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The city is still trying to understand what happened.

When we think of the 1992 riots, some ready-made images come to mind: burning buildings casting billowing clouds of smoke into the skies above South Los Angeles, disinhibited crowds rushing into unguarded storefronts, armed conflict between rioters and Korean American shop owners. Most of all, we might think of the intersection of Florence and Normandie, where a crowd gathered to vent their frustration over the acquittal of the four officers who beat the Black motorist Rodney King the previous year.

But unlike the 1965 Watts riots that engulfed South L.A. a generation before, the conflagration that took hold after the King trial wasn't constrained to that neighborhood and was not restricted to Black Angelenos. To borrow from and tweak the words of the journalist Tim Rutten, who wrote amid that week's events, these incidents constituted the first multiethnic class riots in American history, an eruption of fury at the socioeconomic structures that excluded and exploited so many in Southern California.

To speak of the Los Angeles riots, therefore, is to speak of dozens of events involving multiple cities and counties, an overlapping but not always congruous set of memories and perspectives that do not neatly map onto one another. -By Ismail Muhammad

Before George Holliday caught the L.A.P.D.'s beating of Rodney King on camera, the former police officer Don Jackson helped reveal the brutal reality of policing for Southern California's Black citizens. By Myriam Gurba

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The night of Jan. 14, 1989, Don Jackson, a police officer turned activist, arrived in Long Beach, Calif., riding in the passenger seat of a rental car driven by Jeffrey Hill, another activist and an off-duty state corrections officer. Both men wore plain clothes, and clandestine chaperones escorted their Buick. A van carrying a television crew tailed the rental car. This undercover caravan arrived in Long Beach with a political agenda. When a local NBC station learned about the sting operations that Jackson had been conducting, the network contacted him to suggest a collaboration. The activist agreed. Looking out the sedan's window, he trusted that once Long Beach officers spotted him and his driver, they would be racially profiled.

Born and raised in south Los Angeles County, Don Jackson (who later changed his name to Diop Kamau) became a Ventura County Sheriff's deputy after graduating from California Lutheran College. In 1982, Jackson returned to Los Angeles County as an employee of the Hawthorne Police Department. He was promoted to sergeant in 1986, but there was trouble at work. The department was overwhelmingly white, and when co-workers subjected Jackson to racist slurs, he pushed back. Jackson later spoke to the press about this verbal abuse, sharing with a reporter that one of his white fellow officers had chided him for being offended when he said a racist slur referring to Black people. The white officer told Jackson that the slur didn't apply to him. He wasn't Black: Being a police officer made him blue.

By 1987, the stress of working in the department contributed to Jackson's going on disability leave, which would ultimately shrink his income. A psychiatrist evaluated him in 1988, deeming him "hypersensitive to racism" - an assessment that Jackson later took umbrage at. He dismissed the claim in a 1997 interview with The Associated Press. "I guess I'm supposed to sit still and take it," he said, "but I can't and I never will." He filed a lawsuit against the department, complaining of racial discrimination and harassment. Local media covered the case, and an investigative reporter soon located transcripts of police messages that substantiated Jackson's claims that bigoted jokes were par for the course at the department. A Hawthorne Police Department spokesperson defended the officers, countering that they were uninventive, that they lifted their jokes from a joke book. If there was a culprit, it was the book's publisher.

Southland police officers also gave Jackson's father, Woodrow - who was one of the first Black men to integrate the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office - reason to sue. A retiree in his 60s, he was driving to Inglewood when he was stopped in Pomona. His daughter, LeNise Jackson-Gaertner, was with him, as were several grandchildren who were asleep in the van's back seat. The white police officers who stopped him were hunting for a 25-year-old robbery suspect. In the lawsuit brought by Woodrow against Pomona and its Police Department, as reported in The Los Angeles Times, the former deputy described being removed from his van at gunpoint. The officers reportedly slammed him to the ground and beat him. A recently installed kidney device was forcibly removed from his body.

After the assault on his father, Jackson resolved to catch officers perpetrating abuse. Traveling with a video camera, he filmed incidents in real time, but his growing reputation as an activist made it difficult for him to document abuse in Hawthorne without being spotted. When NBC asked to film one of Jackson's stings, he went to Long Beach, where police officers would be less likely to recognize him, and his driver, as "blue." Instead, they would be perceived as two working-class men traveling Long Beach streets while Black.

Sure enough, two Long Beach police officers, Mark Dickey and Mark Ramsey, caught sight of the vehicle and followed it before bringing the sedan to a stop. When Jackson exited the vehicle, Dickey barked profanity at him before forcing his head through the plate-glass window of a nearby motorcycle shop. Dickey slammed him into the hood of his police car, handcuffed him and placed him under arrest. In their report, the officers justified their violence by saying that the Buick had been weaving between lanes and accused Jackson of uncooperative behavior. But NBC's cameras caught footage that contradicted the officers' report; when the station aired the footage, it turned Jackson into a quasi celebrity and put the Long Beach Police Department under national scrutiny. Two years before George Holliday recorded Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King, indisputable video evidence of police brutality brought hope that justice was on the horizon.

At a Long Beach City Council hearing, Black residents testified that the abuse perpetrated against Jackson was status quo, communicating that their experience of policing was an experience of violence. Dickey was charged with excessive force and falsifying a police report; Ramsey was charged only with falsification. Judge James Wright presided over their trial, with a jury composed of nine white people, two Latinx people and one Black person. The jury deadlocked, leading Wright to declare a mistrial and dismiss the charges. The officers, their attorneys and most of the jury celebrated this outcome at a restaurant overlooking the still waters of the Pacific Ocean. The only Black juror did not join them. One year before a jury in Simi Valley declared the officers who beat King not guilty, Southern Californians learned that incontrovertible video evidence was not enough to verify the reality of racist policing.

Myriam Gurba is a writer and activist living in Long Beach, Calif. She is one of the founders of the Dignidad Literaria, a social movement formed to combat white supremacy in the publishing industry. She is the author of several books including "Mean," a New York Times Editors' Choice.

In 1992, Woodrow Wilson High School became an example of the city's unrest after the Rodney King verdict. Thirty years later, it's still unclear what happened - and what didn't. By Héctor Tobar

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27 years before the 1992 Riots, the journalist Walter Thompson covered the 1965 Watts Riots. Looking back through his reporting notebook, Thompson's grandson considers what did and didn't change between the two events. By Walter Thompson-Hernández

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My aunt Elisa - affectionately known in our family as Tía Licha - got off work at Nimitz Middle School in Huntington Park an hour before she picked me up from school in the same neighborhood. It was Wednesday, April 29, 1992, her 34th birthday. By the time she locked the textbook room behind her and walked to the employee parking lot that afternoon, there were dark clouds forming to our west. "No rain," Tía Licha overheard someone shout before opening their car door. "No rain. Probably just a fire or something."

When we arrived home, Bear, a retired World War II veteran and the last white man on our block, sat on his front porch. A battery-powered radio played faintly while he watched us walk from across the street. After making brief eye contact with him, I quickly lowered my head. It had been a little over a week since two neighborhood friends and I threw grapefruits in the direction of his home. When more Mexican families began moving into the City of Perfect Balance, as Huntington Park was called, Bear chose hostility. He yelled at my friends and me for running in front of his house or for building our lowrider model cars on the sidewalk. The adults in the neighborhood engaged in shouting matches with him. We kids threw fruit from our parents' trees - lemons, oranges, grapefruit - at his home, clogging his storm drains and shattering his windows.

Bear was a vestige of Huntington Park's past. Like other cities in Southeast Los Angeles County, Huntington Park was created for white working-class families in the early 20th century. The short distance to Downtown Los Angeles, close access to a once thriving Pacific Electric Railway system and a five-block stretch of shops on Pacific Boulevard made the area attractive.

The 1965 Watts Riots - also called the Rebellion, or Uprising, by some historians in order to emphasize the riot's political dimensions - changed that. When L.A.P.D. officers stopped 21-year old Marquette Frye near his mother's house in the Watts neighborhood on suspicion of drunken driving on Aug. 11, the neighborhood was already a tinderbox. Intense racial segregation in housing, schooling and employment kept Black citizens confined to neighborhoods to the west of Alameda Street, known in those days as the cotton curtain. Alameda was a de facto line in the sand that demarcated the eastern border between Black Los Angeles and more lucrative jobs and better schools in cities like Huntington Park. Wanton police violence, meanwhile, was a persistent menace. Rumors that the police had attacked Frye's mother was one insult too many, and the resulting riots lasted six days. More than 600 buildings were damaged; more than 30 people died; the city suffered roughly $200 million in property damage. The destruction spurred white families in Southeast L.A. County to leave for places like Orange County and the San Fernando Valley. When property values began to decline, newly arrived Mexican families like my own pooled their money together and purchased homes, forming beachheads for others.

On Aug. 12, my grandfather Walter Thompson - one of the few Black staff writers at The Oakland Tribune - drove down to Watts to report on the riot. He kept a small brown notepad in which he described what he saw and heard: Watts residents clinging to the chain-link fences that separated their homes from the chaos of the riot; National Guardsmen returning fire at unseen assailants; a resident advising him to find shelter elsewhere - every hotel in the neighborhood, my grandfather wrote, having burned down. Most of all, he described a black smoke emanating from burning structures across the area. What he witnessed was a direct response to a state of socioeconomic misery that had plagued the community for decades.

The unrest that spread through Los Angeles 27 years later was, in part, a function of rage at the same privations. A Los Angeles Times editorial 23 years after Watts noted, "Serious crime, drug addiction and gang violence did not begin to rise rapidly until after the mid-1960s, and did not begin to reach catastrophic proportions until the mid-1970s." The people who rioted in 1992 were the offspring of that history of abandonment. Looking back on that night, I feel as if Huntington Park and its surrounding communities were stuck in an vicious loop. With every hour that passed, our neighborhood collapsed into a version of itself that it hadn't experienced since August 1965. Business owners shut their doors, nailing pieces of plywood against their windows in hopes of deterring the looters heading toward the brand-name stores on Pacific Boulevard. The skies became tinted with the same blend of azure and pebble gray that my grandfather described that August.

I've always wondered what my grandfather felt when he reported on the violence. What did it do to his psyche to see crowds of Black men and women running through the streets, fleeing the guns and violence of the National Guard? How did seeing Watts residents resort to violence change him? His notes are terse and objective in tone, serving more as a historical archive than a window into his spirit. Every time I read through them, I am left to wonder where his emotional compass steered him that night. But amid the weathered ink, there is one moment that resonates: When my grandfather drove back to Oakland after spending two weeks in Watts, he used the word "finality" to describe what he had seen, an irrevocable sense that something had come to an end. The experience of living through the 1992 riots produced a similar sense in my mind.

Finality is part of what my mother and I experienced when we left Huntington Park in the summer of 1992. A month after the riots turned the sky gray, my family and I celebrated my birthday at the Olive Garden. It was the first time we celebrated two birthdays, my aunt's and mine. I was 7. It was a special night, and I was surrounded by the adults who cared for me: my mother, Tía Licha, Tío Eve, Tía Meche and Tío Lulo. It would, however, be the last time I celebrated in Huntington Park. Frustrated and fearful of what further violence the deprivations of life in South Los Angeles would cause, my mother revealed that we would be moving to the Westside at the end of the summer. She boasted about the prestigious elementary school I had been accepted to on U.C.L.A.'s campus, and an apartment that had opened up in a graduate housing complex.

The 1992 riots ultimately led to quick and slow deaths all across the city. More than 60 people were killed over the course of five days. Thousands of people were critically injured. A slew of first-generation business owners lost their livelihoods. I became a part of a generation of young people whose neighborhoods were scarred. Like the communities that were irreparably damaged and abandoned after the riots, our connection to the South Los Angeles of our youth was marked by a slow, aching death. In my case, my body and memory were sundered from the place I called home.

I remember that while the adults continued to watch the chaos that night on television, my friends and I met outside to play. The adults retreated into their homes, but the street was filled with children who came out to see the smoke disappear into the night sky. We yelled long into the night and raced one another through the empty streets until the lights came on. We were freer than we had ever been - unaware of the lasting effects of the smoke in the sky. As my grandfather wrote in 1965, children are "the fearless ones," always "too young to recognize disaster."

Walter Thompson-Hernández is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles. His forthcoming memoir, "We Were Boys," is set to be published by William Morrow in 2023.

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The city is still trying to understand what happened. When we think of the 1992 riots, some ready-made images come to mind: burning buildings casting billowing clouds of smoke into the skies above South Los Angeles, disinhibited crowds rushing into unguarded storefronts, armed conflict between rioters and Korean American shop owners.

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Racial Tensions Rise in Los Angeles

The 1980s brought rising unemployment, gang activity, drugs and violent crime to the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Aggressive efforts to exert control by the Los Angeles Police Department fostered a belief among minority communities that its officers were not held liable for abusive police actions.

In August 1988, as part of LAPD Chief Daryl Gates's "Operation Hammer" drug sweeps, more than 80 officers tore apart a pair of apartment buildings on Dalton Street in South L.A., leaving dozens homeless.

In January 1990, a skirmish between the LAPD and Nation of Islam members following a traffic stop resulted in the death of 27-year-old Air Force veteran Oliver Beasley.

The Rodney King Beating

Early on March 3, 1991, an intoxicated parolee named Rodney King led police on a high-speed car chase before stopping in Lakeview Terrace.

His subsequent beating, which left him with a fractured skull and cheekbone, was caught on video by Lakeview resident George Holliday, who forwarded it to local station KTLA. Within days, the footage of police repeatedly hitting a Black man with batons was airing on all major networks, drumming up nationwide outrage against the officers involved.

On March 15, LAPD Sergeant Stacey Koon and officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno were indicted for assault in the King beating, with Koon and Powell also charged with filing false police reports. The African American community endured another blow the following day, when 15-year-old Latasha Harlins was shot and killed by Korean grocer Soon Ja Du over a disputed shoplifting.

Shortly afterward, L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley formed the independent Christopher Commission, named for co-chair Warren Christopher, to investigate operations within the LAPD. In July, the commission published a report that detailed repetitive use of excessive force and recommended a new system of accountability, though Gates staunchly defended his practices.

On November 15, Du drew a sentence that included community service and suspended jail time, a decision that outraged Harlins' family and supporters. Eleven days later, it was announced the trial for the four officers in the King beating would be moved from Los Angeles County to predominantly white Ventura County. In February 1992, the trial commenced with a 12-member jury that included one Latino, one Asian American and one half-African American.

The L.A. Riots

At about 3:15 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29, the jury released their verdict: All four officers were acquitted of charges in the King case, save for a mistrial on one charge against Powell of excessive force.

The response was immediate, as protesters took to the streets. Hundreds of people gathered at the Los Angeles County Courthouse to protest the verdict. By 5:30 p.m., the unrest had grown violent near the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues in South L.A., where locals attacked passing motorists and forced overwhelmed LAPD officers to retreat.

A news helicopter captured footage of white truck driver Reginald Denny being pulled from his rig and beaten nearly to death, with no signs of police assistance. Minutes later, a Latino driver named Fidel Lopez endured a similar attack.

Violence Spreads Rapidly

In a matter of hours, neighborhoods across South and Central Los Angeles were in flames as rioters firebombed thousands of buildings, smashed windows, looted stores and attacked the Parker Center police headquarters in downtown L.A. By the end of the day, California Governor Pete Wilson had declared a state of emergency and ordered the activation of reserve National Guard soldiers.

The citywide unrest showed little signs of abating on April 30, prompting the suspension of rapid transit, mail service, schools and professional sports games. Many businesses closed, leaving residents to wait in long lines for food and gas, while other store owners, like bands of armed Korean merchants, chose to engage the looters.

Although some 2,000 National Guardsmen had reached the city by 8:00 that morning, a lack of proper communication and equipment prevented effective deployment until later in the afternoon.

May 1, the third day of continued rioting, was marked by the televised appearance of King, who asked for the mayhem to stop, quietly pleading, "Can we all get along?"

That evening, President George H.W. Bush also took to the airwaves to denounce both the "senseless deaths" of the riots and the police brutality that inspired them, and to announce the dispatch of thousands of federal officers to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Begins to Recover

By May 2, with 6,000 National Guardsmen bolstered by the addition of another 4,000 federal troops and Marines, the disorder had largely quelled. An estimated 30,000 people marched at a peaceful rally for Korean merchants, and volunteers began cleaning up the streets. Meanwhile, arraignments began for some 6,000 alleged looters and arsonists.

Highway exits reopened and police began recovering stolen merchandise the following day, the only significant trouble coming when National Guardsmen shot a driver who attempted to run them over.

On May 4, Mayor Bradley lifted the citywide curfew, and residents attempted to resume day-to-day activities with schools, businesses and rapid transit resuming operations. Federal troops stood down on May 9 and the National Guard soon followed, though some soldiers remained until the end of the month.

Aftermath of the L.A. Riots

The final tally for the L.A. riots included 2,000 injuries, 12,000 arrests and 63 deaths attributed to the uprising. Upwards of 3,000 buildings were burned or destroyed and 3,000 businesses were affected as part of the $1 billion in damages sustained by the city, leaving an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people out of work.

At the conclusion of the riots, elected officials set about putting the city back together through a combination of federal grants, collaborations with financial institutions and tax proposals.

Governor Wilson and Mayor Bradley tapped Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth to lead the "Rebuild L.A." effort, which attracted nearly $400 million in corporate investments and set in motion a series of grassroots movements to foster job training and community involvement.

LAPD Slowly Reforms

Attention was also focused on the culpability of the city's law enforcement. On May 11, former FBI Director William H. Webster was named to head an investigation into the LAPD response during the riots, and in late June embattled Chief Daryl Gates stepped down.

In October, the commission issued a report that criticized both the LAPD and City Hall for being unprepared and slow to handle the response to the riots. It issued a list of recommendations, including redeploying desk officers into community patrols and upgrading the city's communications and information systems.

Critics of the LAPD earned some vindication in 1993 when officers Koon and Powell were sentenced to 30 months apiece for violating King's civil rights. In April 1994, King was awarded $3.8 million in a civil lawsuit against the city.

Although the LAPD demonstrated improvements with community-based programs, it resisted implementing most of the recommendations of the 1991 Christopher Commission. It wasn't until the Rampart Scandal of the late 1990s, which exposed widespread corruption within an LAPD anti-gang unit, that serious change was enacted.

In 2000, the city of Los Angeles entered a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice that allowed an independent monitor to oversee reforms. After taking over as LAPD chief in 2002, William Bratton was credited with taking steps to overhaul and improve the perception of the department. In 2013, Department of Justice oversight of the LAPD was fully lifted. However, a 2020 report by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights found that thousands of non-traffic infractions issued by police in California were being disproportionately enforced on Black and Latino residents.

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The 1980s brought rising unemployment, gang activity, drugs and violent crime to the poorer neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Aggressive efforts to exert control by the Los Angeles Police Department fostered a belief among minority communities that its officers were not held liable for abusive police actions.

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This project was one of the more personal projects I have ever done in higer ed. The reason I am turning this project in later than expected is because I had to search for information from my own family. My family history is hard for my mother to talk about especially because her father passed recently. It is steal a healing wound but I am happy that I was able to hear and learn more about my history.