“Anarchy was occurring before our very eyes.”

A history of the LA riots written in 1993..

The story of how the worst American riot in this century began is a little like the story of Rodney King’s beating: By now it has been twisted into a series of half-truths and misconceptions. Just as King was not simply a speeding motorist who was beaten after a routine traffic stop, so, too, the analyses of the roots of the Los Angeles riot require some revision. The official version runs roughly as follows: Angry blacks, indignant over a suburban jury’s decision on April 29, 1992, to acquit four LAPD cops in the King beating, started the riot by pulling white trucker Reginald Denny from the cab of his truck and then beating him brutally to avenge the King beating. The subsequent riot was bred out of decades of racism and police brutality and nourished by the enraging conditions of ghetto life: unemployment, poverty, family breakdown, gangs, drugs, welfare and Reagan-era cutbacks in aid. When it was over, more than 50 people lay dead, 2,300 had been injured and $1 billion in property had been damaged.

No one doubts that deprivation and bitterness fill many neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles or that outrage at the cops’ acquittal set the stage for the riot. But there are two core premises to the official version of the riot that are wrong in some instances and exaggerated in others. The first is that the grim conditions of South Central and the surprise acquittals combined to make a riot inevitable. The second is that the Los Angeles riot was fundamentally a massive protest over social injustice. Many liberal commentators, as well as prominent black and Latino Angelenos, now insist that the riot should be referred to as a “rebellion” or an “uprising.” The men accused of beating, trampling and robbing Reginald Denny have thus been dubbed the “L.A. Four”–a moniker usually reserved for political martyrs.

The true story of the riot is more disquieting. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it began in one of South Central’s better-off neighborhoods. Avenging Rodney King was only superficially present in the minds of those who started the riot at the now infamous intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues. And the young men who nearly killed Reginald Denny were distinguished neither by their notoriety as thugs (as some conservatives would have it) nor by their militancy (as some liberals suggest).