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Whatever horror I felt watching the March 1991 tape of Los Angeles Police officers fracturing Rodney King’s skull, breaking his teeth and bones and causing him permanent brain damage was partially offset by a sense of relief: A witness with a camcorder had caught the brutality on tape. The officers couldn’t deny what they’d done, and, thus, my 15-year-old self reasoned, a jury would quickly convict them of excessive use of force and a judge would send them away.
But 30 years ago, that Los Angeles jury acquitted Officers Theodore J. Briseno, Laurence Powell and Timothy E. Wind, and Sgt. Stacey C. Koon, and made me feel foolish for having believed that attacks on Black people would be taken more seriously than they had been when my parents were teenagers.
Whether it was the case of the Scottsboro Boys for my grandparents, the lynching of Emmett Till for my parents’ generation or, for the Black people behind me, acquittals following the killings of Amadou Diallo or Trayvon Martin, every generation of Black folks seems to have at least one moment when its already fragile faith in the courts is dashed against the rocks of American racism.
For my generation, one such moment occurred on April 29, 1992.
It goes without saying that the Black Angelenos who stormed the streets were angry at the accused police and at a jury tolerant of their brutality. But there must have been some angry at themselves for having allowed themselves to believe that the tape would matter and that justice could not possibly be denied them this time. But it was denied, the same way it had been denied to the generation of Black Los Angelenos that had set Watts on fire 27 years earlier.
It’s important to remember the acquittal of the officers who beat up King as the second of two successive slaps to the face of Black Los Angeles. In November 1991, a judge had perversely used the language of racial healing to justify probation, and not prison for a Korean store owner who shot a Black child in the back of her head. That store owner, Soon Ja Du, had accosted and falsely accused 15-year-old Latasha Harlins of planning to steal a $1.79 bottle of orange juice when the teenager had two singles in her hand to pay for it. A jury convicted her of voluntary manslaughter, which had a maximum sentence of 16 years. A higher court upheld the judge’s decision to give Du probation.
The next week, the police who’d been caught beating King walked free.
In a 1993 interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose, novelist and sage Toni Morrison described what she called Black Angelenos’ “amazing” patience. “What struck me most about the people who went burning down shops and stealing,” Morrison said, “was how long they waited. The restraint. Not the spontaneity, the restraint. Do you realize the moment to be anarchic was when we saw those tapes, when we first saw those tapes. … They waited for justice … and it didn’t come.” And then, as if to emphasize her point, she repeated, “They waited.”
In a real sense, the waiting continues. Read more.
