[On April 29th, 1992,
civil unrest erupted
in Los Angeles after the four officers who had beaten Rodney King on video
were acquitted on all charges. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy King himself and
other contexts for and representations of the LA riots, leading up to a special
weekend post on the narrative
of “race riots” itself.]
On two mid-20th
century riots that collectively anticipated the Rodney King story.
On Christmas
Eve, 1951, a pair of Los Angeles policemen got into an extended altercation
with seven young men (five of them Mexican American) at
the Showboat Bar, a conflict that by Christmas morning had turned into
violent arrests of and subsequent police brutality directed at the seven men. The
LAPD initially attempted to sweep that police violence, which came to be known
as Bloody Christmas, under the rug, but significant pressure from the
city’s Mexican American community forced an internal investigation that
resulted in a record number of indictments, suspensions, and other punishments
for police officers. The incident, fictionalized in the James
Ellroy novel L.A. Confidential
(1990) and the 1997
film of the same name, reflected a police department that seemingly felt
empowered to exercise extreme brutality against private citizens, particularly
those from minority communities. Thanks to pressure from local communities the
officers and department did not get away with that brutality in this case, but
such incidents made clear that the relationship between these elements of Los
Angeles society was a fraught and fragile one at best.
Such mid-century
tensions in the city were not limited to any particular communities, however,
as illustrated by another violent event: the June
1943 Zoot Suit Riots. This complex historical event originated in part out
of a pair of specific World War II trends: the striking number of servicemen stationed in Los
Angeles, most of them from other parts of the country; and the narrative
that zoot suits, a popular form of apparel for young people (especially
from minority communities such as Mexican, Filipino, and African Americans),
represented a waste of precious wartime fabric. Certainly exclusionary bigotry and
prejudice also played into the riots, however, which featured sailors and
other servicemen attacking groups of young men and attempting to strip them of
their zoot suits. While the police were not the direct sources of violence in
this case, their
principal roles across the six days of rioting seem to have been aiding and
abetting the white supremacist rioters, both by refusing to stop or arrest them
and by instead arresting more than 500 Mexican Americans on charges such as “rioting”
and “vagrancy.” Which is to say, while the Zoot Suit Riots reflected particular
WWII-era communal tensions, they certainly anticipated the forms of police
profiling and brutality that would come to the fore less than a decade later in
the Bloody Christmas incident.
Half a century
later, the Rodney King incident and riots reflected and extended both sides of
these histories: police brutality that targeted minority citizens in
particular; and related but even more overarching communal tensions that
exploded into days of destructive violence. Among the many ways in which better
remembering the earlier histories might affect and shift our sense of the more
recent ones, I would highlight this in particular (about which I’ve written elsewhere
as well): far too often, if not indeed all of the time, when we refer to an
event with the phrase “race riot” in our media or collective conversations we
mean a riot featuring Americans of color. Yet while of course each of these
historical riots did include such communities, they were driven, as so many of
our historical riots have been, by both white mobs and white supremacist ideologies
and systems. And those systems often include law enforcement and other official
institutions in leading roles, not only in helping define the riots in very
particular and exclusionary ways, but even in providing the impetus for the
conflicts in the first phrase. The more we remember events like Bloody
Christmas and the Zoot Suit Riots, the more equipped we are to recognize when
and how those histories repeat themselves, as was the case with the Rodney King
beating and riots to be sure.
Next King
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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