It’s the Fire Every Time, and We Do Nothing : Violence: The King verdict is the immediate cause, but the hopelessness of an economic dead end is the foundation.

The Rodney King trial verdict unleashed a rage and anger that still resonates through every person in our black community. But that rage and anger saw two very different expressions Wednesday night. The black middle and working classes chose to vent their anger in an organized, nonviolent and traditional manner, with institutional backing and the voices of political and religious leaders. But others chose as their instrument of protest a violence of an ugly and unproductive kind.

If we are to believe the TV commentators and pundits, the perpetrators of violence represent an aberrant group of “savages” who were lying in wait for just the right opportunity to plunder and loot. Such an explanation relieves all of us of our complicity in the making of the conditions that bred this tragic situation.

Rather than savages, these people are the throwaway, the unredeemable and the superfluous, who we as a society have nurtured during 20 years of social and economic neglect.

While celebrating the success of the black middle class, America has failed to address the issues facing the growing group of African-Americans who have been left out of the gains of the civil-rights movement.

This group has depended, more or less, on conventional black leadership to resolve the economic and social neglect that befall them on an everyday basis. But in Los Angeles as elsewhere, this leadership has failed them one too many times: A black mayor is powerless to stop the economic disinvestment that has lost thousands of jobs for South-Central blacks; black political power cannot ensure that the killer of Latasha Harlins receives just punishment; and--the straw that broke the camel’s back--the Rodney King verdict harkens back to Mississippi justice, even to its delivery by a jury with no blacks.

Any faith that this group of young and hopeless people had in their leadership has evaporated in a frenzy of violence and arson that no black middle-class leader could have stopped. The behavior was savage indeed, but the context was rational. Why follow a political leadership that cannot deliver? With no faith in traditional political protest, many South-Central residents called on their only collective memory of extralegal protest--the 1965 Watts riot. The models of behavior that this group chose to follow went back not to a Dr. Martin Luther King of nonviolence but a Malcolm X of “freedom by any means necessary.”

The precursor to this violence was another savage act, the police beating of King, which the jury in its acquittal legitimized.

We can begin to remedy a corrupt police apparatus through a vote for Charter Amendment F on June 2. But how do we remedy the savagery that is the social dynamite now exploding in the black community? We cannot do it by seeing it as an aberration or the act of only a tiny group of extremists. We must address the economic marginalization of so many in the black community that has bred hopelessness and despair in the young and driven so many to an underground economy of gangs and drugs. If we do not do this, then we run the prospect of continually having, in the words of James Baldwin, “a fire next time.”