In April 1992 Los Angeles experienced the worst riot in an American city when the first of the juries trying the police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King acquitted those officers. This was the second major riot in Los Angeles, the first being the Watts Riot in the mid-1960s. After the earlier riot, city officials promised that they would find ways to bridge the gap between the black and white communities and reduce cross-cultural tensions in the city. Tensions between the races and among different ethnic groups continued, however, and exploded once more in the 1992 riot. Those tensions have diminished somewhat in the city, but they have not disappeared, nor have the underlying causes been fully addressed. This leaves it an open question whether these tensions might erupt once more.
Statistics show that this riot was not merely a black against white affair. According to the arrest figures for that period, 38 percent of those arrested in the riot were black, while Latinos constituted 51 percent of those arrested. In addition, the greatest density of riot-related incidents took place north of the Santa Monica Freeway in the Wilshire and Rampart divisions and not in South Central. Davis concludes that there were actually two riots:
The first, which riveted the attention of the world, occurred in South Los Angeles and adjacent parts of L.A. Country, and was driven by Black anger, although it included significant participation of poor Mexican immigrants in the looting of stores and mini-malls. The second, largely invisible, riot occurred in the preponderantly Latino Mid-city area. . . (Davis, 1993, 37-38).
Koreans have been seen by inner-city blacks as exploiters because they own convenience stores and other retail businesses in those areas. Black resentments are fueled by a number of factors. Blacks see cultural differences with Koreans and the fractured English of many Korean merchants as rudeness, and th...