The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Riot date brings dark memories for L.A.
King trial verdict sparked 3 days of violence in 1992.
NATION & WORLD Twenty years later, the April 29, 1992, riots continue to affect lives.
LOS ANGELES — Henry Keith Watson remembers April 29, 1992, as if it happened just last week. History won’t allow him to forget it.
It was a day that marked the beginning of one of the deadliest, most destructive race riots in the nation’s history, and one in which Watson’s spur-of-the-moment decision to take part made him one of the enduring faces of the violence.
He was at home that day like thousands of others when he heard the news that was racing across Los Angeles: A jury with no black members had acquitted four police officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black man stopped for speeding nearly 14 months before.
“I got caught up in the emotions like everyone else,” Watson says 20 years after a riot that would leave 55 people dead, more than 2,300 injured and himself forever recognized as one of the attackers of white truck driver Reginald Denny, who himself became the enduring image of the innocents victimized during the chaos.
South Los Angeles, where the riot began, has changed considerably two decades later, as has Watson. But many things remain the same.
While racial tensions fanned by the verdict and the general feeling of disenfranchisement and distrust of police among Los Angeles’ black population have moderated, residents of the city’s largely black and Hispanic South Side complain the area still is plagued by too few jobs, too few grocery stores and a lack of redevelopment that would bring more life to the area.
One place in particular that time seemingly forgot is the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where Denny was attacked on that dark day the riot began. It remains a gritty corner that’s home to gas stations where men rush up to incoming cars and pump fuel for spare change, as well as a liquor store with more foot traffic than any other business in sight.
Manuel Pastor, professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, says economic distress caused by the departure of manufacturing industries and high unemployment and widespread distrust of the police department set the stage for the outrage following the King verdict.
“It’s a question of if you throw a match and there’s no tinder there will be no fire. If there’s a lot of tinder you need a match. And there was lots of tinder,” Pastor said. “There was lots of economic frustration, there was racial tension in the air.”
Then word of the acquittals set it off.
“People had had enough,” said Connie Rice, a director of the civil rights group Advancement Project and an attorney who has brought numerous civil rights lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department.
As the liquor store at the intersection of Florence and Normandie was being looted and white passers-by were fleeing a barrage of rocks and bottles, Denny stopped his big rig to avoid running over someone. He was quickly dragged from the cab and nearly beaten to death by Watson and a handful of others.
Rioting spread across the city and into neighboring suburbs. Cars were demolished and homes and businesses were burned. Before order was restored, more than 1,500 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Almost a quarter century had passed since LA’S Watts rioting in 1965. The magnitude of this new racial paroxysm shocked a nation that thought it had moved on.
Today, Watson still struggles to explain why he took part in the de- struction. He was a 27year-old ex-marine with a wife and a job and who came from a good family. His father had been his neighborhood’s block captain, no less, and he acknowledges his family didn’t raise him to be a troublemaker.
“I guess you could say, you know, looking at my background and whatever, how could I have gotten caught up in it?” he muses on a recent sunsplashed morning as he sat on the front porch of the home where he grew up, just a few blocks from the intersection.
After a long pause and a sigh, he continues: “You know, honestly, it was something that just happened, man. I never even knew Reginald Denny. Just the anger and the rage just took hold to where I nor anyone who was out there that day was in their right frame of mind.”
Watson was convicted of misdemeanor assault and sentenced to time served for the 17 months he spent in jail before his case was resolved. But that day was a rage, he and others in the community say, fueled by years of high unemployment, abuse and neglect by police, and rising tension with recently arrived Korean store owners.
“We wanted jobs around here, we wanted respect and we didn’t get none of that. And then the police just harassed us all the time,” said Sharon Mcswain, who for 22 of her 45 years has lived within walking distance of the intersection where Denny was attacked. He was saved by a black truck driver who rushed out to help after seeing the brutal beating on television.
Tensions in the com- munity had been running high before the riot, fueled in part by the case of a Korean grocer who shot to death a black teenager she had accused of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. Captured on a store surveillance camera, the shooting stoked the anger.
It occurred just two weeks after George Holliday stood on the terrace outside his San Fernando Valley home and videotaped four LAPD officers beating King. On April 29, 1992, it seemed Holliday’s videotape would be the key evidence in a guilty verdict against the officers. When they were instead acquitted, violence erupted immediately.
In the years since, Watson has gotten on with his life. He has two daughters in college and for years has operated his own limousine business.
Following a drug possession bust a few years after the riot he has stayed out of trouble and now helps keep watch on his neighborhood, just as his late father once did.
He has spent most of his life in the neighborhood, returning last year to the house he grew up in to care for his elderly mother.
Asked if he feels bad about what he did to Denny, he says simply that what happened to the trucker that day was “unfortunate.”
“But I can’t take it back. There’s nothing I can do.”
Watson did apologize personally to Denny some years ago, the only one of his attackers to do so. Another time he offered to send a limo to pick him up and take him to Florence and Normandie, then somewhere afterward where the two could have a drink and talk.
He says Denny, who lives quietly in Arizona these days, declined.
The trucker has shunned interviews for years, and repeated attempts to contact him by mail, phone and in person for this story were unsuccessful.
“He chooses to remain in private,” Watson said. “And we respect his privacy. So be it.”