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Rodney King
In a racist society, it is not enough to be nonracist, we must be antiracist.
âAngela Davis
My introduction to police brutality was the Rodney King case. I was at Carver Middle School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I remember seeing the video on the news. I couldnât believe what I was seeing. My middle school mind was desperately trying to comprehend why I was looking at five white cops beat a Black man worse than a dog. I was shocked, horrified, disgusted, and any other adjective you can think of.
I had of course heard and read about police brutality, but I had never seen it like this. This was back in the early nineties when we didnât have social media. Young people today can see police brutality on their cell phones every other week, but for me this was a complete shock.
I remember hearing the verdict. Something like, âThe jury finds the defendants Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, and Theodore Briseno not guilty in the beating of motorist Rodney King.â And my heart dropped. I was angry. How could this be happening? We all saw the tape. I didnât follow the trial completely, but I saw the tape. They beat him like an animal and we had a verdict that told us that we couldnât trust our lying eyes. That what we all thought was going to be an open-and-shut case somehow resulted in them telling us that they did absolutely nothing wrong legally? They can just do that and get away with it? What possible justification could there be for them to get away with this?
My middle school became a powder keg that was about to erupt. Temperatures were boiling over. I remember some of the girls were crying, and Sheldon, who was a Blood, was talking to Clarence, who was a Crip, and they werenât beefing at all, because they were both upset about the verdict.
I remember Ms. Holmes, a gym teacher, walking into the hallway to tell everyone the bell had rung and fussing at everyone to clear the hall like she did every day, but this day she looked at everyoneâs faces and turned around and walked back into the gym.
The entire school was really mad. Then I remember word spread about a white student named Kevin making a terrible joke about Rodney King and a piĂąata, and the entire school turned our anger toward him. He had picked the wrong time to make a joke. It was the match that was needed to light a fire that was burning in all of us.
We searched for him with the intensity of Nate Parker in The Birth of a Nation. Nobody said a word. It was understood what was about to happen. We were going to seek justice and make him pay for his words about Rodney King.
Once we found him, our classmate Mia Jackson had already handled the situation, cussed him out thoroughly, and slapped him so hard her hand-print was on his face. He ended up apologizing to us and remaining apologetic all through high school.
But everything for me changed that day. The way I looked at the policeâI no longer trusted them. I no longer viewed them as âthe good guys.â
Back in the nineties, we had this program called D.A.R.E. where a cop would come into the school and tell us about the law, and staying out of trouble, etc. The cop who spoke to my class was white. I donât even remember his name, but I do remember that from that point on, I didnât want to hear anything that he had to say. I would protest the session every time he came and would stand in the hall. My teacher didnât even object, she just allowed me the space to peacefully protest, as she knew there were definitely other forms of protest that were readily at my disposal.
I also remember Ice Cubeâs The Predator tape coming out shortly after that and him encompassing everything I was feeling. All of the anger and frustration and loss of trust in the system.
Kickinâ up dust is a must
I canât trust
A cracker in a blue uniform
Stick a brotha like a unicorn âŚ
There has always been this great debate about music having an influence on young people. Well, for me, Cubeâs words definitely spoke to the anger that was already there.
My entire world was shattered after that Rodney King verdict. I remember asking my mother, âWhat happens to Rodney King now? How does someone move on with their life after something like that happens to them? What happens to his family? What happens to his children?â Thatâs why it was such an honor to begin this book with the interview of Mrs. Lora Dene King.
Interview with Lora Dene King
(Daughter of Rodney King)
Etan: Can you describe who Rodney King was before the incident and who he was after the incident? Because a lot of times, people donât understand the aftereffects of police brutality.
Ms. King: My father loved for everyone around him to have a good time. He was a people-pleaser. He would give you the shirt off his back. Really a giving person all around. After that night, a part of him died. And thatâs something that as a child, I donât wish that upon any child. I donât wish that on anybodyâs family, period. He was very nervous. Very paranoid. He was in constant pain. He was a very proud person so he would never admit it, but I could tell when he was in pain. He had over fifty broken bones. His eye socket was completely busted; he had to reconstruct everything. And to deal with that kind of pain, thatâs something that doesnât go away. He had permanent brain damage. The news would say all of these things about him later on, not taking into consideration the trauma he was dealing with.
Etan: A lot of times, people look at the settlement as being payback for what the person went through. How did you look at that?
Ms. King: There was a $3.8 million settlement, but half of that went to attorneys. And thatâs not really a lot of money considering the fact that you have to go your whole life after that. You canât get a job, you have your family, thereâs three of us, Iâm the middle child, youâre dealing with the trauma, and at the end of the day that money is really nothing. Youâre completely damaged for life.
Etan: A lot of people donât understand that every time they see a lawyer on TV speaking on the victimâs behalf, those are billable hours, and over many months those bills really accumulate.
Ms. King: Yes, any interaction and phone call, any meeting, is considered billable. And in addition, my father had to pay for all of his own medical needs. He had to pay for complete reconstruction of his entire face and body, so that settlement money dried up so quick just for his immediate needs.
Etan: How old were you when this happened?
Ms. King: I was seven at the time of the beating.
Etan: Talk about the change in your relationship with your father after that.
Ms. King: The first thing that comes to mind is he was very paranoid after the beating. We never had intimate moments. When we would go out to dinner there would always be someone coming up to him, and it could be negative interaction or positive interaction, but we got a lot of both. I remember some of the things that people would say to my father even as a kidâit affected me because I wanted to defend my father, and he would just smile and answer the question. And now that Iâm an adult thinking back on it, everything changed.
Etan: What could people possibly have to say negative about your father? He was the victim.
Ms. King: Well, my dad made the news a lot after this. DUIs, he struggled with drug addiction and alcoholism. People were so quick to judge him without taking the time to understand the level of trauma that he experienced and the aftereffects of that trauma.
Etan: I saw an interview where Rodney King was discussing the alcohol addiction and he said he was self-medicating and trying to heal internally. And he kept saying that he had to forgive the officers because the anger he felt inside was eating away at him he used the word âtormenting.â A lot of people had strong reactions to him saying he had to forgive the officers, but when he explained it in that context, it just made a lot of sense. People donât understand what your father was going through.
Ms. King: The night of the beating, they were yelling racial slurs, cussing, swearing, etc., at him while they were beating him, and my father was reliving that nightmare literally every single day and night. I think to myself often, I donât think Iâm strong enough to recover from that in any way. You thinking you could realistically die and living through it, and thatâs why I just think they shouldâve gotten him help after that, mental-health help, dealing-with-trauma help.
Etan: How do you personally move forward from that? I see what youâre doing with the Rodney King Foundation and you established the I Am a King scholarship and the Walk in Love and the sock racism tags, so you are keeping his legacy alive and youâre doing amazing work.
Ms. King: Wow, itâs interesting, people never ask me that. Iâm still going through it. You know, my father saw my passion to feed the homeless and do workshops with people in prison, and he kept telling me start a foundation and I never wanted to. So after he passed, I was thinking, How can I honor him? What can I do? So I started the foundation. He passed in June and I started it in August. And I realized that I was depressed. I stopped everything and just worked and went home, worked and went home, that was my routine to busy myself through depression. The last two years, and Iâm still going through it, and this year will be nine years since my father passed and I still canât look at his picture for longer than five minutes. Last month was the first time I was able to watch an actual physical interview. I havenât had the strength. I would just break down completely.
Etan: How do you have the strength to do what youâre doing now with the foundation?
Ms. King: My dad had all girls but he would talk to us like we were boys. And his thing would be, âAre you gonna sit here and cry about it or are you gonna get up and do something?â So thatâs what I do now. It would be selfish of me to sit here and mope about it in my tears when I could be helping somebody with their pain. So the I Am a King scholarship I started because I wanted to uplift and help our Black men. The media has a certain way they portray Black men and demonize Black men like they did my father. The media will literally justify the police slaughtering Black men, so thatâs my focus, offsetting that. The father is the foundation of where the love starts fromâthatâs a daughterâs first love, thatâs a sonâs example, and if we lift up our Black men, they can change the world and it will have a domino effect.
Etan: It always amazes me when survivors of police brutality have a passion to help others and to pay it forward. Someone should be helping you. But you all want to help others. Talk to me about that.
Ms. King: It would be selfish of me to sit here and not use my pain to help others. Thatâs another way I honor my dad. My pain can help someone else. It wasnât by choice, but now I can make a difference. I often think, What about the Eric Garners or Rodney Kings or Tamir Rices that were before them who werenât taped, that nobody knew about or ever heard about, and there is nobody to tell their stories or fight for their justice? So I say yes to fighting for them and no to myself, because I am still dealing with pain, but God gives us the strength to help other people.
Interview with Isiah Thomas
Isiah Thomas is a true basketball legend. Heâs a twelve-time NBA All-Star, is considered one of the fifty greatest players in NBA history, and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. I talked to him about the Rodney King beating and the history of police abuse. As Isiah Thomas explains, this problem is definitely not new.
Etan: You have been unafraid to speak on issues of race and police brutality for a long time, even when it wasnât a popular subject. Where did that come from? Because in your era, the eighties into the nineties, it was kind of quiet.
Thomas: There was definitely a change in the nineties as far as activism. But for me, I grew up on the West Side of Chicago, and my mom worked closely with Fred Hampton, so activism was always a part of what we did. There is actually a street named after my mom in Chicago on the West Side. Mary Thomas Way. But I was also one of the kids who benefited from the [Panthersâs] free breakfast program, and then, after he was assassinated, I had to walk by his house that had the bullets still visibly remaining.
Etan: What was your response to seeing the Rodney King beating and verdict?
Thomas: Unfortunately, I had seen that before in my neighborhood. My brother had his two front teeth knocked out by the police. There were riots in Chicago in â66, â67, â68, and â69. So my first ten years of existence, these were the types of things I was seeing on the West Side of Chicago in terms of police brutality. Growing up and seeing it when everything is burned down, itâs not like they came back and fixed everything up, so you had to walk to school through that carnage and every day I had to look at my brother and see the physical scars and the wounds and the emotional scars that was left on him. So watching what happened with Rodney King in â92 was only a reminder of what was going on throughout my childhood. It was a continuation of our fight to be recognized as human. Thereâs only one race of people and thatâs the human race, and we were put into these subcategories or racialized colors.
Etan: So the Rodney King beating wasnât shocking or a surprise to you at all?
Thomas: No, those riots happened in Chicago for four consecutive years. That was the response to be heard. The voiceless crying out saying, âThis is wrong!!! Look whatâs happening to us as human beings.â We just didnât have cell phones to record everything. So what was happening to the victims of police brutality on a daily basis was deemed to not be believable, because we didnât have it on video to show everyone.
Etan: I remember at Carver Middle School in Tulsa, my math teacher, Ms. Stewart, was asking the class, âWhy are they doing this? Why are they burning up their own neighborhoods?â And I remember us Black students telling her, âBecause theyâre not getting justice. You donât understand how theyâre not treating us as human beings? And people feel like they have no other way for their voice to be heard.â And her response was simply, âNo, itâs wrong, and thatâs why I canât support them.â And itâs interesting hearing the same rationale today.
Thomas: I remember when Rodney King happened, I unfortunately heard a lot of the same rationale that your teacher had. We as...
