(Los Angeles) The beating of a black motorist, Rodney King, by four white police officers and the acquittal of the latter was at the origin of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, but this deadly violence also revealed the tensions which had been brewing for a long time between the different ethnic minorities of the megalopolis.
Posted at 1:20 p.m.
At the time, migrants of Korean origin and their many businesses had been the main target of the rioters, many of whom came from disadvantaged black neighborhoods in South Los Angeles.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an upsurge in violence against Asian people, representatives of black and Korean communities in Los Angeles will come together this week to commemorate the victims of these riots, more of 60 dead (largely black and Latino) and about 2,000 injured.
They will also benefit from the 30and anniversary of this sad event to reflect together on how to prevent it from happening again.
“There is nothing romantic, nothing seductive, nothing beautiful in the commemoration of what happened during these six days” of violence, underlines J. Edgar Boyd, pastor of First AME, the oldest African church. -American City.
“But what we agreed to do is take that ugliness and the mistakes made at the time and embrace them as real,” he told AFP.
Raiders
Although Los Angeles prides itself on being one of the most cosmopolitan cities there is, the various ethnic and cultural communities often remain confined to islets that rub shoulders without ever really mixing even though they are only a few kilometers.
In 1992, after the acquittal of the four police officers who had beaten Rodney King, urban violence first broke out in the South Los Angeles district, at the time overwhelmingly inhabited by very poor black populations and where many grocery stores and small businesses belonged to Korean immigrants.
Gangs of looters had quickly taken their acts of vandalism and arson further north to Koreatown. There, they had come up against armed Koreans, who opened fire on the rioters from the roof of their shops, images that had gone around the world.
The cost of the destruction had reached around a billion dollars, nearly half of which was at the expense of Korean Americans.
For Edward Chang, a professor at the University of California at Riverside, it was the “first multi-ethnic riots” in the United States.
“Poor people fight the poor”
In 1992, ethnic tensions simmered in the South Los Angeles neighborhood after two black shoppers were killed by Korean shopkeepers in the months before the riots.
Neither the murderer of Lee Arthur Mitchell nor that of Latasha Harlins, who died at only 15, had spent a single day in prison. The feeling of impunity was added to a resentment fueled by very marked economic and cultural differences between the two groups.
“It wasn’t necessarily about deliberately attacking the businesses of Korean Americans… There was a desire to react to the denial of justice that was perpetually imposed on the black community,” said Pastor Boyd.
Many protesters and rioters, however, had the impression, justified or not, that Koreans were benefiting economically from a neighborhood where they did not reside and where they did not have the concern to reinvest their earnings, he continues.
According to David Ryu, a teenager at the time of the riots and who has since become the first elected official of Korean origin to sit on the city council, the violence was not so much the expression of a “conflict between Koreans and blacks”. that “a problem of poverty, where poor people fight poor people. »
David Ryu’s parents had just sold their toy store shortly before it went up in smoke during the looting.
“Since (the rioters) could not go after white America or the powerful of the time, they turned their anger on those they had in front of them”, i.e. the Americans of Korean descent, says David Ryu.
“Their American Dream”
Prof Chang says America tends to view ethnic relations in the country through a ‘white vs. black’ lens, but that’s an East Coast ‘bias’ that ignores the complex cultural mosaic of a city like Los Angeles.
In 1992, the police of the city, in great majority white, “decided not to protect a community as they should have done, Koreatown was abandoned”, slice this specialist in ethnic studies.
“Korean immigrants had no choice but to defend their shops. It was their livelihood, their American dream,” he explains.
Friday in Los Angeles, the two communities will meet to celebrate the links forged over the past thirty years, in particular during a religious ceremony in a church of the First AME whose construction was financed by a Korean bank.
“It’s a milestone. They did it when no bank, black or otherwise, wanted it,” Pastor Boyd said.