Voices: R.I.P. Rodney King (1965-2012)

Courtesy: Melville House Books

Rodney King never set out to be a James Meredith or Rosa Parks.

He was a drunk, unemployed construction worker on parole when he careened into the city’s consciousness in a white Hyundai early one Sunday morning in 1991.

While he was enduring the videotaped blows that would reverberate around the world, he wanted to escape to a nearby park where his father used to take him. He simply wanted to survive.

He did survive, but the brutal beating transformed the troubled man into an icon of the civil rights movement. His very name became a symbol of police abuse and racial tensions, of one of the worst urban riots in American history.

- Joe Mozingo and Phil Willon, Los Angeles Times

Sgt Stacey Koon, Theodore Briseno, Timothy Wind and Laurence Powell (l-r). Courtesy: The Daily Mail

You could say King was ahead of his time, because before there was YouTube or citizen journalism, camcorder footage of King, who was black, being beaten by white L.A.P.D. officers who’d stopped him for speeding was one of the first videos to go viral, in effect, on TV newscasts all over the country.

Riots exploded in South Los Angeles after a jury that included no African Americans acquitted three of those officers, and deadlocked on the fourth. In the violence that followed, thousands of people were injured and 55 died. While the city was still on fire, King stepped to the microphone and asked, “Can we all get along?”

I was then and remain in awe of all it took for him to do that. Here was a man who’d had his head beaten, his leg broken, his eye shattered. His face had been partially paralyzed during that rain of kicks and blows — 50 of them — with police batons. That he still called for peace over vengeance is pretty much the ultimate “manning up” in my book.

- Melinda Henneberger, The Washington Post

Courtesy: boston.com

He inhabits a world stocked with heartache and struggle. He calls himself a recovering addict but has not stopped drinking and possesses a doctor’s clearance for medical marijuana. He says he is happy and hopeful, content enough now to forgive the officers who beat him. But he tenses when they are mentioned and admits to being burdened by the weight of his name. He suffers nightmares, flashbacks and raw nerves that echo the symptoms of a shellshocked survivor of war.

On the dock, he gazes out at the smooth water. Fishing is healing. It calms him. Once his therapy was the ocean and surfing, until he was frightened one day by a school of dolphins that he mistook for sharks.

“I sometimes feel like I’m caught in a vise. Some people feel like I’m some kind of hero,” he says of the beating. “Others hate me. They say I deserved it. Other people, I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to the destruction, like I’m a fool for believing in peace.”

- Kurt Streeter, Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2012

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