King Beating Reunites Civil Rights Groups

The scene inside the packed sanctuary of Christian Fellowship Church was as if it had been transported back three decades to one of the famed mass meetings of the civil rights movement.

Leaders of civil rights groups sat at the head of the pews, acting as moderators while audience members engaged in heated debate. One speaker after another rose to offer suggestions on planned protest marches and phone recruitment campaigns and to discuss whether civil disobedience and inviting arrests were appropriate tactics.

“It’s one thing to talk lightly about civil disobedience,” said one civil rights leader. “It’s another thing to have the organization in place to get people out of jail.”

His cause was not voting rights or segregated public facilities. And the place was not some tensed-for-trouble Southern town.

The issue was Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and the March 3 beating of Rodney G. King by Los Angeles police officers. The place was South Los Angeles, inside a church where yet another public meeting was being held--one of scores of community meetings, forums and rallies conducted throughout the city in support of an oust-Gates movement and against police brutality.

Almost overnight, the beating of King, a black motorist from Altadena, by white Police Department officers has triggered a revival of the civil rights community in Los Angeles. The violent incident, captured on videotape by an amateur photographer, has united a diverse, multiracial coalition trying to oust Gates, change the City Charter section that gives the chief of police Civil Service protection, and eliminate what coalition members view as a pattern of police misconduct and abuse.

The King beating and its aftermath, said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, “has brought people together in a way that nothing else has in several years.”

“There have been other instances of police brutality,” Mack said, citing the 1979 shooting of Eula Love, a South Los Angeles woman killed by police officers in front of her children as she wielded a paring knife, “but nothing that galvanized people like this.”

The activists acknowledge that this shot of energy was sorely needed by organizations that, they claim, had lost much of their punch because of the Reagan Administration’s hostility toward civil rights issues, the absence of a unifying cause and, to some degree, internal rivalries.

“We have always worked with other groups, but there is a renewed cohesiveness,” said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Southern California affiliate. “I hadn’t talked to John Mack . . . in a couple of years. I had talked to Mark (Ridley-Thomas of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), but now he’s in the office every other day.”

Officials of civil rights groups across the city say they have been deluged with phone calls from outraged Angelenos since the videotape of the beating was aired. The numbers of people attending their gatherings have swelled, they said. Donations to the ACLU are up, Ripston said.

Since March 9, the day of the first public protests against Gates, marches at the Parker Center police headquarters every Saturday have consistently drawn from 150 to 200 people. In contrast, past protests rarely lasted more than a single week.

Scores of people have turned out at community forums to tell their own stories of alleged excessive use of force by police. Last week, at least four such forums were held. One forum, held April 21 at Lewis Metropolitan CME Church, drew 100 people.

“It was the largest meeting we have had in a long time,” said an organizer.

One force that has kept the issue in the public eye has been the voracious media interest in the story and the presence of television cameras at nearly every gathering. At the same time, a number of prominent civil rights activists are also candidates for two vacant City Council seats in predominantly black districts. The controversy over the Police Department was a central campaign issue in the weeks leading to the April 9 primary and has remained a hot topic in the campaign for the June 4 runoffs.

Ripston said public interest in the subject has shown up in other ways, suggesting that media publicity was not the motivation.

She cited what she said is a flood of new memberships and donations to the local ACLU since the beating. In the first month after the beating, she said, 500 became members. That compares with 341 who joined in the first four months of 1990.

The donations and memberships, Ripston insists, are the result of a full-page newspaper ad about the King beating and fund-raising brochures that contained photographs of police wielding nightsticks against citizens. The donations came primarily from a constituency the ACLU usually does not attract, she said.

“The money was in $10 bills and $5 bills and $20 checks,” said Ripston. “Usually when we run an ad we appeal to upper middle-class people who might send in a check for $1,000. We could tell from the ZIP codes that the ad appealed to the communities that are the victims of the problem, inner-city people who we just don’t usually hear from.”

Leo Terrell, civil rights lawyer and board member of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s Los Angeles branch, noted that individuals and organizations who are supporting the oust Gates campaign and seeking an end to excessive use of police force are not solely black.

According to Terrell, the largest of the umbrella groups--the Coalition for Justice and an End to Police Brutality--is so large and diverse that there is not even unanimity on how many organizations belong to it. Estimates range from 28 to 40 membership groups, including gay and lesbian activists, peace activists, Asian and Latino organizations, and in a few cases, whites who do not consider themselves liberals.

The Parker Center protests have included representatives of largely white, right-to-life groups such as Operation Rescue, who argue that Los Angeles police repeatedly brutalized them during their attempts to block entrances to abortion clinics.

The King beating has cut across racial and economic lines, forcing Angelenos to confront what mainly poor black people had been saying all along, Mack said.

Middle- and upper-class African-Americans, he said, “now know the hard reality that if your face is black, you are viewed by too many police officers as a criminal and if you are young, a gang member,” said Mack. “For whites and others, (the King beating) was a real eye-opener. Many people did not believe this sort of thing existed.”

Mack and most activists have the same answer when asked why the King incident has galvanized such widespread and enduring activism: “The videotape.”

“Every time people saw one of those batons hit Rodney King, they felt it,” said Willis Edwards, a former president of the Hollywood-Beverly Hills NAACP.

Ridley-Thomas of the SCLC said that in previous controversies over alleged police brutality, the question often came down to whether to believe the words of police officers or complainants, some of whom had criminal records and thus, a credibility problem. Also, he said, there may have been a higher tolerance, among African-Americans as well as others, for police misconduct in recent years if it was directed at suspected criminals or gang members and portrayed as for the greater good.

Once the King video aired, “everyone knew this sort of thing can’t be tolerated at all,” said Ridley-Thomas, who is running for the 8th District council seat.

Others suggest that politics played a part in curtailing protests of alleged police brutality before the King incident.

“Because Tom Bradley is mayor no one (in the African-American community) would dare speak out” for fear it might reflect negatively on Bradley’s leadership, said Rod Wright, who is active locally in Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition and who is running against Ridley-Thomas in the 8th District.

After the beating, activists realized that the issue could not be ignored. Within days, they began organizing protests even as Bradley and other elected officials hesitated, at first, to make strong public comments.

“It took the mayor and the City Council six weeks before they said something other than they were shocked and amazed,” said Wright.

Now, the civil rights community describes its task as maintaining momentum and preventing division in the ranks.

The ACLU’s Ripston said she and other activists are trying to form a permanent multi-issue alliance modeled on the Bay Area Civil Rights Coalition, which repeatedly confronts civil rights and other activist issues in the San Francisco area. It would probably include most of the small grass-roots groups that now make up the Coalition for Justice, as well as more established groups such as the Urban League.

Terrell of the NAACP said such a move is necessary if activists want to keep civil rights alive as an issue.

“This is a re-emergence of the civil rights movement in a new context,” he said. “This will be the new direction of civil rights in the ‘90s.”