Putting the King Beating Back in Focus

The services at the Mt. Tabor Missionary Baptist Church last Sunday reminded me how far the Rodney G. King story has strayed.

It started out as a civil rights case, a test of whether people in Los Angeles are protected from police brutality. But the investigation of King’s beating by L.A. cops was submerged by the small-mindedness of a City Hall fight between Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. Their opportune, if unbelievable, reconciliation Tuesday on live TV news didn’t put the case back into proper focus.

Or at least not as well as did the service at Mt. Tabor, located on South Western Avenue, in the heart of predominantly black, working-class South L.A. I’d gone there to hear the Rev. Jesse Jackson discuss the King beating.

Before he spoke, the choir walked down the aisles singing. Singers took their places behind the pulpit and joined the congregation in a hymn.

With perfect appreciation for the moment, the church leaders had chosen “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900 for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The sentiments were so powerful, so reflective of the African-American struggle for liberty, that it became the black national anthem.

Never was the hymn more relevant than when the congregants reached the first words of the second verse:

“Stony the road they trod,” the worshipers sang, “bitter the chastening rod.”

The church itself was a reminder that this is a civil rights case. For the Baptist Church is intertwined with the civil rights movement. Many of the great events of the Southern phase of the movement took place in such churches, before congregations like that of Mt. Tabor, solemn, deeply religious middle-class families. From such a Baptist pulpit, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed the Montgomery bus boycott.

Jesse Jackson was another reminder. When outsiders like Jackson come to town to speak about such events, there’s a tendency to consider them meddlers, as if what happens in this city is none of the rest of the country’s business. I remember people saying that about the Rev. King when he flew here after the Watts riots broke out.

But outsiders often see the big picture.

Jackson stepped to the lectern, tall, athletic, stern, wearing a black robe trimmed with the colors of his Rainbow Coalition. An hour before Jackson’s sermon, he’d learned that his grandmother, who had raised him, had suffered a severe stroke. He was flying back to see her that afternoon and his personal crisis seemed to give added power to his message.

Jackson talked about how police brutality hurts the innocent as well as the guilty, as does deprivation of civil rights. His text was Easter and the Crucifixion. “Calvary,” Jackson said, “is not just for the guilty.” Jesus was a victim of the Roman police, Jackson said. His civil rights were ignored. “If Rodney King could be beaten half to death,” he told the congregation, “so can you.”

That all-important issue is the one city government has been unable or unwilling to explore. The City Council has run away from the beating. Not enough people trust the Police Commission to do an impartial investigation because of its precipitous, abortive suspension of Gates.

That leaves it in the hands of The Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department--the Christopher Commission, headed by Warren Christopher, a prominent lawyer.

On Tuesday, the commissioners and the 13-member legal staff of volunteer lawyers, working for free, began the job of finding out whether the televised beating is symptomatic of widespread brutality and racism in the Police Department.

If you know the department, you understand what a tough job the lawyers face. The cops make up a very tight club. They look on outsiders with suspicion--and silence. That’s especially true when the outsiders come from downtown law firms, wear blue suits and take notes with Montblanc pens.

But six of those men and women with the fancy pens formerly were U.S. Justice Department attorneys, accustomed to questioning tough customers. They know cops.

That’s important. At Mt. Tabor last Sunday, you could see that the worshipers want answers. They have seen a black man beaten senseless by white police officers, the blows raining down long after King was disabled.

To them, the personal politicking of the chief, mayor and council are irrelevant. Rather, this is a cause ranking with the Montgomery bus boycott and other American civil rights struggles, a fight worthy of the solemn attention of the members of Mt. Tabor Baptist Church. Not to mention our city’s supposed leaders.