The L A Riots

How Rodney King and the riots changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.

This title examines an important historic event--the police beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the riots in Los Angeles, California, in 1992. Easy-to-read, compelling text explores the events of March 3, 1991, when a high-speed car chase ended in King's beating, the significance of the video tape of the beating, the officers' trials, and the riots that followed their acquittal in May 1992. Key to the discussion is an examination of the racial context of the riots, including preexisting racial tensions in the city. Also discussed are the 1993 federal trial and the aftermath of the riots. Features include a table of contents, glossary, selected bibliography, Web sites, source notes, and an index, plus a timeline and essential facts. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. Essential Library is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

The causes and the aftermath of the 1992 riots.

The Los Angeles riots in the Spring of 1992 were among the most violent and destructive events in twentieth-century urban America. This collection of original essays by leading urban experts offers the first comprehensive analysis of the unrest that took place after a jury acquitted the police officers who were accused of using excessive force in t

On April 29, 1992, the "worst riots of the century" (Los Angeles Times) erupted. Television newsworkers tried frantically to keep up with what was happening on the streets while, around the city, nation and globe, viewers watched intently as leaders, participants, and fires flashed across their television screens. Screening the Los Angeles "riots" zeroes in on the first night of these events, exploring in detail the meanings one news organization found in them, as well as those made by fifteen groups of viewers in the events' aftermath. Combining ethnographic and quasi-experimental methods, Darnell M. Hunt's account reveals how race shapes both television's construction of news and viewers' understandings of it. He engages with the longstanding debates about the power of television to shape our thoughts versus our ability to resist, and concludes with implications for progressive change.

Acts of violence, inspired by anger at a not-guilty verdict acquitting three Los Angeles police officers in the Rodney King assault trial, took Los Angeles hostage. By the end of the rampage, sixty people were dead, twenty-three hundred more were injured, and thousands of businesses lay in smoky ruins. This account captures the tense mood of one of the deadliest riots in American history.

Sometime near the start of the 1990s, the future became a place of national decline. The United States had entered a period of great anxiety fueled by the shrinking of the white middle class, the increasingly visible misery of poor urban blacks, and the mass immigration of nonwhites. Perhaps more than any other event marking the passage through these dark years, the 1992 Los Angeles riots have sparked imaginative and critical works reacting to this profound pessimism. Focusing on a wide range of these creative works, Min Hyoung Song shows how the L.A. riots have become a cultural-literary event—an important reference and resource for imagining the social problems plaguing the United States and its possible futures. Song considers works that address the riots and often the traumatic place of the Korean American community within them: the independent documentary Sa-I-Gu (Korean for April 29, the date the riots began), Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker, the commercial film Strange Days, and the experimental drama of Anna Deavere Smith, among many others. He describes how cultural producers have used the riots to examine the narrative of national decline, manipulating language and visual elements, borrowing and refashioning familiar tropes, and, perhaps most significantly, repeatedly turning to metaphors of bodily suffering to convey a sense of an unraveling social fabric. Song argues that these aesthetic experiments offer ways of revisiting the traumas of the past in order to imagine more survivable futures.

This is a collection of aritcles about what happened during the riots following the Rodney King verdict, the causes of these riots, similar situations which have provoked unrest in other cities, and what is needed for social justice.