THE 1992 UPRISING: HISTORIC PRESERVATION

THE 1992 UPRISING

Historic Preservation and the Durability of Whiteness

JACKSON LOOP, MPL/MHC

Jackson Loop is an urban planner and historic preservationist working in the Los Angeles area. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Florida, and a dual master’s degree in planning and heritage conservation from the University of Southern California. He is a scholar in residence at the Gamble House in Pasadena, California.

ABSTRACT

Problem, Approach, and Findings

Like every city, Los Angeles has histories of both triumph and shame. But these pasts are not told equally. Lurking beneath empty lots, nondescript intersections, and even this city’s most stately landmarks are stories of strife and oppression, largely invisible. This paper inspects three sites associated with the 1992 Uprising to illustrate that conventional, government-based tools for preserving the past often avoid painful histories and produce stories that are reductive. Designed through a white lens to protect monumental landmarks, this policy framework falls short at these significant sites. Nearly three decades later, in the midst of an international uprising over racial justice, Angelenos still lack a place by which to remember the largest insurrection in the nation’s history.

Implications

Dominant narratives that develop following traumatic historic events often exclude marginalized perspectives. Planning plays this dynamic out in the built environment through preservation. By obsessing over historic building material and landmarks of wealth and state power, this profession limits marginalized peoples’ access to important histories of oppression. Thus, through avoidance and erasure, preservationists enshrine whiteness itself.

Planning builds cities on selective memory. While people around the world tear down racist monuments in response to the police murder of George Floyd, important places associated with the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising remain undesignated, and the city still lacks a central place of remembrance. This project unpacks the role whiteness plays in historic preservation, using the legacy of the 1992 Uprising as a case study to demonstrate the field’s shortcomings.

Literature Review

Broadly speaking, historic preservation seeks to manage the past for present and future gain. As with all planning, power structures and racial hierarchy necessarily affect this process. The profession “normally goes with privilege,” argues famed professor of heritage studies David Lowenthal: “elites usually own it, control access to it, and ordain its public image” (Lowenthal 1996). Preservation’s funding, its legal backing, its bureaucracy— each component propagates this arrangement.

By preventing the survival of certain sites and stories, those with power can exclude others, affecting both how and what societies remember. In recent years, scholars like Laurajane Smith have drawn attention to the role white supremacy plays in this process. In Uses of Heritage, Smith demonstrated how Euro-American ideals on monumentality automatically privilege landmarks associated with the white and wealthy while excluding many non-white historic sites (Smith 2006). In nations throughout the world, such sanitation gives hegemonic cultures “a more long-standing or deeply historically rooted sense of belonging,” as put by sociologist Jo Littler (2008). This process lends the construct of whiteness more legitimacy while invalidating the existence of marginalized people in the present.

While scholars frequently criticize the racist underpinnings of preservation, current policy tools continue to propagate this issue at the national and local level. In 2010, the National Park Service reported that just eight percent of the 86,000 listings on the National Register for Historic Places were designations associated with women or people of color (Meeks 2015). This distinction is much more than honorific: it influences how agencies like FEMA disperse recovery funds for historic sites and is a key step for attaining tax breaks necessary for expensive maintenance. In short, policies that privilege the history of society’s most powerful have real impacts on whether certain stories can obtain the resources needed to survive.

The 1992 Uprising: Whiteness and the Avoidance of Difficult History

On April 29, 1992, a majority-white jury acquitted three of the four officers charged with the brutal beating of Rodney King (Felker-Kantor 2014; Sides 2012). Over the next three days, Los Angeles burned. Footage from helicopters and home video cameras of beatings and torched cars exposed the image of Los Angeles as a multiracial center of prosperity and sunshine as a blatant fiction. One billion dollars in property damage, sixty-three dead, and over 16,000 arrested attested to this (Oliver et al. 1993).

Despite the shock that the unrest caused worldwide, contemporary researchers and commentators agreed that the rebellion was far from unexpected. Many immediately connected the uprising to a recent memory in South Los Angeles, the Watts Rebellion of 1965, which began due to similar causes and left thirty-four dead. In the three decades that followed the Watts Rebellion, changing demographics and decades of federal, state, and municipal policies that gutted urban industrial economies forced people of color in South Los Angeles to continue struggling. In the early 1990s, the Black male unemployment rate in some areas of South Central Los Angeles hovered around fifty percent, which has influenced some historians to refer to the unrest as a “postmodern bread riot” (Gooding-

Williams 1993; Johnson et al. 1992). To make matters worse, between 1965 and 1992, the War on Drugs replaced the social safety net with a brutal “criminal dragnet,” which targeted young Black men disproportionately (Alexander 2010; Johnson et al. 1992). In the pointed words of journalist and native Angeleno Marc Cooper, these policy changes sent “a clear message that the only public service that would be freely offered to minority communities was a shit-kicking police department to keep the lid on” (Cooper 1992). Los Angeles’s efforts to heal these wounds have been tepid at best. Rather than call attention to how systemic discrimination caused the unrest, the City has offered minor police reforms and failed investments over the past three decades. With some 600 police killings county-wide since 2012, and people of color constituting a disproportionate percentage of the area’s COVID-19 deaths, it seems the state of oppression in Los Angeles remains the same in 2021 (Myers 2021).

Preservation planning, designed by and for whiteness, has played a role in this forgetting. Its compulsion to see the most value in unaltered, grand relics of the past overlooks many significant sites and avoids shameful histories. The three examples discussed below demonstrate how this approach leaves important but mundane places unmarked and indistinguishable from their surroundings.

SELECTED SITES

Empire Liquor

On March 16, 1991, a year before the acquittal of King’s assailants, a Korean-American shopkeeper killed a fifteenyear-old Black girl named Latasha Harlins after she allegedly attempted to steal a bottle of orange juice from a liquor store (Gold 2013; LA Department of Building and Safety 1989). A jury convicted the shooter, Soon Ja Du, of voluntary manslaughter and recommended the maximum sentence: sixteen years in prison. Trial Judge Joyce Karlin disagreed, sentencing Du with five years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine (Murphy 1991). In defending her decision, Karlin argued that “This is not a time for revenge . . . and no matter what sentence this court imposes, Mrs. Du will be punished every day for the rest of her life” (Bihm 2017). An appeals court upheld the sentence in April of the following year, one week before the uprising (Schatzman 1992). Du’s business, Empire Liquor, closed soon after Harlins’s murder, and graffiti immediately covered the building’s façade with phrases like “Closed for Murder & Disrespect of Black People” and “Burn This Mother Down” (Morrison 1992). With the help of neighbors who prevented several attempts of arson at the site, the stucco box in the heart of South Los Angeles survived the 1992 Uprising. A large chain grocer, Numero Uno Market, now occupies the building. Constructed in 1962, photo evidence and permits show that the building has undergone substantial alterations, including the addition of an accessory structure in its parking lot in 2001 (LA Department of Building and Safety 2001). The site has no preservation protections and is not designated as a landmark at the local, state, or national level. Ultimately, this site’s past remains dormant, and passersby may have no understanding of the role this building played in the year leading up to the 1992 Uprising.

Moreover, because preservation planning is designed to protect stately monuments of wealth, highly altered buildings like the site of Harlins’s murder typically cannot be designated. This assessment of a place’s historic “integrity” is common across various bodies that manage historic designations in the United States. However, because many communities do not have the resources to maintain their buildings in such specific ways, this approach automatically excludes many significant sites around the country, focusing instead on the properties of typically white, wealthy landowners (Page 2016). Lifting these requirements for sites associated with difficult history—or potentially offering flexibility to sites in which the building’s architecture is less significant than its social history—could allow communities to utilize painful landmarks like the former location of Empire Liquor more fully.

Site of Rodney King Beating (Lot near Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street)

A 1993 article from the Los Angeles Times discussed the lot where police officers beat Rodney King as an “odd landmark” (Glionna 1993). Discovery Cube Los Angeles, an educational museum constructed in 2006 with hands-on exhibits for children, now stands on the site, which is not designated on any local, state, or national register. There

FIGURE 1 - Building of former Empire Liquor store, now occupied by a Numero Uno Market. Photo by author.

is no information about King’s beating available there, nor in a nearby public library.

This place lies some twenty miles north of the heart of the uprising, which makes connecting this place to its historic context challenging. Moreover, the ubiquity of police brutality could make the site of King’s beating sadly unremarkable. Rod Dotson, a Black mechanic, was quoted in the same Los Angeles Times article from 1993 saying that “for most black people that particular spot has no significance whatsoever because a lot of blacks I know have been manhandled by police the same way Rodney King was . . . It’s like trying to find a significant spot on a battlefield. Take your pick” (Glionna 1993).

The lack of designation and avoidance of this site’s difficult history by preservationists demonstrates deep-seated flaws in the profession. Influenced by the white perspective on history—which typically lauds particular individuals, heroes, or places—preservationists have few tools with which to tell stories about systemic violence. This limited approach is even embodied by King’s assigned role as the face of the 1992 Uprising, which overshadows other important issues from this moment, such as disinvestment, municipal neglect, and the widespread assault and murder of Black people by police throughout the United States. Any approach that homes in on particular buildings or sites associated with the unrest would undoubtedly pull attention away from this greater context and leave much untold. Finding new tools to memorialize sites of painful history while understanding them as part of a larger whole could eventually lead to more meaningful, connective storytelling at the site of King’s assault.

Florence and Normandie

The intersection of Florence and Normandie in South Los Angeles is widely cited as the major flashpoint of the 1992 Uprising. It was from this intersection that police retreated as angry crowds became violent following the announcement of the acquittal (Grover 2012). Tom’s Liquor, a store at the intersection’s northeast corner, was one of the first businesses looted (Bermudez 2012). It was also here that four men pulled Reginald Denny from his eighteen-wheeler and beat him while a helicopter crew circled above, filming. Today, the site is not designated on any local, state, or national register and is as non-descript as the hundreds of other wide intersections that make the grid covering Los Angeles’s flatlands. This site affected different races, professions, and classes disparately, which gives those interested in memorializing such a place pause. Preservation, which frequently relies on a celebratory, white perspective on the past, is underequipped to handle such contention. Even an effective designation program could run the risk of further tying this already disinvested area to a narrative of danger, crime, and violence. Moreover, much like the site of King’s beating, designating this particular site may not effectively call attention to an uprising which affected the entire nation. Relying on tools that fetishize material and attempting to freeze this place’s relationship with the past may also prove less than useful, since the site’s daily use differs greatly

FIGURE 2 - Intersection nearest to the lot where police officers beat Rodney King, now occupied by Discovery Cube Los Angeles, the low-slung

building in the background. Photo by author.

FIGURE 3 - Intersection of Florence and Normandie, a major flashpoint of the 1992 Uprising, with Tom’s Liquor visible at the northeast

corner. Photo by author.

from the way it was used in 1992. Meanwhile, while the policies guiding preservation struggle to accommodate a significant site, residents and visitors alike continue to lack any central place of remembrance for what is arguably Los Angeles’s most significant historic event.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS Empire Liquor, the site of Rodney King’s assault, and the intersection of Florence and Normandie demonstrate just how blunt the tools of preservation are. While policies designed to protect white history may perform well at Mount Vernon or Monticello, they clearly fall short at highly altered places of shame and erasure. Narrowly focused on sites, they are incapable of overcoming the thirty-mile distance between the site of Rodney King’s beating and the intersection of Florence and Normandie to tell one story. Obsessed with material and integrity, they offer nothing for the now-unrecognizable site of Latasha Harlins’s murder. Clearly, not all pasts can live on in buildings alone, particularly if we rely on the policy tools of the state—a party that played a direct role in these dark histories of oppression and racial strife.

Alternatives lie outside of the government, where history and grassroots planning come together to validate alternative forms of remembering. As Dolores Hayden (1995) argues best in The Power of Place, projecting marginalized understandings of the past into public space affirms the struggle of oppressed people in the present. In preservation, this process involves trusting communities to build their own relationship with the past to construct a form of counter-memory, which resists mainstream narratives of avoidance and oversimplification (Foucault 1977). By highlighting histories of the oppressed as opposed to the oppressor, preservation can disrupt the status quo, rather than reinforce it.

While these alternative approaches often come from the grassroots, governments could take steps to aid these movements in protecting marginalized understandings of the past. Policy adjustments that reduce the importance of historic structural integrity may welcome sites from disinvested areas, even if they are highly altered. Planners in San Francisco are also testing forms of designation that focus on intangible cultural practices and the way residents use buildings, rather than only protecting buildings themselves (San Francisco Planning n.d.). Lastly, a new form of landmark designation for sites of contention in particular could allow local governments to recognize fraught places without fearing political fallout. This small step could provide a practical means to start conversations about places like Florence and Normandie, which mean something vastly different to every impacted group. Each of these policy shifts can help communities hold space for growing through challenging histories, and recognize harm done by systems that still exist today.

The story we tell through our cities is one of the greatest gifts we have to pass on. But when planners choose to protect only our most monumental buildings, they automatically enshrine and celebrate whiteness at the expense of all nonwhite understandings of the past. This case study shows that this profession needs new tools to tell the story of the 1992 Uprising more fully. Until these are found, further avoidance will only deepen Los Angeles’s crisis of oppression, which will continue boiling over as it did in 1965, 1992, and 2020.

REFERENCES

Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Bermudez, Esmeralda. 2012. “Fading Memories at Florence and Normandie.” Los Angeles Times, April. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-xpm-2012apr-29-la-me-riot-fading-memories-20120429-story.html.

Bihm, Jennifer. 2017. “Say Her Name: Latasha Harlins.” Los Angeles Sentinel, May.

Cooper, Marc. 1992. “LA’s State of Siege: City of Angels, Cops from Hell.” In Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really Happened–and Why It Will Happen Again, edited by Don Hazen. Los Angeles: Institute for Alternative Journalism.

Felker-Kantor, Max. 2014. “Managing Marginalization from Watts to Rodney King: The Struggle Over Policing and Social Control in Los Angeles, 1965-1992.” Ph.D., United States – California: University of Southern California. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1625053129/ abstract/1659B83F016141F3PQ/8.

Foucault, Michel. 1977. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Glionna, John M. 1993. “King Arrest Site Becomes Odd Landmark.” Los Angeles Times, February. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm1993-02-21-me-916-story.html.

Gold, Scott. 2013. “In South L.A., a Bitter Case of Mistaken Identity.” Los Angeles Times, August.

Gooding-Williams, Robert, ed. 1993. “Uprising and Repression in L.A.: An Interview with Mike Davis by the CovertAction Information Bulletin.” In Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising. New York: Routledge.

Grover, Ronald. 2012. “Twenty Years on, Los Angeles Riot Flashpoint a Grim Tableau.” Reuters. April 2012. https://www.reuters.com/article/ususa-losangeles-riots-idUSBRE83J17F20120420.

Hayden, Dolores. 1995. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, Mass: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

Johnson, James H., Cloyzelle K. Jones, Walter C. Farrell, and Melvin L. Oliver. 1992. “The Los Angeles Rebellion: A Retrospective View.” Economic Development Quarterly 6 (4): 356–372. https://doi. org/10.1177/089124249200600402.

Littler, Jo. 2008. “Heritage and ‘Race.’” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, edited by Brian Graham and Peter Howard. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety. 1989. Alteration Permit. http://ladbsdoc.lacity.org/idispublic/.

———. 2001. Alteration Permit. http://ladbsdoc.lacity.org/idispublic/.

Los Angeles Times. 2020. “885 People Have Been Killed by Police in L.A. County since 2000; Most Were Black or Latino.” KTLA. June 2020. https:// ktla.com/news/local-news/885-people-have-been-killed-by-police-in-la-county-since-2000-most-were-black-or-latino/.

Lowenthal, David. 1996. Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Free Press.

Meeks, Stephanie. 2015. A More Perfect Union: Towards a More Inclusive History, and a Preservation Movement That Looks Like America. National Trust for Historic Preservation. https://savingplaces.org/press-center/ media-resources/a-more-perfect-union-towards-a-more-inclusivehistory-and-a-preservation-movement-that-looks-like-america.

Morrison, Patt. 1992. “Symbol of Pain Survives Flames.” Los Angeles Times, May.

Murphy, Dean E. 1991. “Reiner to Seek New Sentence in Girl’s Death.” Los Angeles Times, November.

Myers, Erin. 2021. “In California, COVID-19 Deaths Surge at Record Pace as Cases Decline.” KTLA, January. https://ktla.com/news/california/incalifornia-covid-19-deaths-surge-at-record-pace-as-cases-decline/.

Oliver, Melvin L., James H. Johnson Jr., and Walter C. Farrell Jr. 1993. “Anatomy of a Rebellion: A Political-Economic Analysis.” In Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert GoodingWilliams. New York: Routledge.

Page, Max. 2016. Why Preservation Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press.

San Francisco Planning. 2021. “Cultural Heritage.” San Francisco Planning. 2021. https://sfplanning.org/cultural-heritage.

Schatzman, Dennis. 1992. “Du Sentence Upheld by State Appeals Court.” Los Angeles Sentinel, April.

Sides, Josh. 2012. “20 Years Later: Legacies of the Los Angeles Riots.” Places Journal, April. https://doi.org/10.22269/120419.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors attest that they have no financial interest in the materials and subjects discussed in this article.