Before and After Rodney King : Race, Space, and Activism in Los Angeles

The urban disorder in Los Angeles in the late spring of 1992 shocked the world. For five days following the acquittal of police officers accused of the vicious beating of African American motorist Rodney King, the city’s Black and immigrant neighbourhoods burned. These events have long been understood as an enraged response to blatant racial injustice in an era of criminalization, poverty, and political powerlessness.

Setting the uprising within a twenty-year continuum of activist struggles for spatial justice, Before and After Rodney King tells a different story. George Francis-Kelly introduces an array of diverse and engaged community activists who fought to improve the everyday lives of their neighbours throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, from downtown janitors to East LA grandmothers, South Central entrepreneurs to Compton revolutionaries. Familiar community spaces became sites of struggle to reclaim the future of local development, jobs, and policing. As the global forces of the Reagan era began to define attitudes toward race and neoliberal urban policy, the resulting struggles over urban space precipitated the most destructive, costly, and deadly riot in modern US history.

Drawing from unexplored archival sources, Francis-Kelly examines the intersections between social history and racial geography to situate Los Angeles–based activism within the political landscape of urban America in the 1980s and 1990s.