Invoking images of Los Angeles in flames, Sen. Barack Obama argued Sunday -- the 15th anniversary of the nation's most violent modern civil uprising -- that little had been done to fix the chronic social and economic conditions that gave rise to a three-day rampage that killed at least 53 people.
And although the riots occurred in L.A., the conditions that spawned them persist across the nation, Obama told an overflow crowd at South-Central's First AME Church. The Illinois Democrat is seeking his party's presidential nomination.
"There wasn't anything going on in Los Angeles that was unique to Los Angeles," Obama said. "If you traveled to Chicago, you would see the same young men on street corners without hope, without prospects, and without a sense of any destiny other than ending up in prison or in a casket."
Obama in South-Central: An article in Monday's Section A about a Los Angeles speech by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) referred to Democrats' weekend gathering in San Diego as their national convention. It was their California state convention.
Obama drew a sustained ovation when he rebuked the Bush administration for, as Obama put it, funding the war in Iraq instead of impoverished Americans -- particularly those in minority neighborhoods.
"We have now spent half a trillion dollars on a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged," Obama said. "We could have invested that money in SouthCentral Los Angeles, or the South Side of Chicago, in jobs and infrastructure and hospitals and schools. Why is it we can find the money in a second for a war that doesn't make any sense?"
His speech was the most direct address on race by any of the major presidential candidates who were in California over the weekend for the Democratic National Convention in San Diego.
And it came as the major Democratic contenders are vying for African American support. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll conducted April 5 to 9 found that 41% of African American voters surveyed backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, 34% supported Obama and 3% backed former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.
Clinton, whose husband received strong African American support in both his presidential elections, made a passing reference of the riots in her speech Saturday to the San Diego convention. After mentioning "the chaos and violence in those days and the anger and despair that boiled over into the streets," she endorsed ethnic diversity and called for border policies that recognized "immigration has been and still is the lifeblood of the United States."
