What It Was Like to Live Through the L.A. Riots

Joel Anderson: “This is an early dispatch from the riots. The carnage in L.A. didn’t touch the entire city—affluent areas like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica emerged mostly unscathed. Instead, the fires and turmoil were concentrated in poor and working-class neighborhoods on the south side. In South Central, Black residents first turned on police, then on motorists and merchants. In Pico-Union, Latino immigrants raged against the poverty of their neighborhood. And in Koreatown, shopkeepers took up arms to defend their stores from looters and arsonists.”

JA: “This NPR broadcast from 20 years after the riots featured a grocery store owner named Kee Whan Ha. At the end of the second day of riots, news reports estimated that more than 100 Korean-owned stores—including many in South Central L.A.—had been ‘burned, looted, or robbed.’ We spoke to Dr. Ha for this episode on why he armed himself and what he saw during the riots.”

JA: “By the early ’90s, Los Angeles had become home to the largest Korean community outside Asia. When we interviewed Jinho Lee, a reporter for Radio Korea, he told me the station had reached about 70 percent of the 1 million Koreans living in Southern California at the time. When the riots broke out on April 29, the station stopped its regular programming and just took calls from listeners. This story from LAist helped us understand the station’s impact for residents of Koreatown at a time when they felt abandoned by police.”

JA: “When the riots began, it gave Rodney King a feeling of satisfaction. But the violence also disturbed him. Under pressure from the people closest to him, he ultimately decided to address the public. It was the first time he had done so in 14 months. His question to the city, ‘Can we all get along?’ was immediately derided in L.A. and across the country. In our episode, we explore why and how these words became so iconic, and what they felt like to Black Angelinos who heard them.”

JA: “In the end, nearly 60 people were killed in Los Angeles between April 29 and May 3, when the rioting finally stopped. This Associated Press story from May 4 was one of many contemporary accounts that helped us understand how people in L.A. and across the country processed the riots.”

JA: “This is one of the early retrospectives on the riots that we used in our research. The article came out just a couple weeks after the riots and told the stories of people in the Pico-Union neighborhood.”

Listen to the episode now.