Rodney King and the Los Angeles Uprising of 1992

After the acquittal of the Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King during a traffic stop the year prior, the black community in South Central Los Angeles rose up, with the riots lasting almost a week between 29 April and 4 May 1992. Black people led smaller uprisings around North America protesting the same kind of racist violence in their own cities. While this bibliographic entry features scholarly treatment of the King Uprising, it also necessarily includes documentary films, references to popular music, and contributions from journalists, community members, and law enforcement. This diverse pool of voices reflects both the wide-ranging impact of this case on post–civil rights era Los Angeles and the centrality of black historical struggle to how the United States sees itself. As such, this case illustrates the manner in which the various topics and events of black experience become crucial terrain on which the national narrative is contested, revised, or fortified. One indication of the fault line that blackness represents is that the events in Los Angeles are described as “riots,” “uprisings,” “revolt,” “revolution,” or “rebellion,” with these terms sometimes used interchangeably, but just as frequently deployed conceptually to denote a particular analysis. Since African American studies encompasses a diversity of conceptual approaches to this case, all of these terms are used within the field. The field is consistent in viewing the King Uprisings in terms of the context of black historical struggle in the post–civil rights era. The videotaped beating incident itself, however, stands out in numerous ways that have not yet been adequately analyzed. The video archive of antiblack violence has expanded dramatically since the King case through the ubiquity of cellphone digital recording technology, 21st-century social media platforms, and a criminal justice system impervious to change. As with acquittal of the LAPD officers in the King case, the digital archive that is its legacy has been mostly ineffectual in curbing police impunity. To the contemporary black movements confronting this persistent violence, police behavior in the 1990s now seems quaintly barbaric compared with the brutal efficiency of shoot-first policing over the subsequent three decades, given that the LAPD consciously avoided using firearms against King. As historical perspective on the King case grows, further research will need to address these and other shortcomings in the literature. Pointing to California’s race and class demography, the larger corpus asserts that the King Uprisings were multicultural. This bibliography on the “multicultural riots” stands adjacent to the bibliography of black revolt. The emblematic literature on the King Uprisings can also be distinguished in terms of how the case appears throughout the academic disciplines as an object of knowledge, and how it is often read through popular culture, namely the early 1990s conflation of gangsta rap music with the predicament of black urban youth. Lastly, the many direct stakeholders in the Rodney King case cannot be ignored: in addition to the variety of ethnographic studies of black residents in South Central LA, King himself published a book on his life, as did the lead LAPD officer, the community-based black radio station KTLN-FM, and the Los Angeles Times journalists who reported daily on the uprising.