‘Can we all get along?’
Reflections on a riot: L.A. recalls Rodney King beating 25 years ago
LOS ANGELES — Dee Young remembers April 29, 1992, the way most Americans of a certain age recall Sept. 11 — it’s indelibly etched in his memory as the day his world and that of thousands of others changed forever.
The 27-year-old towtruck driver had stopped for a hamburger at a popular South Los Angeles fast-food joint that afternoon when he saw hordes of shouting, angry people carrying armloads of booze from a liquor store next door.
He soon learned he was witnessing the beginning of one of the worst race riots in American history, and it was unfolding in the neighborhood where he rode bikes and flew kites during a childhood he remembers as idyllic.
The violence erupted after four white police officers were acquitted of assault and other charges in the beating of black motorist Rodney King, which was captured on video the year before. The footage showed officers repeatedly striking, kicking and using a stun gun on King, even after he was on the ground.
Although the uprising seemed to catch the nation and the Los Angeles Police Department by surprise, longtime residents say tensions had been building in South Los Angeles for years and the King verdict was just the tipping point.
Young, who had stopped for that burger, quickly decided he’d better get out of there.
Ironically, he drove to his family’s auto body shop about a mile away and just a couple of storefronts down from the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, streets whose names would become ubiquitous as the riot’s flashpoint.
He got there moments after black men dragged white truck driver Reginald Denny from his big rig and beat him nearly to death as millions watched in horror on live TV. One of those watching, a black truck driver named Bobby Green, rushed to the intersection and rescued him.
“It was chaotic — cars running lights, people in the middle of the street throwing stuff at cars, people stopping to see what was going on and getting their windows broke,” Young recalled.
The uprising, he realizes now, was the culmination of a downward spiral in South Los Angeles that started 20 years earlier with the rise of white flight, disinvestment and drug-dealing street gangs following the 1965 Watts riots, which began nearby.
Residents of the predominantly black neighborhoods on the city’s sprawling south side had come to complain that police stopped them for no reason other than being black, or in some cases Hispanic. They said white people didn’t believe them, and store owners — many of
them recently arrived Korean immigrants who bought modest businesses from the fleeing white owners — saw them more as shoplifters than shoppers.
In the years since 1992, things have gotten “90 percent better,” Young said, adding the neighborhood is getting closer to what he remembers from his childhood of the 1960s and ’70s.
Young, who never left South Los Angeles, has watched the community’s demographics change over the years. It’s now predominantly Hispanic with a smattering of white arrivals, and he believes that’s good.
“People in the neighborhood need to work together — black, Hispanic, even white people — and they are coming back here, if slowly but surely,” he says. “If you all work together, if everybody works together, you can keep the peace.”
“People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?”
— RODNEY KING APPEALING FOR CALM ON MAY 1, 1992, DURING RIOTS IN LOS ANGELES