by Jeff Chang
As it turned out, the call was false. Radio Korea was being flooded with calls by stay-at-home store owners who hoped the young men would protect their businesses. As they reached the restaurant, Lee’s friend in the lead car fired a warning shot in the air. The men on the roof loosed a barrage of bullets. They were, in fact, also young Korean Americans who had come to protect the businesses.
When the shooting ended, Kang was wounded. Another friend, Sam Lee, came and pulled them out of the car. Eddie Lee lay on the pavement, his white shirt stained red shoulder to shoulder, neck to stomach, and died. “I still can’t forgive for this,” Kang said later of the incident. “It didn’t need to happen this way.”25
Attacking “The Aliens”
The twelve hours between noon and midnight on Thursday were the most intense of the riots. The fire department received nearly 5,000 calls, five times the norm.26 Hospitals reported over 750 injuries, 10 percent of them critical.27
Thursday was crucial in another way. The media had portrayed the riots as a Black thing, an echo of Watts. But this frame was obsolete; it rendered the flood of satellite images incomprehensible. Here were shots of children wheeling shopping carts of diapers and food. Most of them were not Black, but Latino. The “race riot”—with Blacks centrally cast as Blacks and Korean Americans in the role of the long-gone whites—had suddenly become what Mike Davis termed a “postmodern bread riot,” and the images seemed as if they were coming from a Central America country, not from within U.S. borders.28 Newscasters were confused.
Most of these Latinos were recent working-class immigrants or refugees. For years, they had quietly transformed the inner city. Jordan Downs was nearing 40 percent Latino. Koreatown was overwhelmingly Latino. Southgate, the town on Watts’s east border, where the Spook Hunters had once patrolled, was now the home of a trio of rappers—Italian, Cuban and Cuban-Mexican—named for an imaginary piece of real estate they called Cypress Hill.
That crew’s 1991 debut opened on Pico Boulevard west of downtown, in the heart of the growing Central American and Mexican neighborhoods of Westlake and Pico-Union, with the hot hum of a police dispatch and a seething anti-pig rant over a steamy Albert King blues beat. Cypress Hill described yet another hole in the network society where English was broken, jobs were endangered, paranoia was palpable and the most advanced technology was in the killing hands of the cops. It was as accurate and specific a predictor of the riots as any record from Compton, South Central or Watts.
On KABC-TV Channel 7, white reporter Linda Mour had tried vainly to find looters who would agree to be interviewed. When she returned to the studio, she was asked by the studio anchor Harold Greene, “Did you get the impression that a lot of those people were illegal aliens?” Mour answered, “Yes.”29 Her botched assignment seemed to give assignment editors and Daryl Gates a new target: “illegal aliens.” By May 2, images of burning buildings had been replaced by images of Latinos facedown on the pavement in mass arrests—including plastic-tied pregnant women and mothers with confused toddlers at their sides. A thousand INS and Border Patrol agents set up command posts in Pico-Union and MacArthur Park.30
Gates’s new sweeps were supplemented by federal agents. In open violation of Special Order 40, a city order limiting local police intervention in federal immigration cases, agents rode shotgun with police as they swept through the ‘hoods looking for stolen merchandise. When stupefied residents could not produce receipts for anything in their apartment that looked new, the object—a bed, a television, a bicycle—was confiscated. One activist called it “reverse looting.”31
Cops and agents swept up anyone who happened be in the wrong place at the wrong time—day laborers on the corner, security guards trying to get to work, families at bus stops. Many were taken in for curfew violations. Many were never charged with any crimes. All now faced deportation without due process.
Between April 29 and May 4, 37 percent of the nearly 10,000 arrestees were Latino, more than any other racial group.32 The LAPD and the Sheriff’s office turned over 1,500 to the INS for deportation proceedings. Detainees were forced to sign voluntary deportation forms or face long prison terms and up to $20,000 in fines. At least seven hundred were deported. One desperate mother was certain her mentally retarded fourteen-year-old girl had been picked up by the INS and bused to Mexico.33
City Councilmember Mike Hernandez, who represented Pico-Union and Koreatown, was livid. “The response to me when I needed the National Guard to protect the people of this area and I needed to protect the businesses, protect the homes, is they gave me the Border Patrol. It was totally an insult,” he said. “To arrest people and put them into custody or to turn them over directly to INS for deportation and to do it simply because they look Latino does not make sense. That’s not what this country is about.”34
Yet right-wing race-baiters like Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Pat Buchanan had already picked up on Mour and Gates’s message and were using it to batter President George Bush and moderate Republicans, whom they accused of tolerating “illegal aliens.” On May 12, Bush belatedly claimed credit for the deportations, and claimed that a third of the first six thousand arrested were “illegal aliens,” a number that has never been substantiated. The backlash against immigrants culminated two years later in the passage of California’s appropriately-named Proposition 187, an initiative that banned all state services, including health care and education, to undocumented immigrants.
Two Speeches
By Friday, May 1, the National Guard had posted tanks at the entrances to Westwood Village. At the same time, all but two supermarkets and dozens of Black businesses in Compton had been burned to the ground, and Korean American-owned businesses had suffered nearly $400 million of the estimated $800 million to $1 billion in total property damages.35 When it was all over, 2,383 had been wounded and 53 were dead, most by gunfire.
Rodney King believed he should make some public statement. After the verdicts were read on April 29, Rodney King had returned home, and as the images of fires and the smiling faces of acquitted cops repeated in an endless loop, King had locked himself in his bedroom and raged at his television. “Why? Why? Why? Why?” he screamed. “Why are they beating me again?”36
On May 1, Lerman finally agreed to let King speak. King was still badly bruised, looked bewildered and broken and unbearably sad, once again a tragic symbol of a broken city. King’s voice was shaky and unstable, as if he could not close all the thoughts chasing around in his head.
I just um
I just want to say
you know can we can we all get along
can we can we get along
um
can we stop making it
making it horrible for
for the for the older people and and the and the kids?
Yet, fleetingly—perhaps when he thought of how he had been demonized in the trials or when his mind’s eye fixed on the blood spreading across the white shirt of Edward Song Lee—he rose toward the clarity of an unfathomable fury.
I love
you know I I’m neutral I love people every I love people of color
you know I I’m not uh I’m not like they
making me out
making me out to be
um we we’ve gotta we’ve gotta quit
we’ve got to quit
you know after all I mean
I can understand the
the first upsets of the first two hours after the verdict
but uh to go on to keep going on like like this and to
see the security guard shot on
on the ground
it uh-huh-hum
it’s it’s uh
it’s just not right
it’s just not right
because those people will will never go home to to their families again
and uh
I mean
please we can
we can get along here
we we all can get along
w
e just gotta
just gotta you know
I mean we’re all stuck here for a while
let’s
you know let’s let’s
let’s try to work it out
let’s try to be you
you know
Let’s try and work it out.
Later that evening, in a national address, President Bush told L.A. residents what they already knew, that American firepower was on the ground in their city—including FBI SWAT teams, U.S. Marshal riot control units and the Border Patrol. He said:
What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights. It’s not about the great cause of equality that all Americans must uphold. It’s not a message of protest. It’s been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple. And let me assure you, I will use whatever force is necessary to restore order . . .
Television has become a medium that often brings us together. But its vivid display of Rodney King’s beating shocked us. And the America it has shown us on our screens these last forty-eight hours has appalled us . . .
Let me say to the people saddened by the spectacle of the past few days, to the good people of Los Angeles, caught at the center of this senseless suffering: the violence will end, justice will be served, hope will return.
Thank you and may God bless the United States of America.
History’s Loop
The next day, L.A.’s Korean-American community marched thirty thousand strong—elderly, children, immigrants who no longer had livelihoods. They wore the white headbands of the young men of April 30. They banged Korean drums and chanted “No justice, no peace.” Their signs read JUSTICE FOR ALL PEOPLE, BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT OUR ENEMIES, and WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT WHEN WE REALLY NEED THEM? In the intervening years, some would become homeless, some would commit suicide, families would fall apart, many would lose their worldly possessions, but at that moment, they were taking a stand, showing what side they were on.
From the streets to the halls of power across the country, a loud chorus began calling for renewed investment in the inner cities. So, over the weekend, the right-wing went on the offensive. An executive memorandum by Heritage Foundation Vice President Stuart Butler was distributed to key Republicans and to the media. It praised Bush for being “wise and forceful” and set out the new terms of the debate over the nation’s urban crisis:
Bush next must address the anger and hopelessness that created the environment for the violence. In doing so he must first reject the phoney [sic] argument that what is needed is a “Marshall Plan” for urban America. Vast new public housing projects, even more generous welfare benefits for single mothers and another army of social welfare administrators will do nothing to improve America’s cities. Indeed it is such programs, which underpinned the Great Society and continue to be the basis of today’s “anti-poverty” strategy, that are the root cause of the problem.37
On cue, Republicans like Bush press secretary Marlin Fitzwater, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan and Housing Secretary Jack Kemp called the riots the result of failed liberal policies of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs, the final repudiation of the progressive urban agenda. When Congress opened its most important debate on urban policy since Carter set foot in the Bronx, the Heritage Foundation’s message dominated the discussion.
In fact, the Great Society programs that conservatives were blaming had long been gutted. During the Reagan-Bush era, federal spending on subsidized housing had been slashed by 82 percent, job training and employment by 63 percent, and community service and development program by 40 percent.38 Because Bush faced a difficult reelection battle, he agreed to sign an emergency $1 billion aid bill for the cities, largely in the form of disaster relief and summer jobs, an amount the nation’s mayors agreed would make little long-term difference. In fact, Bush had forced Congress to cut another $1 billion from the bill before agreeing to sign it. But after losing the election in November, he vetoed a much broader $30 billion bipartisan urban aid and tax bill. The politics of abandonment tied the Bronx of 1977 to the Los Angeles of 1992.
Some had called it an Uprising, others a Rebellion. The official term was “civil disturbance.” Korean Americans simply called it by the date it had begun, 4-2-9, Sa-l-Gu. Whatever the name, these days would mark the hip-hop generation’s passage through fire. After this, there would be the backlash.
In the park after the truce. Eazy E video shoot, 1993.
Photo © B+
17.
All in the Same Gang
The War on Youth and the Quest for Unity
And so our brief subject today is taken from the American Constitution and these words, “Toward a more perfect union.” Toward a more perfect union.
—Minister Louis Farrakhan
We are facing a potential bloodbath of teenage violence in years ahead that will be so bad, we’ll look back at the 1990s and say those were the good old days.
—Criminologist James Alan Fox
First there were the parties. With calm restored to the streets, spontaneous celebrations broke out across from Lynwood to Watts, South Central to Compton, Willowbrook to Inglewood, as rival gang sets tied their colors together, fired up the barbecues and broke bread. Parks that had once been exclusive turf were thrown open. Public spaces were public once again. The rapper Kam summed up the vibe in his epochal single, “Peace Treaty,” its hydraulic “Atomic Dog” bassline pumping a giddy joy:
I’ma always remember this
Because my niggas made the history books
And now the mystery looks a lot clearer
The man in the mirror’s got power
It’s now or never
More than ever
Black people got to stick together
For Los Angeles’s war-weary youths, the gang truce and the Uprising unleashed a burst of creative energy. Rappers like DJ Quik, Compton’s Most Wanted and Above The Law were making noise on the national charts. From the fiercely competitive freestyle ciphers at the Good Life Café on the westside to the intergenerational ferment of spoken word, free jazz and hip-hop in Leimert Park to the free floating parties at the Pharcyde Manor in Hancock Park, an underground was taking shape. At the Hip-Hop Shop on Melrose, b-boys and b-girls gathered to advance the elements. Graffiti writers like HEX and SLICK were engaged in a new age of style wars. Some were joining the surge of energy that was transforming street fashion and graphic design. A number of grassroots magazines, led by URB and Rap Sheet, captured the local scene and articulated a new West Coast aesthetic.
In the streets, gang members turned their attention to creating a future for themselves and their city.
Give Us the Hammer and Nails
Everyone seemed to agree that economic development was the key to saving Los Angeles. On May 2, Mayor Bradley named Peter Ueberroth, the head of the city’s 1984 Olympics, to be the head of a private-sector organization that would be called “Rebuild L.A.,” charged with mobilizing business, government, and community investment. It began assembling a board of directors of nearly one hundred city, corporate, Hollywood and community players, including the likes of Jim Brown, Danny Bakewell, Johnnie Cochran, Michael Ovitz and Edward James Olmos.
Ueberroth predicted that Rebuild L.A. would convince five hundred corporations from three continents to invest more than $1 billion in the city.1 Economic consultants told them that to begin to turn around the inner-city, they would need to raise $6 billion and create more than 90,000 jobs.2 But by any measure, the organization was a complete failure. Ueberroth stepped down from the leadership after only a year, leaving the organization in disarray. Over the next four years, Rebuild L.A. raised less than $300 million. Only half of the thirty-two supermarkets that the organization had been promised were actually built. Vons Corporation had pledged to build two stores but opened only one, in the supermarket-starved city of Compton, and sold it as soon as it could. Rebuild L.A. was, in Mike Davis’s words, “the cruelest joke of all.”3
Among other things, the $3.7 billion plan for inner-city investment called for three new hospitals and forty additional health care centers to be built and the replacement of welfare programs with manufacturing plants. It demanded increased lighting of city streets, $20 million in business loans and community job creation, new books and accelerated learning programs in inner-city schools, and community policing that incorporated former gang members. “Give us the hammer and the nails,” the document read, “and we will rebuild the city.”
For a brief period before and after their 1971 truce, the Bronx gangs had turned to the government for relief as they sought to turn themselves around. But two decades later, this generation of gangs would have no Great Society and no Mayor Lindsay. The infrastructure of aid and rehabilitation had been replaced by Bush’s “thousand points of light,” which usually took the form of do-for-self, faith-based grass-roots nationalism or the trickle-down charities of the anything-goes, everything-is-for-sale marketplace.
To be sure, the new generation was not interested in government promises. Kam put it in the Nation of Islam’s terms: “Less government relief checks, more labor.” They readily admitted that they would need to do their part to make peace work. “We’ve got to show people that this eye-for-an-eye stuff is out the door,” Charles “Q-Bone” Rachal of the Five-Duce Broadway Crips said. “But we have to do it ourselves. All that hand-out stuff from the ‘60s was messed up, and those people who did it messed up. We’re the generation of the ‘90s, and we’ve got to show action.”4