Rants and Vision, Then and Now

The Civil Rights Leaders

“If Rodney King could be beaten half to death, so can you.”

Jesse Jackson, right, at Mt. Tabor Missionary Baptist Church, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1991

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“The community is outraged. But I think this is going to bring the total community together. [The police are] supposed to protect and serve, and they got it wrong.”

-- local NAACP chapter President Geraldine Washington to The Times, Feb. 8, 2005

The Representative

“What we have here is a police state.”

-- Rep. Maxine Waters, in The Times, Jan. 5, 1992

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“Once again, the police in our community act as judge, jury and executioner.”

-- Waters statement, Feb. 7, 2005

The Academic

“The big story is that the jury decided ... to exonerate the police. In effect, they were saying, ‘This is war, martial law applies and the cops can’t be stopped.’ And that’s the message picked up in South-Central Los Angeles.”

-- Andrew Hacker, author of “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal” and professor at Queens College, to USA Today, May 1, 1992

The Articulator

“It’s not enough to do an examination [of the Devin Brown shooting] and get to a correct conclusion. The community is going to be left with seething anger. Their filter for viewing use of force is just as warped as the cops’ is.... Whenever you have a containment model, all you can do is palliate, you can’t make it humane. The cops don’t feel safe enough to police humanely. I had initially said, ‘Well, the tragedy of this is just mind-blowing,’ but I did not think we were on the verge of riots. When I got down into the community ... I realized we barely avoided it. With a mistake like this, there should have been more room before we hit riot territory.”

-- Civil rights attorney Constance Rice, in an interview with The Times last week

The Activist

“The baton blows delivered to Rodney King by the officers is something that is etched in the minds of every black man, woman and child in the city and country.”

-- Danny Bakewell, right, president of the Brotherhood Crusade, in The Times on the anniversary of King beating, March 4, 1992

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“They have killed women, they have killed black men wholesale and now they are killing our children.”

-- Bakewell, to the Daily News, Feb. 9, 2005

The Reverends

“In the short run, we must vent our anger to the larger community

-- the Rev. Cecil L. “Chip” Murray, quoted in The Times on Nov. 17, 1991

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“The community has rallied behind this family because they have decided that enough is enough.”

-- the Rev. Charles Rushing of Slater Street Missionary Baptist Church at a news conference Feb. 22, 2005, quoted by City News Service

The Mayors

“Black racists are trying to get rid of our white chief of police!”

-- former Mayor Sam Yorty, right, in The Times, May 31, 1991

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“Our eyes did not deceive us. We saw what we saw, and what we saw was a crime.”

-- Mayor Tom Bradley, in a televised speech, April 28, 1992

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“If these issues are not dealt with or resolved, six months from now or a year from now, some innocuous incident becomes a flash point for something that is based on a bunch of things that have happened in the past.”

-- Mayor James K. Hahn, in The Times on Feb. 13, 2005