THE SMELL OF SMOKE hung in the air long after the riots erupted across Los Angeles 15 years ago today. Markets that had served minority communities were suddenly and permanently gone; shoe stores and stereo shops stood looted and bare.
Yet the damage was much more than physical. The police brutality that spurred the anger, and the political dysfunction that allowed it to spread, gave the impression of an ungovernable metropolis. It was a shattered and confused city that stumbled into May of 1992. Some people fled, and even among those who stayed there was a prevailing sense of desperation, of worry that perhaps L.A. simply could not be saved.
The riots -- and, please, may we at last dispense with "uprising" to describe those calamitous days? -- exposed the ethnic fault lines that lay beneath the surface of Los Angeles. There was the justifiable outrage that many African Americans felt toward the L.A. Police Department, then a largely white and hidebound institution with a long history of injurious racism. The tape of LAPD officers gang-stomping Rodney King, then the April 29 mirror-image of young black men dragging Reginald Denny from his truck and bashing his head with a chunk of concrete, became the iconic images of white versus black.
As the violence spread through the city that evening and in the days afterward, it revealed other fissures. Koreans took up armed defense of their businesses against black rioters. Marauding looters, many of them Latino, swept across the Eastside and through Hollywood. The headquarters of this newspaper came under attack, and its newsroom was rattled by recriminations, some with racial overtones.
The riots represented the nadir of a long, unhappy slide. Even before the crowds began to gather and the bricks began to fly on that spring afternoon, Newsweek had pronounced Los Angeles "a city racked by chaos and self-doubt." By the time a thousand fires had burned a hole in L.A.'s core, that assessment was cemented. The climb out from the abyss was long and arduous.
Fifteen years later, happily, there is much progress to celebrate. The LAPD is a far more diverse and open place than it was a decade and a half ago. Relations between the city's black and Korean populations, so tense in the 1990s, are less brittle today. The region's economy, once tethered to the collapsing fortunes of defense and aerospace, is far more diverse and supple.
