Can we all get along?” Rodney King asked during the press conference he called in response to the Los Angeles riots of April 29, 1992. The riots flamed up when the four police officers who’d brutally kicked and beaten King unconscious on the highway were caught on videotape and yet acquitted of assault charges. Gary Phillips’s superb debut crime novel, Violent Spring, set in the year following the riots—a book whose 30th birthday is this year—vividly calls to my mind the causal chain of those events. But as I began this piece a week before the 2024 election, the book pulled into sharp focus for me the global crises of wars, economic inequities, homelessness, climate change, and, in the United States, the vulnerability of democracy itself. Since we cannot be past January 6, 2021, and its violent rioters and their reasons for perpetrating the first Capitol insurrection, the question “Can we all get along?” is sadly now beyond Pollyanna.
In 1990, many of us also witnessed Nelson Mandela finally freed from apartheid South Africa imprisonment after 27 years. He was elected president in 1994 and called for a truth and reconciliation commission, even after suffering outrageous abuses, along with all Black people in his country. Could the very meaning of truth, justice, and forgiveness be conceivable in our times?
I’m a Los Angeles native who was here for the ’92 riots, and the last time I relived that period was while visiting the excellent 25th-anniversary exhibition at the California African American Museum, curated by Tyree Boyd-Pates and titled No Justice, No Peace: LA 1992 after a slogan associated with the riots. Visitors traveled in time as they walked through the rooms, starting with the second wave of the Great Migration in the 1940s after World War II and moving through the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots; the Bloody Christmas of 1951; the legislative achievements of the civil rights movement; the 1965 Watts Rebellion; the 1973 election of L.A.’s first Black mayor, Tom Bradley; and the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs police raids. The exhibit acknowledged that Black people continue to be systematically held down by unequal housing practices and discrimination to this day.
Near the beginning of Phillips’s novel, the dead body of a Korean man is found at the cross streets of Florence and Normandie in South Central Los Angeles, where the riots had started the year before. My thoughts went straight to 1991, not far from there, when a 15-year-old Black girl, Latasha Harlins, was shot in the back of the head by Korean store owner Soon Ja Du over a bottle of orange juice Harlins hadn’t actually stolen. Du walked with five years’ probation—another catalyst for the 1992 riots.
The painful history of the conflicts that led to the riots is one that started well before the acquittal of those police officers, and the tensions that came to a head continued in encounters, both large and personal, across the region. I lived in L.A.’s Koreatown in 1987. On a normal errand to the corner video store, with a purse so small it could hold only keys and a phone today, I was confronted with the angry demand of a Korean owner that I hand over my purse before entering. In response, I held the purse high and asked tersely how a video could ever fit in it. He called the police, and I waited, simmering in a righteous anger, only for two Black female cops to arrive, who looked at him and then at me and shook their heads while hearing both sides. I walked out with them as we said our knowing, tired, but friendly goodbyes. My daughter’s father, who is white and with whom I was living at the time, experienced daily harassment like this through my eyes, and he was in constant disbelief. We left the area for West Hollywood, where I was able to rest a little more easily for some time.
In 1992, I was commissioned to teach poetry at a cultural center in Manhattan Beach, in Los Angeles County. I ventured onto the main street of town just once. The South Bay whites’ reaction to a Black woman walking into a shop to buy juice was frightening: If looks could kill, I would have been dead. After that, weekly, I packed my own lunch and juice to bring to class and never left the cultural center’s grounds.
By the early 2000s, my dad had a place an hour south in Newport Beach, where racist incidents were so constant and numerous that my mother refused to come there on weekends after a while. The N-word was scratched into their car. People left notes at the condo door saying that my parents were bringing down the property values of the neighborhood. But to me, the worst of these hellish experiences happened in 2010 while walking across the street with my father. I was holding his arm because, at the time, his leg had been injured. We had the green light and were walking carefully, my eyes alert to any danger, but a teenage white girl in her car attempted with fierce intention to run us down. As I grabbed my dad to run, I saw the glee in her eyes. And I was reminded of her early on Election Day, November 5, when reading the back of the truck parked in front of me on Broadway in downtown L.A. that said, “Redneck, F-bomb Mom, Fuck Snowbirds, Now Hiring Sluts.” Would the driver of this truck try to run me over too, or was I just being judgmental?
In Violent Spring, Phillips beautifully sketches the minute details of L.A.’s neighborhoods as Black PI protagonist Ivan Monk drives the city’s streets, while also portraying the sharp divisions in cultures and opinions in a single county, divisions now made perfectly clear for this nation, following the wave of conservative turnovers of governments across the globe, including ours. With so many of us in dread of losing our most basic rights, will we still find it possible to keep our hearts open?•
Join us on November 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Phillips will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Naomi Hirahara to discuss Violent Spring. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
