Rodney King and the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992

by

Tyron P. Woods

• LAST MODIFIED: 20 August 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0138

Introduction

After the acquittal of the Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King during a traffic stop the year prior, the black community in South Central Los Angeles rose up, with the riots lasting almost a week between 29 April and 4 May 1992. Black people led smaller uprisings around North America protesting the same kind of racist violence in their own cities. While this bibliographic entry features scholarly treatment of the King Uprising, it also necessarily includes documentary films, references to popular music, and contributions from journalists, community members, and law enforcement. This diverse pool of voices reflects both the wide-ranging impact of this case on post–civil rights era Los Angeles and the centrality of black historical struggle to how the United States sees itself. As such, this case illustrates the manner in which the various topics and events of black experience become crucial terrain on which the national narrative is contested, revised, or fortified. One indication of the fault line that blackness represents is that the events in Los Angeles are described as “riots,” “uprisings,” “revolt,” “revolution,” or “rebellion,” with these terms sometimes used interchangeably, but just as frequently deployed conceptually to denote a particular analysis. Since African American studies encompasses a diversity of conceptual approaches to this case, all of these terms are used within the field. The field is consistent in viewing the King Uprisings in terms of the context of black historical struggle in the post–civil rights era. The videotaped beating incident itself, however, stands out in numerous ways that have not yet been adequately analyzed. The video archive of antiblack violence has expanded dramatically since the King case through the ubiquity of cellphone digital recording technology, 21st-century social media platforms, and a criminal justice system impervious to change. As with acquittal of the LAPD officers in the King case, the digital archive that is its legacy has been mostly ineffectual in curbing police impunity. To the contemporary black movements confronting this persistent violence, police behavior in the 1990s now seems quaintly barbaric compared with the brutal efficiency of shoot-first policing over the subsequent three decades, given that the LAPD consciously avoided using firearms against King. As historical perspective on the King case grows, further research will need to address these and other shortcomings in the literature. Pointing to California’s race and class demography, the larger corpus asserts that the King Uprisings were multicultural. This bibliography on the “multicultural riots” stands adjacent to the bibliography of black revolt. The emblematic literature on the King Uprisings can also be distinguished in terms of how the case appears throughout the academic disciplines as an object of knowledge, and how it is often read through popular culture, namely the early 1990s conflation of gangsta rap music with the predicament of black urban youth. Lastly, the many direct stakeholders in the Rodney King case cannot be ignored: in addition to the variety of ethnographic studies of black residents in South Central LA, King himself published a book on his life, as did the lead LAPD officer, the community-based black radio station KTLN-FM, and the Los Angeles Times journalists who reported daily on the uprising.

Black Historical Struggle

An African American studies approach to the Rodney King Uprisings places the events of 1992 within the historical context of the ongoing black liberation movement. Illustrative texts in this category include examinations of earlier eras, and forms, of black revolt; theoretical interpretations of blackness based on this history, or in reference to 1992 specifically; studies of the preconditions for revolt created by racial capitalism and state power generally; and work by the critical race theory movement in legal scholarship emergent at the time of the King Uprisings. Baldwin 1966 and Himes 1986 each provide classic interpretations of the conditions that yoked the 1950s and 1960s uprisings to 1992. Fanon 2005 provides a trenchant diagnosis of colonialism in Africa that continues to inform how African American studies discerns the complexities of black revolt and self-destruction under racial regime. Horne 1997 analyzes the race and class dynamics of the Watts uprising that augurs 1992, while Marable 1983 shows how modest civil rights gains foundered on the shoals of capitalism, lending a crucial analysis of the political economic foundations for the King Uprisings. Patterson 1982 and Wynter 1994, by contrast, provide essential treatments of slaveholding culture, with the latter directly responding to the 1992 uprising by calling out the black revolution’s unfulfilled transformation in knowledge production. Massiah 1986 documents the state’s punitive orientation toward both radical black self-determination and average working-class black communities alike, a key piece of the 1992 story, as it has been the state’s role to take over antiblack policing from everyday white people during the post–civil rights era. The early 1990s also marked the emergence of critical race theory as a coherent and influential voice not only in the legal academy where it originated, but also in wider policy debates on race and distributive justice. Critical race theorists responded to the King Uprisings in its immediate aftermath with comprehensive diagnoses of US structural racism and, in the process, left testament to the severe limitations of the post–civil rights legal framework for redressing injustice. Gordon 2012 and Gibson 2012 explain how 1992 fits within the transhistorical process of configuring blacks as “problem people,” and how the stultifying grip of poverty, along with the enduring criminalization of the entire black community designed to cover it up, has only further deepened twenty years on from the King Uprisings. Browne 2015 also situates the King case within this longer process, with particular attention to how black people invert the many forms of surveillance that seek to control them in order to resist the gaze and monitor the surveillors. Well into the twenty-first century, over three decades after the King Uprising, efforts to redress the harms of policing on black communities, including curbing law enforcement impunity, remain ongoing and still tend to arc back to the events of 1992, as Davis 2018 explains.

• Baldwin, James. “A Report from Occupied Territory.” The Nation, 11 July 1966.

  Baldwin recounts the essential violence of policing in Harlem in the 1960s. “A Report” is reproduced in the volume The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (Boston: Beacon, 2021).

• Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

  DOI: 10.1215/9780822375302

  Browne tracks the historical attempt to control black mobility from slavery to the present, showing how ubiquitous surveillance technologies today have been shaped by racial formation.

• Davis, Angela J., ed. Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment. New York: Vintage, 2018.

  The contributors to this volume critique the role of racism through each stage of the criminal justice process.

• Denver University Law Review. “Colloquy—Racism in the Wake of the Los Angeles Riots.” Denver Law Review 70.2 (1993).

  Convened in the immediate aftermath of the King Uprisings, and with contributions from A. Leon Higginbotham, Jerome McCristal Culp Jr., Deborah Waire Post, Kimberle Crenshaw, Gary Peller, and Anthony Cook, among others, the Denver Law Review Colloquy addresses the “Los Angeles Riots” as both event and structure, drawing attention to the invisibility of racist violence throughout the United States. and the failures of law in protecting communities of color and in remedying the harms of racism.

• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove, 2005.

  Originally published in Presence Africaine in 1961, Fanon’s classic anticolonialist analysis explains the psychological trauma of racial oppression, the ongoing dispossession of the colonial order long after colonialism has formally ended in most places, and the indirect violence of being fundamentally alienated from beingness.

• Gibson, Nigel. “20 Years after the L.A. Riots, Revisiting the Rationality of Revolt.” Truthout, 12 May 2012.

  Gibson considers the applicability of Fanon’s analysis fifty years after the first publication of Wretched and twenty years after the King Uprisings. Gibson argues that Fanon’s insights regarding the colonial order’s atmosphere of violence where everyone must live on edge is very much in effect in Los Angeles and elsewhere in black America.

• Gordon, Lewis. “Of Illicit Appearance: The L.A. Riots/Rebellion as a Portent of Things to Come.” Truthout, 12 May 2012.

  Gordon reconsiders the King Uprisings through the lens of W. E. B. Du Bois and Fanon. Gordon explains how Du Bois’s and Fanon’s insights on visibility and violence apply to Los Angeles and black America in the twenty-first century.

• Himes, Chester. If He Hollers Let Him Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1986.

  Himes’s classic novel narrates how white supremacy, antiblack masculinity, and capitalist exploitation conspire in violent ways against the black worker. The novel’s protagonist is a naval shipyard worker in Los Angeles during World War II who discovers the indistinction between racist discrimination at the workplace and the fears it spawns in his imagination. Originally published in 1945, the novel presages Fanon’s analysis of the colonial order and its manifestation in 1992 Los Angeles.

• Horne, Gerald. Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. New York: Da Capo, 1997.

  Horne’s history of the 1965 Watts uprising analyzes the state-civil society structure, including the black disunity wrought by the intra-race class divide, against which the black rebellion took its stand in 1965 and in 1992. Famously detailed in his historical analyses, Horne’s study of Watts provides an uncanny blueprint for interpreting the King Uprisings almost twenty-five years later.

• Marable, Manning. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. Boston: South End Press, 1983.

  Marable follows the lead of Walter Rodney’s anticolonial study How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1972) to explain why civil rights reform is impotent to overcome the negative effects of capitalist development on black communities. This analysis is especially pertinent to Los Angeles in 1992, as neoliberal capitalism shapes the prevailing policy prescriptions for racial inequality in the post–civil rights era.

• Massiah, Louis, dir. The Bombing of Osage Avenue. Philadelphia: Scribe Video Center, 1986.

  Cowritten and narrated by Toni Cade Bambara, Massiah’s documentary of the Philadelphia Police Department’s attack on the MOVE house in black Philadelphia is a powerful archive of state violence against black communities and indicates that the King Uprisings were responding to a wider political program of repression that took many different forms.

• Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

  Published in the same period as the attack on MOVE and Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, Patterson’s comparative study of slavery across human societies is instructive for ascertaining the features of slaveholding culture well after the formal institution of chattel slavery has ended.

• Wynter, Sylvia. “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1.1 (1994): 1–17.

  Wynter’s call to arms excoriates the Western academy for failing to translate the black revolution on the streets in the 1960s, and again in Los Angeles in 1992, into a fundamental transformation in knowledge.