William Pannell - The Coming Race Wars: A Cry for Justice, from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter

JEMAR TISBY

P LUMES OF SMOKE wafted into the skyline like genies being released from dozens of magical lamps all at once. The people, most of them distant descendants of the African motherland, crowded the streets. Some of them ambled in pairs or trios; others ran singly or roamed in large, loud groups. Journalists stood near enough to observe but far enough back not to participate. Lines of police officers stood outfitted with the instruments of law and ordershields, batons, helmets, and guns. To some it was a riot. To others it was an uprising or a protest. It was Los Angeles in 1992. But it may just as well have been Watts in 1965, Detroit in 1967, Ferguson in 2015, or Minneapolis in 2020. The race wars are, and have been, an American tradition.

William Bill Pannell published The Coming Race Wars? A Cry for Reconciliation in 1993 in the aftermath of the turmoil connected to the March 1991 beating of a Black man named Rodney King by white police officers in Los Angeles. Cops brutalizing a Black person is hardly news. Its practically an American pastime. Just ask the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s. Better yet, refer to them by their full and original namethe Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Defense against whom? The police officers who acted as an occupying force in Black communities.

What made Kings beating of historic consequence hinged on the application of relatively new technology. Less than a decade earlier Sony had introduced the Betamovie Beta camcorder, the first popular-market portable video camera. Swift advances and heavy competition between electronics companies supplied the Sony Handycam that a thirty-one-year-old plumber named George Holliday held in his hands that night. He pressed record on his camcorder and captured the now infamous encounter between Rodney King and a group of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers.

In a 2011 interview Rodney King recalled that he had been drinking that night while at a friends house. He was also on parole for robbery. When he saw a police car following him, he sped up and led police on a high-speed chase. I had a job to go to that Monday, and I knew I was on parole, and I knew I wasnt supposed to be drinking, and Im like Oh, my God, he told the interviewer.

King finally pulled over across the street from an apartment complex. The first officers on the scene ordered King and the two passengers who were with him out of the car. His friends complied, but King did not get out right away. When he did, he reportedly smiled at the officers and danced around. As a female officer approached King, the sergeant in charge, Stacey Koon, intervened. According to his own testimony, Koon thought King might have been on PCP and impervious to pain or reason. (Toxicology reports later indicated that King did not, in fact, have any drugs in his system.) So Koon tased him twice, but the electrical charges failed to incapacitate King. Then the beating commenced.

Ultimately over two dozen officers and a helicopter showed up to witness the savagery. Four officers, including Koon, assaulted King with metal batons and kicks. They delivered fifty-six blows; most of the time their victim lay on the ground alternately recoiling in pain or attempting to cover his head from the deluge of strikes. Doctors revealed that King, who was legally drunk at the time, had suffered a fractured cheekbone, eleven broken bones near the base of his skull, and a broken leg.

I just felt horrible. I felt beat up and like a crushed can, King later testified.

When Holliday turned the video over to a local news station a few days later, most viewers agreed that the police had trampled the line between a justified use of force and an unrestrained assault on a defenseless victim. Jurors decided to indict the four officers who had delivered the pummeling.

The racial overtones of the case reverberated from the night of the beating and throughout the trial. Just sixteen minutes before the encounter with King, one of the officers, Stacey Koon, remarked to a police dispatcher that he had just left a scene that was right out of Gorillas in the Mist. Koon was probably referring to a domestic disturbance call to which he had responded that involved a Black family. Comparing Black people to apes is a long-standing tradition of racists and white supremacists. It is a way of both demeaning and dehumanizing people of African descent, and such mocking creates the context for treating human beings like Rodney King worse than most people would treat an animal.

When the trial began, many people hoped that justice would be done and the accused officers would be convicted. The specific charges included excessive use of force by an officer under color of authority, assault with a deadly weapon, being an accessory to assault, and filing a false police report. But ominous warning signs emerged even before the trial commenced.

The video of Rodney Kings beating stirred national conversation and tense conflicts between people who saw a pattern of police brutality and undeniable evidence of wrongdoing versus those who unequivocally supported the police and saw a drunk and erratic King getting what he deserved for failing to comply with the officers commands. Supposedly due to the public scrutiny, a judge approved a change of venue and moved the trial from Los Angeles County to the majority-white and affluent Simi Valley in Ventura County.

The jury set to hear the case consisted of one person of Hispanic descent, one Asian person, and ten white people. Not a single Black person was represented among a jury of Kings peers. The trial commenced on March 5, 1992, almost exactly one year after the fateful night. On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, the court clerk announced the jurys verdict. They acquitted all four officers of all charges.

What is commonly termed the LA riots began hours after jurors announced the acquittal of the officers who assaulted Rodney King. Language is important here. The word riot connotes chaosan aimless, destructive, counterproductive, impulsive reaction to a particular stimulus. Many activists prefer the term protest or uprising. These words indicate that the people in a certain group or community are pushing back against dehumanization and oppression. Understanding these differences will, in large part, determine ones assessment of what happened over several days in Los Angeles in 1992.