The Empire Strikes Back

Trump speaks, governors jump

After being called names by Trump last night, the nation’s governors are scrambling to show they are not wimps. Many are calling in the National Guard, lowering or instituting curfews, making many arrests (covid or no covid), and using unnecessary violence against protesters. The powers-that-be have chosen the stick, not the carrot.

Big demonstration in small town, Eugene Oregon - by JJ Smith

How to End the Protests

So far, government leaders have done nothing more than utter platitudes about the death of George Floyd. That’s not good enough. Going down on a knee shows support for the protest, but it’s not enough, either. Can we get a pledge that the police will never again kill a peaceful, unarmed Black man? Can we get a commitment that all schools will receive equal funding and resources? Can we get a promise that Blacks will get a fair shot at the good jobs, and not be the first to be laid off? Will they make sure that Black people get health care that is just as good as the health care for white people, and that their treatment by doctors and hospitals is equal to that afforded to whites? (everyone should have free medicare+) Most importantly, will Blacks, and all working class people, have the power to enforce fair and equal treatment for all? If we can’t get this amount of respect, get ready for more, and more, protests for as long as it takes.

Looting

Looting is a crime against property. Often the people smashing windows and doors are not the same people as those taking clothes, shoes, etc. These are opportunity crimes that are driven by poverty, semi-poverty, and the loss of one’s job. Meanwhile, big corporations have looted the Federal Reserve Bank of upwards of $3 trillion dollars because of their co-conspirators in Congress who made it legal in the Cares Stimulus Act last April. This is without a doubt the biggest wealth transfer from working people to the ultra-rich in history. Are you ok with rich-people looting, but hate poor-people looting?

Yes, some of the store owners are nearly as poor as the people driven to steal merchandise from them. On the other hand, Target can easily replace clothing and household items being taken, but no one can replace George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sean Reed, Brendon Glenn, and so many others. According to the Washington Post, Blacks make up 12 percent of the U.S. population. But, from 2015 – 2019 they accounted for 26.4 percent of those that were killed by police. The L.A. Times reported last year that police shootings were the number one cause of death for young Black men.

Call out the National Guard – Really?

Trump said call out the National Guard, so he can federalize them. It’s not quite that easy, the state’s governor still has to request it. The governors may yet buckle under to Trump. Today, many of them called in their state’s National Guard. The Guard will likely be there just for show. They are not trained in urban crowd control and most of them would probably be out protesting if they hadn’t been called up. In the 1992 L.A. Uprising, they were deemed unreliable and after a couple of days were assigned to out-of-the-way locations.

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When the Shoreline Crips stopped Venice from burning down during the 1992 Uprising

On April 28, 1992, Los Angeles exploded in anger at the acquittal of the cops who viciously beat Rodney King. Poor people of every nationality took out their frustration at nearby stores and shopping centers. Many took the opportunity to claim goods and food from stores which they could not normally afford to patronize.

Others were more political. The Los Angeles Times, seen by many as a defender of the establishment, including the police, was one of the first targets. The ground floor of the Times building was trashed. A block away, Parker Center, the Los Angeles Police Department’s headquarters, was under siege. The dismissal of charges by a nearly all white jury against four LAPD officers who had been video-taped beating African-American Rodney King was the final straw for many in South Central and Midtown Los Angeles.

While the lack of justice in the King beating was the immediate cause of the uprising, its roots went much deeper. They sprang from the decades of police brutality, economic catastrophe and constant racism from whites. Until the late 1970s, many of the poverty-stricken “looters,” had good-paying union jobs at four rubber plants, three auto plants and two steel plants, all of which were shut down at the urging of neo-liberal advocates. Thousands more in South Central and East Los Angeles became unemployed as many small manufacturers that supplied the big plants went under.
As the uprising gathered momentum, it spread throughout the area, from Long Beach to Venice. There was little property damage in Venice, compared to other pockets of poverty around L.A. A store was burned on Lincoln Blvd., but it was later determined that it was torched by its owner to collect the insurance money. Venice, and other parts of the city, hosted 4,000 California National Guard troops. Ocean Front Walk was closed down with bayonets.

Most of the action in Venice was well off the ocean front. An apartment building in Oakwood was burnt down by a large group of locals who were expressing their anger at new, unfriendly “yuppies” moving into their hood. Community organizer Melvyn Hayward worked tirelessly to end the violence. He stated later that, in a novel twist, other parts of Venice did not go up in flames only because members of a local gang, the Shoreline Crips, calmed down the angry crowds of non-gang residents.

In the aftermath of the uprising, a half-hearted effort was made to reconstruct the damaged businesses and increase economic activity in the poorest neighborhoods. A public-private organization called Rebuild LA was created and Peter Ueberroth was named to lead it. He had previously made a success of the first privatized Olympics, held in Los Angeles in 1984. However, his entrepreneurship didn’t work this time. Rebuild LA quickly faded into oblivion.

Today, much of Los Angeles is still in the throes of poverty; higher education is even farther out of reach than it was in 1992; and unemployment reached 20 percent in some neighborhoods even before the new “Great Recession.”

On the other hand, the LAPD has become militarized, with high-tech weapons (soon to include drones) and many officers who have experience in urban warfare in Fallujah, Baghdad and Kandahar. Even so, a random, unscientific poll around Venice reveals that many people think it’s just a matter of time until the next uprising. I asked one San Juan Avenue resident at the art opening when he thought the next uprising might occur; he answered, “When Zimmerman goes free.” (George Zimmerman was the vigilante killer of Black teenager Trayvon Martin). Of course, Zimmerman went free in Florida, Trayvon Martin’s life was taken from him, and there is still no justice in the Black community. It has now been 27 years since the 1993 Uprising and, once again, we’re fighting in the streets for justice.

(A version of this story originally appeared in Gentrifying Paradise by James R Smith; Venice West Publishers: 2019)

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