Introduction
Introduction
On April 29, 1992, chaos erupted on the streets of Los Angeles after a mostly white jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers in the beating of a Black motorist, Rodney King. The rioting lasted six days, and the National Guard, regular Army troops, and U.S. Marines were called in to patrol the streets of South Los Angeles. More than twenty-five years later, the events of 1992 continue to resonate as violence perpetrated by police on communities of color has occurred repeatedly in the ensuing decades, giving rise to an ever-growing movement for change in law enforcement culture and the practice of policing.Two archives at USC Libraries, the Independent (Christopher) and Webster Commissions collections, offer insight into the unrest in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. These collections contain the records of two independent commissions set up to investigate the LAPD in the wake of the King beating and the 1992 riots. Together, the collections comprise some 90 boxes of audio and video recordings of interviews, court transcripts, internal LAPD documents, and other materials that are accessible through the USC Digital Library. The records came to the USC Libraries after the commissions published their respective reports and were sealed for a period of twenty years before they could be cataloged, digitized, and made accessible. This resource, The Los Angeles Riots: Independent and Webster Commissions Collections, highlights some of these documents and is intended as an overview of the collections, rather than an exhaustive or definitive historical account. The documents shared here are only a fraction of the materials created and collected by the commissions during the course of their investigations and researchers are urged to search the archives more deeply in order to discover more information and the breadth of materials available.
Should We Still Call Them the L.A. Riots?
An article in the L.A. Weekly on April 15, 2017, "Should We Still Call Them the L.A. Riots?", raises an important question that deserves attention here, since this resource uses the term "riots" to refer to the events that occurred in Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King incident as a reference to the nomenclature of the time. In the 1990s, the "L.A. Riots" was a shorthand way to describe the eruption that occurred in the city, but it should be acknowledged that this is a loaded and contested term -- one connoting a chaotic reaction rather than purposeful protest. It is common nowadays to hear the events described in other terms, such as uprising, rebellion, insurrection, and civil unrest.
Copyright, Access, & Use: Photographs featured in this project are from the Los Angeles Times publication Understanding the Riots: Los Angeles Before and After the Rodney King Case. Images and content from the publication are available in the USC Digital Library.