressor. Because African American customers usually argue that Korean Americans are ripping us off. They are exploiting us.
00:51:16So Korean American merchants became a symbol. Rather than real oppressor, real profit-making venture is corporation, multinational corporations.
00:51:26So Korean Americans are taking all the blames for this corporate America.
00:51:32They are just beginning to realize that we have to voice our concern. You can no longer be just simply passive and wait until someone else to come and rescue you.
00:51:48We want the answer! We want the answer!
00:51:51We are learning the American political game. For example, Korean American Victims Association staged a month-long demonstration in front of the city hall.
00:52:01Which was never heard before.
00:52:10In terms of black-latino relations, we continue to see, in the wake of the riot, of deteriorating relationships between the two groups.
00:52:17What it comes down to, in Los Angeles, in the inner city, it's African Americans and Latinos who are looking at each other with suspicion, seeing that there's a shrinking pie and that they're the only two groups in Los Angeles, in the inner city, who are fighting over that shrinking pie.
00:52:31As you know, as black people, you know, black people getting gang of jobs, you see Mexicans getting put down.
00:52:38There's a lot of hype about the African Americans now. I'm not saying that they're discriminating or not, but they seem to be more in the media.
00:52:46Arturo Ibarra's Watts Century Latino Organization meets every month. A chief topic lately, the tensions between blacks and Latinos in South Central fueled by gang-related violence and anger at the police.
00:53:00People can't go out for anything. They are shooting at each other from corner to corner. You can see the bullet holes in the corner store. It's not fair.
00:53:12In at least 80% of the cases, the victims are Latinos. We have the example of the woman who was driving with her children and an African American teenager shot her in the head.
00:53:29We are not against the African American race, but we're against the element that is harming us, because it is us, the Latino residents,
00:53:41who are suffering the violation of our civil rights.
00:53:45Here, there is a talk that is going to be a big supermarket. There is none in the community.
00:53:50Community leaders like Oscar Andrade, Abel Rescate, and Pico Union are looking beyond the ruins, envisioning new economic opportunities for Latinos.
00:54:01That corner is going to be a training center, so people who work in that store get trained, and at least one-third are members of the community.
00:54:10So it's a source of employment as well, and people get trained not only to put the merchandise on the shelves, but also to learn how a business is run as well.
00:54:21I mean, the very basic.
00:54:23But others are using more divisive tactics.
00:54:26Drive off! Get out of our fucking community, motherfucker!
00:54:29When African American activists protested contractors hiring Latino workers on rebuilding jobs in South Central, a Latino activist struck back.
00:54:38Javier Hermosillo, of the News for America organization, led a counter demonstration here at the same chief auto parts construction site.
00:54:46I don't think racism is limited to people of light skin. Those kinds of confrontational tactics resulted across the street in an Anglo contractor and his three Latino workers being attacked by 35 to 40 black gang members, and then tore up the early stages of that construction.
00:55:03And our position was we were not going to allow that kind of terrorism here in Los Angeles.
00:55:08Of course, many people in the African American community would look at your rhetoric and say that that is racist as well, that you're just doing it from the opposite side.
00:55:15You know, anybody who would speak that way would be speaking out of straight ignorance or deliberately trying to mislead, because what Latinos are trying to do today is what African Americans were trying to do in the 60s, and that is secure an opportunity to succeed.
00:55:31And whenever Latinos have tried to move forward, we're always reminded about 500 years of oppression and slavery, and people neglect to remember that the land that we're standing on was once a part of Mexico.
00:55:43Mexico. We're here to stay, and you better pay attention and listen to us, because unlike the blacks, we may not overcome, but we will overwhelm.
00:55:51Right now, at least, we haven't moved an inch away from where we were in April 1992. Communities are fragmented within themselves. Relationships between the different ethnic groups continue to be very, very tense.
00:56:05Blacks and Latinos, blacks and Koreans, whites and the different ethnic groups. The polarization is almost complete at this point.
00:56:12When I saw the police doing their riot training up by Dodger Stadium, I knew that there would be people, when they see these pictures and hear that they're doing it, who would feel reassured.
00:56:32I felt, I was very distressed. I hated to think of the confrontations that might occur if something breaks out again.
00:56:42The city government is involved in far more preventive or what we call rehabilitative steps than just dealing with the issue of being able to put down small or large skirmishes around the city.
00:56:56Police Chief Willie Williams came from Philadelphia to succeed Darrell Gates.
00:57:00We are in the process of moving forward with our community policing program, expanding from the three areas that we have, neighborhood advisory groups, to all 18 areas of the city.
00:57:09But it's a process of coming together that's going to take years to accomplish.
00:57:15But the frustrations, I mean, I have the frustrations, I'm ready to go, go, go. And you just, you just can't move that fast.
00:57:22We live in a city that sees fit to come up with a million dollars, I don't know from where, for their laundry, their shopping list of riot gear.
00:57:32So that we're, we can prepare for war, but our city doesn't seem to be able to come up with resources to deal with the hungry people that are here, the people that don't have work.
00:57:47What makes it really tragic is that I don't, I don't see that.
00:57:53Every gun store in Los Angeles, and there are an immense number of gun stores here, has done a land office business.
00:58:06And it's a mistake, though, to think of this as a purely white or Anglo phenomenon.
00:58:12The fact of the matter is that the people purchasing firearms are from every racial group and every ethnic community.
00:58:19I mean, this is the one unambiguous communal response to the events of last spring.
00:58:26And that is this kind of private arms race.
00:58:29L.A. is scary.
00:58:32No. No, I do a stunt show where I do shoot guns, but, you know, blanks and things.
00:58:38So I have had that experience, but never a real life gun.
00:58:44This is one of the most rigidly segregated cities in, in America.
00:58:49People tend to live and work and interact mostly with people who, most of whom look like themselves.
00:58:57Partly because of the simple geography of the city.
00:59:00It's, it's, it's a horizontal city, covers vast distances.
00:59:03It's possible to live on the west side of Los Angeles, say in Pacific Palisades, and seldom, if ever, see a black Angeleno.
00:59:13A Latino Angeleno, except for the people who clean the houses and cut the lawn and wash dishes.
00:59:20We know that the gangs and our intelligence, our get teams, and our OSS have verified that if there are going to be riots again, that they're stockpiling these weapons.
00:59:35And that they're going to be used, they're going to, quote, finish the job, end quote.
00:59:39So they're arming themselves.
00:59:42Each side is arming themselves.
00:59:45Sean Collingsworth is a sheriff's deputy with a booming off-duty business in private firearms instruction.
00:59:51He travels to clients' homes, like this one on the affluent west side.
00:59:55Put it in your right hand.
00:59:57On this day, the class included an accountant from Beverly Hills and a television director.
01:00:02Now pull.
01:00:04Now touch the frame.
01:00:05If I'm not going to be protected, my family's not going to be protected, then I got to protect myself.
01:00:09And it's not a Dirty Harry syndrome.
01:00:11It's not the entertainment industry.
01:00:13It's just, it's very analytical.
01:00:15Okay, Abby, you want to be the first one?
01:00:18Watch your front sight.
01:00:22Good.
01:00:23Nah.
01:00:24You did just...
01:00:25Now look.
01:00:26Dead center.
01:00:28That doesn't get any better.
01:00:30Much of what happened here in Los Angeles is rooted in class differences in discrimination among and between social classes of people.
01:00:40This community, this little community in the Mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles, is a good example.
01:00:44This area is called Windsor Village.
01:00:47Their average household income is about $26,000.
01:00:51It's not an affluent neighborhood.
01:00:53It's also a racially mixed neighborhood.
01:00:55This neighborhood began to experience what they, residents, considered an intolerable crime problem.
01:01:01Whether or not it was intolerable is a perceptual question.
01:01:05But they decided to do something about it.
01:01:07Through their neighborhood organization, they did something that an increasing number of neighborhoods are doing.
01:01:14And that is, they petitioned the city to begin the process of essentially walling themselves in.
01:01:21The first thing that happened was they put up traffic barriers.
01:01:26Eventually, this neighborhood will be entirely walled in.
01:01:30It'll have gates with privately paid security guards.
01:01:34Barriers like this, walled neighborhoods like this, are a sign of neighborhoods essentially seceding from the larger community and going into business fending for themselves.
01:01:47It's hard not to see this physical barrier as a metaphor for what's happening all over the city as this process of neighborhood secession proceeds.
01:01:59This side, as you notice, is pristine.
01:02:01It's clean.
01:02:02I don't know.
01:02:03People living up that street may even find it comforting.
01:02:06But if you walk two and a half feet, you see something entirely different.
01:02:15What do these people make of this?
01:02:18Anger?
01:02:19Threat?
01:02:20Rejection?
01:02:22Outrage?
01:02:23Who does this?
01:02:24Who does this?
01:02:25And what really separates them from the people on that side?
01:02:40Here we are.
01:02:42We're suddenly all attentive to the problem.
01:02:45Everybody I asked to attend to this morning was very anxious to join in on this because they had thoughts about it, et cetera.
01:02:53Stanley Scheinbaum, an economist and political activist, is a pillar of the Los Angeles liberal establishment.
01:02:59As president of the police commission, he fought for the removal of Chief Darrell Gates even before the April Troubles.
01:03:05His living room is as close as Los Angeles comes to a political salon.
01:03:09When we talk about class and we talk about color, when we talk about racism, I know what it means to live in a wonderful neighborhood.
01:03:17I know what it means to live high on the hog.
01:03:20But I also know what it means to come out at night and try and get a cab.
01:03:24And we got to deal with how we really see and think and feel about each other because we haven't dealt with it.
01:03:33And we're so afraid to deal with the fact, why do I hold my pocketbook closer to me when I see somebody young and black?
01:03:41Why do we do that?
01:03:43Right now in the Korean community, do you know what's happening?
01:03:45I was in a mental health center.
01:03:47It is true.
01:03:48People are having post-traumatic stress disorder.
01:03:51Why?
01:03:52You know what triggers it?
01:03:53When they see a young black man walking toward them.
01:03:56They were just describing it to me.
01:03:58Their hands were like this.
01:03:59Just describing it to me.
01:04:00Pretty soon I see sweat.
01:04:01Okay?
01:04:02There's something wrong with this picture.
01:04:04Now, I'm not saying everybody in this room has to go out and solve it.
01:04:07It definitely is the racism factor.
01:04:09Definitely.
01:04:10Because that's the image that we got out of our media.
01:04:13Out of our media.
01:04:14Out of our media.
01:04:15That's the image that we got.
01:04:16All right.
01:04:17All right.
01:04:18I was going to say, there's a certain reality in how people respond too.
01:04:20No.
01:04:21I know that.
01:04:22But the media has a very, that's why the media found itself in a crisis.
01:04:26I wanted to respond when you said, I have an 85 year old mother-in-law who lives in Queens.
01:04:31When she walks down Roosevelt Boulevard and she sees four young black guys coming the other
01:04:38way, she does not assume that they are on leave from Harvard Medical School for the vacations.
01:04:43She is terrified.
01:04:44It is a real terror and she did not get it from the media.
01:04:48I mean, there is a low level race war going on in the country and has been for 100 years.
01:04:53And this happens to be the way it is manifesting itself at the moment.
01:04:58So the purse clutching seems to me a rational response, particularly if you're a little
01:05:03and older.
01:05:04Over the past year in Los Angeles, the battle has been played out in two specific arenas.
01:05:10First, there was the federal trial of the four police officers charged in the beating
01:05:14of Rodney King.
01:05:15We the jury, find the defendant, Stacy Coon, guilty.
01:05:24The verdict ten days ago, convicting to and acquitting to, came after weeks of tension
01:05:29and fear of new violence.
01:05:32After the decision, the city gave a collective sigh of relief.
01:05:36But now attention is gradually turning to the trial yet to come, that of the defendants
01:05:41charged in the beating of Reginald Denny.
01:05:44The Denny defendants have come to be known as the LA Four Plus.
01:05:50Gary Williams, Damian Williams, no relation.
01:05:54Henry Watson and Antoine Miller, plus Lance Parker and two others.
01:05:59There have been rumors of plea bargains, but only Gary Williams has pled guilty
01:06:03to stealing Denny's wallet.
01:06:06Damian Williams was charged with a variety of state and federal counts,
01:06:10including attempted murder.
01:06:12He's being held on bail of over half a million dollars.
01:06:16Defense attorney Edie Fall claimed that his client did not have effective counsel during
01:06:20the preliminary hearing last August.
01:06:22What's on trial, in many people's view, is the justice system.
01:06:27And we're looking for a just society.
01:06:30Everybody still would kind of agree on that.
01:06:33But then you begin to discover that one group says the justice system works.
01:06:40Another group says it doesn't.
01:06:43And so, once that cleavage begins, then the language becomes more or less useless.
01:06:53People can't talk anymore about individual cases, can't talk about whether this is just
01:06:59or unjust because the perspective is so different.
01:07:04This is for the rebellion, man.
01:07:06So, uh, bear with us.
01:07:08Watch it.
01:07:09Government officials ain't.
01:07:10Say we have police officers, they ain't.
01:07:13No matter if you stand up, straight up.
01:07:15If you're sick, crank it up.
01:07:16They never was.
01:07:17They're gonna never be.
01:07:18Every Thursday night in South Central, local rappers take the stage,
01:07:22here at a health food store, on Crenshaw Boulevard.
01:07:25The weekly hip hop amounts to a report from the streets.
01:07:28You said not guilty.
01:07:30Prejudice was free to go home and relax and rejoice.
01:07:33If you have committed angry acts, man, lift every voice and sing.
01:07:36Like a shot in the name of Rodney King.
01:07:38Like a shot in the name of Rodney King.
01:07:40Go!
01:07:41They tell an everyday story.
01:07:43The constant police presence in South Central, the helicopters overhead,
01:07:47and the ground patrols, unmarked cars, along with the black and whites.
01:07:52On the December day I rode through with Stan Sanders,
01:07:55we ran into a congregation a couple of blocks away from Florence and Normandy.
01:08:00Needless to say, this area is probably well patrolled in the months since April 29.
01:08:11Patrolled or cordoned.
01:08:13A lot of activity in front of this house.
01:08:15The police were gathered outside the home of Damien Williams,
01:08:18in custody since May for the beating of Reginald Denny.
01:08:22His mother is Georgiana Williams.
01:08:24Miss Williams, my name is John Wideman.
01:08:26Hello.
01:08:27How are you? I'm a writer.
01:08:28Oh, I'm a cook.
01:08:31You're a cook?
01:08:32Well, I'll tell you what.
01:08:33I'll write something for you if you cook something for me,
01:08:35because I'm hungry.
01:08:37Why would the wider day congregate?
01:08:41No reason.
01:08:42No reason.
01:08:43No reason.
01:08:44This is every day the cops is over here.
01:08:45Why?
01:08:46This is every day.
01:08:47So this is no longer...
01:08:48This is nothing new.
01:08:49This is no longer a free street.
01:08:50This is not an American street.
01:08:51It had never been free.
01:08:52No.
01:08:53No.
01:08:54This has been going on for years.
01:08:57They come over here and they beat up people,
01:09:00and they take them down, go and arrest them.
01:09:03So this goes on over here every day.
01:09:06Oh, you want to see my notes?
01:09:08Since Damien's arrest, Mrs. Williams, who works nights as a nurse,
01:09:12has drawn attention from the media,
01:09:14as she has publicly spoken out in defense of her son
01:09:17and the other young men accused in the Denny beating.
01:09:24The justice system is on trial because it's failed.
01:09:29It's failed black people.
01:09:31If you have an instrument that doesn't work, why use it?
01:09:36That's the question that's being asked.
01:09:40We prayed that this case would be handled
01:09:43in a way that would cause this community
01:09:46to have respect for the criminal justice system.
01:09:49Family and supporters of the Denny defendants
01:09:51have organized as the LA4 Plus defense committee.
01:09:55And this winter, it drew outside support
01:09:58from political leaders like Maxine Waters.
01:10:00So we watched and we waited while the young men
01:10:05who supposedly were identified on videotape were apprehended.
01:10:11We have watched as they have not been allowed to get bail.
01:10:14The police officers that were involved in the Rodney King case
01:10:19were people who were entrusted with enforcing the law,
01:10:23which is a position of trust, a position that was violated,
01:10:29notwithstanding that some of them were allowed
01:10:33to walk the streets on $5,000 bill.
01:10:35No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace.
01:10:39Last December 14th, the LA4 Plus defense committee
01:10:43went back to the corner of Florence and Normandy to hold a rally,
01:10:47an event that became a new flashpoint marking the city's divisions.
01:10:52...of our demands that the excessive bail be reduced
01:10:54to a reasonable amount and that these brothers be released forthwith
01:10:59because the French trial was virtually impossible.
01:11:02For the African-American community, for the leadership to say
01:11:05that those four black suspects who viciously beat Reginald Denny,
01:11:11fired a shotgun at him, threw a brick at his head,
01:11:14that they should be released is lunacy.
01:11:18What's outraged me more than anything in this whole LA experience
01:11:22is that the victims are being declared as criminals.
01:11:27And yet the gangsters, the criminals, are looked upon as some kind of heroes.
01:11:33The mother of one of these criminals has very prominently gotten involved
01:11:40in attacking the media and attacking white people
01:11:44and attacking the people that say her son is a criminal.
01:11:47And you just have to shake your head in shame and say,
01:11:50this woman is really the problem.
01:11:53She's not the solution. She is the problem.
01:11:56If the charges had been assault with a daily weapon,
01:11:59aggravated assault, or any type of assault,
01:12:02I wouldn't have had nothing to say because the charge would have fitted the crime.
01:12:06But with mayhem, aiding and abetting, attempted murder, uh-uh, there's no way I'm going to keep quiet.
01:12:13Say hypothetically, because this is all going to be taken care of in court, say they did it.
01:12:18But you're saying that even if they did it, the way they're being charged.
01:12:22I'm not going to say they did it because everyone is innocent until the court of law proves them guilty.
01:12:28So I can't say that they did it because I wasn't up there.
01:12:31Damien did not tell me he was there.
01:12:33Georgiana Williams, mother of Damien, mother of William.
01:12:37Georgiana Williams has become a powerful figure in her community
01:12:43and on the LA-4 Plus defense committee.
01:12:48And we have brother Paul Parker.
01:12:51Brother of Lance Parker.
01:12:54Paul Parker is the chairperson.
01:12:57This is Lance Parker's mother.
01:13:00Last summer, police had identified Lance as the man they believed fired a shotgun at Reginald Denny.
01:13:07And before dawn, on July 10th, the FBI arrived at the Parker home.
01:13:12Okay, um, there was a knock at the door.
01:13:14And my mother opened at the door, because it was around 6.30.
01:13:17And she's like, well officers, what is this all about?
01:13:20She's like, lady, open the door.
01:13:22And so my mom asked, would it have to be some type of search warrant?
01:13:25Do I have to have some type of search warrant or something for this officer?
01:13:27And the ch-ch-ch, lady, open the door.
01:13:29For the Parker family, the visit from the FBI brought memories of another night,
01:13:34almost a decade earlier, when the police arrived with the news that Paul's father had been killed.
01:13:40And he said, I'd like to inform you that your father has been shot and killed.
01:13:45And, um, later on we found out that it was a little theft.
01:13:50Somebody was still watching his wallet.
01:13:52And they actually had a positive ID on the guy.
01:13:55They had an eyewitness and they had an open and closed case.
01:13:59And they decided not to pursue it.
01:14:02They said that, um...
01:14:04They never brought charges against anybody.
01:14:06No.
01:14:07Um, they just said that, you know, we just feel that it would, you know, just upset your family more to go through the whole ordeal.
01:14:15So, therefore, you know, we just want to...
01:14:17That your mother wanted to bring charges?
01:14:19Yeah.
01:14:20You know, we all did.
01:14:21Um, you know, that type of situation, you want to see some type of, like, we call it justice done.
01:14:27And, um, you know, we understand black and white, um, black and black crime.
01:14:31Well, the black man shot your father, probably.
01:14:33Exactly.
01:14:34And, uh, you know, we still understand it.
01:14:36People's experiences with racial injustice are so different.
01:14:40Um, they mean different things, I think, when they say that.
01:14:45But one of the things I believe that happened, for instance, when the Rodney King, the beating tape, was, became public, that there was certainly a moment, at least, where probably every black person in America felt the same sense of outrage.
01:15:07A shared sense of outrage.
01:15:10Reginald Denny would have not gotten beaten down on April the 28th, on April the 27th, or any other day before April 29th.
01:15:18It was only because of cause and effect situation.
01:15:21Well, let me, um, ask you also about, about that beating itself.
01:15:26We have spent all our lives and then our parents before us and all the different, you know, movements, uh, for equality and justice, trying to get our country into a position where people are not vulnerable to violence because of the color of their skin.
01:15:44Okay, well, from our standpoint, as blacks, we're just on a defense.
01:15:49We protect ourselves.
01:15:50We are not out there committing genocide upon other races.
01:15:56If justice were served, none of this would have happened.
01:15:59So you're saying because they were black and angry that they don't have to live up to some kind of standard of morality?
01:16:05No, I believe that since white people have put black people in the situation that they are in, that white people are the cause of a reaction.
01:16:14Well, what do you say to him? I mean, Reginald Denny, if he was sitting here and you all were looking at each other face to face, what would you say to him?
01:16:22I would say that, you know how it feels to be a victim now, you know, as many black people over 500 years.
01:16:32It's something that, you know, God deal with, but you know how it feels now to, to be black.
01:16:40I am not going to go around and say that kicking a white man in his head and pulling him out of his truck and beating him until he's bloody in the head is politics.
01:16:51And also, I think that our movement has a higher purpose than that.
01:16:58Our movement is not personal revenge.
01:17:01And our movement is not picking out individual white people and beating up on them as symbols.
01:17:07We fought against that. And we don't have any business doing the same thing to anybody else.
01:17:12The right to demonstrate the right of political protest is a sacred American right and one that must be maintained at all costs.
01:17:20But it does not include the right to assault another human being and to beat them almost to death.
01:17:26Now, someone did that to Reginald Denny.
01:17:29Whether it's these four individuals or two of them or four other individuals, the court will sort that out.
01:17:36But the notion that the court shouldn't try and sort that out is simply preposterous.
01:17:41Free the L.A. 4 now! Free the L.A. 4 now!
01:17:45You know, there's this old question, this sort of poignant question of Rodney King's.
01:17:49You know, can we all get along?
01:17:51The real question is, can we be fair to each other?
01:17:54The lesson of our system is that we can only be fair to each other when we all talk to each other.
01:18:01We cannot rely on each other's charity.
01:18:04We can only rely on our system when we all have the opportunity to speak honestly to each other about our needs, about our resentments, about our indignation.
01:18:14It's incredible the way we, as a culture, have to divide things, that we've now hit upon the strategy of comparing the Denny atrocity to the Rodney King atrocity.
01:18:39We've suddenly done what we always do. We have one column for black statistics and one column for white statistics.
01:18:48And now, somehow, that will give us a grip on what these events mean because we can compare them.
01:18:57Well, black people are barbaric. Well, but wait a minute. White people are barbaric. And it's obscene. It's crazy.
01:19:06With the knowledge we have about what happened in April and May, is there some sort of a working relationship developing between these various communities and the people down in the inner city?
01:19:20I got an infinity of calls from Beverly Hills people, people you know. I hear they're coming up here.
01:19:29You know, I hear they're going to Pacific High to kidnap my kids. Are we still flying blind or have we learned anything?
01:19:40I go back to that day, that day when I heard the verdict. You know, when I think about it, doggone it, it upsets me even right now thinking about it.
01:19:47I felt as though somebody had just punched me in my face, then my stomach and told me that me, me, my life and anybody else like me just was not worth that much, that my life was expendable.
01:20:06All you got to do is be one black person in the wrong place at the wrong time, and everybody's going to think that, oh, well, you deserved it.
01:20:16Cheryl, how do you feel about Reginald Denny in that verdict? I mean, I agree with your feelings on the other, but how do you feel about those guys? I mean, you saw the same thing I saw.
01:20:26You know, the thing about it is, is I say to you, what did either one of those two men, whether black or white, what did either one of those two men do to deserve to get beaten the way both of them got beaten?
01:20:40No, no, I'll answer your question. I know what you're getting to, and I'll be happy to answer it.
01:20:44I think, first I think we need to make a distinction. The king was under color of law, and there is a difference.
01:20:51When you have 19 police officers standing around in their uniforms in full view, feeling free enough to beat this one black man probably just because he was black, it's a lot different than having some teenagers.
01:21:06I'm not disagreeing. I'm not disagreeing with you.
01:21:07No, but I'm saying I think it's a critical distinction. I think it's a critical distinction and a critical comment on the city and our society.
01:21:14I agree that there's a distinction, okay? Critical distinction. Okay, now tell me that you're sitting on the Denny decision. You've now seen this tape. Are you saying to me that those people did not deserve punishment in their law?
01:21:31Not at all.
01:21:31You can get more time for kicking a dog than you can for shooting the head, shooting the back of a head of a black woman off.
01:21:43When that verdict came out, I was shocked myself. By the same token, these four young African-American men were wrong. They're beating this man. He did not deserve to be beaten.
01:21:58Soonja Doo had nothing. She had no criminal history whatsoever. She had nothing in her background to suggest that she was going to repeat this horrible crime, and I do think it was horrible, and I've said it, and I've gotten threats for saying it.
01:22:14How could you as a Korean, ethnic Korean, say this? But come on, let's get to some truth at last. It is so hard to break out of our boxes. I am in so many boxes. I'm a woman. I'm ethnic Korean.
01:22:28I'm second generation. I speak a different language. I'm a lawyer. You know? I mean, these are boxes that society wants to keep putting me in, and I keep having to say no, no, no.
01:22:40And you know what? There are no role models for me of people who just have the ability to see what the truth is in this situation. And in this city, in Los Angeles, the truth is that it could explode again.
01:22:58This month, the peace is holding, helped by the convictions in the King case.
01:23:04Aggravated mayhem.
01:23:05But after months of preliminary hearings, the trial of the Denny beating defendants will soon begin.
01:23:10And once again, each community will watch and fear the verdict and the violence that could follow.
01:23:18In Los Angeles this spring, the images of a year ago stay fresh in the mind's eye.
01:23:23Occasionally, other images emerge, like this softball game in South Central between a team from Simi Valley and players from the city, from different ethnic groups.
01:23:40But the turnout was small. Not even all the players showed up.
01:23:46Here he goes! Everybody move!
01:23:48Los Angeles has always been the city we've watched to read the future.
01:23:53The playing field on which issues facing us all are first joined.
01:24:01Above all, the question of whether a multi-ethnic society can survive as a community.
01:24:07A year later in Los Angeles, many are still asking when their day will come.
01:24:21Will it ever come? Still not sure, but here comes the sun.
01:24:27It's rising and rising and rising. It's risen.
01:24:29Thank you God Almighty for the time that He's given.
01:24:32Me, my tree, which means unity.
01:24:34Peace, quality, art.
01:24:36Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace
01:25:06¶¶
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