but one thing is certain: the riots speak to conditions beyond any single incident.
In the five years preceding the Rodney King beating, 2,500 claims relating to the use of force were filed against the LAPD. To describe just one: In April 1988, Luis Milton Murrales, a twenty-four-year-old Latino man, lost the vision in one eye because of a police beating. That incident also began with a traffic violation, followed by a brief chase. Murrales crashed his car into a police cruiser and tried to flee on foot. The police caught him, clubbed him, and kicked him when he fell. They resumed the beating at the Rampart station; the attack involved a total of twenty-eight officers. One commander described his subordinates as behaving like a “lynch mob.” Though the city paid $177,500 in a settlement with Murrales, none of the officers were disciplined.23
Such incidents, as well as the depressed economic conditions of the inner city, supplied the fuel for a major conflagration. The King beating, the video, and the verdict offered just the spark to set it off.24
A Lesson To Learn and Learn Again
Rodney King’s beating was unusual only because it was videotaped. The community that revolted following the acquittal seemed to grasp this fact, even if the learned commentators and pious pundits condemning them did not. By the same token, the revolt itself also fit an established pattern.
In 1968, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonly called the Kerner Commission) examined twenty-four riots and reached some remarkable conclusions:
Our examination of the background of the surveyed disorders revealed a typical pattern of deeply-held grievances which were widely shared by many members of the Negro community. The specific content of the expressed grievances varied somewhat from city to city. But in general, grievances among Negroes in all cities related to prejudice, discrimination, severely disadvantaged living conditions and a general sense of frustration about their inability to change those conditions.
Specific events or incidents exemplified and reinforced the shared sense of grievance.… With each such incident, frustration and tension grew until at some point a final incident, often similar to the incidents preceding it, occurred and was followed almost immediately by violence.
As we see it, the prior incidents and the reservoir of underlying grievances contributed to a cumulative process of mounting tension that spilled over into violence when the final incident occurred. In this sense the entire chain—the grievances, the series of prior tension-heightening incidents, and the final incident—was the “precipitant” of disorder.25
The Kerner report goes on to note, “Almost invariably the incident that ignites disorder arises from police action. Harlem, Watts, Newark, and Detroit—all the major outbursts of recent years—were precipitated by routine arrests of Negroes for minor offenses by white officers.”26
A few years earlier, in his essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” James Baldwin had offered a very similar analysis:
[T]he only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive. None of the Police Commissioner’s men, even with the best will in the world, have any way of understanding the lives led by the people they swagger about in twos and threes controlling. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place.… One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congeals, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.27
Baldwin wrote his essay in 1960. Between its publication and that of the Kerner report, the U.S. witnessed civil disturbances of increasing frequency and intensity. Notable among these was the Watts riot of 1965. The Watts rebellion has been said to divide the sixties into its two parts—the classic period of the civil rights movement before, and the more militant Black Power movement after.28
Like the riots of 1992, the Watts disturbance began with a traffic stop. Marquette Frye was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol near Watts, a Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. A crowd gathered, and the police called for backup. As the number of police and bystanders grew, the tension increased accordingly. The police assaulted a couple of bystanders and arrested Frye’s family. As the cops left, the crowd stoned their cars. They then began attacking other vehicles in the area, turning them over, setting them on fire. The next evening, the disorder arose anew, with looting and arson in the nearby commercial areas. The riot lasted six days and caused an estimated $35 million in damage. Almost 1,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. One thousand people were treated for injuries, and thirty-four were killed.29
Fourteen years after Watts, and thirteen years before the Rodney King verdict, a similar drama played out on the other side of the country, in Miami. On December 17, 1979, the police chased, caught, beat, and killed a Black insurance salesman named Arthur McDuffie. McDuffie, who was riding his cousin’s motorcycle, allegedly popped a wheelie and made an obscene gesture at Police Sergeant Ira Diggs, before leading police on an eight-minute high-speed chase. Twelve other cars joined in the pursuit, and when they caught McDuffie, between six and eight officers beat him with heavy flashlights as he lay handcuffed, face down on the pavement. Four days later, he died.30
Three officers were charged with second-degree murder, and three others agreed to testify in exchange for immunity. Judge Lenore Nesbitt called the case “a time bomb” and moved it to Tampa, where an all-White jury had recently acquitted another officer accused of beating a Black motorist. The defense then used its peremptory challenges to remove all Black candidates from the jury. The outcome was predictable: the cops were acquitted; crowds then looted stores, burned buildings, and attacked White passers-by. Crowds also laid siege to the police station, breaking its windows and setting fire to the lobby. When calm returned, seventeen people were dead, 1,100 had been arrested, and $80 million in property had been damaged. Four hundred seventeen people were treated in area hospitals, the majority of them White.31
Here was a key difference: in Miami, the typical looting and burning of White-owned property were matched with attacks against White people. In the disorders of the 1960s, attacks against persons had been relatively rare. In three of the sixties’ largest riots—those of Watts, Newark, and Detroit—the crowd intentionally killed only two or three White people. Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn comment:
What was shocking about Miami was the intensity of the rage directed against white people: men, women and children dragged from their cars and beaten to death, stoned to death, stabbed with screwdrivers, run over with automobiles; hundreds more attacked in the street and seriously injured.… In Miami, attacking and killing white people was the main object of the riot.32
Among those injured in the riots was an elderly White man named Martin Weinstock. Weinstock was hit in the head with a piece of concrete and suffered a fractured skull. He was hospitalized for six days. Still, he told an interviewer:
They should only know that I agree with their anger.… If the people who threw the concrete were brought before me in handcuffs, I would insist that the handcuffs be removed, and I’d try to talk to them. I would say that I understand and that I’m on their side. I have no anger at all. But they’ll never solve their problems by sending people like me to the hospital.33
Weinstock is right: violence directed against random representatives of some dominant group is hardly strategic, much less morally justifiable. But if such attacks are (as Porter and Dunn insist) “shocking,” it can only be because Black anger has so rarely taken this form.
White violence against Black people has never
