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The 20th Anniversary of Rodney King's Beating: Reflections of Everyday Angelenos
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On March 3, 1991, 20 years ago today, a black male Los Angeles resident named Rodney King was stopped by the LAPD for speeding. Four officers brutally beat him, and, in one of the first modern instances of citizen journalism, the whole thing was caugh
I was in college at the time and I had a break between classes. I walked into the cafeteria to grab a snack and chitchat with the cashier. Her name was Melinda and she was a white woman in her mid 50’s. When she saw me, she didn’t greet me
I was a young boy in East Los Angeles. We were dismissed early from school and even had it canceled due to air pollution and risk of the riots expanding. I watched a little of it on TV, but mostly used the time off to play vid
I was working in the library system at UCLA on the first day of the uprising. I'm not sure whether they closed the campus, or just started advising people to go home. There were ashes in the air as I crossed the quad. I took side roads through the
I was a junior at Los Angeles High School when the story broke with the videos of Rodney King's beating on television. The next day, my English teacher, one of my favorite teachers, who happened to be only a few years into his second career afte
I remember sitting in a friend's living room—there we were: three mixed (father black, mother white) kids, two Persian kids, two black kids, and some of our parents. We watched the news, watched the rioting, insanity of the worst and humanit
I was 10 when the Rodney King beating occurred. I remember it went viral before we'd ever heard that term. It was everywhere. You couldn't turn on the TV without seeing him curled up on the ground, trying to cover his head from the blows. As
When the Rodney King beating was first aired on TV, it was horrible. I was a student at an all girls Catholic high school in Hollywood. My friends and I already felt that African American youth were targeted. If you went to the movies in Westwood, the
The Rodney King riots occurred during my first year of teaching in Compton. I was attending night class at CSU Dominguez Hills when someone came in and told us the campus was closing due to the riots and that we needed to go home immediately. But this
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