In Ferguson, they made us remember how it was last time.

MyTen tried to reconstruct in detail what followed what happened during the 1992 Los Angeles riot. Since subjectivity is our everything, we, as usual, will express our assessment of the situation as a whole. It did not affect the given chronology. You may not agree with her. But we will say what we want to say. The opinion of the author, of course, may not coincide with the opinion of the editors.

10 stages of the riot in Los Angeles in 1992.

1) First you need to understand the prerequisites for such riots In Los Angeles.

Historically, the population of South Los Angeles is very poor. In the 1990s, this was further aggravated by the economic crisis.

Already by that time, the public in the States was nervous about the beating of a black detainee by white police officers.

Los Angeles police officers had already been accused of racial intolerance many times by that time, and this can explain many subsequent events. In particular, when one of the police officers was accused of racism, the only thing he could do was accuse the detainee Rodney King of.

2) March 3, 1991, after, according to one source of another chase, a police patrol stopped a car with three passengers. All three were African American. All cops are white. We would gladly not dwell on this, but this is the root issue of the subsequent turmoil. Two passengers obediently obeyed the orders, and Rodney King, the third detainee, behaved defiantly. This is evident from the detention. He did not calm down even after he was shot twice with a stun gun. At that moment, when he got up from the ground for the second time, King lunged towards one of the policemen. It was from that moment that everything that happened began to be filmed by a passing by Argentine citizen George Holliday.

The three police officers begin beating King and stabbing him 56 times in total. This ends for him with a fracture of the facial bone, two broken legs, numerous hematomas, and lacerations. But he remains alive.

3) History would not have received proper development if not for the American press. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, ABC News, after being exposed to George Holliday's videotape for a year, constantly return to this topic. Los Angeles Times two weeks after the incident publishes dedicated to Rodney King.

The case dragged on for a year, but in the end, as early as 1992, the district attorney accused the police of exceeding their powers and causing excessive violence.

On April 29, 1992, a jury of 9 whites, one "biracial", one Hispanic and one Asian, acquits the police officers. This is considered to be Starting point unrest.

4) 1 day. Peaceful demonstrations about the acquittal of the police quickly turned into a real riot. In connection, as already mentioned above, with the severe economic situation, the population of Los Angeles, the riots were accepted with a bang. From 6 pm, robberies of shops and arson of buildings begin. At 18:45, a demonstrative "revenge" takes place. White driver Danny Oliver is pulled from a truck that is stopping at an intersection and beaten to a pulp. It takes off in live ABC News helicopter circling over the city. Suddenly, another African American intervenes in this scene, who saves the almost dead driver by quickly stuffing him into the truck and (tough video, we warn you).

The city authorities are mobilizing all police officers and officers and asking to bring the national guard into the city.

5) 2 day. On the second day, life in the city is more like a movie about a society that survived the apocalypse. Shopkeepers defend their business with guns in their hands. For the first time gunshots are heard. Rules traffic no one complies (learned from the bitter experience of a truck driver who suffered just because he stopped).

The President of the country, George Bush, for the first time publicly comments on the situation (unlike Barack Obama, who commented on the situation in Ferguson an hour and a half after the verdict was announced). George W. Bush calls for an end to the pogroms and says "anarchists" .

From now on, medics and firefighters travel only in motorcades with police officers, as attacks on them have become more frequent.

The state governor declares a state of emergency.

Rodney King calls to stop the pogroms, but he does it rather sluggishly (again, when compared with how the mother of the murdered Michael Brown does in Ferguson). on his "Bill Cosby Show" he denounces the riot and calls for an end to the riots.

About 400 people are trying to storm the police headquarters.

Any arrest in the city provokes more violence.

6) 3 and 4 days. Up to 4,000 soldiers enter the city national guard. On the evening of May 1, George Bush declares that "terrorism, which appears here and there, will be suppressed in as soon as possible and that justice will prevail.

Los Angeles Airport stops accepting planes due to thick smoke that hangs over the city due to burning buildings.

The governor and mayor are asking for at least double the number of soldiers in the city and the number of medical personnel deployed from neighboring states. The entertainment of the metropolis has finally stopped working. The famous hippodrome is closed, where one of the most famous festivals “Los Alamitos Race Course” is being held at that moment.

The riots are spreading to San Francisco, where the pogroms are no longer purely racial. More than 100 stores were looted there during the day.

By the beginning of the third day, namely by 9 o'clock in the morning, a thousand victims were reported and. Information about the detainees at that time is not given.

TO fourth day The media does not undertake to accurately calculate the number of dead and wounded.

7) 5 day. May 2 in Los Angeles up to 10,000 police officers, 3,000 military (by that time there were already 12,000 National Guard soldiers in the city) and thousands of FBI agents. Also in the city 1,500 soldiers of the first division marines U.S.A. During the day, the police 15 people and hundreds of wounded.

It is precisely such drastic measures that make it possible to turn the tide.

The story of the Los Angeles Korean Quarter deserves special attention: on the first day, the Koreans put up such defense against marauders that the National Guard did not dare to use force, since “personnel losses could turn out.” For almost a day, the mayor of the city had to personally persuade the Korean commune to lay down their arms. The Koreans, for a long time, refused to believe that order could now be established in the city.

"The case of the police" is given to the "feds".

8) 6 and 7 days. The city is gradually coming under the control of the military and police.

The state of emergency has been lifted.

The mayor of Los Angeles officially announces the end of the unrest in the city. Soldiers of the National Guard remain in the city for another 6 days, and additionally tightened police officers - until May 27.

9) The losses suffered by the city are difficult to estimate accurately. - more than $1 billion over 5,000 buildings. More than 2,000 injured. - 53 people.

Repeated trial ends with two cops being found guilty and receiving jail terms, two more being found not guilty. All four were dismissed from the police without the right to reinstatement.

10) Rodney King was paid financial compensation over $3 million from the Los Angeles Police Department.

In later years, he also had problems with justice and was detained with various charges.

These pogroms can be assessed differently: from the strongly right-wing (supposedly African-Americans are to blame for everything) to the radical left (again, supposedly the States are a police state).

The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. Every state has an unresolved national question and the government of any state, especially a large one, will severely suppress any radical expression of will, be it the United States, Russia, China or India.

In the spring of 1992, a real apocalypse broke out in respectable Los Angeles. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans committed a large-scale pogrom in the city, expressing in this way a protest against discrimination against the black population.

Hell in the city of angels

In the fine days of May 1992, the sky over Los Angeles was clouded with the smoke of raging fires - thousands of buildings and cars blazed like that. Spontaneous clashes arose on the streets, accompanied by the sound of broken glass, shooting and the screams of people.

These are stoned and drugged rioters, taking rifle, fired at everything that moves, simultaneously destroying shops and offices along the way. Someone tried to protect their property, and someone fled in a panic, leaving everything at the mercy of the raging crowd.

People of all ages and nationalities with some devilish frenzy robbed supermarkets, carrying armfuls of everything that fell under their hands. The most enterprising ones filled trunks and car interiors household appliances, electronics, spare parts, weapons, perfumes, food.

At first, the police did not interfere in the looting of the city: several thousand law enforcement officers were simply powerless to stop the rampant elements. Even passenger airliners did not dare to approach the huge metropolis plunged into chaos, flying around the seething city.

This is not the first such incident in Los Angeles. In August 1965, in Watts, a suburb of Los Angeles, 34 people died and more than a thousand were injured as a result of six-day riots. real estate$40 million worth of damage was done.

With all the differences, both events have the same roots: the protest of the black population against discrimination by the authorities and the police. Los Angeles, which found itself in the middle of the 20th century on the path of the mass exodus of the US colored population from the disadvantaged south to the free north, became perhaps the most "African American" city in the country.

So, if in 1940 about 63 thousand representatives of the black diaspora lived in Los Angeles, by 1970 its number exceeded 760 thousand people. A spark was enough to ignite this huge mass of indignant people.

By race

At the turn of the 1980-90s South part the center of Los Angeles (South Central Los Angeles), where the bulk of the black population lived, was most affected by the economic crisis, it was here that the most high percent unemployment. Consequently - high level crime and regular police raids.

Representatives of the African American community were convinced that the arrest and use of force by the police of the city is guided solely by racial grounds. Particular outrage among the black population of Los Angeles was caused by the sentence of an American Korean descent, who on March 16, 1991, shot a 15-year-old black girl in her own store. Despite the fact that the jury found Sun Ya Du guilty of premeditated murder, the judge gave her an extremely lenient sentence of 5 years of probation.

However, the drop that overwhelmed the patience of the black population of Los Angeles was the verdict of the court against four police officers who severely beat the black American Rodney King. Three of them escaped any punishment altogether.

On March 3, 1991, after an 8-mile chase, a police patrol stopped Rodney King's car with three other African Americans in it. Police officer Stacey Kuhn ordered four assistants - Powell, Windu, Briseno and Solano to handcuff King. However, the latter put up quite aggressive resistance to law enforcement officers, in particular, hitting one of them in the chest. The police were forced to use a stun gun, but when this method did not calm the violator, the security forces switched to more decisive actions and simply began to beat King with batons and legs.

It was later revealed that King's blood contained traces of alcohol and marijuana, although this did not relieve the police of responsibility. All this action was captured on camera by an Argentinean George Holliday who lived nearby. The footage of the incident subsequently spread throughout the American media.

Color bacchanalia

Already on the evening of April 29 after acquittal Thousands of angry crowds of "blacks" and with them "Latinos" poured into the streets of Los Angeles. Stones flew, gunshots rang out, fires flared up. The rioters set fire to 17 government buildings.

According to eyewitnesses, what happened was more like civil war and all this is literally a stone's throw from the dream factory - Hollywood and the fashionable Beverly Hills district. Calls for an uprising of the "colored" against the domination of the "whites" sounded more and more actively on the streets, the most aggressively inclined through a megaphone urged the crowd to go "to Hollywood and Beverly Hills to rob the rich."

But one of the first to suffer was not a snickering bourgeois, but 33-year-old trucker Reginald Denny. A crowd of rioters pulled him out of the cab and beat him almost half to death - he could neither walk nor speak. The police at this time only circled over the scene of the incident, and broadcast everything live on TV. They were ordered not to interfere.

A lot went to Korean Americans, especially store owners: it was revenge for an unfair court decision in the case of the murder of a black girl by a Korean woman.

Very quickly, the riot swept the African American and Latin neighborhoods of south and central Los Angeles, the authorities managed to keep the east of the city. Traffic has been suspended in the city public transport, rail and air traffic was also disrupted. For more late dates sports and cultural events. Following the city of dreams, the uprisings spread to several dozen more US cities.

The next day, riots spread to San Francisco. Over a hundred stores were looted there. As the San Francisco Examiner told the newspaper, famous representative Democratic Party Willie Brown: "For the first time in American history most of the demonstrations, as well as most of the violence and crime, especially looting, were multiracial in nature, involving everyone - blacks, whites, Asians and Latin America».

denouement

On the morning of May 1, at the request of California Governor Pete Wilson, special vehicles with guards left for the city, but only 1,700 police officers had to cope with the riot before they arrived. On the evening of the same day, President George W. Bush addressed the people, reassuring everyone and assuring that justice would prevail.

Only on the fourth day of unrest reinforcements entered the city: about 10,000 guards, 1,950 sheriffs and their deputies, 3,300 military and marines, 7300 police officers and 1000 FBI agents. Mass raids and arrests began, the 15 most active rebels were destroyed by the forces of law and order. The uprising was put down.

The US Department of Justice has launched a federal investigation into the beating of Rodney King. Later, the US federal authorities brought charges against the police officers for violating civil rights. The process lasted a week, after which a verdict was handed down, according to which all four police officers involved in the beating of Rodney King were fired from the ranks of the Los Angeles police.

According to the results of the six-day Los Angeles riot, according to official figures, 55 people were killed, more than 2,000 were injured, over 5,500 buildings burned down and damaged, which amounted to a total damage of more than $ 1 billion. Insurance companies rated this damage as the fifth largest natural disaster throughout US history. The arrests were the largest in the history of the state - more than 11 thousand people, including 5 thousand African Americans and 5.5 thousand Hispanics. Total participants in the uprising approached a million people.

Curiously, Rodney King received a $3.8 million settlement from the LAPD. With some of these funds, he opened the Alta-Pazz Recording Company label, where he began to record rap. Subsequently, King did not settle down, and still had problems with American justice.

April 29 marked the 21st anniversary of the start of the Los Angeles uprising. It lasted 8 days. About 140 people were killed during the uprising. The city's Korean community managed to contain it, and only then the FBI and the National Guard completed the job.

There were two events that caused the Colored Revolt. First, on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted 3 police officers (another received only a symbolic penalty) accused of beating a Negro Rodney King. Four police officers tried to detain King and two of his comrades on March 3, 1991. If his friends immediately obeyed the demand of the police, got out of the car and meekly lay down on the ground, hands clasped behind their heads, then King resisted. Later, he justified his behavior by saying that he was on parole (he was in jail for robbery), and was afraid that he would be put back behind bars. The police ended up beating him severely, breaking his nose and leg.

The second event - on the same days, the court actually acquitted the American of Korean origin Sunn Ya Du, who shot 15-year-old black woman Latasha Harlins in her own store while trying to rob it. The court gave Sunn Ya Du only 5 years probation.

It is worth adding that the jury that considered the Rodney King case consisted of 10 whites, 1 Hispanic and 1 Chinese.

All this combined gave Negroes a reason to declare that "white America" ​​is still racist.

The first hours of the performance were peaceful - their political activists, including several Baptist pastors, took to the streets with posters. But already in the evening, aggressively minded youth appeared on the streets. Houses and shops were lit up at night.

The epicenter of the uprising was the South Central Los Angeles area. Looking ahead, let's say that during the uprising, about 5.5 thousand buildings were burned.

A day later, on the evening of April 30, the uprising began in the central neighborhoods of Los Angeles, inhabited by Hispanics. The city was on fire.

The first two days - April 29-30 - the police practically did not intervene in the riot. The maximum that was enough for the local police was to protect the place of the uprising so that it did not spread to other quarters where wealthy whites lived, as well as to the business part of the city. In fact, for two days, a third of Los Angeles was in the hands of the rebel colored people. Moreover, the rioters even tried to storm the headquarters of the Los Angeles police, but the guards withstood the siege. Also, the crowd smashed the editorial office of the well-known newspaper Los Angeles Times, justifying this by saying that it is a "stronghold of lies."

Wealthy residents fled in fear from the captured quarters and from the surrounding ones. The first who rebuffed the rioters were the Koreans. They rallied into about 10-12 mobile groups, each of 10-15 people, and began to patrol the districts. The rest of the Koreans stood guard over their homes, shops and other buildings. In fact, it was the Koreans who then saved the city, preventing the uprising from spreading to other quarters.

Only by the evening of May 1, 9,900 national guardsmen, 3,300 military and marines in armored cars, as well as 1,000 FBI agents and 1,000 border guards were pulled into Los Angeles. These security forces cleared the city until May 3. But in fact, the uprising was suppressed only on May 6.

The security forces did not stand on ceremony. According to various sources, they killed from 50 to 143 people. There was no autopsy of most of the corpses, and it remained unclear who killed whom. About 1,100 people received gunshot wounds. Quite often, as witnesses later testified, the security forces killed the unarmed - so that others would be disrespectful. In several cases, for example, they shot detainees who were searched by them and forced to their knees. But most often, the security forces shot at the hands and feet of those caught - hence the large number of non-lethally wounded.

The civilian police did the job. The police assisted the security forces in finding and detaining colored people. Later, she also took part in clearing debris, searching for corpses, helping the victims and other volunteering.

More than 11,000 rioters were arrested. Of these, 5,500 were blacks, 5,000 were Latinos, and 600 were whites. There were no Asians at all. About 500 of those detained are still serving sentences in prisons - they received from 25 years to life imprisonment.









According to rumors, the first stones were thrown on the afternoon of April 29, when the four police officers who beat Rodney King and the judges who acquitted them left the courthouse. Immediately after that, thousands of people took to the streets of Los Angeles. A few hours later, the riot spread throughout the city and very soon the situation began to resemble a civil war. The police abandoned the main areas of clashes, yielding the streets to the rebellious poor.


Beating of Rodney King by the police


Systematic arson of capitalist enterprises began. In total, more than 5,500 buildings burned down. People fired at police officers and at police and journalistic helicopters. 17 government buildings were destroyed. The premises of the Los Angeles Times were also attacked and partially looted. A huge cloud of smoke from the fires covered the city.

Flights departing from Los Angeles international airport, were canceled, incoming aircraft were forced to change course due to smoke and sniper fire. Following the cultural capital of the nation, spontaneous uprisings spread to several dozen cities in the United States.

This riot was the only such violent episode of civil unrest in the United States in the 20th century, leaving the urban unrest of the sixties far behind, both because of its sheer destructiveness and because the April-May 1992 riots were multi-racial uprisings of the poor.

As Willie Brown, prominent Democratic Representative in the California State Legislature, told the San Francisco Examiner: all blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics."

At the very beginning of the riots, the police were outnumbered and quickly retreated. The troops did not appear until the troops began to wane. Some rioters with megaphones tried to turn the performance into a war against the rich. "We should burn their neighborhoods, not ours.

We have to go to Hollywood and Beverly Hills,” one man shouted through a bullhorn (London Independent, May 2, 1992). CELEBRATE AS IF IT'S 1999 IN THE YARD...

The rebellion began among blacks, but soon spread to the Latin neighborhoods of South and Central Los Angeles and Pico Union, and then to the unemployed whites in the area from Hollywood in the north to Long Beach in the south and Venice in the west. East Los Angeles was spared only because of the mass concentration of forces of order there. Everyone went outside. There was an unprecedented sense of togetherness.

Before setting fire to stores, people took fire hoses to protect their homes from the spreading fires. The old people were evacuated, it was a family affair. Cars, full of people, showed up at the knitting factory, loaded up and drove away. Massive looting continued for two days. The police were nowhere to be seen. Consumer goods were redistributed, otherwise some people would not have got anything.

As for the beating of truck driver Reginald Denny, the men who attacked him shortly before defended a fifteen-year-old boy from police beating him. This, of course, was not reported in the means mass media. In an article dated the first of May, Harry Cleaver wrote: "The remarkable thing about the dynamics of the uprising was the defeat of the means of mediation.

When the verdict was announced on the evening of Wednesday, April 29, all self-respecting "community leaders" in Los Angeles, including the black police chief Major Bradley, tried to prevent a clash by channeling people's outrage into a controlled channel. Meetings were organized in churches where impassioned pleas were mixed with equally passionate indignant speeches designed to provide a helpless, purifying outlet for emotions.

At the largest such gathering, broadcast on local television, a desperate mayor went too far, pleading for complete inaction. Just as good trade unions working with employers make it their main task to make agreements and keep the peace among the workers, community leaders see it as their main goal to maintain order.

Fortunately, they didn't succeed. The May Day edition of The New York Times, a newspaper that considers itself a spokesman for the U.S. ruling class, noted with dismay that "in some neighborhoods a street party atmosphere prevails, blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians united in a carnival of plunder.

As countless policemen watched in silence, people of all ages, men and women, some with small children in their arms, entered and left the supermarkets, large bags in their hands and armfuls of shoes, bottles, radios, vegetables, wigs, auto parts and weapons. Some patiently waited in line, waiting for their time to come." The liberal-entrepreneurial humor magazine Spy wrote that people

large car park, specially opened doors for the disabled. An anarchist one-day newspaper in Minneapolis that borrowed its design from USA Today and was called "L.A. Today (Tomorrow... The World)" ("Today Los Angeles, Tomorrow... The World") wrote: They're celebrating in Los Angeles..." An eyewitness in Los Angeles exclaimed, "These people don't look like robbers. They're like quiz winners."

In the robberies, this proletarian "short-term suppression of market relations", Harry Cleaver even noted the emergence of "new laws (!) of distribution and a new type of moneyless social order, when huge wealth is transferred from the entrepreneurs to the have-nots. In this direct appropriation, however, we must see political content behind the arson: the demand to destroy the institutions of exploitation...

The disruption of the trading networks of capitalist society is a blow to its circulatory system. "The image of these riots, as well as riots in general, created by the opponents of such uprisings, is completely false. Riots are usually presented as a chain of senseless clashes, when the rebels rush at each other like hungry sharks.

In fact, crimes against people practically disappeared as soon as the previously divided proletarians different colors skins and nationalities united in a mass collective violence, a "proletarian trip to the shops" and a celebration of destruction. During the riots, there were far fewer rapes and group hooliganism than on ordinary days when the "forces of order" dominate.

After the uprising, young people who were previously unable to walk down the neighboring street because it was under the control of a hostile group can now do so. One Los Angeles resident told us that after the riots, as a woman, she feels safer on the street. Welfare-receiving mothers of many children from four districts have banded together to fight against impending cuts in benefits.

When these women picket the welfare offices, the ruling class knows they have over a hundred thousand rioters behind them. According to conservative estimates, this is the number of poor people in and around Los Angeles who have acquired the collective experience of arson, robbery and clashes with the police, the experience of the intelligent use of collective violence as a weapon of political struggle.

The number of participants in the uprising, obviously, was still approaching a six-figure figure. This can be judged at least by the fact that more than 11 thousand people were arrested (5,000 blacks, 5,500 Hispanics and 600 whites). The vast majority of the rebels and robbers managed to get away unpunished. The significance of the Los Angeles uprising is perhaps best measured by comparison with the San Francisco riot, the second largest riot in the country (or maybe third if you count the armed clashes in Las Vegas). If the San Francisco riot had happened on its own, independent of the events in Los Angeles, it would have been the largest in California since the sixties.

On April 30, more than a hundred stores were looted in San Francisco in the central Market Street area. Numerous high-end stores in financial center the cities that rebelled invaded the lair of the wealthy Nob Hill and beat up a fair amount of luxury cars. In one of the luxury hotels, a group of young people chanting "Death to the rich!" broke all the windows.

As in the campaign against the Gulf War, East Bay demonstrators marched down Highway 80 and closed the bridge, creating traffic jams in which hundreds of thousands of vehicles were stuck. It was a commendable tactical use of the automotive urbanism spawned by capitalism as a weapon against capital. Events in Los Angeles resonated along the coast and elsewhere in the United States.

Despite the few and atypical racist incidents, the riots were for the most part a series of positive events in their essence, purely anti-police uprisings, which led to the fact that in the areas where they occurred, market relations broke down for a while and the totalitarian reality of modern America cracked. These riots were an explosive return of class warfare to the United States on a scale larger than the heroic uprisings of 1965-1971.

These riots were more racially mixed than the urban uprisings of previous decades, and were further confirmation of the ongoing war between the social classes.

The wave of revolts of the poor became a decisive blow to the triumphant propaganda of the ruling classes, which followed the fall of their main imperialist enemy - Soviet Union and defeat former allies USA Panama and Iraq. This propaganda claimed that humanity as animal species has reached the "end of history" and that democracy and the market are the inevitable outcome of human evolution. SECTS, LIES AND VIDEOS...

Radio and newspaper reports during the riots clearly show how our enemy, the media, was stumped by the suddenness and magnitude of the riots. But most disorienting and terrifying to these lackeys of the ruling class was the multi-racial nature of the rebellion.

In reportage filming, people of all skin colors were always present on the streets. For fifty years, one of the foundations of capitalist ideology in the United States has been a massive and determined denial that our society is a class society. The uprising, at least a short time destroyed the results of half a century of introduction of democratic ideology.

The government-bashing media managed to film the beating of a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, and this highly atypical incident was shown over and over again hundreds of times in order to denigrate the uprising as a race riot. Danny's rescue by a few blacks wasn't televised that often. Toward the end of the uprising, the people who had rescued Denny, naively or foolishly, accepted rewards for his rescue from local businesses.

This allowed the bourgeoisie to appropriate ownership of such humanitarian acts and present the riots solely as an episode of mass psychosis or a pogrom. This swift and insidious upheaval by the wealthy and the media is understandable, as it came from a region specialized in exporting spectacle and air to the rest of the world. The bourgeois media described the looting and burning of Korean stores as "racially motivated".

Unfortunately, many businesses were left untouched simply because they were owned or operated by blacks, or because they predominantly employed blacks, as in the case of McDonald's. However, on the other hand, it was a manifestation of the class war, which took the form of a racial uprising, in which the workers and the poor, who turned out to be mostly black, opposed the shopkeepers, who were mostly Korean.

The United States is a monstrously racist society. Fifty years of total mass disinformation has destroyed the class consciousness of the poor and successfully divided the working class along the lines of race. That is why some participants in the riot expressed their hatred for the constant robbery of the poor in racial terms. The media buried the analysis of the causes of the uprising under a pile of superficial remarks about racism in the United States.

By limiting the riots to the issue of racial relations between "whites" as such and "blacks" as such, the media tried to hide the multiracial nature of the riots and present them as the exclusive expression of "black crime". White workers and the poor, no matter how poor and how they are exploited, and no matter how they resisted the police and trade relations, are united in this propaganda scheme with rich whites only on the basis of skin color.

It must be emphasized here that we are not liberals or racists: we do not pity the looted or burned enterprises, the owners of whatever race and nationality they belonged to, but the fact that the participants in the unrest chose some targets and left others untouched, mistakenly looking at their oppressors with race point of view.

The uprisings of April-May 1992, like the riots that have taken place over the past ten years, clearly demonstrated that the most realistic, practical and immediate way that can help the working class and the poor to overcome the 5 racism and racial division that is rooted in people 5 can be found in a violent struggle against our common enemies - the police, the entrepreneurs, the rich and the market economy.

On May 2, 5,000 Los Angeles police officers, 1,950 sheriffs and their deputies, 2,300 patrol officers, 9,975 National Guardsmen, 3,300 military and marines in armored cars, and 1,000 FBI agents and border guards entered the city to restore order and secure shops. Hundreds of people were injured. Most of those who died during the clashes were killed precisely during the suppression of the uprising and were not participants in the riots.

Those killed were mostly bystanders who became victims of the police. So, in Compton, two natives of Samoa were killed during arrest, when they were already dutifully on their knees. The police also tried in every possible way to end the truce between the various gangs. They wanted the working class of Central and South Los Angeles to start shooting at each other.

Maoid "Revolutionary Worker" wrote that one elderly woman told young people, nodding at the policemen: "You need to stop killing each other and start killing these fuckers." More than 11,000 people were arrested in Los Angeles. These were the largest mass arrests in the history of the United States. Insurance companies, assessing the damage caused by the uprising in Los Angeles, called it the fifth largest natural disaster in US history.

In the most radical and consistent episodes of class warfare, there have always been and always will be instances of the thoughtless use of violence.

The recent riots also involved not angels, but living people of flesh and blood, with all the vices and limitations imposed on them by horrendous poverty and exploitation, reflecting the everyday violence of this fucking society with all its horrors and hoaxes. We must support all participants in the riots, regardless of what they are accused of and what we consider fair and unfair.

None of them can count on a fair trial, but even if we could, we must nevertheless adhere to the strategy of unconditional support for all hostages taken by the state during the May Day events.

African American and Hispanic riot in Los Angeles, from April 29 to May 4, 1992
During the riots, 58 people were killed. The city's Korean community managed to contain it, and only then the FBI and the National Guard completed the job.

+27 photos....>>>

There were two events that caused the Colored Revolt. First, on April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted 3 police officers (another received only a symbolic penalty) accused of beating a Negro Rodney King. Four police officers tried to detain King and two of his comrades on March 3, 1991. If his friends immediately obeyed the demand of the police, got out of the car and meekly lay down on the ground, hands clasped behind their heads, then King resisted. Later, he justified his behavior by saying that he was on parole (he was in jail for robbery), and was afraid that he would be put back behind bars. The police ended up beating him severely, breaking his nose and leg.

The second event - on the same days, the court actually acquitted the American of Korean origin Sunn Ya Du, who shot 15-year-old black woman Latasha Harlins in her own store while trying to rob it. The court gave Sunn Ya Du only 5 years probation.

It is worth adding that the jury that considered the Rodney King case consisted of 10 whites, 1 Hispanic and 1 Chinese.

All this combined gave Negroes a reason to declare that "white America" ​​is still racist. They were particularly hated by the Koreans and the Chinese, whom the Negroes declared "traitors to the colored world" and servants of the "white killers."

The first hours of the performance of the Negroes were peaceful in nature - their political activists, including several Baptist pastors, went out into the street with posters.
But in the evening Negro youth appeared on the streets. She began to stone whites and Asians.
Houses and shops were lit up at night. The epicenter of the uprising was the South Central Los Angeles area. Looking ahead, let's say that during the uprising, about 5.5 thousand buildings were burned. Negroes also broke into residential buildings where whites lived - raped, robbed them.

A day later, on the evening of April 30, the uprising began in the central neighborhoods of Los Angeles, inhabited by Hispanics. The city was on fire.
But the main goal of the rebels was robbery. Hundreds of shops and even houses were looted. They took out everything, even diapers. In total, the goods were taken out in the amount of up to 100 million dollars. The total material damage from the uprising amounted to about 1.2 billion dollars.
The first two days - April 29-30 - the police practically did not intervene in the riot. The maximum that was enough for the local police was to protect the place of the uprising so that it did not spread to other quarters where wealthy whites lived, as well as to the business part of the city. In fact, for two days, a third of Los Angeles was in the hands of the rebel colored people. Moreover, the blacks even tried to storm the headquarters of the Los Angeles police, but the guards withstood the siege. The crowd also smashed the editorial office of the well-known newspaper Los Angeles Times, justifying this by saying that it is a "stronghold of white lies."

Whites fled in fear from the captured quarters and from the surrounding ones. Only the Asians remained. They were the first to repulse the blacks and Latinos. The Koreans were especially distinguished. They rallied into about 10-12 mobile groups, each of 10-15 people, and began to methodically shoot the colored people. The rest of the Koreans stood guard over houses, shops and other buildings. In fact, it was the Koreans who then saved the city, preventing the uprising from spreading to other quarters and holding back the brutal crowds of colored people.
Only by the evening of May 1, 9,900 national guardsmen, 3,300 military and marines in armored cars, as well as 1,000 FBI agents and 1,000 border guards were pulled into Los Angeles. These security forces cleared the city until May 3. But in fact, the uprising was suppressed only on May 6.

The security forces did not stand on ceremony with the colored people. According to various sources, they killed from 50 to 143 people (there was no autopsy of most of the corpses, and it remains unclear who killed whom). About 1,100 people received gunshot wounds. Quite often, as witnesses later testified, the security forces killed the unarmed - "for warning" others. On several occasions, for example, they shot Negroes who were searched by them and forced to their knees. Either the security forces shot at the arms and legs of those caught (hence the large number of non-lethally wounded).

The civilian militia, made up of whites, completed the job. The police assisted the security forces in finding and detaining colored people. Later, she took part in the removal of rubble, the search for corpses, the provision of assistance to the victims, and other volunteering.

More than 11,000 rioters were arrested. Of these, Negroes made up 5,500 people, Hispanics - 5,000 people, whites only 600 people. There were no Asians at all. About 500 of those detained are still serving sentences in prisons - they received from 25 years to life imprisonment.