The old adage holds that history occurs twice—first as tragedy, then as farce—but if anything is to be learned from the tragic tale of Rodney King, it’s that history’s encores are often just as brutal as its débuts. King, who died Sunday at age forty-seven, was inducted, unwitting and unwilling, into a fraternity of men whose experiences seem like a series of historical paraphrases. There’s John Weerd Smith, the Newark cabdriver whose arrest sparked the 1967 riots in that city; Marquette Frye, whose 1965 D.U.I. arrest in Watts ignited days of chaos and fire. In 1964, fifteen-year-old James Powell was shot and killed by an N.Y.P.D. officer in Harlem— word of his death was just so much kindling to an already tense city, and riots broke out in Manhattan and Brooklyn. During the Second World War, the police shooting of Robert Bandy, a soldier, inaugurated the 1943 Harlem riot. And there are more. That roll call explains why the disbelief that swaths of America felt when viewing the videotape of Rodney King’s beating was scarce in black America, why so many African Americans saw it through eyes jaundiced by similar experience—a civic violation as lived cliché.


King’s experience wasn’t novel, nor is it unusual for police to be exonerated in excessive force trials. Yet the verdict in the trial of Officers Stacey Koon, Theodore Briseno, Laurence Powell, and Timothy Wind stripped away the bit of idealism about the judicial system that remained in places like South Central Los Angeles. In a single volatile moment, people confronted two irreconcilable truths: George Holliday’s grainy footage meant that no longer could reports of L.A.P.D. behavior be dismissed as hyperbole from the race-hustle crowd, and that even video evidence of a man being beaten wasn’t enough to prove police brutality. And for the next three days, a fiery scene from America’s urban history replayed itself yet again.

The video also insured that, unlike Smith, Frye, Powell, and Bandy, Rodney King’s name would remain permanently tethered to the bedlam that reigned in Los Angeles for a time in the spring of 1992. It remade a common man as a vector of history. The role never really fit him. In later years his pupils appeared to be permanently dilated by the glare of public attention. And in a country that demands its heroes pure, King remained a troubled soul—his blood-alcohol content was twice the legal limit on the night he was beaten by the L.A.P.D., and the next couple decades of his life were dotted with more arrests and flailing attempts at sobriety. At this remove, after all that, it’s possible to forget the smaller details of how he rose to his occasion: the way his voice quavered when he made his plaintive request that we all get along, the stooped posture that suggested he was physically burdened by the ruin being done across his native city in his name.

King’s later foray into reality television looked at first like a strange twist in an already convoluted plot, but on a deeper level it seems like the logical extension of his experiences. For a genre that consistently conflates trauma with drama, where the public beatings are metaphorical but no less ubiquitous, King was, yet again, an unwitting trailblazer. If you’ve lived through something out of an episode of “Caught on Camera,” showing up on “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” no longer seems like such a stretch.

King was changed by what transpired on March 3, 1991, and we’d like to believe we have been also, though precisely how is hard to pinpoint. The three levels of bureaucratic self-defense are to deny a problem exists; admit that it exists but say it’s confined to a few rogue individuals; or admit to systemic troubles, create a commission, and then claim that reforms have completely eliminated the problem. After the Los Angeles riots, the L.A.P.D. went directly to level three. In the wake of the Christopher Commission’s findings, the department took steps to diversify its ranks. The removal of Police Chief Daryl Gates and the subsequent appointment of Willie Williams, the first black police chief in L.A. history, was directly related to King’s beating. But in 2009, television viewers saw grainy footage of another black man lying prone at the feet of a California police officer, this time in Oakland. The man, Oscar Grant, had been shot and killed. Earlier this year, the New York Civil Liberties Union released a report pointing out that in 2011 the N.Y.P.D. conducted nearly six hundred and eighty-six thousand stop-and-frisks, with blacks and Latinos accounting for more than eighty-six per cent of those targeted by police. A little leaguer has a vastly higher chance of being thrown against a mailbox and searched in New York City than when I was growing up there.

Photograph of Rodney King in Los Angeles on April 13, 2012, by Matt Sayles/AP Photo.


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