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US supported War in El Salvador  results in over 1 million refugees to CA and Texas

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US supported War in El Salvador  results in over 1 million refugees to CA and Texas

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As civil wars engulfed several Central American countries in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled their country and came to the United States.

Between 1980 and 1990, the Salvadoran immigrant population in the United States increased nearly fivefold from 94,000 to 465,000. The number of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States continued to grow in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of family reunification and new arrivals fleeing a series of natural disasters that hit El Salvador, including earthquakes and hurricanes.

By 2008, there were about 1.1 million Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. Salvadorans are the country's sixth largest immigrant group after Mexican, Filipino, Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese foreign born.

The immigrant population from this tiny Central American country is now nearly as large as the immigrant population from much larger China. (As reference, China's total population is 200 times larger and its territory is about 500 times larger than El Salvador's.)

More than half of all Salvadoran immigrants resided in just two states, California and Texas, although they are also concentrated in New York, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia (for more information on immigrants by state, see the ACS/Census Data tool on the MPI Data Hub).

Foreign-born men and women from El Salvador have higher rates of participation in the civilian labor force than immigrant men overall. They are also heavily concentrated in construction and services.

This spotlight focuses on Salvadoran immigrants residing in the United States, examining the population's size, geographic distribution, and socioeconomic characteristics using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) and 2000 Decennial Census, and the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) for 2008.

Click on the bullet points below for more information:

Size and Distribution

Demographic and Socioeconomic Overview

Legal and Unauthorized Salvadoran Immigrant Population

The U.S. Census Bureau defines the foreign born as individuals who had no U.S. citizenship at birth. The foreign-born population includes naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, refugees and asylees, legal nonimmigrants (including those on student, work, or other temporary visas), and persons residing in the country without authorization.

The terms foreign born and immigrant are used interchangeably.

Size and Distribution

Up until 1990, the foreign born from El Salvador ranked behind most foreign-born groups in terms of size (see Table 1). For instance, in 1980, the number of Salvadoran born in the United States (94,447) was about half the size of the immigrant population from Jamaica (196,811) and comparable to the foreign-born population from the Netherlands (103,136).

By 2008, the Salvadoran-born population was more than double the size of the Jamaican-born population (636,589) and 13 times larger than the Dutch immigrant population (85,635). Between 2000 and 2008, Salvadorans surpassed Cubans as the second largest immigrant group from Latin America (after the Mexican born) (see the pie charts showing the top 10 countries of birth of immigrants residing in the United States over time here).

The Salvadoran born in 2008 were similar in size compared to the Vietnamese born (1.1 million) and the Korean born (1.0 million) but smaller than the immigrant population born in mainland China (excluding Hong Kong) (1.4 million).

Table 1. Total and Salvadoran Foreign-Born Populations, 1960 to 2008

Notes: a Rank refers to the position of the Salvadoran born relative to other immigrant groups in terms of size of the population residing in the United States in a given census year.
Source: Data for 2000 from the 2000 census; data for 2008 from the American Community Survey 2008. Data for earlier decades from Gibson, Campbell and Emily Lennon, U.S. Census Bureau, Working Paper No. 29, Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850 to 1990, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC., 1999. Available online.

The next four states with large Salvadoran-born populations accounted for an additional one-fourth of Salvadorans residing in the United States: New York (91,966, or 8.4 percent), Maryland (71,729, or 6.6 percent), Virginia (67,820, or 6.2 percent), and Florida (46,141, or 4.2 percent).

Salvadoran immigrants were particularly concentrated in Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV, where they accounted for 12.3 percent of all foreign born in that metro area, and in Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX (8.0 percent); Richmond, VA (7.0 percent); and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA (6.3 percent).

Demographic and Socioeconomic Overview

Of the total foreign-born population in the United States in 2008, 7.4 percent were minors, 69.0 percent were of working age, and 23.6 percent were seniors.

(Note: The term limited English proficient refers to any person age 5 and older who reported speaking English "not at all," "not well," or "well" on their survey questionnaire. Individuals who reported speaking only English or speaking English "very well" are considered proficient in English).

On the other end of the education continuum, about 7.6 percent of Salvadoran immigrants had a bachelor's degree or higher compared to 27.1 percent among the 31.9 million foreign-born adults.

By contrast, among the 13.6 million foreign-born males age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 25.9 percent reported working in construction, extraction, and transportation, and 17.4 percent reported working in services.

By contrast, among the 9.5 million foreign-born females age 16 and older employed in the civilian labor force in 2008, 25.7 percent reported working in service occupations and 14.7 percent reported working in administrative support occupations.

Legal and Unauthorized Salvadoran Immigrant Population

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) empowers the executive branch of the U.S. government to grant temporary immigration status on humanitarian grounds, known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS). (In addition to TPS, the executive branch can grant humanitarian relief through deferred departure or deferred enforced departure (DED) and extended voluntary departure (EVD), which suspend the enforcement of deportation orders against beneficiaries.)

TPS can be granted by the secretaries of State and Homeland Security if there is an ongoing armed conflict posing a serious threat to the personal safety of returned nationals, if a foreign state requests TPS because it is unable to handle the return of nationals due to environmental disaster, or if there are other extraordinary conditions preventing the safe return of foreign nationals.

TPS does not make an individual eligible for permanent residence or citizenship, and TPS beneficiaries must request work authorization from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

The most recent extension was announced in September 2008, when an estimated 229,000 Salvadorans qualified, according to USCIS. TPS for Salvadoran nationals is currently set to expire on September 9, 2010.

For more information on TPS and other forms of temporary humanitarian relief, see:

For information about ACS methodology, sampling error, and nonsampling error, click here.
Sources
U.S. Census Bureau. 2008 American Community Survey. Accessed from Steven Ruggles, Matthew Sobek, Trent Alexander, et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Population Center, 2004.

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Salvadoran Immigrants in the United States in 2008

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The 1.1 million Salvadoran immigrants residing in the United States in 2008 accounted for 2.9 percent of all U.S. immigrants, making them the second-largest immigrant group from Latin America. MPI's Aaron Terrazas examines their socioeconomic characteristics, where they live, and the size of the Salvadoran-born unauthorized population.

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There and Back: Los Angeles Japanese and Executive Order 9066 

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There and Back: Los Angeles Japanese and Executive Order 9066 

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in Spring 1942

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In the spring of 1942, the City of Los Angeles experienced a population exodus triggered by a presidential executive order. Images in the Los Angeles Public Library's Herald Examiner Collection and Shades of L.A. Collection tell the story of Executive Order 9066 and its impact on Japanese residents and on the city itself.

From the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7, 1941, many Americans lived in fear of a further assault or even an invasion. President Roosevelt's Executive Order, while not naming the Japanese or any other group by name, gave broad powers to the Secretary of War to guard against the threat of sabotage and espionage. Within days of the February 19 order, a series of "Public Proclamations" and "Civilian Exclusion Orders" directed that Japanese and Japanese-Americans be removed from all West Coast states in order to prevent collusion with the enemy. Virtually all Japanese, by birth or ancestry, were rounded up with scant warning and sent to ten internment camps far from the coast. Age, sex, or condition offered no exception to the rule. Having as little as 1/16th Japanese blood marked one for removal. Orphans of Japanese blood were gathered up and transported, even if they were in the care of Caucasian families.

Big Sale in Little Tokyo

In the spring of 1942 many Japanese lived and worked in a section of downtown Los Angeles dubbed Little Tokyo. When the order came down, families were given six days to dispose of their property and belongings; each person was allowed to bring only what they could carry with them. Japanese businesses held fire sales; families sought desperately for places to store their belongings and friends to care for their property and their pets. Cars were sold for pennies on the dollar.

Many Japanese were anxious to show their loyalty to the United States and its institutions. The photo editor of the image above made sure to draw attention to the sign posted above the cash register in this Japanese-run drugstore: "Please no talk war!"

Exodus

Japanese families gather with their belongings at a departure point where they will be taken to an assembly center and, eventually, to an internment camp. All persons, including children, had to wear identification tags. The intention of the tags was to prevent families from being separated. Tags also identify bales of bedding that might or might not be reunited with their owners.

Evacuees had to endure several weeks or months at assembly centers while basic camp structures were prepared for them in the hinterland. Assembly centers were located throughout the West at fairgrounds and racetracks where families often were crowded into horse or livestock stalls. As with all aspects of the relocation, government publicity outlets bent over backward to give a favorable impression of their actions. The photograph above, from the Herald Examiner, is accompanied by a highly colored optimism: "A little Japanese girl meekly submits to a hair wash while a woman nearby also washes her hair on June 25, 1942. A far cry from the Axis concentration camps ravaged with torture, starvation, and death, is the Santa Anita Assembly Center, where 18,500 Japanese are quartered on the grounds of the luxurious Santa Anita Race Track."

This image (with crop marks) shows rows of temporary housing erected in the parking lot of the Santa Anita Park racetrack. The track's parade ring is at right.

Home Away from Home

Aware of the mixed feelings on internment, government and media tried hard to style detention as something in the best interests of the internees, as well as the local populace. The term "internment camp" was often replaced with "relocation center" or "evacuation center." (The preferred term among some historians today is "concentration camp.") Some news accounts went further to spin the reality of the forced move, referring to "new homes" awaiting the "evacuees." The article accompanying the photo above calls Manzanar, the destination of the motor caravan, "the new boom town, Little Tokio of the Mountains."

Of course stark reality was much different. The sites chosen were in remote, harsh environments. Accommodations were hastily erected with much work needing to be completed by the inmates themselves. Residents of Los Angeles might find themselves at Gila River on an Arizona Indian Reservation, at Heart Mountain in the sagebrush desert of Wyoming, at treeless Tule Lake in Northern California, or at Manzanar-a once fertile valley drained of its water by the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

It is not surprising that there are few if any, images of the exodus in the Shades of L.A. Collection. Those caught up in the confusion would have other things to worry about than documenting their departure and a camera would have been a heavy luxury to carry along. However, once settled in the camps, Japanese families for the most part adopted a stoic resignation and worked to recreate some sense of familiarity and normality in bleak surroundings. In the photo above, James Otake celebrates his first birthday at the Gila River camp sitting on the lap of his mother, Mariko (Mary). A cake sits next to them. Since the photo is dated 1945, James must have been born in the camp.

Changes at home

The wholesale removal of Japanese and Japanese-Americans meant the streets of Little Tokyo were deserted-but not for long. Real estate abhors a vacuum as much as nature does. Without paying tenants, the landlords of these buildings were able to re-lease the storefronts and apartments, in many cases to other ethnic minority groups. African-American families arrived in West Coast cities to work in the war effort. With racial covenants in place in many communities and widespread discrimination in housing generally, the newly vacated Little Tokyo presented one of the few options available to them.

For approximately three years Little Tokyo took on the moniker "Bronzetown," in recognition of the many African-American run businesses that sprang up there, including Schepp's Playhouse, a nightclub. In this photo Ruth David, William Love, and Bernice Patton (R.N., 2nd Lt., Army) relax at Schepp's.

A man, identified as Alberto Munoz, prepares to re-open a cleaners established by a Japanese family. The movie poster at right advertises the Japanese film Joi Kinuyo Sensei (Doctor Kinuyo) from 1937. The star of the movie, Kinuyo Tanaka, was a popular actress in both pre-and post-war films and, later, one of Japan's first female film directors.

The Return

This photo accompanied an article titled "Japs leave to settle in freedom throughout the U.S." The freedom referred to meant moving across state lines from California to Nevada. Toward the end of 1943 overcrowding at the camps forced authorities to relax some restrictions. However, this hardly meant full freedom. Those allowed to leave Manzanar had to swear they would not return to their homes on the coast.

Tara Kawa was able to reclaim his fish market after returning from the Gila River internment camp, [1945]. Herald-Examiner Collection

In December 1944, with the war in the Pacific turning in favor of the Allies, President Roosevelt lifted Executive Order 9066. The process of re-integrating the Japanese back into the lives they'd left behind was complex; it would be another year before all the camps were completely closed. Many internees had lost everything, including friends, and did not return to California. Others were able to piece their lives back together with some help from public authorities and faith groups. The lucky ones, such as the man above, were able to re-establish their businesses.

Justice for all?

In 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the man who issued Executive Order 9066, visited internees at Gila River and then wrote a lengthy piece for Colliers Magazine about internment. While acknowledging the exigencies of war, the First Lady made clear her own feelings in the matter:

"We have no common race in this country, but we have an ideal to which all of us are loyal. It is our ideal which we want to have live. It is an ideal which can grow with our people, but we cannot progress if we look down upon any group of people amongst us because of race or religion. Every citizen in this country has a right to our basic freedoms, to justice and to equality of opportunity, and we retain the right to lead our individual lives as we please, but we can only do so if we grant to others the freedoms that we wish for ourselves."
-Eleanor Roosevelt, "A Challenge to American Sportsmanship," Collier's Magazine, October 10, 1943

In 1989 the U.S. Government issued a formal apology to those interned during World War II and provided "redress" payments of $20,000 to each surviving internee.

Written by Eleanor Boba. Originally published on the Photo Friends Blog on April 10, 2017.

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There and Back: Los Angeles Japanese and Executive Order 9066

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In the spring of 1942, the City of Los Angeles experienced a population exodus triggered by a presidential executive order. Images in the Los Angeles Public Library's Herald Examiner Collection and Shades of L.A. Collection tell the story of Executive Order 9066 and its impact on Japanese residents and on the city itself.

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For years, whenever Japanese Americans would get together after World War II, one question would come up: "Which camp were you in?"

Like where you went to school, what you did for work, and whether you rooted for the Dodgers or the Giants, it was a form of small talk but probed at something deeper. The question referred to 10 wartime prisons where the government locked up more than 120,000 men, women and children, a majority of them U.S. citizens, because of their ethnicity.

Those who answered "Tule Lake" say they were often met with silence, then scorn: "Oh, you were one of those."

Some even turned away in disgust.

Many of those who were sent to the Northern California camp had answered no to two questions on a loyalty test. One asked whether they would serve in the U.S. military, and the other whether they would swear absolute allegiance to the United States in its war against Japan. They came to be called the "No-Nos," and they bore the label of being disloyal to America in the government's eyes.

The stain was so strong that even after President Reagan apologized in 1988 for the "grave wrong" of mass incarceration, some people who had been at Tule Lake felt the need to hide their personal histories, even from their children, to avoid being shunned within the Japanese American community.

This March, 75 years after the closing of Tule Lake, that narrative is changing as survivors tell their stories and reclaim the camp's legacy, not as one of disloyalty and shame but as one of protest and courage.

The demand that fractured a community

In response to Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States, without evidence, labeled anyone of Japanese descent as a potential enemy threat.

In the name of national security, the government's War Relocation Authority banished most people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast to stark barracks in remote areas.

Government authorities soon began to discuss what to do with their prisoners. Some felt they could not keep them all indefinitely locked up without charges. They needed a reason to justify releasing people they had labeled as potential enemies.

In February 1943, wartime authorities issued a multi-question survey. It aimed to reveal "tendencies of loyalty or disloyalty," in part to determine who could be granted leave or drafted into military service. Versions of this "loyalty questionnaire" were handed out to adults in camps as a litmus test for fealty.

The last two questions caused great anxiety. Superficially, they were about military service and loyalty. In essence, they were asking how to be Japanese American, and on whose terms.

People had to make decisions based on very little information from the government, not knowing how their responses would be used.

Did saying yes to question 27 mean you would be sent away to fight?

Was Question 28 a Catch-22? If answering yes meant admitting you had a preexisting allegiance to Japan, were you justifying your own imprisonment? If answering no indicated disloyalty to the government, were you justifying your continued detainment?

Yes-or-no questions could not capture the complexity of their dilemma, survivors said in oral histories collected by historians.

How to answer these questions created a rift within the community that lasted for decades.

Among those who said yes, many felt they had to keep proving their loyalty as Americans to gain acceptance in their fight for equality, despite the indignity of the questions. They would swallow their anger and keep sacrificing their freedoms, in camp or in combat, in the hopes that their actions would underscore the injustice of their incarceration.

Some even excoriated those who disagreed with them for making the community look bad, which seeded the resentment toward the No-Nos.

The government treated anything other than a yes as a sign of disloyalty and moved to isolate those who said no.

They chose Tule Lake, where 41% of the inmates did not say yes, in part because so many people had refused to fill out the questionnaire.

In July 1943, the government converted Tule Lake into a maximum-security prison to hold all of the No-Nos. Approximately 12,000 people from the nine other camps who had said no or refused to answer were moved to join about 6,250 people already at Tule Lake.

The prison within a prison

The Tule Lake camp sits in the northeastern corner of California in a flat and treeless basin that was drained for farmland in the 1920s.

Before it became a center for No-Nos, it was comparable to the other camps. Afterward, it was defined by a fence topped with barbed wire, with 28 guard towers, Army tanks and a battalion of soldiers.

"Incarceration was a prison environment, and Tule Lake was the most prison-like of all the camps," said Barbara Takei, 71, who has been researching Tule Lake for two decades.

Camp authorities viewed mass gatherings with fear and suspicion. When inmates went on strike to protest wretched working conditions, authorities brought strikebreakers in from other camps. Community leaders who tried to negotiate for better amenities were thrown in the stockade, a prison within a prison. Armed soldiers conducted dragnet-style sweeps through the camp to ferret out anyone who went into hiding. The Army declared martial law in Tule Lake for two months.

Former California Assemblyman George Nakano (D-Torrance), 85, recalls that one day, as a boy of 9, he headed to the camp's canal for a swim. As he and his friends were about to jump in, a guard in a tower threatened them with his rifle for being too close to the fence.

George Nakano, right, with parents and siblings in a photo taken at Tule Lake dated February 1946. (Photo courtesy of George Nakano.)

Complicating camp dynamics, No-Nos from other camps were mixed with inmates already at Tule Lake. Factions sprung up, rumors ran rampant, and paid informants within the prisoner population made it difficult to know who could be trusted and what was true.

As the war drew to an end, the government began to plan for the closing of the camps. Incarcerated people at Tule Lake were asked whether they would stay in America or renounce their citizenship.

Some who decided to give up their citizenship had become disillusioned by how their country had treated them. Others had lost everything during incarceration and had no home to return to. Thanks to overseas propaganda carried over by short-wave radio, some believed that Japan was winning the war. Others feared their family would be separated if their immigrant parents were deported, so they renounced to ensure they stayed together.

Altogether, 5,589 citizens - 98% of whom were incarcerated at Tule Lake - gave up their American citizenship.

When Japan announced on Aug. 15, 1945, that it would surrender, and it had become clear that the country had been devastated during the war, many tried to reverse course - but it was too late. They were designated enemy aliens and prepared for deportation.

Some went to Japan. Some were left fighting their deportation when Tule Lake closed.

A new legacy

The trauma of incarceration didn't vanish after camp.

Japanese Americans were suddenly living among neighbors who had supported their incarceration and saw them as no different than the enemies America had just fought in the Pacific theater.

There was a palpable fear that you could be targeted again if you stepped out of line, said Satsuki Ina, 76, a psychotherapist and documentary filmmaker who was born at Tule Lake. "People lived behind psychological barbed wire to be accepted."

One post-war coping strategy was to be the model minority, Ina said. The other was to stay silent.

Parents demanded that their children pursue stable and secure careers after living through the nerve wracking uncertainty of incarceration. Children felt distant from parents who struggled to express their feelings.

Tule Lake No-Nos were further isolated for their resistance, which was viewed as disloyalty. The Japanese American Citizens League, one of the biggest groups within the community, formally condemned the No-Nos, a move they apologized for in 2019.

Ina didn't learn her parents had renounced their citizenship at Tule Lake until she was a college student at UC Berkeley during the Free Speech movement in the 1960s.

Her mother had omitted this part of their family history because she feared her children would be ashamed of them, said Ina.

"Stigma silences and shrouds you in shame," Ina said. "Healing comes from speaking our truths, being seen and heard in the safety and company of those who are open and empathetic to our experiences."

Since 1969, former inmates, students and others have been making trips to Tule Lake to revisit, learn and remember.

These trips evolved into biannual pilgrimages organized by the Tule Lake Committee, said Takei, who is also the committee's chief financial officer.

In the last 20 years, the committee has focused its efforts on validating the history of principled protest and resistance at Tule Lake. The 2004 pilgrimage recognized No-Nos, renunciants, and the attorney who fought to restore their citizenship.

"There is solace in returning to the site where violations occurred, and to be able to share and mourn with others who were subjected to the same dehumanizing treatment," said Nakano, the former state assemblyman. He returned to Tule Lake for the first time in 2004 to recognize that lawyer, Wayne Collins.

Grace Hata, 90, whose family was separated during incarceration until it reunited briefly at Tule Lake, said she had long tried to block out the memories. She never wanted to go back. But when she joined a Tule Lake Committee pilgrimage in 2012, she was able to meet people who could explain the situation and help her put things in perspective.

"I don't feel the guilt," Hata said. "I don't feel like a traitor. I don't feel bad like that anymore because it was the situation that drove us to having to make that choice."

Survivors of incarceration at Tule Lake who attended the 2018 pilgrimage. (Courtesy of Ginger Greenfield)

Ina credits the committee for challenging the "biased and distorted" narrative that their government-sanctioned segregation stemmed from disloyalty.

The committee's most recent trip, in 2018, came soon after the Trump administration was harshly criticized for separating immigrant families at the border with Mexico. Those incarcerated at Tule Lake as children came out in force to protest the separations from the site of the Tule Lake jail, drawing parallels with their own experiences.

From there, Ina and others teamed up with younger activists to form Tsuru for Solidarity. The social justice group draws its inspiration and its name from the Japanese word for "crane," which symbolizes peace and freedom. They protest against immigrant detention centers across the country.

"There was no organized protest when we were incarcerated," Ina said. "Now we use our culture, values and personal histories to protest the repetition of that history."

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They failed a 'loyalty test.' Now, Japanese Americans incarcerated at Tule Lake camp reclaim their stories

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For years, whenever Japanese Americans would get together after World War II, one question would come up: "Which camp were you in?" Like where you went to school, what you did for work, and whether you rooted for the Dodgers or the Giants, it was a form of small talk but probed at something deeper.

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California tribes were forced by the Spanish and later Americans into ways of life they had no understanding of, nor desire to be part of...Their ancient lifeways were interrupted, disrupted, and largely destroyed by the Spanish, then Mexicans, then Americans.

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California tribes were forced by the Spanish and later Americans into ways of life they had no understanding of, nor desire to be part of...Their ancient lifeways were interrupted, disrupted, and largely destroyed by the Spanish, then Mexicans, then Americans.

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Genocide, Slavery, and L.A.'s Role in the Decimation of Native Californians

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In 1851, California's first Anglo-American governor stood before the state legislature and declared the genocide of Native Californians a sad inevitability.

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Who We Are Stop AAPI Hate is a national coalition fighting against racism and racial injustice targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Together, we work with local communities and government stakeholders to document the rise of anti-AAPI hate and dismantle the systems that allow it to persist.

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Mexican Land seized after Mexican American War 

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Mexican Land seized after Mexican American War 

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1846-1848

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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the Mexican-American War in favor of the United States. The war had begun almost two years earlier, in May 1846, over a territorial dispute involving Texas. The treaty added an additional 525,000 square miles to United States territory, including the land that makes up all or parts of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Mexico also gave up all claims to Texas and recognized the Rio Grande River as America's southern boundary.
WATCH: The Mexican Revolution on HISTORY Vault
Mexican-American War: 1846-1848

On May 13, 1846, the U.S. Congress voted in favor of President James Polk's request to declare war on Mexico in a dispute over Texas. Under the threat of war, the United States had refrained from annexing Texas after the latter won independence from Mexico in 1836.

But in 1844, President John Tyler restarted negotiations with the Republic of Texas, culminating with a treaty of annexation.

Did you know? During his presidency, James Polk managed another important land acquisition, this time without a war, when his administration diplomatically settled a border dispute with the British and gained control of the present-day states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, plus parts of Montana and Wyoming.

The treaty was defeated by a wide margin in the U.S. Senate because it would upset the slave state-free state balance between North and South and risked war with Mexico, which had broken off relations with the United States.

But shortly before leaving office and with the support of President-elect Polk, Tyler managed to get a congressional resolution passed and then, on March 1, 1845, signed into law. Texas was admitted to the union on December 29 of that year.

While Mexico didn't follow through with its threat to declare war, relations between the two nations remained tense over border disputes, and in July 1845, President Polk ordered troops into disputed lands that lay between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers.

In November, Polk sent the diplomat John Slidell to Mexico to seek boundary adjustments in return for the U.S. government's settlement of the claims of American citizens against Mexico and to make an offer to purchase California and New Mexico.

After the mission failed, the U.S. Army under General Zachary Taylor advanced to the mouth of the Rio Grande, the river that the state of Texas claimed as its southern boundary.

Mexico, claiming that the boundary was the Nueces River to the north of the Rio Grande, considered the advance of Taylor's army an act of aggression and in April 1846 sent troops across the Rio Grande. Polk, in turn, declared the Mexican advance to be an invasion of U.S. soil, and on May 11, 1846, asked Congress to declare war on Mexico, which it did two days later, starting the Mexican-American War.
WATCH: The Struggle for Mexican Independence
Mexico Surrenders

Following the defeat of the Mexican army and the fall of Mexico City in September 1847, the Mexican government surrendered and peace negotiations began. The war officially ended with the February 2, 1848, signing in Mexico of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

The treaty added an additional 525,000 square miles to United States territory, including the land that makes up all or parts of present-day Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

Mexico also gave up all claims to Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as America's southern boundary. In return, the United States paid Mexico $15 million and agreed to settle all claims of U.S. citizens against Mexico.

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: Aftermath

Although Polk's war was successful, he lost public support after nearly two bloody and costly years of fighting. Additionally, the controversial war reignited the slavery extension debate that would ultimately result in the Civil War in the 1860s.

Polk did not seek re-election after his first term, and died at age 53 in June 1849, three months after leaving office. Zachary Taylor, who became a national hero during the Mexican-American War, ran for president in the 1848 election and won. However, 16 months after his inauguration, Taylor became ill and died.

Sources

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). National Archives.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Library of Congress: Hispanic Reading Room.
On this day, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed. National Constitution Center.

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The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the Mexican-American War in favor of the United States. The war had begun almost two years earlier, in May 1846, over a territorial dispute involving Texas.

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waves of immigration, repression and control 

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waves of immigration, repression and control 

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A home made of reinforced concrete commanded the northwest corner of then-West Adams Street and Western Avenue on a vintage postcard mailed in 1912. Today, that corner is home to a retirement housing and assisted livingcomplex. Theda Bara, a silent screen star, rented this home briefly in 1918. (Patt Morrison / Los Angeles Times)

A new horror anthology TV series, "Them: Covenant," is making news for its grisly depictions of violence against a 1950s Black family in their new home in the then-white city of Compton. Without the supernatural elements, the decades-long stories of Black people trying to take up residence in Los Angeles County's white neighborhoods are more than scary enough.

L.A. didn't start out that way. Of the 22 adults among the pobladores, the first settlers, who set up housekeeping and created Los Angeles in 1781, 10 had African ancestry. And the last governor of Mexican-ruled California, Pio Pico, was of mixed race.

And that was pretty much the end of that chapter.

As more people - mostly white people - found their R-1 paradise in Los Angeles, neighborhood after neighborhood, house after house decided to keep out the "undesirables," meaning anyone not like the people living there. It didn't really take burning crosses, although they appeared now and again.

No, something called "restrictive covenants" is all it took - language written into deeds to keep a piece of property from being bought by or sold to a non-Caucasian. Restrictive covenants were walls made of paper and ink.

To break down those paper walls took years of persistence. It took actresses and activists. It took courageous families and stubborn ones, and long, slogging decades through the courts and the voting booths.

Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison

California entered the union in 1850 as a free state, not a slave state. For a long while, the percentage of Black Angelenos was low - about 2% in the 1910 census, peaking at above 11% around 1990.

Still, in 1913, the Black intellectual and writer W.E.B. Dubois brought the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People here and was impressed enough to say of L.A. that "nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed."

Yeah, well. Some exceptions applied.

A hundred or so California cities - among them Hawthorne and Glendale - were "sundown towns," where Black people and sometimes other minorities dared not be found after dark, lest they be run out of town, run into jail or worse.

Also not for Black Angelenos: some of those darling Spanish houses or Craftsman bungalows along the city's spreading edges. Restrictive covenants helped to ensure that the growing Black population was kept bottled up in many of the same neighborhoods of 1910, when the census showed that an astounding 36.1% of Black Angelenos owned their own homes.

Nat Laws was a babe in arms in 1910 when his parents, Henry and Anna, moved here. L.A. hadn't changed for decades after the Laws family arrived, according to how Law described it to The Times almost 40 years ago: "Out in Hollywood and West Los Angeles, Negros couldn't live in those neighborhoods. And Huntington Park? Man, a Negro couldn't walk the streets in Huntington Park." Signs on street corners in Huntington Park informed Black and Asian people that they were unwelcome, Laws said. "It was almost as bad in Culver City."

In 1964, the Black writer Lynell George's family went house hunting around Inglewood, and at the second house they stopped to see, someone down the street hollered the N-word at them. (At the first look-see appointment, the man who opened the door said he was too busy watching "Perry Mason," and shut the door in their faces.)

This R-1 segregation was taken so much for granted that it was news in 1926 when a Black shipping clerk named Mentis Carrere bought a house in the 700 block of West 85th Street in Los Angeles. Feelings against him and his family, as The Times put it genteelly, "were aroused," and so a white colleague named Harry Grund "became almost a bodyguard" for the Carrere family. One night, so the cops said, Grund fired off a pistol to make it seem like the Carreres were under attack. One bullet broke a window across the street, and, surprise, the very next day some high-pressure negotiations began to get Carrere to sell.

In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that governments couldn't officially enforce racial segregation but wink-wink, nudge-nudge, the door was still wide open for private neighborhood segregation, one deed at a time - a "covenant" of agreement that, for sure, I won't sell to any of those people, will you, Bob? No sir, not me; Tom, are you with us?

And that's how it worked. Sometimes "those people" extended to Jews, or Asians, or Armenians, but first and last, they meant Black.

There followed more court decisions propping up segregation by redlining and other means. In 1928, California's Supreme Court overruled two Los Angeles judges and said that a Black L.A. couple, A.D. and Mattie Kinchlow, could own the house in the restricted Crestmore neighborhood, on West 30th Street. They'd bought it from a white man who, as The Times put it, had "kicked over the traces" of the restrictive covenant to sell to them. But the judge also decreed that the Kinchlows could not live there. Our "Solomon" had officially halved the baby.

It wasn't until the end of World War II that L.A.'s restrictive covenants finally took a big kick in the pants, and thanks to some dauntless Black residents of a fine and fancy neighborhood they called Sugar Hill - a spot near USC named Adams Heights.

Same old, same old. Eight white neighbors brandished their restrictive covenant deeds and went to court. Let this continue, they shrilled, and their property "would lose value and racial clashes would inevitably ensue."

But this time, their "objectionable" neighbors were more famous and probably richer than they, L.A.'s Black aristocrats, led by a formidable trio of Sugar Hill neighbors: the Oscar-winning actress Hattie McDaniel, actress Louise Beavers and blues singer Ethel Waters. They had the numbers, they had the money, and in the end, they had the law.

Superior Court Judge Thurmond Clarke had taken the time to take a look around Sugar Hill, and on Dec. 5, 1945, he made his decision: "It is time that members of the Negro race are accorded, without reservations or evasions, the full rights guaranteed them under the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution. Judges have been avoiding the real issue too long."

So welcome home, Mesdames McDaniel, Beavers and Waters, et al.

What Clarke did in 1945, the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced in 1948, using the same 14th Amendment.

Quickly, and embarrassingly, a Los Angeles real estate organization joined other California real estate organizations in an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to uphold covenants "to protect American family life, stabilize home values, avoid widespread home depreciation, avert racial tensions."

When that went nowhere, they tried the same in California. Real estate interests put on the 1964 ballot an initiative to overturn the Rumford Act banning housing discrimination and to use the state Constitution to protect property bias.

I'm sorry to say that The Times endorsed it, and that Californians voted for it 2 to 1. But once again, the U.S. Supreme Court invoked the 14th Amendment to invalidate it, and in 1974, a different California electorate repealed it.

Housing bias still bubbled to the surface, like ugly globs in an oil spill.

A Black aerospace engineer named Kenneth C. Kelly had to use a white colleague as an intermediary to buy a house in a white neighborhood in Gardena, and again in 1962 when he moved to Northridge, where he became head of the Valley's Fair Housing Council and encouraged other Black Angelenos to not to get deterred from buying the houses they wanted in the neighborhoods they wanted to live in.

After the 1965 Watts riots, The Times began looking more seriously at the realities for Black Angelenos, how they lived, and where. A Page One article in 1968 was headlined: "Negroes in White Suburbia: Few Problems Once Over the Barrier: Valley Negroes in Suburbia Finding Acceptance." "Some 300 negro families," the Fair Housing Council noted, have moved into middle-class white neighborhoods with "some early difficulties, but little outward hostility, no lowered real estate values or ostracizing of the negroes by their neighbors."

In southeast L.A. County, white-flight fears after the Watts riots, and the disruptions from building the Century Freeway, altered the racial makeup of towns like Lynwood, Maywood and Huntington Park, where young Nat Law had once seen those racist signs. Unencumbered at last by restrictive covenants, Black people and Latinos bought and rented in neighborhoods that had once prohibited them. By 1972, the theretofore white town of Compton was 71% Black.

An unnamed retired white industrial worker in Compton told The Times then that white people were "in a sweat" to sell and move out - not because of Latinos, he made a point of saying, but because of Black people.

Restrictive covenants kept a kind of power - as a tripwire. President Reagan found out the hard way, publicly, a month before election day 1984 - that some property he'd once owned in the Hollywood Hills during World War II carried fine-print language declaring that "no persons of any race other than the Caucasian race" could use or occupy that property, except as servants.

In 1994, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was embarrassed in her reelection. Hours after she accused her opponent of having restricted-covenant language in property he'd owned, she learned that her own property was saddled with the same language dating to 1909.

Restrictive covenants still have a long and shadowy reach in Los Angeles. The city was and in many places is still deeply and de facto segregated.

For me, an incident that revealed that clearly - and ultimately violently - was this:

In May 1974, when the Black leader of the radical revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army group brought his white "soldiers" and his hostage-or-follower, the heiress Patricia Hearst, to Los Angeles, he made the basic, fatal error of not doing his recon.

In the SLA's old Bay Area stomping grounds, his group of mixed-race men and women moving around in a working-class neighborhood would likely not have been remarked on.

But the comings and goings of six or eight young white women and men in a Black neighborhood of South L.A. - especially white people with guns - got the locals' attention.

The Los Angeles Police Department found out where the SLA was hiding when a woman went up to a traffic cop and asked whether the police "were looking for the white people with the bullets and guns."

They were in her daughter's house on East 54th Street. The hours-long gunfight that followed was broadcast live on TV, and it ended with six dead SLA members in the little house that burned down to the crawl space.

Judging by the wisdom of the internet, where that house once stood is now a pretty duplex fronted by a thicket of semitropical plants. Also judging by the internet, the place one or two doors down, another apartment, has a price tag floating around three-quarters of a million.

Maybe equity is the best revenge.

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Behind the new show 'Them' is the ugly and true history of L.A.'s racist housing covenants

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"Them: Covenant" on Amazon Prime is a reminder of the all-too-common housing covenants that restricted who could buy homes in certain neighborhoods in Compton, around Southern California and elsewhere. Determined Black people over the decades fought for their rights to live where they pleased.

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indigenous people displaced

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Dear Wishtoyo Friends, Family and Community,

We hope you and your loved ones are doing well during this difficult and confusing time. Wishtoyo's top priority is the well-being of our community as a whole - Elders, youth, and the general public at large. As health protocols and safety standards continue to develop in response to COVID-19, we are carefully following all available measures to limit the spread of this new virus.

For the protection of our students, partners, staff, families, and community Wishtoyo is cancelling all events, in-person meetings, on-site educational programming indefinitely. Both Wishtoyo Chumash Village in Malibu and our First Nations Ecological Cultural Conservancy and offices in Santa Paula will be closed until further notice. Our team will continue working remotely to carry on our fight protecting the natural cultural resources we all depend upon.

Especially during this time of social distancing and self-isolation, we feel it is important to stay connected to one another. We will be offering remote educational and cultural programming which will be posted as we develop these online learning resources. Look for our updates on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WishtoyoChumashVillage/

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at 805-667-7818 or info@wishtoyo.org
Me'pšumawiš a tipašumawiš
Together we are healthy and spiritually at peace,

The Wishtoyo Team

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Dear Wishtoyo Friends, Family and Community, We hope you and your loved ones are doing well during this difficult and confusing time. Wishtoyo's top priority is the well-being of our community as a whole - Elders, youth, and the general public at large.

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Gabrielino-Tonga Tribe lands stolen from them. Treaties ignored

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Gabrielino-Tonga Tribe lands stolen from them. Treaties ignored

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History – Gabrielino-Tongva Indian Tribe

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May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, a month in which we celebrate the culture, traditions, accomplishments, and history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. It is also an occasion to reflect on the turbulent history and hard won achievements of previous generations and to recognize that the Chinese community, like many ethnic communities in Los Angeles, survived and prospered despite discrimination, prejudice, and persecution.

"These ugly things in our past history ought to be known ...They may not be pleasant to read about. They are not pleasant to write about..."-Horace Bell

Los Angeles in 1871 was a dirty, violent city of nearly 6,000 people. Though the city had a higher homicide rate than New York or Chicago, it employed only six police officers to maintain law and order. Lynchings and mob justice were commonplace.

According to the U.S. Census, in 1870 the Chinese population in Los Angeles numbered 172, or roughly three percent of the total population of 5,728. More than half of the Chinese lived in the adobes along Calle de los Negros, or Negro Alley (named not for African Americans but for the dark-skinned Spaniards who originally lived there). Negro Alley was the infamous vice district of Los Angeles. Saloons, gambling parlors, and brothels lined the short, unpaved alley just off the Plaza.

Map of Los Angeles, as it appeared in 1871

During the 1850s and 1860s, few attacks against Chinese were reported and press coverage of the Chinese was fairly neutral. The tolerant attitude changed in 1869 when the Los Angeles News and The Los Angeles Star began running editorials condemning Chinese immigration and attacking the Chinese as inferior and immoral. Unsurprisingly, there was a concomitant increase in racially motivated attacks against the Chinese.

In October, 1871, tensions were running high in Chinatown because of a feud between leaders of two rival Huignan (mutual benefit associations) over the kidnapping of a young Chinese woman. A shootout between several Chinese men broke out in the middle of Negro Alley. The ensuing response by two police officers resulted in the wounding of one of the officers and the death of a civilian who assisted the officers, Robert Thompson. The shooters took cover in the Coronel Building.

Lafayette Hotel stagecoach near the adobes in Calle de los Negros circa 1870, presently Alameda Street near Union Station and Terminal Annex Building. The old Antonio Coronel adobe is in the background.

Word quickly spread that Chinese had killed Thompson, a popular former saloon owner. A mob of rioters quickly grew to 500 people, ten percent of the population of the city. The rioters forced the Chinese out of the Coronel Building and dragged the captured Chinese to makeshift gallows at Tomlinson's corral and Goller's wagon shop. When John Goller protested that his children were present, a rioter pressed a gun to his face and said, "Dry up, you son of a bitch." After Goller's portico crossbar was filled with seven hanging bodies, the crowd dragged three more victims to a nearby freight wagon and hung them from the high side of the wagon. While there are varying accounts of exactly what transpired, there is no disputing the brutality and savagery of that night.

The bodies of 17 Chinese men and boys lie in the Los Angeles jail yard on October 24 , 1871, the results of the Chinese massacre.

The next morning, seventeen bodies were laid out in the jail yard, grim evidence of the horrific events of the previous night. The eighteenth victim, the first man hanged, had been buried the night before. Ten percent of the Chinese population had been killed. One of the Chinese caught up in the mob violence was the respected Dr. Gene Tong. In fact, of the killed, only one is thought to have participated in the original gunfight.

Though a grand jury returned 25 indictments for the murder of the Chinese, only ten men stood trial. Eight rioters were convicted on manslaughter charges, but the charges were overturned on a legal technicality and the defendants were never retried.

The tragedy was quickly forgotten; the local newspapers made no mention of it in the year end recap of major events of the year. The unfortunate truth is that little changed in Los Angeles as a result of the massacre on October 24. The massacre did not result in racial tolerance, in fact, anti-Chinese sentiment increased in the following years. The Anti-Coolie club was formed in 1876, counting many prominent citizens among its members, and the newspapers resumed their editorial attacks against the Chinese.

Further Reading

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Forgotten Los Angeles History: The Chinese Massacre of 1871

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May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, a month in which we celebrate the culture, traditions, accomplishments, and history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.

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Glendale, Burbank, Hawthorn Simi Valley,  Blacks had to leave by sundown in the not too distant past!

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Since 2001, at least 968 people have been killed by law enforcement in Los Angeles County, according to homicide records from the county medical examiner-coroner. The Times has compiled them all into this database, which will update with the latest cases.

Almost all of the dead were men, nearly 80% were Black or Latino. More than 97% were shot to death.

Criminal charges are rare. In nearly all cases, the use of force was deemed legally justified by the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, which conducts an investigation into each incident. Since 2000, only two officers have been charged as a result of shooting a civilian while on duty.

The trend over time

Over the last 23 years, police in Los Angeles County have killed about four people each month. The number has varied but remains relatively steady, averaging roughly 42 people per year.

Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, Times analysis

The number of people killed each year has ranged from a low of 32 in 2001 to a high of 55 in 2011 and 2013. Here is how this year's count compares:

Cumulative deaths over the course of each year

Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, Times analysis

Who is being killed

Some populations are disproportionately affected by police violence. Men between the ages of 20 and 39 account for nearly all of the deaths.

Black people make up less than 10% of L.A. County's population, yet they represent a 24% of law enforcement killings. Conversely, white people, who make up more than a quarter of the population, are killed in 19% of the incidents.

Percentage of population vs. deaths

Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner, U.S. Census, Times analysis

Where it happens

Killings by law enforcement have occurred across Los Angeles County. Police killings are more concentrated in areas with large numbers of Black and Latino residents such as Long Beach, Compton and Inglewood.

Everyone who has died

Here is the complete list of every police killing deemed a homicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner-coroner's office and logged by The Times' Homicide Report.

Times reporter Nicole Santa Cruz tracks the death of every person killed by another in Los Angeles County for the Homicide Report, which is free to all readers.

To support her reporting, and make more stories like this one possible, subscribe today. Already a subscriber? Your contributions help us maintain this page. Thank you.

The Times' Homicide Report compiled deaths by reviewing publicly-available records from the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner's office and verifying information with law enforcement.

The records include each death that has been ruled a homicide by medical examiners, which is the death of a person at the hands of another. Our records do not include deaths that have not been ruled a homicide, such as on-duty vehicular deaths, jail suicides and other in-custody deaths. Some counts, such as those from the local Black Lives Matter chapter, have included such incidents.

In an effort to aid researchers, The Times has released its database of police killings in Los Angeles County to the public.

The database is available on Github, a popular website for hosting data and computer code. The files will be updated periodically at github.com/datadesk/los-angeles-police-killings-data.

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L.A. police killings: Tracking homicides in Los Angeles County since 2000

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Since 2001, at least 968 people have been killed by law enforcement in Los Angeles County, according to homicide records from the county medical examiner-coroner. The Times has compiled them all into this database, which will update with the latest cases. Almost all of the dead were men, nearly 80% were Black or Latino.

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Forced sterilization of Mexican women in late ’60s and early ’70s L.A.

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Forced sterilization of Mexican women in late ’60s and early ’70s L.A.

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"Every time I make a film, it's because something pissed me off," said Academy Award-nominated documentarian Renee Tajima-Peña, professor of Asian American studies at UCLA.

It was a personal impetus that drove the creation of "No Más Bebés," her award-winning 2015 film that tells the story of Mexican immigrant women who were permanently sterilized at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center hospital in the late 1960s and early 1970s - either without their consent or under extreme duress to consent to a tubal ligation procedure. A group of them launched an unsuccessful class action suit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, against the hospital in 1975.

As part of its "Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985" exhibition, produced in conjunction with the Getty Initiative's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, the Hammer Museum at UCLA will screen "No Más Bebés" Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. followed by a Q&A with Tajima-Peña.

"These women went to the hospital for emergency C-sections," Tajima-Peña said. "They were distressed, terrified their babies would die, often hemorrhaging and medicated. Most did not speak English and they were often given these English-language consent forms, while in labor, before they could get care, and some of them did not consent at all."

Some women would not discover what happened to them until years later after trying to get pregnant again, and failing.

Tajima-Peña first heard the story of these women from her neighbor at the time, historian Virginia Espino, who became the film's co-producer. At the time, she led the Latino program at the UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research and is now a lecturer in the Chicana and Chicano studies department. The two women had small children around the same age and would get together, talking about their work as their sons played nearby. Tajima-Peña was basking in her choice to become a mom at the time.

"I remember thinking 'this is fabulous, why did I wait so long?'" she said. "I grew up middle class always thinking 'oh, if I want to have a baby I can have a baby.'"

The story of the women involved in Madrigal v. Quilligan made her think differently about the fight for reproductive rights.

"One thing that Virginia always talked about was motherhood as a political act. These women in the 1970s were asserting their values of being a mother," Tajima- Peña said. "If you look at U.S. feminist history at that point, that idea was kind of contrary to the movement, at least for middle-class women. For my generation the fight for reproductive rights really centered around safe access to abortion.

"But when I heard about these women, it really hit me in the gut," she said. "It just outraged me."

At UCLA, Tajima-Peña teaches courses in EthnoCommunications. Her film credits include the documentaries, "Calavera Highway," "Skate Manzanar," "Labor Women," "My America ... or Honk if You Love Buddha" and "Who Killed Vincent Chin?"

For "No Más Bebés" Tajima-Peña set out on a five-year mission to tell their stories. She and Espino interviewed as many of the women as they could who were plaintiffs in the Madrigal v. Quilligan case brought against Dr. Edward James Quilligan, who was head of the women's hospital at the time. She also interviewed Quilligan along with several other doctors, including Bernard Rosenfeld, an intern at the time, who was the whistleblower about the methods his workplace employed to sterilize women.

The fact that 10 of those women bravely stepped forward to speak out about what happened to them as part of the lawsuit was radical in and of itself, Tajima-Peña said.

"They were at the bottom of the social hierarchy," she said. "They were Mexican immigrant women, they were homemakers, factory workers, restaurant workers. And they went up against some very powerful white men. They lost their case, but the fact that they brought this practice to light resulted in real change."

Many were not eager to re-live the experience for the film, she said. Some of the women involved still hadn't shared what they had been through with their own children, who were too young at the time to remember. For some, their now-grown children convinced them to participate in the film after finally learning the truth.

As Tajima-Peña and Espino conducted research they uncovered a multilayered UCLA connection to the story.

Espino, who is speaking at the Hammer Museum on Oct. 29 on a panel about forced sterilization in U.S. history, was instrumental in preserving documents related to the case, which now reside in the Chicano Studies Research Center in an archive called the Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez Sterilization Papers. Vélez-Ibáñez was an anthropology professor at UCLA who testified on behalf of the women and donated all of his records to UCLA. His activist research on the topic was unheard of at the time, Tajima-Peña said.

And Antonia Hernandez, the young Latina lawyer who filed the case and represented the sterlized women had just graduated from UCLA School of Law. Charles Nabarrete, who was just a few years out of UCLA Law, served as lead counsel.

"At that time there were very few Chicanos not only in law school but in the state and U.S. bar at all," Tajima-Peña said. "They went up against these powerful institutions - the hospital, the county state and federal government - working out of a storefront in Boyle Heights."

Most of the doctors involved believe they did nothing wrong, Tajima-Peña said, based on her interviews with them. And for some, that might be true, she believes.

But there was a cultural tension in the early 1970s around the population explosion of the previous decades, one that prompted concerted efforts to promote sterilization, especially among minority communities across the United States. Sterilization rates in California were among the highest in the country.

At the same time as the events from her film, a widespread campaign to promote voluntary sterilization resulted in one-third of the population of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico undergoing such procedures.

A strong and well-financed crop of family planning services available at the time played a role, Tajima- Peña said.

"They were good programs because women who could otherwise not afford this whole menu of contraceptive services, got them, so they were really beneficial," she said. "But there also was this environment for abuse - a perfect storm created by well-financed family planning initiatives, attitudes about immigrants and population-explosion fears."

The furor surrounding these women's stories in the wake of their federal suit did lead to new standards in consent for sterilization, especially for non-English speakers.

But for the women in "No Más Bebés," the pain lingers, Tajima-Peña said.

"Most of the doctors I interviewed contend they did nothing wrong - that these women did consent to sterilization but maybe had post-surgery regrets or a change of heart," she said. "On one hand, trying to be an objective filmmaker, you have to think that's plausible ... until I met the women themselves.

"It was 40 years later and their emotions were still so raw, they still felt so wronged and violated. To me it did not read as regret - they had very precise memories of what happened to them."

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UCLA professor's film documents forced sterilization of Mexican women in late '60s and early '70s L.A.

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"Every time I make a film, it's because something pissed me off," said Academy Award-nominated documentarian Renee Tajima-Peña, professor of Asian American studies at UCLA.

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The Mexican Repatriation was a mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from the United States between 1929 and 1936. Estimates of how many were repatriated range from 400,000 to 2,000,000

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The Mexican Repatriation was a mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from the United States between 1929 and 1936. Estimates of how many were repatriated range from 400,000 to 2,000,000. An estimated sixty percent of those deported were birthright citizens of the United States. Because the forced movement was based on ethnicity, and frequently ignored citizenship, some scholars argue the process meets modern legal definitions of ethnic cleansing.

Widely blamed for exacerbating the overall economic downturn of the Great Depression, Mexicans were further targeted because of "the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios." While supported by the federal government, actual deportations were largely organized and carried out by city and state governments, often with support from local private entities.

At the beginning of the Great Depression, there were two primary sources of US residents of Mexican descent: territorial changes after the Mexican-American War, and migration.[citation needed ]

With the U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War, the Gadsden Purchase, and the annexation of the Republic of Texas, much of the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Texas, Colorado, and Wyoming, were ceded to the United States. This land was roughly half of Mexico's pre-war territory.

80,000-100,000 Mexican citizens lived in this territory, and were promised U.S. citizenship under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War. About 3,000 decided to move to Mexican territory. Mexicans who remained in the U.S. were considered U.S. citizens and were counted as "white" by the U.S. census until 1930, but a growing influx of immigrants combined with local racism led to the creation of a new category in the census of that year.

Mexican emigration to the United States was not significant until the construction of the railroad network between Mexico and the Southwest, which provided employment and eased transit. Increasing demands for agricultural labor, and the violence and economic disruption of the Mexican Revolution, also caused many to flee Mexico during the years of 1910-1920 and again during the Cristero War in the late 1920s.

American employers often encouraged such emigration. At the onset of the 20th century, "U.S. employers went so far as to make requests directly to the president of Mexico to send more labor into the United States" and hired "aggressive labor recruiters who work outside the parameters of the U.S." in order to recruit Mexican labor for jobs in industry, railroads, meatpacking, steel mills, and agriculture. This led to the existence of Mexican communities outside of the Southwest, in places like Indiana and Michigan (though the vast majority of Mexicans in the US remained in the Southwest).

These early waves of immigration also led to waves of repatriation, generally tied to economic downturns. During the depression of 1907, the Mexican government allocated funds to repatriate some Mexicans living in the United States. Similarly, in the depression of 1920-21, the US government was advised to deport Mexicans to "relieve ... benevolence agencies of the burden of helping braceros and their families." While some sources report up to 150,000 repatriations during this period, Mexican and US records conflict as to whether emigration from the US to Mexico increased in 1921, and only a limited number of formal deportations were recorded.

Immigration from Mexico was not formally regulated until the Immigration Act of 1917, but enforcement was lax and many exceptions were given for employers. In 1924, with the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol, enforcement became more strict, and in the late 1920s before the market crash, as part of a general anti-immigrant sentiment, enforcement was again tightened.

Due to the lax immigration enforcement, and porousness of the border, many citizens, legal residents, and immigrants did not have the official documentation proving their citizenship, had lost their documents, or just never applied for citizenship. Prejudice played a factor: Mexicans were stereotyped as "unclean, improvident, indolent, and innately dull", so many Mexicans did not apply for citizenship because they "knew that if [they] became a citizen [they] would still be, in the eyes of the Anglos, a Mexican".

Large numbers of Mexican nationals and Mexican-Americans were repatriated during the early 1930s. This followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, and resulting growth in nativist sentiment, exemplified by President Herbert Hoover's call for deportation and a series on the racial inferiority of Mexicans run by the Saturday Evening Post.

Reliable data for the total number repatriated is difficult to come by. Hoffman estimates that over 400,000 Mexicans left the US between 1929 and 1937, with a peak of 138,000 in 1931. Mexican government sources suggest over 300,000 were repatriated between 1930 and 1933, while Mexican media reported up to 2,000,000 during a similar span. After 1933, repatriation decreased from the 1931 peak, but was over 10,000 in most years until 1940. Research by California state senator Joseph Dunn concluded that 1.8 million had been repatriated.

This constituted a significant portion of the Mexican population in the US. By one estimate, one-fifth of Mexicans in California were repatriated by 1932, and one-third of all Mexicans in the US between 1931 and 1934. The 1930 Census reported 1.3 million Mexicans in the US, but this number is not believed to be reliable, because some repatriations had already begun, illegal immigrants were not counted, and the Census attempted to use racial concepts that did not map to how many Spanish-speakers in the Southwest defined their own identities.

Repatriation was not evenly geographically distributed, with Mexicans living in the US midwest being only 3% of the overall Mexican population in the US but perhaps 10% of repatriates.

Besides coverage in local newspapers and radio, deportation was frequent enough that it was reflected in the lyrics of Mexican popular music.

Even before the Wall Street crash, a variety of "small farmers, progressives, labor unions, eugenicists, and racists" had called for restrictions on Mexican immigration. Their arguments focused primarily on competition for jobs, and the cost of public assistance for indigents. These arguments continued after the beginning of the Great Depression.

For example, in Los Angeles, C.P. Visel, the spokesman for Los Angeles Citizens Committee for Coordination of Unemployment Relief (LACCCU), wrote to the federal government that deportation was necessary because "[w]e need their jobs for needy citizens". A member of the Los Angeles County board of Supervisors, H.M. Blaine, is recorded as saying "the majority of the Mexicans in the Los Angeles Colonia were either on relief or were public charges." Similarly, Congressman Martin Dies (D-TX) wrote in the Chicago Herald-Examiner that the "large alien population is the basic cause of unemployment." Independent groups such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the National Club of America for Americans also thought that deporting Mexicans would free up jobs for U.S. citizens and the latter group urged Americans to pressure the government into deporting Mexicans. Secretary of Labor William Doak (who at that time oversaw the Border Patrol) "asserted that deportation ... was essential for reducing unemployment".

Contemporaries did not always agree with this analysis. For example, in a study of El Paso, Texas, the National Catholic Welfare Conference estimated that deportation of parents who were non-citizens would cost more than roundup and deportation, because previously ineligible remaining children and wives would become eligible for welfare. Modern economic research has also suggested that the economic impact of deportation was negligible or even negative.

Racism was also a factor. Mexicans were targeted in part because of "the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios."

In response to these justifications, the federal government, in coordination with local governments, took steps to remove Mexicans. These actions were a combination of federal actions that created a "climate of fear", along with local activities that encouraged repatriation through a combination of "lure, persuasion, and coercion". Another justification made by Mexican officials for bringing back Mexican nationals was to repatriate large numbers of Mexican citizens with agricultural and industrial expertise learned in the United States.

In response to these justifications, the federal government, in coordination with local governments, took steps to remove Mexicans. These actions were a combination of federal actions that created a "climate of fear", along with local activities that encouraged repatriation through a combination of "lure, persuasion, and coercion".

Early "voluntary" repatriation

Mexicans were often among the first to be laid off after the crash of 1929. When combined with endemic harassment, many sought to return to Mexico. For example, in 1931 in Gary, Indiana, a number of people sought funding to return to Mexico, or took advantage of reduced-rate train tickets. By 1932, such repatriation was no longer voluntary, as local governments and aid agencies in Gary began to use "repressive measures ... to force the return of reluctant voyagers". Similarly, in Detroit, by 1932 one Mexican national reported to the local consul that police had "dragged" him to the train station against his will, after he had proven his residency the previous year. Mexican Consulates across the country received complaints of "harassment, beatings, heavy-handed tactics, and verbal abuse".

Federal government action

Repatriation in Los Angeles

Beginning in the early 1930s, local governments instigated repatriation programs, often conducted through local welfare bureaus or private charitable agencies. Los Angeles had the largest population of Mexicans outside of Mexico, and had a typical deportation approach, with a plan for "publicity releases announcing the deportation campaign, a few arrests would be made 'with all publicity possible and pictures,' and both police and deputy sheriffs would assist". This led to complaints and criticisms from both the Mexican Consulate and local Spanish language publication, . The raids were significant in scope, assuming "the logistics of full-scale paramilitary operations", with cooperation from Federal officials, country deputy sheriffs, and city police, who would raid public places, who were then "herded" onto trains or buses. Jose David Orozco described on his local radio station the "women crying in the streets when not finding their husbands" after deportation sweeps had occurred."

After the peak of the repatriation, Los Angeles again threatened to deport "between 15,000 and 25,000 families" in 1934. While the Mexican government took the threat seriously enough to attempt to prepare for such an influx, the city ultimately did not carry through on their threat.

Once apprehended, requesting a hearing was a possibility, but immigration officers rarely informed individuals of their rights, and the hearings were "official but informal," in that immigration inspectors "acted as interpreter, accuser, judge, and jury.". Moreover, the deportee was seldom represented by a lawyer, a privilege that could only be granted at the discretion of the immigration officer. This process was likely a violation of US federal due process, equal protection, and Fourth Amendment rights.

Mexican governments had traditionally taken the position that it was "duty-bound" to help repatriate Mexicans who lived in the annexed portions of the southwest United States. However, it did not typically act on this stated policy, because of a lack of resources. Nonetheless, because of the large number of repatriations in the early 1930s, the government was forced to act and provided a variety of services. From July 1930 to June 1931, it underwrote the cost of repatriation for over 90,000 nationals. In some cases, the government attempted to create new villages ("colonias") where repatriates could live, but the vast majority returned to communities in which relatives or friends lived.

After the peak of the repatriation had passed, the post-1934 government led by Lázaro Cárdenas continued to speak about encouraging repatriation, but did little to actually encourage that to occur.

The federal government responded to the increased levels of immigration that began during World War II (partly due to increased demand for agricultural labor) with the official 1954 INS program called Operation Wetback, in which an estimated one million persons, the majority of whom were Mexican nationals and immigrants without papers, were repatriated to Mexico. But some were also U.S. citizens and deported to Mexico as well.

The US federal government has not apologized for the repatriations. In 2006, Congressional representatives Hilda Solis and Luis Gutiérrez introduced a bill calling for a commission to study the issue. Solis also called for an apology.

The state of California apologized in 2005 by passing the "Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program", which officially recognized the "unconstitutional removal and coerced emigration of United States citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent" and apologized to residents of California "for the fundamental violations of their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights committed during the period of illegal deportation and coerced emigration." However, no reparations for the victims were approved. Los Angeles County also issued an apology in 2012, and installed a memorial at the site of one of the city's first immigration raids.

Repatriation is not widely discussed in U.S. history textbooks. In a 2006 survey of the nine most commonly used American history textbooks in the United States, four did not mention the topic, and only one devoted more than half a page to the topic. In total, they devoted four pages to the repatriation.

An economics paper that studied the effects of the mass repatriation concluded that

cities with larger repatriation intensity ... performed similarly or worse in terms of native employment and wages, relative to cities which were similar in most labor market characteristics but which experienced small repatriation intensity. ... [O]ur estimates suggest that [repatriation] may have further increased [native] levels of unemployment and depressed their wages. (emphasis added)

The researchers suggest that this occurred in part because non-Mexican natives were paid lower wages after the repatriation, and because some jobs related to Mexican labor (such as managers of agricultural labor) were lost.

A legal scholar has argued that since the forced movement was based on race, and frequently ignored citizenship, the process meets modern legal standards for ethnic cleansing.

Johnson, Kevin (Fall 2005). "The Forgotten Repatriation of Persons of Mexican Ancestry and Lessons for the War on Terror". 26 (1). Davis, California: Pace Law Review.

^ Ruiz, Vicki L. (1998). Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 27-29. ISBN 978-0-19-513099-7.

^ Castillo, Richard Griswold del (1992-09-01). "Chapter 5: Citizenship and Property Rights". The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 9780806124780.

^ Gratton, Brian; Merchant, Emily Klancher (2016-09-30). "La Raza: Mexicans in the United States Census". Journal of Policy History. 28 (4): 537-567. doi:10.1017/S0898030616000257. ISSN 1528-4190. Alt URL

Aguila, Jamie R. (March 2007). "Mexican/U.S. Immigration Policy Prior to the Great Depression". The Journal of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Diplomatic History. 31 (2): 207-225. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2007.00612.x.

Betten, Neil; Mohl, Raymond A. (1973-08-01). "From Discrimination to Repatriation: Mexican Life in Gary, Indiana, during the Great Depression". Pacific Historical Review. 42 (3): 370-388. doi:10.2307/3637683. ISSN 0030-8684. JSTOR 3637683.

^ Valdés, Dennis Nodín (1988-01-01). "Mexican Revolutionary Nationalism and Repatriation during the Great Depression". Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. 4 (1): 1-23. doi:10.2307/1052051. ISSN 0742-9797. JSTOR 1052051.

^ Hoffman, Abraham (1972-10-01). "Mexican Repatriation Statistics: Some Suggested Alternatives to Carey McWilliams" (PDF). The Western Historical Quarterly. 3 (4): 391-404. doi:10.2307/966864. ISSN 0043-3810. JSTOR 966864.

Saúl Alanís Enciso, Fernando (2017). They Should Stay There: The Story of Mexican Migration and Repatriation During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill. ISBN 978-1469634258. OCLC 970604385.

^ Salinas, Michelle (2016). "Singing the Great Depression: Mexican and Mexican American Perspectives Through Corridos (1929-1949)". EScholarship. UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations: 21-36.

^ Lee, Jongkwan; Peri, Giovanni; Yasenov, Vasil (September 2017). "The Employment Effects of Mexican Repatriations: Evidence from the 1930s" (PDF). NBER Working Paper No. 23885. doi:10.3386/w23885.

^ Valdés, Dennis Nodín (1988-01-01). "Mexican Revolutionary Nationalism and Repatriation during the Great Depression". Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. 4 (1): 1-23. doi:10.2307/1052051. ISSN 0742-9797. JSTOR 1052051.

^ https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1939/07/18/93940224.pdf

^ https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1926/06/15/98382532.html?pageNumber=38

^ Bermudez, Esmeralda (2017-07-15). "L.A.'s Mexican American cultural center begins to blossom after a rocky start". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035.

The Immigration Debate: Studies on the Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration. National Academies Press. 1998. doi:10.17226/5985. ISBN 978-0-309-05998-5.

Boisson, Steve (2006-09-01). "Immigrants: The Last Time America Sent Her Own Packing". HistoryNet.

Chávez, John R. (1984-01-01). The Lost Land: The Chicano Image of the Southwest. UNM Press. ISBN 9780826307507.

Garza, Melita M. (2017-01-02). "Framing Mexicans in Great Depression Editorials: Alien Riff-Raff to Heroes". American Journalism. 34 (1): 26-48. doi:10.1080/08821127.2016.1275216. ISSN 0882-1127.

Guerin-Gonzales, Camille (1994-01-01). Mexican Workers and American dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 9780813520483. OCLC 867315464.

Lee, Stacy, ed. (2002-10-01). "Deportation and Repatriation". Mexico and the United States. Marshall Cavendish. ISBN 9780761474029.

McKay, Robert R. "The Federal Deportation Campaign in Texas: Mexican Deportation from the Lower Rio Grande Valley during the Great Depression," Borderlands Journal, Fall 1981

Skerry, Peter (1995-01-01). Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674572621.

Valenciana, Christine (2006). "Unconstitutional Deportation of Mexican Americans During the 1930s: A Family History and Oral History" (PDF). Multicultural Education. Spring: 4-9.

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The Mexican Repatriation was a mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans from the United States between 1929 and 1936. Estimates of how many were repatriated range from 400,000 to 2,000,000. An estimated sixty percent of those deported were birthright citizens of the United States.

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Tuesday morning in downtown Los Angeles began with quiet reverence.

Against a backdrop of city sounds came the splash of water hitting a truck's flatbed in front of the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. Then came the names of men and women in Los Angeles killed by law enforcement or while in police custody: John Horton, Matthew Blaylock, Wakiesha Wilson.

"We have 700 names, and we're still counting," said Black Lives Matter Los Angeles leader Paula Minor, dubbed "Mama Paula," as she steadily poured water from a bottle onto leafy branches tied together with string. A little water trickled out as each name was said aloud, until the bottle was empty.

A crowd of a few hundred people gathered around a makeshift stage to honor the dead and commemorate the life of George Floyd, who was murdered a year ago Tuesday when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned the Black man to the ground for nearly nine and a half minutes.

"We pour libations in the hope of having some spiritual umbrella over our work," Minor said. "It's honoring those people whose lives have been stolen."

Catherine Walker, mother of 30-year-old Grechario Mack, who was killed by Los Angeles police in 2018 at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall, gave an impassioned speech about the pain she felt losing her son.

"It shouldn't have took George Floyd ... for y'all to stop doing what you're doing," said Wilson, wearing a red shirt and pink face mask featuring the face of her son. "You've been doing it to our people for hundreds of years. But guess what, it's time to stop because we woke up, and we going to stay woke!"

Cheers from the crowd greeted her words. Flags and posters featuring the faces of activists such as Angela Davis and historical figures like Harriet Tubman speckled the gathering. Handmade posters advocated "Fund services not police" and "Amplify black voices." Another read: "Black lives matter everywhere."

Anthony Pittman, 28, took a bus from Compton to attend the rally, which he said was the least he could do to support the cause.

"This is a part of who I am. It affects me on a daily basis. I have no other choice," Pittman said. "I was born and raised in Compton and almost all of my interactions with the Compton sheriff have been negative. So I'm trying to see where this is going and how I can support or at least be a part of it."

Sitting in a shady spot on the sidewalk, 34-year-old Carolyn Lee said she's not usually the most vocal at rallies, but she felt the need to be present.

"I think it's important to still show up," Lee said. "I can feel overwhelmed personally, but coming here reminds me that there is a community being built and people that are moving the conversation forward and driving change."

The environment of the rally showcased how much has changed in the city since the previous year's protests. Los Angeles is largely reopened now, a stark contrast to the pandemic lockdowns that engulfed the county in late May 2020. Chauvin has since been convicted of murder. And the chant "Black lives matter" has become a household phrase, printed on store windows and merchandise.

Long Beach mother Adika Dayo Jackson, 37, stood by a stroller with her two toddlers, aged 2 and 3. She said she felt it was necessary to bring her children to the gathering to remember George Floyd and protest.

"My kids have to understand that the fight didn't start with us," Jackson said. "They may not remember the day, but they'll know that we were here and here for a reason - to fight for Black lives."

Despite the wave of activism and awareness that followed Floyd's death last summer, speakers on Tuesday emphasized the need for continued movement.

"About a year ago today, people all over the world saw what we've been talking about for years ... changes were promised," Minor said. "But here in Los Angeles city and county, the change did not occur."

L.A. County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Hilda Solis said in a statement that Floyd's death gave Los Angeles leaders "newfound momentum," and she is committed to rooting out systemic racism through new policies.

"Every resident regardless of their zip code, ethnicity, race, background, etc. deserves to live in a safe and healthy community," she said in the statement. "Our communities also deserve to hold law enforcement who engage in misconduct and harm accountable as no one is above the law, including those in law enforcement. The work is ongoing and with our community, we will continue to forge ahead."

At points, the memorial transformed into a rallying cry to defund the police, a phrase echoing last summer's protests calling for more investment in community services and organizations. After last year's explosive activism, the Los Angeles City Council voted to cut the LAPD budget, shrinking the police force to fewer than 10,000 officers for the first time in more than a decade.

Los Angeles is now facing a new budget, in which Mayor Eric Garcetti proposed increasing funding for LAPD by 3%. Amid occasional calls of "F- Garcetti" by attendees, Pastor Eddie Anderson of Clergy for Black Lives called on those gathered to continue protesting and pressuring city officials to defund the police and invest in the community.

"We want police accountability, in the name of George Floyd," Anderson said.

Lisa Hines, Wilson's mother, concurred: "The Los Angeles Police Department ain't nothing but hit men and women with targets on our people's backs."

After the rally in front of police headquarters, the group marched to the county building, chanting, "Black lives, we matter."

Similar commemorations of Floyd's death took place across the country. Floyd's family spent a busy morning meeting with national leaders, including President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). In Minneapolis, organizers held a community festival and candlelight vigil Tuesday, following a march on Sunday at the courthouse where Chauvin was convicted.

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On anniversary of George Floyd's death, L.A. rally declares, 'Black lives matter everywhere'

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Tuesday morning in downtown Los Angeles began with quiet reverence. Against a backdrop of city sounds came the splash of water hitting a truck's flatbed in front of the Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. Then came the names of men and women in Los Angeles killed by law enforcement or while in police custody: John Horton, Matthew Blaylock, Wakiesha Wilson.

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Welcome back to Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment. I'm Sammy Roth.

There were several topics I considered writing about this week, including the results of California's latest cap-and-trade auction and a bill in Sacramento dealing with the proposed Eagle Mountain hydropower project.

But after a week of protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police, I realized there was only one topic I could focus on in this newsletter: environmental injustice. It's a term that describes how people of color and poor communities have borne disproportionate harm from pollution, and the discriminatory systems that have perpetuated those inequities.

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There are countless links between environmental degradation and inequality. Consider water contamination in predominantly black and brown communities, such as Flint, Mich., where experts say the drinking water crisis was rooted in systemic racism. Or research finding that, in the U.S., the best predictor of whether you live near a hazardous waste site is the color of your skin.

In Los Angeles, poisonous lead contamination at homes near the closed Exide battery recycling plant has yet to be fully cleaned up, hurting working-class Latino families, as my colleague Tony Barboza has reported. Black, Latino and low-income California residents are especially likely to live near unplugged oil and gas wells that can spew pollution, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. People of color are more likely than white people to live alongside power plants, oil refineries and landfills.

Rachel Ramirez discussed the roots of environmental injustice in a piece for Grist this week, noting that "some legacies of redlining - the government-sanctioned denial of home loans and insurance to communities of color - include housing stock that is disproportionately located near polluting industrial infrastructure."
The COVID-19 pandemic has only worsened existing inequities.
In a story for Outside magazine, Heather Hansman explains how a lack of access to clean drinking water in the Navajo Nation has helped fuel the country's worst known COVID-19 outbreak by infection rate. My colleague Kurtis Lee has also written several pieces about the Navajo Nation's unique vulnerability to the coronavirus, as well as its lack of running water and electricity.

There's already research linking polluted air - which, in America, blacks and Latinos are more likely to breathe - with a higher likelihood of dying from COVID-19.

Marshall Shepherd, a climate scientist and former president of the American Meteorological Society, wrote that "I can't breathe" - some of the last words spoken by George Floyd as a police officer pressed a knee into his neck - seems like a theme for 2020.
"The historic coronavirus pandemic has literally taken the breath of many people," Shepherd wrote in a piece for Forbes.
Then there's global warming.

The climate crisis often hits people of color hardest, in the U.S. and around the world. It's true in cities, where black, brown and low-income people experience hotter temperatures during deadly heat waves because their neighborhoods lack tree cover and parks, or because they're near freeways or industrial facilities. It's true in Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Maria caused thousands of deaths and gave birth to a climate movement. It's true in Central America, where climate-fueled drought is driving migration.

Writing for the Guardian a few years ago, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors and fellow activist Nyeusi Nguvu argued that "the inequalities that turn an extreme weather event into a disaster or human catastrophe mirror the inequalities that cause the disproportionate loss of black and poor life globally - and the exact systems that Black Lives Matter fights against."
"Environmental injustice has always been an issue and a fight taken on by black and poor communities," they wrote. "We are the first to die, but we are also the first to fight on the frontlines."
Those ideas help explain why a growing number of activists support policy proposals, such as the Green New Deal, that tie climate change action to significant economic reforms meant to tackle inequality and racism.
Or as many folks have put it on Twitter: "Climate justice is racial justice."

A reminder that climate justice IS racial justice.

You cannot say you fight for climate justice without also fighting for racial justice. You cannot say you're a climate activist without understanding that the two struggles are inseparable.#BlackLivesMatter
- Jamie Margolin (@Jamie_Margolin) June 1, 2020

At the same time, racism can derail efforts to fight climate change, according to the marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson.
"How can we expect black Americans to focus on climate when we are so at risk on our streets, in our communities, and even within our own homes?" Johnson asks in an op-ed for the Washington Post."How can people of color effectively lead their communities on climate solutions when faced with pervasive and life-shortening racism?"
As a journalist, I don't pretend to have the answers. But I know it's incumbent on me to be part of the conversation, and to shine a light on environmental injustice. So consider this week's newsletter my commitment to doing more. Hold me accountable, please.

Here's what else is happening around California and the American West:

TOP STORIES

For the first time since 1885, the U.S. got more energy from renewables than from coal in 2019. This was going to happen sooner or later, as solar and wind power are increasingly beating coal on cost. But it's still a huge milestone; here's the story from Katherine Blunt at the Wall Street Journal. Coal's decline has continued in 2020, with 13 plant closures announced this year, per Benjamin Storrow at E&E News. (For a slightly out-of-date look at coal closures in the West, here's a story I wrote in February.)

In a landmark vote, a majority of Chevron shareholders demanded that the oil giant issue a report on its climate change lobbying. The shareholder resolution is nonbinding, as Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik explains in his piece. But it's the latest sign that investors want to know how oil and gas companies plan to keep making money in a climate-constrained world.

Probably my favorite read this week was "Cash Flows: How Investors Are Banking On the West's Water Scarcity." It's a collaboration between public radio stations and other nonprofit news outlets in Arizona, Colorado and Nevada, tracking how out-of-town private investors are buying up farmland in hopes of selling rural water supplies to cities, or otherwise transferring water from agriculture to other uses. The fear of water transfers is also pervasive in California's Imperial County, as I wrote in April.

POLITICAL CLIMATE

Can a new climate consensus unite the left and boost Joe Biden? In two pieces for Vox, David Roberts makes the case that after years of disagreement between various left-of-center factions on climate change, there's an emerging policy consensus focused on sector-specific standards, public investments and a commitment to justice. Roberts also argues that embracing this consensus would help Joe Biden build support among climate activists, environmental justice advocates, unions and other key groups.

The tracks do not appear to be greased for quick construction of high-speed rail in California. Twelve years after voters approved bonds to build a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, environmental impact statements are still trickling in. The latest one focuses on a 14-mile segment from downtown L.A. to Burbank, as Ralph Vartabedian writes for The Times. Ralph also reports that the bullet train may need operating subsidies, contrary to what voters were once promised.

Environmental activists are pushing back against Gavin Newsom's budget proposal. With California facing a projected $54-billion budget shortfall amid the coronavirus crisis (remember the coronavirus?), Gov. Newsom has taken a sledgehammer to all sorts of climate and environmental priorities, proposing less spending - relative to his earlier budget plan - on electric vehicle rebates, oil and gas regulation and preserving wildlife habitats, as Dustin Gardiner reports for the San Francisco Chronicle.

POWER STRUGGLES

The electric truck start-up Nikola is about to go public. Here's the story by Russ Mitchell for The Times. If you've never heard of Nikola, there are a few things to know: Like Tesla, the company is named for electric grid pioneer Nikola Tesla; and unlike Tesla, the company's founder has only nice things to say about his competitor, Elon Musk. (Also unlike Tesla, Nikola plans to use hydrogen fuel cell technology rather than lithium-ion batteries. I've written about hydrogen a few times recently; see here and here.)

Let's call it a tale of two San Diegos. A new report finds that L.A.'s neighbor to the south has the second-most solar power of any U.S. city, as the San Diego Union-Tribune's Rob Nikolewski reports. (Los Angeles came in first, although San Diego has more solar per capita.) But what about transportation, the largest source of climate pollution? David Garrick reports that some San Diegans are unhappy about a plan to spend suburban development fees building bike lines and bus routes in denser neighborhoods.

AROUND THE WEST

Federal judges are pushing back against President Trump's fossil fuel agenda. It's been a rough few months for the Trump administration's efforts to open up more of the West's public lands to oil and gas drilling: Federal judges have canceled fossil fuel leases across more than 300,000 acres in Montana and Wyoming, rejected plans for new natural gas wells in Colorado, and once again blocked construction of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, as Matthew Brown reports in an Associated Press roundup.

The Klamath Basin is facing a severe water shortage. It's worth remembering that in a state as big as California, drought can be a regional phenomenon. So even though Southern California has gotten a good amount of rain the last few months, the state's far northern region is still quite dry - which is why the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation told farmers along the Oregon border to plan for a lot less water than normal, then cut their estimates even further, as the San Francisco Chronicle's Kurtis Alexander reports.

Here's an absolutely wild story. As oil and gas drillers fight Colorado's growing push to regulate them, a University of Colorado scientist who has been monitoring emissions from fracking operations was abruptly fired by the university, as Daniel Glick reports for InsideClimate News. The school claimed he misused public funds, but Glick uncovered several holes in that explanation.

ONE MORE THING

It's been a heavy week, to say the least, so I'll end with something light and fun.

People have been telling me for years to watch "California's Gold," a public television program hosted by the late Huell Howser that explored "the state's rich history, cultural diversity, landmarks, natural wonders, amazing people and points of interest, especially lesser known and out-of-the-way places," per IMDb. I'd never seen an episode until this weekend, when I watched Huell's visit to one of my favorite places in the world, Mt. San Jacinto outside Palm Springs.

The episode focuses on two things: the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, an amazing contraption that carries visitors nearly 6,000 feet up the mountain in little more than 10 minutes; and the Colorado River Aqueduct, which bores a tunnel through the mountain on its path to deliver water from the California-Arizona border to the Los Angeles area. Huell actually gets a look inside the tunnel!

Anyway, the episode is an absolute treat. I'm looking forward to watching more "California's Gold" at the show's archives.
I'll be back in your inbox next week. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.

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Why communities fighting for fair policing also demand environmental justice

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Welcome back to Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment. I'm Sammy Roth. There were several topics I considered writing about this week, including the results of California's latest cap-and-trade auction and a bill in Sacramento dealing with the proposed Eagle Mountain hydropower project.

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In 1973, Tom Bradley was elected as Mayor of Los Angeles, a role he'd hold for 20 years. L.A.'s first African American mayor, Bradley served over five terms, prior to the establishment of successive term limits, making him the longest-serving mayor of Los Angeles.

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William Parker became police chief in 1952. He largely refused to hire Black police officers. During most of his tenure, those already on the force were prohibited from having white partners.[9]

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The presences of the Southern Pacific and Transcontinental railroads meant that Los Angeles had a relatively high African-American population for a city in the Western United States; in 1910 it had 7,599 African-Americans.[3] The first branch of the NAACP in California was established in Los Angeles in 1913.

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After the pandemic muted May Day events last year, hundreds of protesters converged in L.A.'s Chinatown to march loudly to City Hall in the name of immigrants and workers rights.

At least another 100 vehicles followed behind the marchers shouting "si se puede!" Musicians from the Korean Resource Center banged traditional drums and Aztec dancers helped lead the protest which led to street closures along Spring Street and around City Hall.

Organizers like the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights usually hold the annual event in MacArthur Park but moved the starting point of the march to Chinatown in a nod to the surge in anti-Asian violence over the last year.

One of LA's big #MayDay events is usually held in MacArthur Park.

But this year labor & immigrant activists are starting their march in Chinatown to take a stand against anti-Asian hate.

Drummers from the Korean Resource Center help set the beat. pic.twitter.com/VUPOX3t0W7
- Josie Huang (@josie_huang) May 1, 2021

"We're here... to rise up against racial violence, including anti-Asian attacks and everyday police brutality that kills Black and brown people," said CHIRLA's executive director Angélica Salas.

Aside from anti-Asian hate, essential workers were also top of mind.

Father Richard Estrada read off the names of those who died of COVID-19 while the crowd shouted back "presente!"

Lillian Cabral of SEIU Local 72 said essential workers "brought their butts up" for the community during the pandemic and deserve hero pay.

"If you're an essential worker, you need that hero's pay," Cabral said.

You need to say you are heroes. You're no longer victims of your circumstances, but you're victorious people that walk through Los Angeles, through California

Businesses have countered they can't afford hero pay. The grocery company Kroger responded to "hero pay" mandates in L.A. and Long Beach by announcing several store closures in both cities.

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May Day Rallies Are Back. This March Focused On Essential Workers And Racial Violence

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Watts, California

It was a low-key traffic stop around 7 p.m. on a Wednesday evening that ignited what would become known as the Watts Rebellion.

Stepbrothers Marquette and Ronald Frye were pulled over by a white California Highway Patrol officer while driving their mother's car near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Marquette failed a sobriety test and panicked as he was arrested. As Marquette's anger rose at the thought of going to jail, a scuffle broke out between him and one of the police officers. Ronald joined in, partly to protest the arrest but also to protect his brother.

A crowd began to gather, and back-up police arrived under the assumption that the crowd was hostile, which resulted in a fight between someone in the crowd and an officer. Another newly-arrived officer jabbed Ronald in the stomach with his riot baton and then moved to intervene in the fight between Marquette and that officer.

Marquette was knocked down by the riot baton, handcuffed and taken to the police car. The Frye brothers' mother, Rena, showed-up on the scene and-believing police were abusing Marquette-rushed to pull the officers off of him, resulting in another fight.

Rena was arrested and forced into the car, followed by Ronald, who was handcuffed after attempting to intervene peacefully in his stepmother's arrest.

As the crowd got angrier about the scene they had witnessed, more highway patrol officers arrived and used batons and shotguns to keep the crowd back from the police car. Hundreds more people flocked to the scene to investigate the sirens there.

As two motorcycle police attempted to leave, one was spat on. Those police stopped to pursue the woman who they believed did it, the crowd converged around them, sending several other officers into the crowd to assist them. More police cars were called to the scene.

The two police found Joyce Ann Gaines and to arrest her for spitting at them. She resisted and was dragged out of the crowd which, believing she was pregnant, became even angrier.

By 7:45 p.m., the riot was in full force, with rocks, bottles and more being thrown at the buses and cars that had been stalled in traffic because of the escalating incident.

Watts Explodes

The night after the arrest, crowds attacked motorists with rocks and bricks, and pulled white drivers out of their cars and beat them.

The following morning, there was a community meeting helmed by Watts leaders, including representatives from churches, local government and the NAACP, with police in attendance, designed to bring calm to the situation. Rena also attended, imploring the crowds to calm down. She, Marquette and Ronald had all been released on bail that morning.

The meeting became a barrage of complaints about the police and government treatment of Black citizens in recent history. Immediately following the statement by Rena, a teenager grabbed the microphone and proclaimed that rioters planned to move into the white sections of Los Angeles.

William Parker

Local leaders requested the police dispatch more Black police, but this was turned down by the Los Angeles Police Department Chief William H. Parker, who was prepared to call the National Guard. Word of this decision and subsequent news reports about the teenager's tirade are credited with causing the riots to escalate.

Overnight, violence had engulfed the streets as mobs clashed with police, set buildings and cars on fire and looted area stores. Crowds attacked firefighters and obstructed them from putting out fires.

By the end the third day, rioting covered a 50 square-mile section of Los Angeles and 14,000 National Guard troops were dispatched to the city, erecting barricades. Further clashes included sniper fire at police and Guardsmen, police raids on vehicles and apartments, and Molotov cocktails. Watts resembled a war zone, and the violence continued three more days.

Police Commissioner Parker fanned flames by deriding rioters as "monkeys in a zoo" and implying Muslims were infiltrating and agitating. In the early morning of the final day of the riots, as violence began to subside, police surrounded a mosque, resulting in gunfire and the arrest of people inside.

Police ransacked the building next door and tear-gassed the sewers to prevent anyone from escaping. Two fires broke out and destroyed the mosque. Charges were dropped against arrestees and the Muslim community accused police of using the riots as an excuse to destroy their place of worship.

After the Watts Rebellions

Most of the 34 dead were Black citizens. Two policemen and one firefighter were among the casualties, and 26 deaths, mostly the result of Los Angeles Police Department or National Guard actions, were deemed justifiable homicides.

A commission was set-up to study the causes of the riot, after which several community-improvement suggestions were made that would improve schools, employment, housing, healthcare and relations with the police department.

There was little follow-up, but a new era of DIY local activism blossomed in Watts, including reformed street gang members who joined with the Black Panther Party to rebuild and monitor police excesses.

What Caused the Riots

The riot was not an isolated event, with multiple urban riots across the country taking place in 1964 and 1965 prior to the Watts explosion.

In 1964, there was a three-day riot in Rochester, NY, leaving four dead; in the New York City neighborhoods of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, a six-day riot involving as many as 4,000 people following the shooting of a young Black man; in Philadelphia, a three-day riot following the arrest of a Black couple who had gotten into a scuffle with police; and a three-day riot in Chicago when a Black woman attempting to shoplift alcohol was attacked by the store owner and crowds later gathered to protest.

Some blamed the Watts riots on outsider agitators, but most understood it as the result of continuing dissatisfaction about living conditions and opportunities, and long-standing tension between police and residents.

In 1961, the arrest of a Black male in Griffith Park for riding a merry-go-round without a ticket resulted in crowds throwing rocks and bottles at police. In 1962, the police raided a Nation of Islam mosque and killed an unarmed man, resulting in massive protests.

Over the two years leading up to the riot, 65 Black residents were shot by police, 27 of them in the back and 25 of them unarmed. During that same period, there were 250 demonstrations against the living conditions there.

The Violence Continues

Nationwide, the violence would not end. On August 12, the day after tensions erupted in Watts, Chicago's troubled Garfield Park neighborhood erupted into three days of violence following the death of Dessie May Williams in a fire truck ladder accident.

The following year saw fire bombings, riots and killing in the same city. And the Detroit Riots began two years later, resulting in 43 deaths. The 1992 Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King beating trial of four police officers led to the deaths of 63 people and were a grim reminder that many issues of racism remained unresolved.

Sources

Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. The Eisenhower Foundation.
Watts Riots: Traffic stop was the spark that ignited days of destruction in L.A. Los Angeles Times.
Watts: Remember what they built, not what they burned. Los Angeles Times.

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Watts Rebellion - Riots, Summary & 1965 | HISTORY

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The Watts Rebellion was a series of riots that stemmed from an August 1965 arrest in a mostly Black Los Angeles neighborhood before subsiding after six days.

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ACLU Report on LAPD racial profiling        2008

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ACLU Report on LAPD racial profiling        2008

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Melina Abdullah stood in the bed of a white pickup truck parked in the middle of Vine Street in Hollywood before a sea of people whose end she could not place.

Speaking into a microphone, she told the crowd on that early June day that they were going to honor the spirits of people whose lives had been stolen by police violence.

She called out George Floyd. She called out Ryan Twyman. She called out Wakiesha Wilson. She called out Kisha Michael. After each name, she poured water from a plastic bottle onto the hot pavement below, while protesters responded with "Àse" (ah-shay), a word used by the Yoruba people of Nigeria akin to ending a prayer with "Amen."

"Our power comes not only from the people who are here but from the spirits that we cannot see," said Abdullah, a Cal State L.A. professor, single mother of three and the leader of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. "When we say their name, we invoke their presence."

Then they marched.

The unprecedented size and scope of recent rallies speaks to how Black Lives Matter has transformed from a small but passionate movement into a cultural and political phenomenon. And in few places has that movement generated more passion than in Los Angeles, home to two of BLM's guiding forces, Abdullah and Patrisse Cullors.

A core group of Los Angeles activists has worked relentlessly for years protesting LAPD actions, advocating criminal justice reform, speaking out at Police Commission meetings and picketing outside City Hall. Now, four weeks after Floyd was killed when a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes, members are continuing to channel their outrage and grief over his killing into a sustained mass campaign for profound social change.

The group has political sway that would have seemed unimaginable just a few months ago, with defunding police now becoming a mainstream political policy question. And their protests have brought together a melting pot of people demanding change.

It's been seven years since the group formed after George Zimmerman's acquittal in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. On July 13, 2013, Alicia Garza, an Oakland activist, posted what she called a love letter to Black people on Facebook, telling them, "Our lives matter." Los Angeles activist Cullors turned it into a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter. New York activist Opal Tometi built the digital platform.

A few days later, Cullors called her friend Abdullah and 30 others together to form the first chapter of what is now a network of 16 across North America.

The movement spread after protests erupted nationwide in 2014 when a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black 18-year-old.

Between instances of nationwide unrest, BLM L.A. has pursued racial justice reforms and supported the families of those killed by law enforcement in the region. The organization has been viewed by some as controversial for its confrontational tactics and rejection of so-called respectability politics. But its approach has also attracted young Black people and embraced those who are LGBTQ.

Despite its growing renown among Black Americans, only recently has Black Lives Matter become a household phrase among people outside the Black community. Cullors, 37, likens the organization to an underground cult band that has now broken into the mainstream.

Leadership within the movement is decentralized. But Cullors, who serves as chair of the BLM Global Network Foundation, the group's international arm, assists her hometown chapter when needed. She also collaborates with organizers outside BLM under the broader Movement for Black Lives, a national coalition of more than 100 organizations.

With nearly 100,000 estimated protesters, the June 7 Hollywood protest was the biggest organized gathering so far in Los Angeles since Floyd's death.

BLM has made it easier for people to lean into social justice, Cullors said, in part through use of social media and the engagement of celebrities like the rapper YG, who promoted that protest and used footage from it in a music video for his song "FTP," which is an abbreviation for "F- the police."

"It's unheard of in L.A. to bring out 100,000 people to protest," Cullors said. "That's very New York, that's very Chicago. L.A. is a very apathetic town."

Before the march began, E'Layjiah Wooley approached Cullors to ask how she could join the movement. The 19-year-old with curly pink hair told Cullors that they'd met a year before at a march in Oakland and that she had just moved to Los Angeles.

"You're in the right place," Cullors told her.

Cullors, who grew up in Van Nuys in the 1990s, said her earliest memory of police is watching officers force their way into her home while looking for her uncle and ransacking the place without acknowledging the family. She was 7.

For Cullors, the mother of a 4-year-old boy, the current struggle is being waged for this generation - and those to come.

"This is a movement led and envisioned and directed by Black women," she said. "Many of us are queer, we're moms, and we really started this work because we wanted to see our children survive. We're laying the groundwork and foundation for a new world, not just for our descendants but for right now."

With 500 members, the L.A. chapter is one of the biggest and most influential in the BLM network.

The core leadership team consists of five people, including Abdullah, who manages messaging and strategy. She said she tries to ensure that members have a say in most decisions, though the core team takes on alone issues that could risk danger or arrest. None of the leaders are paid for their organizing work.

Scot Brown, a professor of African American studies and history at UCLA, said people like Abdullah are the "real heroes" for leading the resistance long before there was international support.

"There was a time when this movement was vilified," he said. "Now it's become the chant that affirms human rights."

The current moment has brought a wave of support from other progressive organizations. But at times, good intentions have proved insufficient.

This month, the group behind the yearly LA Pride parade organized a march in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. But its leaders came under fire after they submitted a special event permit application to the Los Angeles Police Department.

As a matter of practice, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles does not collaborate with police on any of its events. Under pressure, LA Pride apologized and said it would step back from the event. The All Black Lives Matter solidarity march did take place at the direction of a newly formed group, Black LGBTQ+ Activists for Change, whose board is composed entirely of Black LGBTQ people.

For Abdullah, the situation illustrates the deeper thinking that must occur when people consider what solidarity really means.

"It's more than just saying 'Black lives matter' or painting it on the street," she said.

Abdullah, who is in her 40s, grew up the daughter of two schoolteachers in East Oakland during the rise of the Black Panther Party. She now teaches pan-African studies at Cal State L.A. - and was supposed to spend this year writing a book. In September, she took her first sabbatical in 18 years.

While Abdullah is more the academic theorist, Cullors flourishes in the world of art. Originally trained as a dancer, her work lives at the intersection of performance and activism. For her master's thesis last year at USC's Roski School of Art and Design, Cullors contrasted the "history of Black bodies being harmed, tortured and brutalized" with pieces designed to showcase respite and healing. This month, she performed "A Prayer for the Runner," which centers on a prayer she contributed to writing after the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.

Cullors released her first book, a "poetic memoir" co-written with Asha Bandele about Black Lives Matter titled "When They Call You a Terrorist," in 2018. Art, she believes, is essential to the movement.

"We didn't build it as a policy think tank; we built it as a cultural movement," she said. "That's why everybody feels moved by it. It's why it tugs at people's hearts. It's why it pisses people off. It's why people felt like they had to pick a side."

That's what it did for the mother of Grechario Mack, 30, who was having a mental episode when he ran through the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza shopping mall with a knife and was shot dead by police. The Los Angeles Police Commission later ruled that the 2018 shooting violated department policy.

Catherine Walker, Mack's mother, said the leaders of BLM L.A. have become like a second family to her during a three-year period when she lost three family members. She spoke at a protest June 3 that drew thousands.

Having that platform has made her feel validated, Walker said.

"Even though my son is gone, George Floyd opened our doors to show there is hope that justice can be gotten," she said.

BLM L.A. helps families like Walker's by ordering independent autopsies, which can cost upwards of $6,000. Abdullah said those autopsies can make all the difference in wrongful-death lawsuits. The organization also requests body-cam video from police departments, removes the narration by law enforcement officials and pushes the raw footage back out on social media.

"We try to strip it of their narrative, so that people can see what actually happened," Abdullah said.

That kind of continued support is part of the core mission of BLM L.A., whose two main tenets are to prosecute police whose use of force is unjustified and to defund police departments while shifting resources toward social services including mental health, schools and housing.

BLM organizers, who take inspiration from the civil disobedience tactics of the Black Power era of the 1970s, have clashed at times with veteran activists in L.A.'s Black community, who say those actions distract from their message. Others question BLM's follow-through after moments of confrontation.

Longtime community activist Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, said BLM's tactics opened city leaders' eyes to the seriousness of police violence. Without the recent protests, he said, leaders would never have agreed to reduce the LAPD budget.

"However, without sustained, focused political engagement and a structured organization to carry out a concrete program for police overhaul, the great danger is that when the moment passes they will take back every one of the gains," Hutchinson said.

Juliet Hooker, a political science professor at Brown University who has studied the BLM movement, called it the most effective Black political mobilization since the civil rights era.

"It's only seven years old and there are these massive protests all over the U.S., all over the globe in solidarity and raising questions about racism in their own local context," she said. "That's an enormous potential transformation in political consciousness."

It's too early, Hooker said, to judge BLM on legislative or policy outcomes. But she said that the groundwork for those changes is being laid now and that political candidates have no choice but to address systemic racism ahead of the November election.

Increasingly, BLM's strategy appears to be working. At Los Angeles City Hall on Monday, Abdullah urged City Council members to stop relying on police and embrace new strategies for public safety.

"The world is speaking right now," she said at the meeting. "They're saying we don't want a system of policing that puts targets on the backs of Black people."

Abdullah's remarks came during a special meeting devoted to the People's Budget, an alternative spending plan for City Hall that would allocate 5.7% of the city's general fund to the LAPD, a reduction of about 90% compared with Mayor Eric Garcetti's spending plan for the upcoming budget year.

Garcetti said that the city needs more law enforcement reforms and that leaders are exploring how to respond to nonviolent 911 calls with medical and mental health workers. He announced a moratorium on adding people to the CalGang database and new processes for reporting police misconduct.

"But we can't limit our law enforcement budget to a point that would deny our communities critical emergency services," he said. "We have to continually work to improve all of our government services, including policing."

Law enforcement officers have killed more than 880 people, including Twyman, in Los Angeles County since 2000. Almost all were men and nearly 80% were Black or Latino. In the vast majority of cases, the use of force was deemed legally justified by the L.A. County district attorney's office.

Local organizers with Black Lives Matter have built momentum through aggressive tactics - camping out at City Hall, shutting down freeways - and targeting top law enforcement officials and Garcetti. They advocated firing former Police Chief Charlie Beck and his successor, Michel Moore, as well as L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, over their perceived mishandling of police shootings and misconduct.

Though the Police Commission, a civilian panel that oversees the LAPD, was praised for passing reforms including de-escalation training, use of body cameras and limiting the use of chokeholds, Abdullah has maintained that those don't go far enough.

Among Black Lives Matter organizers' achievements, they count the firing of the five Inglewood officers who fatally shot Kisha Michael and Marquintan Sandlin in 2016; the end of a Los Angeles Unified School District policy of randomly searching students with metal detectors; the 2019 arrest of Democratic donor Ed Buck, accused of preying on gay Black men and forcibly injecting them with fatal doses of methamphetamine; and Police Commission rulings of wrongdoing by officers in the deaths of numerous L.A. residents at the hands of police.

They also say they forced Lacey into a November runoff election against progressive challenger George Gascón.

After public pressure last year, city prosecutors dropped eight misdemeanor charges against Abdullah after she allegedly grabbed the arm of an LAPD officer during a contentious Police Commission meeting. In February, Abdullah filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the police and city attorney's office illegally targeted her for prosecution because of her activism.

A day before the primary election in March, Lacey's husband pointed a gun at Abdullah and other unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters during a confrontation outside the couple's home, telling them: "I will shoot you. Get off of my porch."

State officials are whether Lacey's husband committed a crime and should face prosecution. After the incident, Lacey apologized on her husband's behalf but also derided the protesters for what she called repeated harassment and threats throughout her two terms in office.

Recent BLM protests have come against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disproportionately killed Black Americans. Abdullah said she's fighting a more existential threat.

"We pray that we don't get sick," she said. "But if we do, it is what it is because my children are under greater threat by these officers who kill people than they are by COVID-19."

After days of protests, which at times were marred by instances of vandalism and theft, local officials lifted curfews and pulled back the heavy police presence. Faced with growing criticism over the mass arrests of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators, top law enforcement officials said they will not pursue criminal or financial penalties against the protesters.

Garcetti committed to making a $250-million investment in communities of color. The money will be cut from city operations, including as much as $150 million from the Los Angeles Police Department, which has a budget of $1.8 billion. Abdullah called the cuts a positive step forward but said that commitment came after five years of pressure to defund police while the department's budget increased.

On the Monday after the big Hollywood march, Abdullah's day started with a radio interview at 4 a.m. She tuned into the city's Budget and Finance Committee meeting and then spoke at a news conference in front of City Hall in support of defunding the Los Angeles School Police Department.

When she got home close to 7 p.m., she pulled her hair into a bun and sank into her burnt orange sectional for a conference call.

During the initial weeks of the coronavirus stay-at-home orders, Abdullah said, she slowed down for the first time since Black Lives Matter Los Angeles was established. She returned to cooking family dinners of eggplant Parmesan and fried fish and greens. The family grew closer.

Then Floyd was killed. And though Abdullah regularly brings her children to protests and other actions, she worries she isn't giving them the same attention as mothers who aren't leading a social movement.

For Abdullah, this historic moment means 20-hour days that end with her answering emails until her eyes get blurry and she crashes on the couch. It's a sacrifice she's willing to make - for her own children, for those whose parents died at the hands of police and for a vision of a better United States that for so long has been maddeningly out of reach.

"We decided as a family - we talked about it, that we got to be all in in this moment," she said. "But it's not going to be forever."

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How L.A. activists vaulted Black Lives Matter to center stage

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Melina Abdullah stood in the bed of a white pickup truck parked in the middle of Vine Street in Hollywood before a sea of people whose end she could not place. Speaking into a microphone, she told the crowd on that early June day that they were going to honor the spirits of people whose lives had been stolen by police violence.

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Proposition 187 was a California ballot measure passed in 1994 that sought to deny public services to undocumented immigrants.  While the initiative was meant to keep the “immigrant threat” at bay, it mobilized non-immigrants and immigrants in Latino communities as well as their allies across the state. The political awakening of this powerful group would dramatically change the state’s electoral politics, transforming the state into a Blue and progressive state for the first time. Proposition 187 created new and enduring political faultlines across California and across the nation as well as molded the political careers of a new generation of leaders.

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Proposition 187 was a California ballot measure passed in 1994 that sought to deny public services to undocumented immigrants. While the initiative was meant to keep the "immigrant threat" at bay, it mobilized non-immigrants and immigrants in Latino communities as well as their allies across the state. The political awakening of this powerful group would dramatically change the state's electoral politics, transforming the state into a Blue and progressive state for the first time. Proposition 187 created new and enduring political faultlines across California and across the nation as well as molded the political careers of a new generation of leaders.

Watch a pivotal moment in California history unfold through more than 20 interviews with major political figures, artists and thinkers such as California state senator Maria Elena Durazo, Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund (MALDEF) president Antonia Hernández and former California State Assembly speaker Fabian Núñez and more. See how the historic events helped awaken a new generation of political Latinos that would soon rise to power including former California State senator Gil Cedillo, former California State senate president pro tempore Kevin de León and MALDEF president Thomas Saenz. Watch how the fight for immigrant rights in California influenced artists such as Culture Clash and Lalo Alcaraz. Witness the dawn of a new era in California politics.

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Proposition 187 was a California ballot measure passed in 1994 that sought to deny public services to undocumented immigrants. While the initiative was meant to keep the "immigrant threat" at bay, it mobilized non-immigrants and immigrants in Latino communities as well as their allies across the state.

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On March 3, 1991, King was beaten by LAPD officers during his arrest

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1992 Los Angeles riots

Date

April 29 - May 4, 1992
(6 days); 31 years ago

Location

Caused by

Methods

Widespread rioting

looting

assault

arson

protests

vandalism

shootouts

Resulted in

Riots suppressed

Many homes and businesses damaged, looted, or destroyed

Resignation of Chief Daryl Gates

Death(s)

63[1]

Injuries

2,383

Arrested

12,111[2][3]

Damage

$1 billion

The 1992 Los Angeles riots, (also called the Rodney King riots, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, or Sa-I-Gu in Korean) were a series of riots and civil disturbances that occurred in Los Angeles County, California, United States, during April and May 1992. Unrest began in South Central Los Angeles on April 29, after a jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) charged with using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King. The incident had been videotaped by George Holliday, who was a bystander to the incident, and was heavily broadcast in various news and media outlets.

The rioting took place in several areas in the Los Angeles metropolitan area as thousands of people rioted over six days following the verdict's announcement. Widespread looting, assault, and arson occurred during the riots, which local police forces had difficulty controlling. The situation in the Los Angeles area was resolved after the California National Guard, United States military, and several federal law enforcement agencies deployed more than 10,000 of their armed first responders to assist in ending the violence and unrest.

When the riots had ended, 63 people had been killed, 2,383 had been injured, more than 12,000 had been arrested, and estimates of property damage were over $1 billion, making it the most destructive period of local unrest in U.S. history. Koreatown, situated just to the north of South Central LA, was disproportionately damaged. Much of the blame for the extensive nature of the violence was attributed to LAPD Chief of Police Daryl Gates, who had already announced his resignation by the time of the riots, for failure to de-escalate the situation and overall mismanagement.

South Central Los Angeles, where much of the rioting took place[10]

Before the release of the Rodney King videotape, minority community leaders in Los Angeles had repeatedly complained about harassment and use of excessive force against their residents by Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers. Daryl Gates, Chief of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, has been blamed for the riots. According to one study, "scandalous racist violence... marked the LAPD under Gates's tempestuous leadership." Under Gates, the LAPD had begun Operation Hammer in April 1987, which was a large-scale militarized push in Los Angeles.

The origin of Operation Hammer can be traced to the 1984 Olympic Games held in Los Angeles. Under Gates's direction, the LAPD expanded gang sweeps for the duration of the Olympics. These were implemented across wide areas of the city but especially in South Central and East Los Angeles, areas of predominately minority residents. After the games were over, the city began to revive the use of earlier anti- syndicalist laws in order to maintain the security policy started for the Olympic games. The police more frequently conducted mass arrests of African American youth. Citizen complaints against police brutality increased 33 percent in the period 1984-1989.

By 1990 more than 50,000 people, mostly minority males, had been arrested in such raids. During this period, the LAPD arrested more young black people since the Watts riots of 1965. Critics have alleged that the operation was racially motivated because it used racial profiling, targeting African American and Mexican American youths. The perception that police had targeted non-white citizens likely contributed to the anger that erupted in the 1992 riots.

The Christopher Commission later concluded that a "significant number" of LAPD officers "repetitively use excessive force against the public and persistently ignore the written guidelines of the department regarding force." The biases related to race, gender, and sexual orientation were found to have regularly contributed to the LAPD's use of excessive force. The commission's report called for the replacement of both Chief Daryl Gates and the civilian Police Commission.

In the year before the riots, 1991, there was growing resentment and violence between the African American and Korean American communities. Racial tensions had been simmering for years between these groups. In 1989, the release of Spike Lee's film Do the Right Thing highlighted urban tensions between white people, black people, and Koreans over racism and economic inequality. Many Korean shopkeepers were upset because they suspected shoplifting from their black customers and neighbors. Many black customers were angry because they routinely felt disrespected and humiliated by Korean store owners. Neither group fully understood the extent of the cultural differences and language barriers, which further fueled tensions.

On March 16, 1991, a year before the Los Angeles riots, storekeeper Soon Ja Du shot and killed black ninth-grader Latasha Harlins after a physical altercation. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and the jury recommended the maximum sentence of 16 years, but the judge, Joyce Karlin, decided against prison time and sentenced Du to five years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine instead. Relations between the African American and Korean communities significantly worsened after this, and the former became increasingly mistrustful of the criminal justice system. A state appeals court later unanimously upheld Judge Karlin's sentencing decision in April 1992, a week before the riots.

The Los Angeles Times reported on several other significant incidents of violence between the communities at the time:

Other recent incidents include the May 25, [1991] shooting of two employees in a liquor store near 35th Street and Central Avenue. The victims, both recent emigrants from Korea, were killed after complying with robbery demands made by an assailant described by police as an African American. Last Thursday, an African American man suspected of committing a robbery in an auto parts store on Manchester Avenue was fatally wounded by his accomplice, who accidentally fired a shotgun round during a struggle with the shop's Korean American owner. "This violence is disturbing, too," store owner Park said. "But who cries for these victims?

On the evening of March 3, 1991, Rodney King and two passengers were driving west on the Foothill Freeway (I-210) through the Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley. The California Highway Patrol (CHP) attempted to initiate a traffic stop and a high-speed pursuit ensued with speeds estimated at up to 115 mph (185 km/h), before King eventually exited the freeway at Foothill Boulevard. The pursuit continued through residential neighborhoods of Lake View Terrace in San Fernando Valley before King stopped in front of the Hansen Dam recreation center. When King finally stopped, LAPD and CHP officers surrounded King's vehicle and married CHP officers Timothy and Melanie Singer arrested him and two other car occupants.

After the two passengers were placed in the patrol car, five Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers - Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Rolando Solano - surrounded King, who came out of the car last. None of the officers involved were African-American; officers Koon, Wind and Powell were Caucasian, while Briseno and Solano were of Hispanic origin. They tasered King, struck him dozens of times with side-handled batons, kick-stomped him in his back and tackled him to the ground before handcuffing him and hogtying his legs. Sergeant Koon later testified at trial that King resisted arrest and that he believed King was under the influence of PCP at the time of the arrest, causing him to be aggressive and violent toward the officers. Video footage of the arrest showed that King attempted to get up each time he was struck and that the police made no attempt to cuff him until he lay still. A subsequent test of King for the presence of PCP in his body at the time of the arrest was negative.

Unbeknownst to the police and King, the incident was captured on a camcorder by local civilian George Holliday from his nearby apartment across from Hansen Dam. The tape was roughly 12 minutes long. While the tape was presented during the trial, some clips of the incident were not released to the public. In a later interview, King, who was on parole for a robbery conviction and had past convictions for assault, battery and robbery, said he did not surrender earlier because he was driving while intoxicated, which he knew violated the terms of his parole.

The footage of King being beaten by police became an instant focus of media attention and a rallying point for activists in Los Angeles and around the United States. Coverage was extensive during the first two weeks after the incident: the Los Angeles Times published 43 articles about it, The New York Times published 17 articles, and the Chicago Tribune published 11 articles. Eight stories appeared on ABC News, including a 60-minute special on Primetime Live.

Upon watching the tape of the beating, LAPD chief of police Daryl Gates said:

I stared at the screen in disbelief. I played the one-minute-50-second tape again. Then again and again, until I had viewed it 25 times. And still I could not believe what I was looking at. To see my officers engage in what appeared to be excessive use of force, possibly criminally excessive, to see them beat a man with their batons 56 times, to see a sergeant on the scene who did nothing to seize control, was something I never dreamed I would witness.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney subsequently charged four police officers, including one sergeant, with assault and use of excessive force. Due to the extensive media coverage of the arrest, the trial received a change of venue from Los Angeles County to Simi Valley in neighboring Ventura County. The jury had no members who were entirely African American. The jury was composed of nine white Americans (three women, six men), one biracial man, one Latin American woman, and one Asian-American woman. The prosecutor, Terry White, was black.

On April 29, 1992, the seventh day of jury deliberations, the jury acquitted all four officers of assault and acquitted three of the four of using excessive force. The jury could not agree on a verdict for the fourth officer charged with using excessive force. The verdicts were based in part on the first three seconds of a blurry, 13-second segment of the videotape that, according to journalist Lou Cannon, had not been aired by television news stations in their broadcasts.

The first two seconds of videotape, contrary to the claims made by the accused officers, show King attempting to flee past Laurence Powell. During the next one minute and 19 seconds, King is beaten continuously by the officers. The officers testified that they tried to restrain King before the videotape's starting point physically, but King could throw them off physically.

Afterward, the prosecution suggested that the jurors may have acquitted the officers because of becoming desensitized to the beating's violence, as the defense played the videotape repeatedly in slow motion, breaking it down until its emotional impact was lost.

The riots began the day the verdicts were announced and peaked in intensity over the next two days. A dusk-to-dawn curfew and deployment by the California National Guard, U.S. troops, and federal law enforcement personnel eventually controlled the situation.

A total of 63 people died during the riots, including nine shot by police and one by the National Guard. Of those killed during the riots, 2 were Asian, 28 were black, 19 were Latino, and 15 were white. No law enforcement officials died during the riots. As many as 2,383 people were reported injured. Estimates of the material losses vary between about $800 million and $1 billion. Approximately 3,600 fires were set, destroying 1,100 buildings, with fire calls coming once every minute at some points. Widespread looting also occurred. Rioters targeted stores owned by Koreans and other ethnic Asians, reflecting tensions between them and the African American communities.

Many of the disturbances were concentrated in South Central Los Angeles, where the population was majority African American and Hispanic. Fewer than half of all the riot arrests and a third of those killed during the violence were Hispanic.

The riots caused the Emergency Broadcast System to be activated on April 30, 1992, on KCAL-TV.

The acquittals of the four accused Los Angeles Police Department officers came at 3:15 p.m. local time. By 3:45 p.m., a crowd of more than 300 people had appeared at the Los Angeles County Courthouse protesting the verdicts.

Meanwhile, at approximately 4:15-4:20 p.m., a group of people approached the Pay-Less Liquor and Deli on Florence Avenue just west of Normandie in South Central. In an interview, a member of the group said that the group "just decided they weren't going to pay for what they were getting." The store owner's son was hit with a beer bottle, and two other youths smashed the store's glass front door. Two officers from the 77th Street Division of the LAPD responded to this incident and, finding that the instigators had already left, completed a report.

At 4:58 p.m., Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley held a news conference to discuss the verdicts. He both expressed anger about the verdicts and appealed for calm.

"Today, this jury told the world that what we all saw with our own eyes wasn't a crime. Today, that jury asked us to accept the senseless and brutal beating of a helpless man. Today, that jury said we should tolerate such conduct by those sworn to protect and serve. My friends, I am here to tell this jury, "No. No, our eyes did not deceive us. We saw what we saw, what we saw was a crime..." We must not endanger the reforms we have achieved by resorting to mindless acts. We must not push back progress by striking back blindly."

-  Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, post-verdict press conference

Assistant Los Angeles police chief Bob Vernon later said he believed Bradley's remarks incited a riot and were perhaps taken as a signal by some citizens. Vernon said that the number of police incidents rose in the hour after the mayor's press conference.

At Florence and Halldale, two officers issued a plea for assistance in apprehending a young suspect who had thrown an object at their car and whom they were pursuing on foot. Approximately two dozen officers, commanded by 77th Street Division LAPD Lieutenant Michael Moulin, arrived and arrested the youth, 16-year old Seandel Daniels, forcing him into the back of a car. The rough handling of the young man, a well-known minor in the community, further agitated an uneasy and growing crowd, who began taunting and berating the police. Among the crowd were Bart Bartholomew, a white freelance photographer for The New York Times, and Timothy Goldman, a black U.S. Air Force veteran who began to record the events with his personal camcorder.

The police formed a perimeter around the arresting officers as the crowd grew more hostile, leading to further altercations and arrests (including that of Damian Williams' older brother, Mark Jackson). One member of the crowd stole the flashlight of an LAPD officer. Fearing police would resort to deadly force to repel the growing crowd, Lieutenant Moulin ordered officers out of the area altogether. Moulin later said that officers on the scene were outnumbered and unprepared to handle the situation because their riot equipment was stored at the police academy.

Hey, forget the flashlight, it's not worth it. It ain't worth it. It's not worth it. Forget the flashlight. Not worth it. Let's go.

-  Lieutenant Michael Moulin, bullhorn broadcast as recorded by the Goldman footage at 71st and Normandie

Moulin made the call for reporting officers to retreat from the 71st and Normandie area entirely at approximately 5:50 p.m. They were sent to an RTD bus depot at 54th and Arlington and told to await further instructions. The command post formed at this location was set up at approximately 6 p.m, but had no cell phones or computers other than those in squad cars. It had insufficient numbers of telephone lines and handheld police radios to assess and respond to the situation. Finally, the site had no televisions, which meant that as live broadcasts of unrest began, command post officers could not see any of the coverage.

After the retreat of officers at 71st and Normandie, many proceeded one block south to the intersection of Florence and Normandie. As the crowd began to turn physically dangerous, Bartholomew managed to flee the scene with the help of Goldman. Someone hit Bartholomew with a wood plank, breaking his jaw, while others pounded him and grabbed his camera. Just after 6 p.m., a group of young men broke the padlock and windows to Tom's Liquor, allowing a group of more than 100 people to raid the store and loot it. Concurrently, the growing number of rioters in the street began attacking civilians of non-black appearance, throwing debris at their cars, pulling them from their vehicles when they stopped, smashing window shops, or assaulting them while they walked on the sidewalks. As Goldman continued to film the scene on the ground with his camcorder, the Los Angeles News Service team of Marika Gerrard and Zoey Tur arrived in a news helicopter, broadcasting from the air. The LANS feed appeared live on numerous Los Angeles television venues.

At approximately 6:15 p.m., as reports of vandalism, looting, and physical attacks continued to come in, Moulin elected to "take the information" but not to respond or send personnel to restore order or rescue people in the area. Moulin was relieved by a captain, ordered only to assess the Florence and Normandie area, and, again, not to attempt to deploy officers there. Meanwhile, Tur continued to cover the events in progress live at the intersection. From overhead, Tur described the police presence at the scene around 6:30 p.m. as "none".

At 6:43 p.m., a white truck driver, Larry Tarvin, drove down Florence and stopped at a red light at Normandie in a large white delivery truck. With no radio in his truck, he did not know that he was driving into a riot. Tarvin was pulled from the vehicle by a group of men including Henry Watson, who proceeded to kick and beat him, before striking him unconscious with a fire extinguisher taken from his own vehicle. He lay unconscious for more than a minute as his truck was looted, before getting up and staggering back to his vehicle. With the help of an unknown African American, Tarvin drove his truck out of further harm's way. Just before he did so, another truck, driven by Reginald Denny, entered the intersection. United Press International Radio Network reporter Bob Brill, who was filming the attack on Tarvin, was hit in the head with a bottle and stomped on.

Reginald Denny, a white construction truck driver, was pulled from his truck and severely beaten by a group of black men who came to be known as the "L.A. Four". The attack was recorded on video from Tur's and Gerrard's news helicopter, and broadcast live on U.S. national television. Goldman captured the end of the attack and a close-up of Denny's bloody face.

As the L.A. Four fled, another quartet of black residents came to Denny's aid, placing him back in his truck, in which one of the rescuers drove him to the hospital. Denny suffered a fractured skull and impairment of his speech and ability to walk, for which he underwent years of rehabilitative therapy. After unsuccessfully suing the City of Los Angeles, Denny moved to Arizona, where he worked as an independent boat mechanic and has mostly avoided media contact.

Around 7:40 p.m., almost an hour after Denny was rescued, another beating was filmed on videotape in that location. Fidel Lopez, a self-employed construction worker and Guatemalan, was pulled from his GMC pickup truck and robbed of $2,000 (equivalent to $4,200 in 2022). Rioters, including Damian Williams, smashed his forehead open with a car stereo and one tried to slice his ear off. After Lopez lost consciousness, the crowd spray-painted his chest, torso, and genitals black. He was eventually rescued by black Reverend Bennie Newton, who told the rioters: "Kill him, and you have to kill me too." Lopez survived the attack, but it took him years to fully recover and re-establish his business. Newton and Lopez became close friends. In 1993, Reverend Benny Newton died of leukemia.

Sunset on the first evening of the riots was at 7:36 p.m. The first call reporting a fire came in soon after, at approximately 7:45 p.m. Police did not return in force to Florence and Normandie until 8:30 p.m., by which time the intersection was in ruins and most rioters had left to other nearby intersections and shopping centers in the area, with rioting and looting spreading across the rest of South Central Los Angeles once word spread of the situation at Florence and Normandie, as by nightfall the neighborhoods of Crenshaw, Hyde Park, Jefferson Park, West Adams, Westmont, Green Meadows, Historic South Central, Florence, Willowbrook, Florence-Graham and Watts were being looted, vandalized and set ablaze by rioters.

Numerous factors were later blamed for the severity of rioting in the 77th Street Division on the evening of April 29. These included:

No effort made to close the busy intersection of Florence and Normandie to traffic.

Failure to secure gun stores in the Division (one in particular lost 1,150 guns to looting on April 29).

The failure to issue a citywide Tactical Alert until 6:43 p.m., which delayed the arrival of other divisions to assist the 77th.

The lack of any response - and in particular, a riot response - to the intersection, which emboldened rioters. Since attacks, looting, and arson were broadcast live, viewers could see that none of these actions were being stopped by police.

As noted, after the verdicts were announced, a crowd of protesters formed at the Los Angeles police headquarters at Parker Center in Downtown Los Angeles. The crowd grew as the afternoon passed and became violent. The police formed a skirmish line to protect the building, sometimes moving back in the headquarters as protesters advanced, attempting to set the Parker Center ablaze. In the midst of this, before 6:30 p.m., police chief Daryl Gates left Parker Center, on his way to the neighborhood of Brentwood. There, as the situation in Los Angeles deteriorated, Gates attended a political fundraiser against Los Angeles City Charter Amendment F, intended to "give City Hall more power over the police chief and provide more civilian review of officer misconduct". The amendment would limit the power and term length of his office.

The Parker Center crowd grew riotous at approximately 9 p.m., eventually making their way through the Civic Center, attacking law enforcement, overturning vehicles, setting objects ablaze, vandalizing government buildings and blocking traffic on U.S. Route 101 going through other nearby districts in downtown Los Angeles looting and burning stores. Nearby Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) firefighters were shot at while trying to put out a blaze set by looters. The mayor had requested the California Army National Guard from Governor Pete Wilson; the first of these units, the 670th Military Police Company, had traveled almost 300 miles (480 km) from its main armory and arrived in the afternoon to assist local police. They were first deployed to a police command center, where they began handing out bulletproof vests to the firefighters after encountering the unit whose member had been shot. Later, after receiving ammunition from the L.A. Police Academy and a local gun store, the MPs deployed to hold the Martin Luther King Shopping Mall in Watts.

In the Lake View Terrace district of Los Angeles, 200-400 protesters gathered about 9:15 p.m. at the site where Rodney King was beaten in 1991, near the Hansen Dam Recreation Area. The group marched south on Osborne Street to the LAPD Foothill Division headquarters. There they began rock throwing, shooting into the air, and setting fires. The Foothill division police used riot-breaking techniques to disperse the crowd and arrest those responsible for rock throwing and the fires eventually leading to rioting and looting in the neighboring area of Pacoima and its surrounding neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley.

Mayor Bradley signed an order for a dusk-to-dawn curfew at 12:15 a.m. for the core area affected by the riots, as well as declaring a state of emergency for the city of Los Angeles. At 10:15 a.m., he expanded the area under curfew. By mid-morning, violence appeared widespread and unchecked as extensive looting and arson were witnessed across Los Angeles County. Rioting moved from South Central Los Angeles, going north through Central Los Angeles causing widespread destruction in the neighborhoods of Koreatown, Westlake, Pico-Union, Echo Park, Hancock Park, Fairfax, Mid-City and Mid-Wilshire before reaching Hollywood. The looting and fires engulfed Hollywood Boulevard, and simultaneously rioting moved west and south into the neighboring independent cities of Inglewood, Hawthorne, Gardena, Compton, Carson and Long Beach, as well as moving east from South Central Los Angeles into the cities of Huntington Park, Walnut Park, South Gate and Lynwood and Paramount. Looting and vandalism had also gone as far south as Los Angeles regions of the Harbor Area in the neighborhoods of San Pedro, Wilmington, and Harbor City.

Koreatown is a roughly 2.7 square-mile (7 square kilometre) neighborhood between Hoover Street and Western Avenue, and 3rd Street and Olympic Boulevard, west of MacArthur Park and east of Hancock Park/ Windsor Square. Korean immigrants had begun settling in the Mid-Wilshire area in the 1960s after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It was here that many opened successful businesses.

As the riots spread, roads between Koreatown and wealthy white neighborhoods were blocked off by police and official defense lines were set up around the independent cities such as Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, as well as middle-upper class white neighborhoods west of Robertson Boulevard in Los Angeles. A Korean American resident later told reporters: "It was containment. The police cut off Koreatown traffic, while we were trapped on the other side without help. Those roads are a gateway to a richer neighborhood. It can't be denied." Some Koreans later said they did not expect law enforcement to come to their aid.

The lack of law enforcement forced Koreatown civilians to organize their own armed security teams, mainly composed of store owners, to defend their businesses from rioters. Those who stood on the roof of the California Supermarket at 5th and Western Avenue with firearms were later referred to as the "roof" or " rooftop Koreans." Many had military experience from serving in the Republic of Korea Armed Forces before emigrating to the United States. Open gun battles were televised, including an incident in which Korean shopkeepers armed with M1 carbines, Ruger Mini-14s, pump-action shotguns, and handguns exchanged gunfire with a group of armed looters, and forced their retreat. But there were casualties, such as 18-year-old Edward Song Lee, whose body can be seen lying in the street in images taken by photojournalist Hyungwon Kang.

Out of the $850 million worth of damage done in L.A., half of it was on Korean-owned businesses.

The LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) organized response began to come together by midday. The LAFD and Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACoFD) began to respond backed by police escort; California Highway Patrol reinforcements were airlifted to the city. U.S. President George H. W. Bush spoke out against the rioting, saying anarchy would not be tolerated. The California Army National Guard, which had been advised not to expect civil disturbance and had, as a result, loaned its riot equipment out to other law enforcement agencies, responded quickly by calling up about 2,000 soldiers, but could not get them to the city until nearly 24 hours had passed. They lacked equipment and had to pick it up from the JFTB (Joint Forces Training Base), Los Alamitos, California, which at the time was mainly a mothballed former airbase.

Air traffic control procedures at Los Angeles International Airport were modified, with all departures and arrivals routed to and from the west, over the Pacific Ocean, avoiding overflights of neighborhoods affected by the rioting.

Bill Cosby spoke on the local television station KNBC and asked people to stop the rioting and watch the final episode of his The Cosby Show. The U.S. Justice Department announced it would resume federal investigation of the Rodney King beating as a violation of federal civil rights law.

In the early morning hours of Friday, May 1, the major rioting was stopped. Rodney King gave an impromptu news conference in front of his lawyer's office, tearfully saying, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?" That morning, at 1:00 am, Governor Wilson had requested federal assistance. Upon request, Bush invoked the Insurrection Act with Executive Order 12804, federalizing the California Army National Guard and authorizing federal troops and federal law enforcement officers to help restore law and order. With Bush's authority, the Pentagon activated Operation Garden Plot, placing the California Army National Guard and federal troops under the newly formed Joint Task Force Los Angeles (JTF-LA). The deployment of federal troops was not ready until Saturday, by which time the rioting and looting were under control.

By this point, many entertainments and sports events were postponed or canceled. The Los Angeles Lakers hosted the Portland Trail Blazers in an NBA playoff basketball game on the night the rioting started. The following game was postponed until Sunday and moved to Las Vegas. The Los Angeles Clippers moved a playoff game against the Utah Jazz to nearby Anaheim. In baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers postponed games for four straight days from Thursday to Sunday, including a whole three-game series against the Montreal Expos; all were made up as part of doubleheaders in July. In San Francisco, a city curfew due to unrest forced the postponement of a May 1, San Francisco Giants home game against the Philadelphia Phillies.

The horse racing venues Hollywood Park Racetrack and Los Alamitos Race Course were also shut down. L.A. Fiesta Broadway, a major event in the Latino community, was canceled. In music, Van Halen canceled two concert shows in Inglewood on Saturday and Sunday. Metallica and Guns N' Roses were forced to postpone and relocate their concert to the Rose Bowl as the LA Coliseum and its surrounding neighborhood were still damaged. Michael Bolton canceled his scheduled performance at the Hollywood Bowl Sunday. The World Wrestling Federation canceled events on Friday and Saturday in the cities of Long Beach and Fresno. By the end of Friday night, all the remaining smaller riots were completely quelled.

On the fourth day, 3,500 federal troops - 2,000 soldiers of the 7th Infantry Division from Fort Ord and 1,500 Marines of the 1st Marine Division from Camp Pendleton - arrived to reinforce the National Guard soldiers already in the city. The Marine Corps contingent included the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, commanded by John F. Kelly. It was the first significant military occupation of Los Angeles by federal troops since the 1894 Pullman Strike, and also the first federal military intervention in an American city to quell a civil disorder since the 1968 King assassination riots, and the deadliest modern unrest since the 1980 Miami riots at the time, only 12 years earlier.

These federal military forces took 24 hours to deploy to Huntington Park, about the same time it took for the National Guard. This brought total troop strength to 13,500, making L.A. the largest military occupation of any U.S. city since the 1968 Washington, D.C. riots. Federal troops joined National Guard soldiers to support local police in restoring order directly; the combined force contributed significantly to preventing violence. With most of the violence under control, 30,000 people attended an 11 a.m. peace rally in Koreatown to support local merchants and racial healing.

Mayor Bradley assured the public that the crisis was, more or less, under control as areas became quiet. Later that night, Army National Guard soldiers shot and killed a motorist who tried to run them over at a barrier.

In another incident, the LAPD and Marines intervened in a domestic dispute in Compton, in which the suspect held his wife and children hostage. As the officers approached, the suspect fired two shotgun rounds through the door, injuring some of the officers. One of the officers yelled to the Marines, "Cover me," as per law enforcement training to be prepared to fire if necessary. However, per their military training, the Marines interpreted the wording as providing cover by establishing a base of firepower, resulting in a total of 200 rounds being sprayed into the house. Remarkably, neither the suspect nor the woman and children inside the house were harmed.

Although Mayor Bradley lifted the curfew, signaling the official end of the riots, sporadic violence and crime continued for a few days afterward. Schools, banks, and businesses reopened. Federal troops did not stand down until May 9. The Army National Guard remained until May 14. Some National Guard soldiers remained as late as May 27.

During the riots, Korean Americans received very little aid or protection from police authorities, due to their low social status and language barriers. Many Koreans rushed to Koreatown after Korean-language radio stations called for volunteers to guard against rioters. Many of the volunteers that helped defend the Korean stores were from an organization called LA Korean Youth Task Force and they went to protect these stores because there were no adult males in those families that could do it. Many were armed, with a variety of improvised weapons, handguns, shotguns, and semi-automatic rifles.

Television coverage of two Korean merchants firing pistols repeatedly at roving looters was widely seen and controversial. The New York Times said: "that the image seemed to speak of race war, and of vigilantes taking the law into their own hands." One of the merchants, David Joo, said, "I want to make it clear that we didn't open fire first. At that time, four police cars were there. Somebody started to shoot at us. The LAPD ran away in half a second. I never saw such a fast escape. I was pretty disappointed." Carl Rhyu, also a participant in the Koreans' armed response, said, "If it was your own business and your own property, would you be willing to trust it to someone else? We are glad the National Guard is here. They're good backup. But when our shops were burning we called the police every five minutes; no response." At a shopping center several miles north of Koreatown, Jay Rhee, who said he and others fired five hundred shots into the ground and air, said, "We have lost our faith in the police. Where were you when we needed you?" Despite Koreatown's relative geographical isolation from South Central Los Angeles, it was the most severely damaged in the riots.

The riots have been considered a major turning point in the development of a distinct Korean American identity and community. Korean Americans responded in various ways, including the development of new ethnic agendas and organization and increased political activism.

One of the largest armed camps in Los Angeles's Koreatown congregated at the California Market. On the first night after the officers' verdicts were returned, Richard Rhee, the market owner, set up camp in the parking lot with about 20 armed employees. One year after the riots, fewer than one in four damaged or destroyed businesses had reopened, according to the survey conducted by the Korean American Inter-Agency Council. According to a Los Angeles Times survey conducted eleven months after the riots, almost 40 percent of Korean Americans said they were thinking of leaving Los Angeles.

Before a verdict was issued in the new 1993 Rodney King federal civil rights trial against the four officers, many Korean shop owners prepared for violence. Gun sales increased sharply, many to people of Korean descent; some merchants at flea markets removed merchandise from shelves, and they fortified storefronts with extra Plexiglas and bars. Throughout the region, merchants readied to defend themselves, and others formed armed militia groups. College student Elizabeth Hwang spoke of the attacks on her parents' convenience store in 1992. She said at the time of the 1993 trial, they had been armed with a Glock 17 pistol, a Beretta, and a shotgun, and they planned to barricade themselves in their store to fight off looters.

As a result of the L.A. riots, Korean Americans formed activist organizations such as the Association of Korean American Victims. They built collaborative links with other ethnic groups through groups like the Korean American Coalition. A week after the riots, in the largest Asian-American protest ever held in a city, about 30,000 mostly-Korean and Korean American marchers walked the streets of L.A. Koreatown, calling for peace and denouncing violence. This cultural movement was devoted to the protection of Koreans' political rights, ethnic heritage, and political representation. New leaders arose within the community, and second-generation children spoke on behalf of the community. Korean Americans began to have different occupation goals, from store-owners to political leaders. Korean Americans worked to gain governmental aid to rebuild their damaged neighborhoods. Countless community and advocacy groups have been established to further fuel Korean political representation and understanding.

Edward Taehan Chang, a professor of ethnic studies and founding director of the Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies at the University of California, Riverside, has identified the LA riots as a turning point for the development of a Korean American identity separate from that of Korean immigrants and that was more politically active. "What was an immigrant Korean identity began to shift. The Korean American identity was born ... They learned a valuable lesson that we have to become much more engaged and politically involved and that political empowerment is very much part of the Korean American future."

According to Edward Park, the 1992 violence stimulated a new wave of political activism among Korean Americans, but it also split them into two camps. The liberals sought to unite with other minorities in Los Angeles to fight against racial oppression and scapegoating. The conservatives emphasized law and order and generally favored the economic and social policies of the Republican Party. The conservatives tended to emphasize the differences between Koreans and other minorities, specifically African Americans.

According to a 1993 report by the Latinos Futures Research Group for the Latino Coalition for a New Los Angeles, one-third of those who were killed and one half of those who were arrested in the riots were Latino; between 20 and 40 percent of the businesses that were looted were owned by Latinos. Hispanics were considered a minority despite their increasing numbers, so they lacked political support and were poorly represented. This lack of social and political representation obscured acknowledgment of their participation in the riots. Many who lived in the area were new immigrants, not yet able to speak English.

According to Gloria Alvarez, the riots united Hispanics and black people instead of driving them apart. Although the riots were viewed as having different aspects, Alvarez writes that they contributed to greater understanding between Hispanics and blacks. Hispanics now heavily populate the once-predominantly-black area, and the relationship between Hispanics and blacks has improved. Building a stronger and more-understanding community could help prevent outbreaks of social chaos, although hate crimes and widespread violence between the two groups continue to be a problem in the Los Angeles area.

U.S. Marines disembark from their trucks and Humvees in Compton for riot control operations. Thousands of federal troops patrolled Los Angeles to restore order.

Almost as soon as the disturbances broke out in South Central, local television news cameras were on the scene to record the events as they happened. Television coverage of the riots was near-continuous, starting with the beating of motorists at the intersection of Florence and Normandie which was broadcast live by television news pilot and reporter Zoey Tur and her camera operator Marika Gerrard.

In part because of extensive media coverage of the Los Angeles riots, smaller but similar riots and other anti-police actions took place in other cities throughout the United States. The Emergency Broadcast System was also utilized during the rioting.

Another prominent source of media coverage was Korea Times, an independent Korean American newspaper.

Richard Reyes Fruto wrote in an article in The Korea Times, "Looters targeted Korean American merchants during the LA. Riots, according to the FBI official who directed federal law enforcement efforts during the disturbance." The English-language Korean newspaper focused on the 1992 riots, with Korean Americans at the center of the violence. Initial articles in late April and early May described victims' lives and damage to the Los Angeles Korean community. Interviews with Koreatown merchants such as Chung Lee evoked sympathy from readers. Lee watched, helpless, as his store was burned down: "I worked hard for that store. Now I have nothing".

While several articles included the minorities who were involved when damages were cited or victims were named, few of them actually incorporated them as a significant aspect of the struggle. One story framed the race riots as occurring at a "time when the wrath of blacks was focused on whites." They acknowledged the fact that racism and stereotyped views contributed to the riots; articles in American newspapers portrayed the LA riots as an incident that erupted between black and white people who were struggling to coexist with each other, rather than include all of the minority groups that were involved in the riots.

On Ted Koppel initially only interviewed black leaders about the black/Korean conflict, and they shared detrimental opinions about Korean Americans.

Activist Guy Aoki became frustrated with early coverage because only black/White framing was used in it, the Korean American community and the suffering which it experienced were vilified and ignored.

In an article written by Hanna Kang, she sees the conflict between Korean Americans and blacks as overstated and only part of the story was told in the news. In this article, Kang interviews more than twenty people from both races in many different fields, and all of them had the same view of the media during the riots. They all believe the influence of the new coverage persuaded how the public looked at the riots. She goes on to say that many of the pictures that were shown in the media coverage of Korean Americans, were pictures of them standing on the tops of the buildings defending them. This was only a small portion of the store owners who could do this. With these misunderstandings between the two races, many believe that education is the only way to get rid of these conflicts in the future.

After the riots subsided, an inquiry was commissioned by the city Police Commission, led by William H. Webster (special advisor), and Hubert Williams (deputy special advisor, president of the Police Foundation). The findings of the inquiry, The City in Crisis: A Report by the Special Advisor to the Board of Police Commissioners on the Civil Disorder in Los Angeles, also colloquially known as the Webster Report or Webster Commission, was released on October 21, 1992.

LAPD chief of police Daryl Gates, who had seen his successor Willie L. Williams named by the Police Commission days before the riots, was forced to resign on June 28, 1992. Some areas of the city saw temporary truces between the rival Crips and Bloods gangs, as well as between rival Latino gangs, which fueled speculation among LAPD officers that the truce was going to be used to unite the gangs against the department.

Rioters targeted Korean American shops in their areas, as there had been considerable tension between the two communities. Such sources as and suggested that black people thought Korean American merchants were "taking money out of their community", that they were racist as they refused to hire black people, and often treated them without respect. There were cultural and language differences, as some shop owners were immigrants.

There were other factors for social tensions: high rates of poverty and unemployment among the residents of South Central Los Angeles, which had been deeply affected by the nationwide recession. Articles in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times linked the economic deterioration of South Central to the declining living conditions of the residents, and reported that local resentments about these conditions helped to fuel the riots. Other scholars compare these riots to those in Detroit in the 1920s when the whites rioted against black people. But instead of African Americans as victims, the race riots "represent backlash violence in response to recent Latino and Asian immigration into African American neighborhoods."

Social commentator Mike Davis points to the growing economic disparity in Los Angeles, caused by corporate restructuring and government deregulation, with inner-city residents bearing the brunt of such changes; such conditions engendered a widespread feeling of frustration and powerlessness in the urban populace, who reacted to the King verdicts with a violent expression of collective public protest. To Davis and other writers, the tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans had as much to do with the economic competition between the two groups caused by wider market forces as with cultural misunderstandings and black anger about the killing of Latasha Harlins.

A Special Committee of the California Legislature also studied the riots, producing a report entitled To Rebuild is Not Enough. The Committee concluded that the inner-city conditions of poverty, racial segregation, lack of educational and employment opportunities, police abuse and unequal consumer services created the underlying causes of the riots. It also noted that the decline of industrial jobs in the American economy and the growing ethnic diversity of Los Angeles had contributed to urban problems. Another official report, The City in Crisis, was initiated by the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners; it made many of the same observations as the Assembly Special Committee about the growth of popular urban dissatisfaction. In their study, Farrell and Johnson found similar factors, including the diversification of the L.A. population, the tension between the successful Korean businesses and other minorities, and excessive force on minorities by LAPD and the effect of laissez-faire business on urban employment opportunities.

Rioters were believed to have been motivated by racial tensions but these are considered one of numerous factors. Urban sociologist Joel Kotkin said, "This wasn't a race riot, it was a class riot." Many ethnic groups participated in rioting, not only African Americans. Newsweek reported that "Hispanics and even some whites; men, women, and children mingled with African Americans." When residents who lived near Florence and Normandie were asked why they believed riots had occurred in their neighborhoods, they responded to the perceived racist attitudes they had felt throughout their lifetime and empathized with the bitterness the rioters felt. Residents who had respectable jobs, homes, and material items still felt like second class citizens. A poll by Newsweek asked whether black people charged with crimes were treated more harshly or more leniently than other ethnicities; 75% of black people responded "more harshly", versus 46% of white people.

Several prominent writers expressed a similar " culture of poverty" argument. Writers in Newsweek, for example, drew a distinction between the actions of the rioters in 1992 with those of the urban upheavals in the 1960s, arguing that "[w]here the looting at Watts had been desperate, angry, mean, the mood this time was closer to a manic fiesta, a TV game show with every looter a winner."

According to a 2019 study in the American Political Science Review found that the riots caused a liberal shift, both in the short-term and long-term, politically.

The 1992 events in Los Angeles were compared to the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd in the U.S. city of Minneapolis that resulted in a global protest movement against police brutality and structural racism. Floyd's murder served as an inflection point after the police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky in March 2020, fueling cumulative public outrage. Unlike in 1992, participants who protested Floyd's murder were more racially diverse than in 1992 and there was little if any racially motivated violence.

Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton said that the violence resulted from the breakdown of economic opportunities and social institutions in the inner city. He also berated both major political parties for failing to address urban issues, especially the Republican Administration for its presiding over "more than a decade of urban decay" generated by their spending cuts. He also maintained that the King verdicts could not be avenged by the "savage behavior" of "lawless vandals" and stated that people "are looting because ... [t]hey do not share our values, and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours, without family, without neighborhood, without church, without support." While Los Angeles was mostly unaffected by the urban decay the other metropolitan areas of the nation faced since the 1960s, racial tensions had been present since the late 1970s, becoming increasingly violent as the 1980s progressed.

Conversely, President Bush argued that the unrest was "purely criminal." Though he acknowledged that the King verdicts were plainly unjust, he said that "we simply cannot condone violence as a way of changing the system ... Mob brutality, the total loss of respect for human life was sickeningly sad ... What we saw last night and the night before in Los Angeles is not about civil rights. It's not about the great cause of equality that all Americans must uphold. It's not a message of protest. It's been the brutality of a mob, pure and simple."

Vice President Dan Quayle blamed the violence on a "Poverty of Values" - "I believe the lawless social anarchy which we saw is directly related to the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society" Similarly, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater alleged that "many of the root problems that have resulted in inner-city difficulties were started in the 1960s and 1970s and ... they have failed ... [N]ow we are paying the price."

Writers for former Congressman Ron Paul framed the riots in similar terms in the June 1992 edition of the Ron Paul Political Newsletter, billed as a special issue focusing on "racial terrorism." "Order was only restored in LA", the newsletter read, "when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began ... What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt, the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off, and the violence subsided."

In the aftermath of the riots, public pressure mounted for a retrial of the officers. Federal charges of civil rights violations were brought against them. As the first anniversary of the acquittal neared, the city tensely awaited the federal jury's decision.

The decision was read in a court session on Saturday, April 17, 1993 at 7 a.m. Officer Laurence Powell and Sergeant Stacey Koon were found guilty, while officers Theodore Briseno and Timothy Wind were acquitted. Mindful of criticism of sensationalist reporting after the first trial and during the riots, media outlets opted for more sober coverage. Police were fully mobilized with officers on 12 hour shifts, convoy patrols, scout helicopters, street barricades, tactical command centers, and support from the Army National Guard, the active duty Army and the Marines.

Rodney King was awarded $3.8 million in damages from the City of Los Angeles. He invested most of this money in founding a hip-hop record label, "Straight Alta-Pazz Records." The venture was unable to garner success and soon folded. King was later arrested at least eleven times on a variety of charges, including domestic abuse and hit and run. King and his family moved from Los Angeles to San Bernardino County's Rialto suburb in an attempt to escape the fame and notoriety and begin a new life.

King and his family later returned to Los Angeles, where they ran a family-owned construction company. Until his death on June 17, 2012, King rarely discussed the night of his beating by police or its aftermath, preferring to remain out of the spotlight. King died of an accidental drowning; authorities said that he had alcohol and drugs in his body. Renee Campbell, his most recent attorney, described King as " ... simply a very nice man caught in a very unfortunate situation."

In the weeks after the rioting, more than 11,000 people were arrested. Many of the looters in black communities were turned in by their neighbors, who were angry about the destruction of businesses who employed locals and provided basic needs such as groceries. Many of the looters, fearful of prosecution by law enforcement and condemnation from their neighbors, ended up placing looted items curbside in other neighborhoods to get rid of them.

After three days of arson and looting, some 3,767 buildings were affected and damaged. and property damage was estimated at more than $1 billion. Donations were given to help with food and medicine. The office of State Senator Diane E. Watson provided shovels and brooms to volunteers from all over the community who helped clean. Thirteen thousand police and military personnel were on patrol, protecting intact gas stations and food stores; they reopened along with other businesses areas such as the Universal Studios tour, dance halls, and bars. Many organizations stepped forward to rebuild Los Angeles; South Central's Operation Hope and Koreatown's Saigu and KCCD (Korean Churches for Community Development), all raised millions to repair destruction and improve economic development. Singer Michael Jackson "donated $1.25 million to start a health counseling service for inner-city kids". President George H. W. Bush signed a declaration of disaster; it activated federal relief efforts for the victims of looting and arson, which included grants and low-cost loans to cover their property losses. The Rebuild LA program promised $6 billion in private investment to create 74,000 jobs.

The majority of the local stores were never rebuilt. Store owners had difficulty getting loans; myths about the city or at least certain neighborhoods of it arose discouraging investment and preventing growth of employment. Few of the rebuilding plans were implemented, and business investors and some community members rejected South L.A.

Many Los Angeles residents bought weapons for self-defense against further violence. The 10-day waiting period in California law stymied those who wanted to purchase firearms while the riot was going on.

In a survey of local residents in 2010, 77 percent felt that the economic situation in Los Angeles had significantly worsened since 1992. From 1992 to 2007, the black population dropped by 123,000, while the Latino population grew more than 450,000. According to the Los Angeles police statistics, violent crime fell by 76 percent between 1992 and 2010, which was a period of declining crime across the country. It was accompanied by lessening tensions between racial groups. In 2012, sixty percent of residents reported racial tension had improved in the past 20 years, and the majority said gang activity had also decreased.

Simultaneous 1992 riots:

Other Los Angeles riots:

Afary, Kamran, Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse After the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992, Lexington Books, 2009.

Assembly Special Committee To Rebuild is Not Enough: Final Report and Recommendations of the Assembly Special Committee on the Los Angeles Crisis, Sacramento: Assembly Publications Office, 1992.

Baldassare, Mark (ed.), The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future, Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994.

Cannon, Lou, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, Basic Books, 1999.

Gibbs, Jewelle Taylor, Race and Justice: Rodney King and O.J. Simpson in a House Divided, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.

Gooding-Williams, Robert (ed.), Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, New York and London: Routledge, 1993.

Hazen, Don (ed.), Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really Happened - and Why It Will Happen Again, Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992.

Jacobs, Ronald F., Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From the Watts Riots to Rodney King, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Los Angeles Times, Understanding the Riots: Los Angeles Before and After the Rodney King Case, Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times, 1992.

Song Hyoung, Min, Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Wall, Brenda, The Rodney King Rebellion: A Psychopolitical Analysis of Racial Despair and Hope, Chicago: African American Images, 1992.

Webster Commission, The City in Crisis' A Report by the Special Advisor to the Board of Police Commissioners on the Civil Disorder in Los Angeles, Los Angeles: Institute for Government and Public Affairs, UCLA, 1992.

Of the 63 people killed during '92 riots, 23 deaths remain unsolved - artist Jeff Beall is mapping where they fell - 25 Years After, an Artist's Response - LA Times, April 28, 2017.

The L.A. Riots: 15 Years after Rodney King from Time.com.

The L.A. 53 Archived December 23, 2014, at the Wayback Machine - full listing of 53 known deaths during the riots, from the L.A. Weekly.

L.A.'s darkest days - Christian Science Monitor retrospective and interviews with victims and participants.

"Charting the Hours of Chaos". Los Angeles Times. April 29, 2002.

The Untold Story of the LA Riot, David Whitman, U.S. News & World Report, May 23, 1993, with special emphasis on the riot's first day

Urban Voyeur - Black and White photographs taken during the riots.

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1992 Los Angeles riots Date April 29 - May 4, 1992 (6 days); 31 years ago Location Caused by Methods Widespread rioting looting assault arson protests vandalism shootouts Resulted in Riots suppressed Many homes and businesses damaged, looted, or destroyed Resignation of Chief Daryl Gates Death(s) 63[1] Injuries 2,383 Arrested 12,111[2] [3] Damage $1 billion The 1992 Los Angeles riots, (also called the Rodney King riots, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, or Sa-I-Gu in Korean) were a series of riots and civil disturbances that occurred in Los Angeles County, California, United States, during April and May 1992.

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Herstory

In 2013, three radical Black organizers — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi — created a Black-centered political will and movement building project called #BlackLivesMatter. It was in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman.

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Quick Things You Can Do Right Now

1. SIGN & SHARE the to remove LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva.

2. TEXT five of your friends and tell them that "District Attorney Jackie Lacey has signed off on the murders of 622 people by police. Vote her out on November 3rd."

An unprecedented number of Black leaders and organizations have come together to issue a list of demands for justice during the global pandemic.

Research indicates that Black people are suffering disproportionately from COVID-19. The needs of our community are specific and immediate, so this list of demands for changes both in immediate response and structural realities is crucial in the struggle for justice.

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Black Lives Matter Los Angeles is made of regular people who have committed our lives to Black freedom. We're not Paid organizers or "special" people. We're Mamas, babas, workers, formerly incarcerated folks, straight, queer, trans, students, youth, elders, Christians, Muslims, traditional