Ivan Monk wondered if he was the only one who got the joke. Standing next to his mother and sister at the groundbreaking of the future shopping complex at the corner of Florence and Normandie in South Central Los Angeles, the private eye remembered the maelstrom this intersection had been not so long ago.
It was one of those significant moments in time, forever etched in the deep cells of his brain. Like the day and the hour he heard his father had died or when he was in grade school and a tearful Mrs. Rogers came in and told the class that President Kennedy had just been shot.
Wednesday afternoon, April 29, 1992 was one such moment. All of Los Angeles had its collective ear glued to radios a few minutes past three as the sixty-five-year-old forewoman of the jury on the live broadcast read the not guilty verdict.
The incredible decision was delivered by a jury of ten whites, one Latina and one Filipina who supported the claim of the LAPD officers on trial for use of excessive force against Black motorist, Rodney King. The four cops were captured in a hazy and brutal cinema verite as they beat the living shit out of King on a Lake View Terrace street in the San Fernando Valley.
Monk stared open-jawed at the radio, his secretary Delilah gripping his arm, hard, in disbelief. Soon they both got that look on their faces one got from being Black in America. That look that said, Yeah, we been given the short end again, so what’s new.
The city raged red with blood and fury. Reginald Denny, a white working-class guy, a union truck driver, was pulled from his cab at Florence and Normandie and senselessly beaten and shotgunned in the leg by young Black men venting their anger in frustrated and futile fashion. And four other Black people got him to safety.
But having no established avenue of redress—indeed what had the incredible verdict delivered from the white suburb of Ventura’s Simi Valley said to them?—the fellaheen sought justice in the streets. Subsequently, in the federal trial of the cops, two of the four were found guilty. And a city short on money and hope was momentarily spared another conflagration.
But the fact that now Monk stood at Florence and Normandie at a groundbreaking site, a symbolic gesture of rebuilding at one of the flashpoints for the riots that ripped his hometown, was not what he considered the joke.
“Isn’t that Tina over there next to the mayor, Ivan?” his mother said, disrupting his reverie.
Monk glanced at the dais. The mayor adjusted a sheaf of papers held in his thick hands as he stood at the portable podium. On either side of the solid built man in the blue serge suit were folding chairs. Various city officials, business people and some community leaders sat in them or milled about. Councilwoman Tina Chalmers, an African American woman who represented this district his mother lived in, and Monk’s old flame, sat on the stage talking to an older white man in an expensive-looking gray and black-flecked double-breasted suit.
“Yeah, that’s her, Mom.” Monk studied the man Tina talked with.
He’d only seen him on television and in news photos previously, but you’d have to have been in orbit on a space station not to have seen or heard of Maxfield O’Day. After the uprising, as the rubble and rhetoric piled high, O’Day emerged as the silver-haired man on the white charger. Lawyer, businessman, developer, political insider. A Los Angeles mover and shaker of the first order who played an active role in the election of one of his boardroom peers as the current mayor of Los Angeles.
Maxfield O’Day was appointed, some wags say anointed, by the mayor and the City Council to head the official rebuilding efforts of the city. His task was to pull a consortium of city and business people together in an effort to infuse South Central and Pico Union with new business ventures. “To massage capital, to give it confidence in doing business in the inner city,” O’Day was fond of saying. Particularly when there was a reporter around. Of course, Monk concluded, if that meant being lax on things like environmental laws, undercutting the minimum wage, and gutting California’s workers’ comp program, well, big money was so insecure.•
From Violent Spring, by Gary Phillips. Reprinted by permission of Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press. Copyright © 1994 by Gary Phillips.
