A Legacy as Complex as the ’92 Riots

Five years ago, Roy Walker was a man in a doorway at one flash point of the worst rioting in modern U.S. history. As gunfire crackled and his family huddled on the floor, he made two decisions: to stay until the flames died down, and then to make for the suburbs like a bat out of hell.

But a funny thing happened. Walker never left that infamous neighborhood near Florence and Normandie avenues. The house wouldn’t sell, for one thing, but after a while, the place didn’t seem so unlivable. The drive-by shootings subsided. The news choppers went away. Cops slipped back into their old routines.

Life went on. Same black and Latino neighbors, same roses in the spring. And when someone mentioned the riots the other day, it occurred to Walker that only the stigma remains. And he didn’t feel much like talking about that.

“If you saw what I saw, you don’t want to think about it anymore,” mused the 46-year-old father and highway patrolman, who is black. “It is like the rains came, the floods came, and now the water has evaporated. The grass is growing back.”

There are a lot of people like Roy Walker, people who don’t want to think about the riots anymore. Five years is a long time in a place as big as this. Too much can happen: births, deaths, earthquakes, fires, celebrity trials.

What forgetfulness doesn’t carry off, our vastness absorbs. History dissolves. Only artifacts remain. Many, like Walker, see the riots as a mass convulsion that was awful, but is over now. For others, the only souvenir is disappointment that so little changed. A smaller number--those who suffered the most--rage against society’s dim memory.

The lasting meaning of the riots remains as disparate as the people who lived through those frightening days that began April 29, 1992, searching their souls from the housing projects of the inner city to the pastel suburbs far beyond.

Inconsolable Grief

Many days, Jung Hui Lee, 52, sits in her modest Koreatown living room, with shades drawn. Her grief is inconsolable.

Five years ago, when Korean shopkeepers took up arms against the looting mobs, her only son, Edward, was gunned down. He was one of 55 people who died in the unrest. He was the only Korean American. He was 18.

His pals had heard an appeal for help on Radio Korea and were urging Edward to join them. He’d be back in 10 minutes, the teenager told his mom.

Those words were to be his last to her. In the smoke and confusion, officials would later say, a panicked Korean merchant mistook him for a rioter and fired.

Now, try as she might, Lee can’t work, can’t rest. Can’t bring herself to dispose of her own painful artifacts: her son’s things. His books are still in the bookshelves, his camping gear clutters his old room.

“Who can mend my broken heart?” she wants to know. “How do you ever get over what happened to my son?”

How can it be, she wonders, that a loving Korean boy could die as a result of what she will always regard as “a racial fight between the blacks and the whites”?

“My son was sacrificed,” the mother mourns. “For what, I don’t know.”

Like Lee, there are many Angelenos who wish they had a better sense of what the riots were all about. Even with the luxury of hindsight, the reasons remain too complex for consensus to settle in. There are psychological explanations, sociological explanations, political explanations, moral explanations--all of them capable of provoking broad disagreement about what the riots represented and how they should be recalled.

Were they a revolt against the jury’s refusal to convict the white officers who beat a black motorist named Rodney King? A black pogrom against an inner-city Korean merchant class? An economic uprising of the disenfranchised and poor? A demonstration of mob psychology in a society that has come to view rioting as the obligatory response to any injustice involving race?

There are, among the competing viewpoints, such strong feelings that--as was the case after the 1965 Watts riots--people can’t even agree on what to call the events of five years ago. Depending on your perspective, the racial violence, the looting, the lawlessness, the anarchy amounted to a “riot,” a “rebellion,” a “civil disturbance,” los quemazones (the great burnings) or something beyond words, as in the Korean word for it--sa-ee-gu, which translates simply as the landmark date, “4-29.”

Today, there are African American activists who believe that the white middle class is finally beginning to understand their point of view, and white suburbanites who blame the riots for the discomfort they now feel when a black person enters the room. There are minimum-wage Mexican immigrants who won’t be surprised if another riot erupts someday soon, so little has been done about the poverty that seemed to underpin the looting.

There are homeowners in the central city who credit the riots with galvanizing their neighborhoods, civil servants who say the riots renewed their commitment to the poor, young people from the suburbs who have felt drawn back to their ethnic roots.

There are businessmen who will be paying into the next century on burned-down liquor stores that will never again exist. There are wealthy philanthropists who gladly write checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity, but are less willing to visit the impoverished beneficiaries of their largess.

And there are historians and experts of every stripe, feeling their way around that angry week like blind men around the proverbial elephant. They claim alternately that the riots were both underplayed and overblown, that we should move beyond them and never forget.

Raised Consciousness

California writer and commentator Richard Rodriguez--who saw the violence as a multiethnic conflagration, and not the black-and-white clash that was widely depicted in its immediate aftermath--believes that the legacy lies in the raised consciousness Angelenos are gradually beginning to display.

After the riots, he says, “for the first time, a city that had thought of itself in terms of separate suburbs, separate freeway exits, separate communities--for the first time, people in Los Angeles began to think of themselves as residents of the same city.”

They may be more nervous around each other than ever before, he says, but they are aware of each other, and that is the first step toward understanding.

“The world is meeting the world in Los Angeles, and that’s not an easy experience,” Rodriguez believes. “But in time something deeper happens: People become neighbors, become friends, marry each other, divorce, have children, become co-workers.

“The riots may have been the birth of L.A., as well as the death of its innocence.”

Troy Duster, director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley, believes the only thing the riots showed us was “the capacity of this society to respond only to crisis.”

“The city and the nation did respond for a period of six months or a year or so, [because] there was a sense of crisis,” Duster said. “But once the burning stopped and it became clear this was only going to be a sporadic possibility at, say, the end of the O.J. verdict or whatever, there was no sense that something deep or systemic or long term needed to be addressed.

“When cities are burning, we respond. But when five years go by and the burning has stopped, it’s, ‘Let’s dismantle welfare,’ and, ‘Let’s dismantle human services,’ and, ‘Let’s continue a strategy where the people at the top are getting 20 times more than the people at the bottom.’

“Ain’t no juice, ain’t no use,” Duster chuckled sadly. “All we can see are flames.”

In day-to-day life, the legacy is far more subtle.

Take a recent afternoon on a trendy strip of cafes and furniture boutiques along La Brea Avenue north of Wilshire Boulevard. Five years ago, La Brea--a mid-city bastion of upscale L.A.--was like a war zone. Looters of every race, creed and color rampaged up and down the boulevard, smashing windows, pulling down iron security grates with their bare hands.

They came in pickups, BMWs, school buses, limousines. The Radio Shack was picked clean. A sign on a savaged computer store read, “Looted and Empty.” At the posh bistro Campanile, one of the owners fled to the San Fernando Valley with her kids while the other stood guard in the upstairs apartment they shared.

Now, those days are just a memory. The manager of the amply stocked Radio Shack echoed Roy Walker’s resilient take on things.

“It was, how do you say it? An act of nature,” shrugged Ramon DeLeon, 39, a portly Filipino American in a shirt and tie scanning a bank of security monitors in the stockroom in the back.

“Before the riots, after the riots, it’s the same L.A.,” DeLeon smiled. “It happened. Forget it already. The past is past.”

Across the street at Campanile, Pat Siegel, a white interior decorator who lives in Los Feliz, had to think a moment when asked about the riots’ impact. “Which riots do you mean?” she asked at first, wondering whether she had missed a disaster somewhere.

She was not directly affected, she said. The closest any of her loved ones came to being hurt was when her housekeeper went home on the first night to South-Central Los Angeles. When the housekeeper came back to work the next day, she told Siegel that looters had stolen her pickup truck from her driveway, then returned it at dawn with stolen toys littering the truck bed.

Siegel says the only personal carry-over is a vague unease that sometimes comes over her when she ventures into an unfamiliar part of town. And that discomfort, she laughs, is minimal compared to some of her more jittery friends.

“True story,” Siegel says. “A friend and her husband live in Beverly Hills, very wealthy, and they have a policy [since the riots]: They never go east of Highland. It’s kind of a joke.

“Well, shortly after the riots, they were invited to a party near Hancock Park on Country Club Drive. Lovely party, lovely home. But they had just bought a new Lincoln, and of course, this was east of Highland. So can you believe it, they came to the party, but when they pulled up, it was in a Rent-a-Wreck!”

The story, delivered over elegant bowls of celery-root soup, drew laughs from Siegel’s luncheon companion, 86-year-old Mary Allen of Hancock Park. Allen confessed, however, that even after spending 60 years in this city, the riots had frightened her. After that week, she said, she never went back to her beloved (and now defunct) Bullocks Wilshire, a store where the clerks once greeted her by name.

Their waiter, a young white city dweller who was raised in Orange County, said he thinks of the riots now mainly when he goes to underground clubs.

“You used to just go out with friends and enjoy yourself,” said Bret Johns, discreetly laying down the check. “Now, when homeboy-type people walk in [to the clubs], people think, well, maybe this is a sketchy situation. Maybe, you know, we should leave.”

This discomfort is lost on Leon Watkins on the other side of the Santa Monica Freeway in South-Central Los Angeles. Watkins, 51, a black man, runs a community crisis line and has been a local activist for much of his adult life.

“If anything,” he says, “I feel more comfortable around whites now. Hopefully more people understand what’s going on, and we can have dialogue.”

Watkins’ neighbor Jose Redondo isn’t so hopeful. Redondo, who emigrated from Mexico eight years ago, said that, like many of his neighbors, he breaks his back for minimum wage. He works 50 hours a week at a carwash, he says, and the money he makes barely provides for his wife and 7-year-old child.

“There is work here, but not enough well-paying work,” Redondo said, standing outside a carneceria on Florence Avenue. “That’s what makes people frustrated. And there is nowhere for us to turn. No one represents us or tries to make things better for us.”

The situation is just as frustrating for merchants like Cornelius Pettus, who owns two markets in South-Central. Few people rebuilt in his section of town after the looting and fires, he said, and merchants still can’t get fire insurance, so many have closed.

“It could happen again,” said Pettus, who five years ago organized a bucket brigade to keep the flames from spreading to his stores. “All the signs are here. I haven’t seen any improvement in the job situation.”

Those sentiments echo in Central American settlements of Pico-Union. Unlike the less impoverished barrios on the Eastside, Pico-Union--with its legions of day laborers and dirt-poor immigrants--suffered deep devastation and was the site of widespread looting in 1992.

Bitter Disillusionment

Those who would portray the riots as a class-based phenomenon still cite the densely populated Pico-Union as evidence. Community organizer Carlos Ardon, who had marched on Parker Center on the first night of the riots, wishes the protesters had “organized a much more efficient response, and channeled all that frustration into real change.”

Ardon, 37, said he had been a revolutionary in his native El Salvador, and he remembers with irony how, on that anarchic first night, he believed for a shining moment that all those fires had been part of some unknown guerrilla’s plan.

“We thought it had to be an organized response,” he recalled in Spanish. “Who could burn so many buildings at once?”

But he was wrong. And in the ensuing years, he complains, the response from government and business has been as disorganized and sporadic as the riots themselves. The new, stricter immigration laws, he added, have only made things worse.

“Everything is the same,” Ardon sighed. “All that’s missing is the fuse to light the explosion again.”

Not far away in Koreatown, the legacy of the riots has manifested itself as bitter disillusionment with the American dream.

“Many times since those days, I have asked myself, ‘Why did I come to America?’ ” said Jong Ho Park, a Koreatown market employee who armed himself with a hunting rifle in 1992 to guard the store where he still works.

Like many Korean Americans, Park says he will never forget the lawlessness of those days, and the way it overwhelmed police. Nor, his neighbors say, will they forgive the year that led up to the riots--a time in which they believe that tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans in South-Central were relentlessly exaggerated in headlines and on TV news.

In Koreatown, sa-ee-gu has come to be viewed as a pogrom against Korean merchants that was fueled by sensationalistic media portrayals of their conflicts with the black neighborhoods they served. Time and again, Korean Americans contend, their side of the story--often told by reticent business people in broken English--was downplayed in favor of the accounts of more articulate black activists.

“Korean immigrant shop owners were portrayed as rude, disrespectful and money-chasers,” Korean American scholar Edward T. Chang of UC Riverside wrote in “Riots and Pogroms,” a recently published anthology. In story after story, Chang and others believe, the Korean side was undercut by the failure of the media to probe beyond that stereotype.

The last five years have been an education for many Korean newcomers, who come from one of the most homogenous cultures in the world.

“Sa-ee-gu made us realize that we really live in a multiethnic community,” said Joseph Cho, a printer of grocery store fliers whose business is only now regaining its old profitability. What he has learned, he said, is that it is not enough to work hard and mind your own business. You have to be a political player in this country to count.

For him, this lesson has played out most dramatically in the life of his son, Andy, a suburban youth who wasn’t big on his ethnicity until 1992. After the riots, Cho said, his son changed his major at UCLA from engineering to Asian American studies. Not long ago, he went back to Seoul to brush up on his father’s native tongue.

Revisiting a Flash Point

Down at Florence and Normandie, Roy Walker isn’t sure just what to make of it all. The neighborhood where white truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten nearly to death, the neighborhood that millions still associate with that week of rage--well, that’s just not the neighborhood Walker lives in today. Sure, it has its problems, he says, but they were already here--what do they have to do with riots?

To the extent that he is reminded of 1992, the reminders come from the world outside. The TV cameras that sprout at the intersection every year about this time. The way that even the street names--florenceandnormandie--have become this universal shorthand for mayhem and violence. You never know, he says, when or where the legacy will resurrect itself.

A few months ago, he and his wife were in a bicycle shop in Pasadena, and suddenly his wife looked up and there was Rodney King.

“I walked up to him and told him, ‘You don’t know me, but you have changed my life,’ ” Walker recalled.

King just smiled.

“Strange coincidence,” was all he said.

Times staff writers K. Connie Kang, Hector Tobar, John Glionna, John Gonzales and Peter Hong contributed to this story.

* CONTROVERSIAL FILM: Anger and criticism flare after special screening of the cable TV film “Riot” at First AME Church. B1