Amy Alexander - Uncovering Race: A Black Journalists Story of Reporting and Reinvention

Uncovering Race

A Black Journalists Story of Reporting and Reinvention

Amy Alexander

Beacon Press

Boston

Contents

Introduction: April 29, 1992Southbound on U.S. Interstate Highway 5

We hurtled out of the Tehachapi Mountains as dusk deepened to blue night, the Chevrolet Lumina moving swiftly toward South Central Los Angeles. Once out of the San Fernando Valley on the San Diego Freeway, we saw splashes of flames between buildings. I was in the car with two others, a female reporter riding shotgun and a male photographer behind the wheel. Two hours earlier we had sat in a fluorescent-lit newsroom 250 miles north of Los Angeles. Now I rode in the backseat of a silvery-blue sedan speeding south from Fresno toward disaster. Radio antennas bobbed on the car. It crossed my mind that our midsize Chevy looked like an unmarked police vehicle.

This could be a problem.

Four white Los Angeles cops had been acquitted of criminal charges in the 1991 beating of an unarmed black motorist named Rodney King. The jury in Simi Valley had returned the verdict at 3:15 p.m. on that Wednesday. Ten minutes later, through an electronic in-house message, I flippantly told my editor at the Fresno Bee newspaper that Id volunteer for riot duty. Seated twenty feet away, he read my message on the big, bulky computer atop his city desk, and by early evening the flat San Joaquin Valley and the silent Tehachapi Mountains stretched between me and the largest civil disturbance in the nations history.

Not far from LA, we realized we needed to spread out. My reporting colleaguea white Los Angeles nativeparted ways with us just north of the sprawling city. Taking one of the two large, first-generation cellular phones wed brought, she set out for the Civic Center driving a rented white Chrysler LeBaron. The photographer, a Chinese American man Id known since college, steered our car toward South Central. Emergency sirens sounded. Loose knots of people formed every few miles. The radio announcers voice rattling from the Chevy dashboard reported looting at downtown stores.

I had covered disasters before, natural and social, in cities across America. The rush that always preceded covering calamity wasnt new, and the urgency of this story was unmistakable. Yet as we neared the University of Southern California exit off the freeway, something less recognizable spiked the familiar adrenalin high. The idea of confronting a full-scale urban uprising brought queasy twitching to my stomach.

I wondered whether there would be shootings, firebombings, or mobs of rioters clubbing bystanders at random. But it was more than that. Something else cranked up the anxiety, turning it into a prickly pear I didnt want to handle. This denial troubled me further. Finally, my concentration drifting away from the map opened across my lap, I owned up to what troubled me.

What if I became suddenly incapable of separating my feelings as a liberal, African American woman from those of my objective, professional self? Could I agree with the crowds anger without endorsing its actions? Is this whats referred to in those laborious newspaper seminars as an ethical dilemma? I was allowing my mind to drift toward the future, though I also knew better; staying in the moment was crucial, not only for my ability to report and write on deadline but also for staying safe if things heated up around me.

The photographer turned up the volume of the car radio; we listened more closely to a local news program. Every few moments, breathless correspondents from Simi Valley to Long Beach filed urgent-sounding reports describing small crowds of people gathering in streets. A Los Angeles Times satellite office was hit, and the culprits made off with a few computers, according to the radio broadcast. In the three or four hours since the verdict had come in, the Civic Center in downtown Los Angeles had drawn hundreds of angry, chanting people.

From above South Central, a reporter aboard a news helicopter described watching black and brown residents yanking white-looking motorists from their cars and beating them at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues in South Central Los Angeles. The local news station also reported that a city firefighter riding an engine toward a burning building had been shot. All this sounded like mayhem.

The ethical questions bubbled once again in my chest. I struggled to swallow them. We had only about an hour to get to the action in South Central; interview residents, police, and fire officials; and then roll out to the Associated Press offices at Second and Figueroa Streets in downtown LA. From there, we would transmit our stories and photographs to the newsroom in Fresno.

After pulling the Chevrolet off the freeway and into the intersection of Normandie and La Salle Avenues, we saw we had missed our mark, Florence and Normandie, by a few miles. Turning back wasnt an option. We watched a crowd gathering along a commercial strip nearby.

A furniture store and adjacent apartment building were ablaze, their broken windows framing angry lashes of yellow-orange flame that whipped up into the dark sky. Firefighters, evidently stunned by reports that they were being shot at, had positioned their trucks between themselves and the crowd in order to work the fire. We parked half a block away on La Salle, locked the car, and stood for a moment looking toward the intersection at Normandie Avenue.

The photographer, like me, was a native San Franciscan. We had gone to the same university, circulated in the same tight circle of twenty-something Bay Area print journalists. During and after college, on the streets of Berkeley, San Francisco, and Oakland, boisterous public demonstrations, protests, and marches had been regular assignments for us. We had both recordedand experiencedthe sweeping momentum that often overtakes public protests.

The photographer buckled the clasp of a small canvas pack tightly around his waist, its generous pocket fitting snugly against the small of his back. Then he slid the pocket around his body to rest below his abdomen. Inside were a heavy black lens and a few rolls of film. A 35-mm camera, weighted with a flash and lens, hung over his left shoulder. I knew that he would keep an elbow or fingertip discreetly pressing the cameras nylon strap to his side whenever he was not shooting.

I slipped a narrow reporters notebook into the back pocket of my Levis and gripped a black ballpoint pen in the sweating palm of my right hand. I swiveled the bill of my black San Francisco Giants baseball cap forward, pulling it tightly around my short, curly hairdo. The night air was warm, but I snapped shut the windbreaker Id thrown on.

Looking up at the sky to the south, I watched the horizon take on a peach-colored glow. Firelight. It was getting late, and we had to file soon. The sounds of scattered yells and sharp concussions of breaking glass grew louder as we ran-walked out of the residential street toward the commercial strip of Normandie Avenue. Los Angeles was on fire, a disaster in the making. We were primed to chronicle the calamity.

It seems odd to say, but the LA riots couldnt have happened at a better time. Before that moment, midway through my second year as a staff writer on the metro desk of the Fresno Bee , I was becoming restless, gripped by impatience and a persistent worry that I would never work my way out of the Central Valley.

Even before Id flung myself into the major blowup in LA, my professional persona had been forged by disaster coverage. My byline had appeared on stories about big forest fires in the Sierra Nevada mountains, the gargantuan Loma Prieta earthquake that had creased Northern California in October 1989, massive street protests over inadequate federal funding for AIDS and HIV research, and any number of high-profile murders and crimes in San Francisco and Fresno. Yet my modest treasure trove of war stories derived from the escapades that lay beneath those bylines was puny compared to that of older newsroom veterans.