Which Way, L.A.?
Who Is LA, Twenty Years after the Riots?
How did the 1992 Rodney King riot shape the city we know today? How did it shape our perceptions about the most diverse metropolitan center in the US, perhaps in the world?
By Warren Olney • • 59m ListenThis is the second in a week of special programs about the Rodney King riot of 1992, America's worst civil disturbance of the 20th Century. How did it shape the city we know today? How did it shape our perceptions about the most diverse metropolitan center in the United States, perhaps in the world? We hear from a diverse panel and from the Rev. Cecil "Chip" Murray of the LA's First AME Church. (For additional KCRW coverage of the 1992 riots, go to http://KCRW.com/LARiots.
Banner image: Looters leave a liquor store with cases of beer, May 1, 1992 in Los Angeles, after a mostly white jury acquitted the four police officers accused in the videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. Photo by Hal Garb/AFP/Getty Images
In this episode
2 storiesWho Is LA, Twenty Years after the Riots?
In this second in a week of special programs, we consider how the Rodney King riot of 1992 shaped the city we know today. We start at what's often called the epicenter of the civil disturbance, the place where Reginald Denny was pulled out of his truck and brutally beaten, while millions watched on TV. A white man, he was beaten by black rioters.
Read the story46 minThe First AME Church, a Voice of Reason amid the Riots
In the aftermath of the riots, one of our first Which Way, LA? programs was broadcast from the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Adams District, just south of the 10 Freeway not far from USC. Dr. Cecil "Chip" Murray took over a church with 300 members in 1977.
Read the story13 min
