A Message Louder Than a Billion Pleas : America is a brutal land; its language is violence. That’s why King was beaten, why another King was slain.

Rodney King controlled the men who battered him. That’s what at least one of the jurors believed before returning an innocent verdict on four Los Angeles policemen being tried for King’s brutal beating.

According to the verdict, the authorities didn’t use excessive force; instead it was King who forced them. How else can we explain King continuing to rise while being pummeled by four men with steel-reinforced riot sticks? Wasn’t this active resistance? And who can doubt that these police officers were truly frightened of a man who (it seemed) couldn’t be battered into submission? Such a man would frighten me.

A man who could take so much pain, a man who could invite the righteous brutality of L.A. justice on his own body; this is certainly a man to fear. Was he crazy? Didn’t he know how close he came to ending his own life?

I don’t know King. I don’t know if he’s a good man, whatever that means, or why he was racing down the streets of Los Angeles that unlucky night. The only thing I know about him is that he’s a black American, and like all black Americans he probably has an acute sense of history. Not written history, but memory in the oral tradition. The oral histories of young men who were taken into the police station, or the back alley, and beaten until they broke or expired. The histories of young women who were picked up for questioning and sexually intimidated or raped. The shoplifter who lost an eye on the way to jail; the drunken brawler who couldn’t urinate without pain for two months after he was pacified.

And, like a modern-day Thucydides, King has seen and experienced some of that history. He’s known men and women who have died or withered from alcohol and drugs. He’s seen children with the hatred of war in their eyes. He’s heard impassioned political speeches that the news media downplayed or ignored. And he has gone from pool hall to church social to barbershop repeating what he’s learned.

That’s the way knowledge is transmitted in the black community. Not all of it is true. But, then again, not everything they teach in school is true, either.

History tells us who we are and who our enemies are. History gives us our boundaries and our limits. Black American oral history is an enigma because no one outside of the community has wanted to hear about it.

It is this enigmatic history that tells me what to think about the complex events surrounding the night Rodney King was beaten. When I see the tapes of him rising again and again only to be battered with night sticks and abusive language, I see a man fighting frantically as if he were afraid of being killed. And when I see the blows rained down on him, I agree, death was near.

King wasn’t controlling the police that night, he was struggling to survive. He was living out the metaphor that almost every black American experiences almost every day--a child daring the dangers of the street to get to school; a teen-ager facing the despair of motherhood with no support; the concussive silence of the newspapers and Congress; the outrageously shortened life spans of inner-city black men; the horror of awakening morning after morning to drug infested, violence-torn streets.

The pain of King’s beating can be felt by almost anyone seeing the tape. But the cruel poetry of that beating is understood only by people who are not surprised when they see these events on video--people who are not surprised when a jury is selected that is exclusive of blacks, not surprised when the verdict is not guilty. What’s the surprise? It’s all right there, in the history lived every day. It’s not a history we control. It’s a history of blows that we survive under--maybe.

And when young people run out in the streets for revenge, mayhem and looting--the black community doesn’t applaud. We are lessened and razed by the riots. But we also know that the fear Rodney King felt was echoed in the white community when property began to burn and blows began to fall. We, lamentably, expect some reaction now, some questions (at last) about the state of the black community.

America is a brutal land; its language is violence and bloodshed. That’s why King was beaten. That’s why another King was assassinated. And that’s why, tragically, the rioters sent out a message that is louder than a billion pleas over the past 400 years of beating, burning and death.