This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles, California riots, although many called it a rebellion or an uprising. I was living there when it happened. And yes, buildings very nearby my residence were set on fire, and yes, it was a bit unsettling for me and my roommate. I am glad to have lived through it, and what I experienced was something that I hope other people never have to go through. Again, it is a rather unsettling experience.
Living in Los Angeles, California in the mid to late 1980’s as a single African American male was an absolute challenge, and an absolute challenge for me too. I drove a car back in those days; I don’t own one now even though I maintain a current driver’s license, but I did drive back then. And it was a real challenge to constantly encounter the local law enforcement stopping me often while I drove. It got to a point for me to consider not owning an automobile anymore; it just didn’t seem worth the hassle that I was going through with the local police. But I wasn’t the only one, and this built in a strange mental occurrence to my thinking about what this was and why it kept happening to me. And knowing that I wasn’t the only one, I saw my city become more agitated and aggressive toward each other.
And then, in the early 1990’s there was an African American man who was being beaten by police after being finally being stopped following a high-speed freeway chase that ended on a residential neighborhood street. The driver of the car, an African American man, was defensive toward police after exiting his car, and the police physically beat him on the spot. A nearby resident across the street from the scene captured this police beating on his video camera, and the video was shown on the local news, which quickly went to national news, which quickly went to worldwide news. The video was stunning to watch, and it affected people everywhere. Afterward in Los Angeles, many of the people wanted to feel a sense of justice for this beaten man. But the courts and their verdicts did not assign quilt to the police involved, and the news of the verdict sent many of the people of the city into exploding emotions of anger and fear.
My roommate was at work that day in Hollywood, we both worked at the same place. I was off from work that day, the day when the riot began. I was looking at the local news on television; I was appalled at what I saw, but I knew why so many people were so angry with the verdict. It wasn’t the verdict itself that made so many people react in anger; it had also been the many decades of turmoil that people of color and the city officials and departments had with each other that saw no sign of ever having an equitable existence with each other. My roommate called me at home on the phone and asked me to come and pick her up from work that day, and soon. I said of course, and while I had been watching the local news on television that morning, I had not yet been outside the house. I got in my car and drove down my short street to the main street arteries to turn south. When I made my turn and headed south, I was met with one of the most astonishingly awful views that I have ever witnessed. The entire sky to the south was black with smoke from building fires; it was as though there were the most menacing storm clouds that one could imagine were upon you. It was an absolute spectacle to see; it brought the reality of the anger being expressed by so many people into a sharp focus for me.
I drove a bit south and then turned right and headed west on the street toward where my roommate and I worked. It was surreal, to have the sky so dark from the smoke of burning buildings on my left, and a still clear sky on my right. I arrived at the place we worked, and I went inside and found my roommate and tried to tell her we were about to see outside. She had not been outside yet, and when we got into my car and headed east back to the house, she too was astonished at what she saw when she looked south. The city was on fire, and there was no doubt about it in our minds. We both began to talk and plan on preparing for what might happen over the next few hours or even days at that point. We both wanted to live through this horrible event indeed.
The violence and rioting did reach our neighborhood the next night, and the nights after that too. At one point, we needed food supplies in the house, so during one afternoon I volunteered to go out and get us some food. It was a fairly short walk around the corner from our house in Hollywood to get to a large supermarket at an intersection of two main city avenues. I walked across the intersection to where the supermarket was, and it looked strange.
The employees had stacked up many pallets of canned goods up against the front windows of the store, and the windows were very large and went very high up on the building. It was eerie to say the least, to not be able to enter the store immediately; there were employees and guards at the narrowed front entrance to the store that spoke to every person before they could enter. When they spoke to me, they told me that in case the large front store windows were broken out by the rioting, people and goods would receive lees damage from the stacked pallets of cans. The inside of the store was mostly dark; it was strange to see it like that. The employees stressed that we get in and get out of the store as quickly as possible as it could close at any second. It was probably the strangest shopping experience that I have had, trying to get items in a large, darkened supermarket as fast as I could. When I saw the faces of the other shoppers in the store as I shopped, I did see some panicked looks on some of them. Again, it was a surreal experience.
Walking back home with the food, I witnessed all manner of law enforcement vehicles and Army vehicles on the streets. It looked like a war zone to say the least out on the streets where I lived during the riots. One night, a row of stores was set on fire just on the other side of the property where I and my roommate lived. As bad as that was, one of the stores was a shoe store that was going up in flames, and the thick black smoke came and settled on our house, and the houses around us. We lived in the small old style Hollywood cabanas, not very big, but two people could live there just fine. There were four of these cabana-type dwellings that stood alone but close-by ours. And just on the other sides of the cabanas were the stores, including the shoe store. The smoke from the fires were so thick at one point, we had to close up all the windows of the house to protect ourselves. I and my roommate went outside of our house when the smoke became very thick and noticed burning debris and sparks landing on the roof of our home from the stores on fire next to our property.
Thankfully, after a long while we did finally hear the fire department arrive and deal with the fires next to our property. All of the little cabana-type homes we were living in survived the unsettling event. But the riots in Los Angeles continued on for a couple of more days, it was a very intense time. Me and my roommate stayed at home for a few days, and watched things unfold on the local news on television. We watched and I was personally astonished to see the auto parts store that I went to for parts for my car looted during the daytime, caught on one of the many camera views captured from a news helicopter, and then watch it be set alight that same evening and burn brightly in fire, again with a camera view captured from a helicopter. After the riots were declared officially over, I took a walk around my Hollywood neighborhood and found so much destruction and burned-out buildings. Some of these burned-out buildings were places that I used to shop at, but no more. So much hit me emotionally during that time; there was so much negativity among so many people living in the city at that point.
I had moved to Los Angeles to share the musicality that I possessed with other great musicians there, and to share my technical experience with the great technicians there as well. I think that I accomplished this on some levels, and I was glad to interact with the many different people from all strata to accomplish some really great things in the entertainment business. While we did these things together, it was never about the color of our skin, it was always about the art that we were trying to make and the technology that we used to make things brilliant and joyful for people.
I am glad to have survived what I will call the Los Angeles uprising, because that is what it was in the end to me. Certainly, it was the sense of so many people of color’s anger rising up, but it was also the sense of people of color rising up for hope to change relations between people in not only the city, but relations between people in the world for the better. Let us all hope for a brighter future and let us hope that there will never be another level of negativity expressed by so many people in a place known as the City of Angels.