The L.A. Riots, 20 Years Later [Voices]

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Courtesy: Los Angeles Times

Courtesy: Time Magazine

“Everybody just assumed they were guilty,” said Mathew McDaniel, a filmmaker who made the documentary, “Birth of a Nation 4-29-92.”But there was far more to it than one jury verdict.

“The Rodney King situation was just the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said YoYo Whitaker, who grew up in South LA and was then just beginning her career as a rapper and actress. “The community had been suffering so long and screaming out for help.”

Whitaker and McDaniel are hardly alone in seeing the eruption of civil unrest as the consequence of a long-unfolding narrative.

It had been 27 years since a comparable breakdown of social order happened in Watts in 1965, when hopes raised by the then still-young civil rights movement crashed headlong into urban realties, and frustration boiled over. Studies were commissioned and recommendations issued, but in many ways conditions did not improve.

- Patrick Healy, KNBC-TV

VIDEO NSFW. TRIGGER WARNING: This video contains images of violence and bloodshed.

I get home after my long, cranky drive and find my dear son, safe and sound. Relief. I throw my things on the couch, turn on the TV and see … a riot.

(TV is a teleportation machine. Your eyes, ears and brain are instantaneously transported anywhere a camera can go – outer space, China, South Central L.A. You are literally there, witnessing things in real time in a real place.)

I am in a helicopter, looking down on the neighborhood that is exactly 1.7 miles from my school. I recognize it all. The wide city streets. The mini malls. The gas stations. But throngs of people are milling around with unusual energy.

Something’s happenin’ here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.

What the hell??!? I was just there an hour ago…

And then I realize what’s happened.

The Rodney King verdict. All those kicking, beating, bone-crunching cops are declared innocent. It is just …too much!

The result has touched off the fury of people who have had enough. The folks I watch from my perch in the sky are the warriors of South Central tearing down The Man.

- Donna Schoenkopf, Fourstory

Protesters gather outside LAPD Headquarters. Courtesy @RealTimeLARiots/KNBC

Any other night, Clifford “Skipp” Townsend said, he would have turned around to face his death. But on this particular evening, as the L.A. riots raged around him, he and the seven or eight other members of the Rollin’ 20s Bloods with whom he was breaking into a safe in an abandoned garage got off easy.

Townsend had spun around to see a man wearing a blue bandana and brandishing a shotgun: a Crip, his gang’s implacable rival. It would have taken only a twitch of the Crip’s trigger finger to kill him. But amid the confusion of the riots, L.A.’s most notorious gangs called a truce.

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