This story is about how we learn to not see, how we are conditioned to ignore the harsh realities that structure our surrounding world. It shares key moments on my journey to greater awareness about racial injustice, moving from a world of whiteness to the ability to recognize patterns of social exclusion and do something about them.

In April of 1992, I was living in Prairie Village, Kansas. We had moved there years earlier from Finchville, Kentucky, a small farming town on the outskirts of Louisville. We moved for my father’s job, so that he could lead a Baptist Church in Kansas City, Missouri and apply the pastoral skills he had just refined in seminary.

Prarie Village was no Kansas City. It was a white, wealthy suburb with low-crime and nationally recognized public schools. Despite weekly journeys into the big city for church, my childhood consciousness was totally disconnected from the realities of Kansas City proper. In my first nine years of life, I have nearly no memory of recognizing homelessness, poverty, or other forms of social exclusion. Instead I was learning basic mastery over reading, writing, math and science at Belinder elementary, a school with hundreds of students, dozens of teachers, yet only a handful of people of color in all. As I recall it, my universe in those years was almost exclusively white.

Given this background, what do I remember about the LA riots? What memories do I have the spontaneous uprising that drove national news and congressional hearings for months? Almost none at all. I have a vague memory that it happened. And that’s about it. Read More…

In 1990, I organized a grassroots coalition against redlining and for community reinvestment. It was led mostly by women of color and a few very exceptional men.  That was my job.  We were called Communities for Accountable Reinvestment.

We did direct actions against banks, forced the Federal Reserve to hold hearings in the community, we negotiated with bank presidents, and we even created our own people’s bank, called the South Central People’s Federal Credit Union.  We were, as my now-deceased comrade Clyde Johnson used to say, a raggedy coalition of determined folks.

All this occurred in the wake of the Savings & Loan crisis when the policy solution was a humungous bailout that favored the banks and hurt the people.  We used the facts of that narrative to teach people that the government, aka the people, subsidized the banking industry with low-cost loans, insured deposits, and yes, when things got tough, bailouts for the biggest.  For those reasons, we asserted, banking should be considered a right.

This all made sense to our members who had never received their proper measure of fairness or investment from banks that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 (CRA) promised, but never delivered.  But communicating the painful consequences of financial discrimination to others –– to the press, to politicians, to people who didn’t suffer discrimination –– remained an uphill battle.  “Banks are businesses,” they would say.  And as our country veered neo-liberally towards deregulation, we were constantly reminded to leave business to the business people and banking to the bankers.

And then the riots happened.

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Mama Toya

On April 27, 1992, my mother had to make probably one of the most difficult decisions in her life—take my grandmother off life-support. I was 8 years-old and I remember standing in the hallway, outside Mama Toya’s room because the doctors and nurses said I was too young to see her. Her long battle with Colon Cancer was finally over, a painful disease that transformed a vibrant and resilient woman into a frail 40-pound shell of a person. She was finally at peace. The pillar of our family left this earth as Los Angeles was at the brink of burning in flames.
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Heck of an anniversary to mark, this 20th year since the riots or civil unrest if you prefer jumped off that day on April 29 after the not guilty verdicts came in from Simi Valley.  Pretty much the only thing I knew about Simi Valley then was the year before the Ronald Reagan Library had been opened out there.  So when the trial of the four cops who beat Rodney King was switched to Simi, you had the feeling no good, from the black community’s standpoint, was going to come from such a change of venue.

But it wasn’t just the verdicts in the King beating, by happenstance caught on surreptitious video by George Holliday, that stoked the maelstrom to be.  Echoes of today and the shooting death of the unarmed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida by self-appointed neighborhood watcher George Zimmerman, there had been another shooting of an unarmed black teenager before siegu [Hangul for 4/29], April 29.

On the morning of March 16, 1991, 15-year-old high school student Latasha Harlins stopped in the Empire Liquor Market Deli on Figueroa near Manchester to buy a bottle of orange juice.  She put the juice in her backpack, holding the money for the item as she came to the counter.  The 51-year-old Soon Ja Du, a Korean national, behind the counter assumed the girl was trying to steal from her store and they got into a heated argument.  Du grabbed at Latasha’s backpack and the girl struck her.  Latasha then threw the orange juice bottle on the counter and turned to leave, whereupon Du shot her in the back of the head killing here instantly.  Ultimately Judge Joyce Karlin would essentially exonerate Du, convicted of manslaughter but given probation and no jail time   Karlin faced a recall that failed – years later she would go on to serve on the Manhattan Beach City Council for two terms — and Empire was firebombed during the unrest.

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When the verdict on the Rodney King trial was announced on April 29, 1992, I was 6 years old. My family lived in a neighborhood that bordered a lot of different areas that went up in flames. Koreatown, Hollywood Boulevard and Mid-Wilshire. Neighbors helped a fireman water down the local camera store, Samy’s Camera, just a block away from my house.

Samy’s Camera up in flames – taken from SgtWyatt on YouTube.

It’s difficult to write about how the unrest affected me as a child, I was too young to understand what was going on. My sister, 8 years old at the time, remembers us watching the news and getting scared to see places not far from us getting looted. I still recall the sirens, the smoke in the sky, the countless burnt-down buildings and hearing only the unfamiliar word ‘riots’ to explain them.

My father remembers the time well. The snipers on the roofs of Hollywood Blvd, the arrival of the National Guard, the realization that “LA was burning down” while driving home past curfew and seeing the city from the top of a hill. The sadness he felt for Rodney King, for the African-American community and for those in the streets “attacking shops in their own neighborhoods because they couldn’t do anything else. All that anger and nowhere to put it. It brought tears to my eyes.”

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