History & Classics
Event Title
Rap, Riot, and Rodney King: the 1992 LA Riots Revisited
Document Type
Poster Presentation
Location
Indianapolis, IN
Subject Area
History & Classics
Start Date
11-4-2014 12:00 PM
End Date
11-4-2014 1:00 PM
Sponsor
Melinda Zook (Purdue University)
Description
In 1992 following the acquittals of four LAPD officers that brutally beat motorist Rodney King, riots broke out for about a week withgreat destruction. The rioters caused an estimated $1 billion in damage; most stores were burned to the ground. The riots left 2,383 wounded and 53 dead.[1] In this atmosphere, the rapper Ice Cube released the song "We Had to Tear this Muthafucka Up," during which he juxtaposed the clash between white authorities and frustrations of local, minorities in urban areas. Amidst the background of political speech by Mayor Ben West and newscaster reports of "The jury found that they were all not guilty, not guilty..." Ice Cube begins his rap:
Not guilty, the filthy, devils tried to kill me.
When the news gets to the hood the niggas will be,
Hotter than cayenne pepper, cuss, bust.
Kickin' up dust is a must.
I can't trust, a cracker in a blue uniform,
Stick a nigga like a unicorn.
Born wicked, Laurence, Powell, foul
Cut his fuckin' throat and I smile.[2]
Ice Cube's song not only narrates the story that the men were acquitted—which led to the rioting in Los Angeles, but it also exhibited the conflict between gangsta rap culture and the LAPD culture. Gangsta rap is known as much or more for its vulgarity as for its politics in mainstream American media, and the LAPD is renowned for its brutality though it maintains that it only seeks to actively maintain law and order. This project will use the Rodney King riots as a lens to examine the racial and cultural conflict between these two groups. My preliminary thesis is that LA gangsta rap and the culture that it represents only mirrored what the minorities of Los Angeles faced under the oppressive authority of the LAPD; and that the LA riots served as a concrete manifestation of the ethos of gangsta rap with its call to lash out against the abuses of white authority and strive for local control. While my thesis has not been wholly cemented it will certainly contain elements of: 1) the manner in which the violent rap culture coopted the violent style of LAPD and vice versa, 2) the struggle for local authority between a white minority and a black majority in the urban neighborhoods, and 3) the riots as a populist expression of the sentiments of gangsta rap group Niggaz With Attitude and rapper Ice Cube as an extension of the Black Power movement.
The questions that will guide my research are: In what ways does the gangsta rap culture reflect the opposing LAPD culture in terms of racism, violence, and vulgarity? To what extent did the gangsta rap and LAPD subcultures represent the urban and suburban cultures, respectively, in Los Angeles? If representative, how did that impact rioting? Did gangsta rap music have a sustaining effect on the riots? In what ways were both gangsta rap culture and the LAPD altered by the riots? Was one affected more than the other? Considering NWA claimed to be a source of news for urban struggle, was it a truthful representation of daily life for African-Americans in urban LA? Was it accurate or excessive? What was the influence of control of authority and distribution of power between local minorities and majorities on the relationship between the two subcultures and the rioting?
There are many scholarly studies on LA in the 1980s and early 1990s under the Reagan and Bush administrations.[3] While cultural scholars have examined the rise of LA hip hop, political scholars have examined the beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed in the context of the broader struggles of the civil rights movement in the conservative era. These books have differed in their approaches whether they emphasize issues of local authority, popular culture, and cultural politics. Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be (2010), Jeff Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop (2005), Bradford Martin's The Other Eighties (2011), and Gil Troy's Morning in America (2005), use different source and frameworks to understand the role of race, local politics, and popular culture in Los Angeles.[4] In my work I want to undertake my thesis from a perspective that bridges national and grassroots politics with developments in popular culture to deepen historical understanding of the impact of gangsta rap as a form of local, popular-cultural politics on the 1992 riot, an event that would take place on the national stage.
The Chapter entitled "Reagan, Rap, and Resistance, 1979-2000" in We Ain't What We Ought to Be addresses issues of local authority, grassroots movements, and the Civil Rights Movement. Stephen Tuck, a cultural historian, argues that the simultaneous rise of rap music and resurgence of political conservatism at the time of Ronald Reagan's election represented the decline of the traditional Civil Rights Movement. Tuck contends that the fight for racial equality became a more localized, grass-roots effort.[5] While contemporary critics contended that gangsta rappers reinforced negative stereotypes by glorifying violence and wearing heavy jewelry and politicians claimed it as an attack on traditional family values, Tuck believed that the critics of gangsta rap "missed the point." According to him, rap raised many of the issues on the ground such as unemployment, poor housing, prison, and the police while simultaneously illuminating the tensions between black Americans by marginalizing groups such as women, homosexuals, and middle to upper-class blacks.[6] My work will differ from Tuck's insofar as I will focus on the Rodney King beating and riot—issues that he does not even mention. I will combine his approach of looking at cultural politics with a popular culture approach by studying the lyrics of the music itself. I also want to further investigate an idea that he just mentions which is that "hip hop was a reflection of existing [inner-city] tensions."[7] While this is just an aside in Tuck's writing I want to explore this idea as it pertains to the Rodney King issue, the LAPD, and gangsta rap specifically.
While Tuck only briefly examines the history of hip hop, Jeff Chang's book Can't Stop, Won't Stop: a History of the Hip Hop Generation deals specifically with the rise of rap over time. His chapters "The Culture Assassins: Geography, Generation, and Gangsta Rap" and "Gonna Work It Out: Peace and Rebellion in Los Angeles" specifically cover gangsta rap's rise and the LA riots. Chang, a journalist and hip-hop critic, while presenting the history of the rise of NWA argues that while they had political ideas worked into their songs, the group had no intention of becoming role models for the black community.[8] They wanted to simultaneously use shock and excess in order to gain sales and to express the unheard voice of the "brother on the corner."[9] My thesis diverges from Chang's work because I want to focus on the way that, though the group had no intention of becoming leaders, in a paradoxical way their songs are a source of cultural politics. This ironically caused them to become the leading voice for expressing urban tensions in a way other artists could not. In a later chapter Chang treats the riots and building of LA, but he does so from a gang perspective. In my own work I will not focus on gang activity whatsoever. I will look at the roots of the rioting and the cultural clash between gangsta rap and the LAPD.
Brad Martin's, The Other Eighties: a Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan is a history of popular culture during the 1980s and how it can explain oppositional events and movements that occurred during the Reagan era to challenge the conservative ascendency. Pertinent to my work is his chapter "Fighting the Power: The Response of African American Politics and Culture." In this chapter Martin, a political historian, claims that policies of urban industrialization, cuts to social welfare, and "white flight" to suburbs did not make the urban underclass passive but that it made the black community more active in cultural realms, particularly the arts, to achieve political goals.[10] Martin goes on to claim that gangsta rap is a West Coast extension of the consciously political, militant rap style of Public Enemy and therefore an extension of historic black resistance to white authority. Gangsta rap dealt with themes such as police oppression and criminalization of black youth. I want to build on Martin's closing notion that through gangsta rap "African Americans used hip-hop and the cultural realm to thrust ideas and messages into the public consciousness."[11] He, like all of the source material that treats gangsta rap as simply a force of cultural politics from the perspective of African Americans, but this neglects any analysis of the opposing LAPD culture and the ways in which rap music shaped the views of white police officers toward the African American communities they patrolled. My research examines gangsta rap culture and LAPD culture together to more thoroughly understand the perceptions of the "other" by each community. This more comprehensive analysis will illuminate more fully the tensions that begot the riots following the acquittals in the Rodney King case.
Gil Troy's Morning in America uses a cultural-political approach to examine events that occurred during Reagan's administration from a national lens. Troy's justifies his approach by virtue of his focus, Reagan, who himself was a dominating political figure and believed in a top-down approach. Troy analyzes an event in each year of Reagan's presidency in a different location each time. He uses this strategy to illustrate that the 1980s were a "time of high drama, great progress, and intense frustration." His own caveat is that even though this was time when many realized the American Dream there were still many others that "demanded liberty and justice and equality and prosperity and meaning and morality and community for all."[12] This caveat is where my work adds on to his because of its civil-rights focus. The approach used by Troy is important for me in building my thesis because by combining my grassroots political approach with a national, top-down approach such as his I am able to juxtapose the national and local political rhetoric to strengthen my work and further situate it historically.
I will use a variety of primary sources to narrate my thesis and answer my research questions. These sources include songs, memoirs, legislative reporting, and newspaper and magazine articles. The songs I will use are from the most influential gangsta rap group, NWA, and from the solo work of its leading member Ice Cube. The group was based in Los Angeles and started to gain real fame and notoriety with the release of their album Straight Outta Compton (1988) just a few years prior to the beating of Rodney King. The songs relay the daily experiences of these young black men with law enforcement. Songs I have chosen to use in my writing include "Fuck Tha Police" (1988), "Gangsta Gangsta" (1989), and "We Had to Tear This Muthafucka Up" (1992). I chose these songs because they give the most forward accounts of the intersection of police and rap culture or because they manipulate the feelings that surfaced following the beating and reached their zenith during the riots. There are two memoirs I will examine to understand the context of the Rodney King beating and subsequently the riots. The first is the memoir of Rodney King, The Riot Within, which gives me great insight into what happened during the beating and the rioting from the central figure of both events.[13] The other memoir I will study is Presumed Guilty: the Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. It conveys the perspective of Stacey Koon, the police officer who tasered Rodney King twice and abetted his beating.[14] This memoir is valuable to my project because it offers insight into culture of the LAPD. Another source that will give me both quantitative and qualitative information to use to analyze the culture of the LAPD. The Report of the Independent Commission on the LAPD presents statistical data about crime reporting and response as well as testimony of police officers and transcripts of the communication between officers.[15] The Commission collected this data while investigating abuses of police force by the LAPD, and the investigation resulted solely because of George Holliday's nationally broadcasted footage of the King beating. Finally I will analyze a myriad of articles from newspapers and magazines.[16] I will primarily look at music and rap related magazines to help contextualize NWA's music. I will be able to see how influential they were as well as read their own words to see how they viewed their music. In terms of newspapers I will study primarily the Los Angeles Times in order to get a sense of how the riots played out and how the media framed the objects of my thesis: the beating, the acquittals, the riots, and the music.
My project will contribute to our understanding of gangsta rap and the LA riots in several ways. I will explain how gangsta rap culture critiques the oppressive LAPD culture in order to contextualize a style of music that many people do not understand. While many scholars and contemporary journalists have condemned gangsta rap for its vulgarity, sexism, and negativity, I examine it as both a cultural source and legitimate form of political activism. By treating seriously a popular culture source that shaped local and national perceptions of minority lifestyles and political frustration, my work will bridge a gap in historical scholarship between music history, cultural history, and political history to show the important connection between the values expressed in gangsta rap and their ultimate fomentation in the form of the LA riots.
[1] Jeff Chang, Can't Stop, Won't Stop: a History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), 376.
[2] Ice Cube, "We Had to Tear This Muthafucka Up," The Predator (Priority Records, 1992), compact disc.
[3] Stephen Tuck, "Reagan, Rap, and Resistance," We Ain't What We Ought to Be (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010); Chang, "The Culture Assassins," 299-329, and "Gonna Work It Out," 357-379; Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: a Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
[4] Tuck, Ain't What We Ought; Chang, Can't Stop; Martin, Eighties; Troy, Morning.
[5] Tuck, Ain't What We Ought, 376-378.
[6] Tuck, Ain't What We Ought, 377-379.
[7] Tuck, Ain't What We Ought, 377.
[8] Chang, Can't Stop, 318.
[9] Chang, Can't Stop, 328.
[10] Martin, Eighties, 139.
[11] Martin, Eighties, 143.
[12] Troy, Morning, 23.
[13] Rodney King, The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
[14] Stacey Koon, Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1992).
[15] Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, "Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department" (July, 1991).
[16] D. Russell, "N.W.A. displays a winning attitude; stickered album is nation's top seller," Billboard 103, June 22, 1991, 7; S. Scott and W. Cole, "Rapid rap rise," Time 137, no. 25, June 24, 1991, 67; Steve Hochman, "Police Don't Give Rappers Bad Rap," Los Angeles Times, Apr 02, 1989; "The Jury's View." The Washington Post, May 1, 1992.
Rap, Riot, and Rodney King: the 1992 LA Riots Revisited
Indianapolis, IN
In 1992 following the acquittals of four LAPD officers that brutally beat motorist Rodney King, riots broke out for about a week withgreat destruction. The rioters caused an estimated $1 billion in damage; most stores were burned to the ground. The riots left 2,383 wounded and 53 dead.[1] In this atmosphere, the rapper Ice Cube released the song "We Had to Tear this Muthafucka Up," during which he juxtaposed the clash between white authorities and frustrations of local, minorities in urban areas. Amidst the background of political speech by Mayor Ben West and newscaster reports of "The jury found that they were all not guilty, not guilty..." Ice Cube begins his rap:
Not guilty, the filthy, devils tried to kill me.
When the news gets to the hood the niggas will be,
Hotter than cayenne pepper, cuss, bust.
Kickin' up dust is a must.
I can't trust, a cracker in a blue uniform,
Stick a nigga like a unicorn.
Born wicked, Laurence, Powell, foul
Cut his fuckin' throat and I smile.[2]
Ice Cube's song not only narrates the story that the men were acquitted—which led to the rioting in Los Angeles, but it also exhibited the conflict between gangsta rap culture and the LAPD culture. Gangsta rap is known as much or more for its vulgarity as for its politics in mainstream American media, and the LAPD is renowned for its brutality though it maintains that it only seeks to actively maintain law and order. This project will use the Rodney King riots as a lens to examine the racial and cultural conflict between these two groups. My preliminary thesis is that LA gangsta rap and the culture that it represents only mirrored what the minorities of Los Angeles faced under the oppressive authority of the LAPD; and that the LA riots served as a concrete manifestation of the ethos of gangsta rap with its call to lash out against the abuses of white authority and strive for local control. While my thesis has not been wholly cemented it will certainly contain elements of: 1) the manner in which the violent rap culture coopted the violent style of LAPD and vice versa, 2) the struggle for local authority between a white minority and a black majority in the urban neighborhoods, and 3) the riots as a populist expression of the sentiments of gangsta rap group Niggaz With Attitude and rapper Ice Cube as an extension of the Black Power movement.
The questions that will guide my research are: In what ways does the gangsta rap culture reflect the opposing LAPD culture in terms of racism, violence, and vulgarity? To what extent did the gangsta rap and LAPD subcultures represent the urban and suburban cultures, respectively, in Los Angeles? If representative, how did that impact rioting? Did gangsta rap music have a sustaining effect on the riots? In what ways were both gangsta rap culture and the LAPD altered by the riots? Was one affected more than the other? Considering NWA claimed to be a source of news for urban struggle, was it a truthful representation of daily life for African-Americans in urban LA? Was it accurate or excessive? What was the influence of control of authority and distribution of power between local minorities and majorities on the relationship between the two subcultures and the rioting?
There are many scholarly studies on LA in the 1980s and early 1990s under the Reagan and Bush administrations.[3] While cultural scholars have examined the rise of LA hip hop, political scholars have examined the beating of Rodney King and the riots that followed in the context of the broader struggles of the civil rights movement in the conservative era. These books have differed in their approaches whether they emphasize issues of local authority, popular culture, and cultural politics. Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be (2010), Jeff Chang's Can't Stop, Won't Stop (2005), Bradford Martin's The Other Eighties (2011), and Gil Troy's Morning in America (2005), use different source and frameworks to understand the role of race, local politics, and popular culture in Los Angeles.[4] In my work I want to undertake my thesis from a perspective that bridges national and grassroots politics with developments in popular culture to deepen historical understanding of the impact of gangsta rap as a form of local, popular-cultural politics on the 1992 riot, an event that would take place on the national stage.
The Chapter entitled "Reagan, Rap, and Resistance, 1979-2000" in We Ain't What We Ought to Be addresses issues of local authority, grassroots movements, and the Civil Rights Movement. Stephen Tuck, a cultural historian, argues that the simultaneous rise of rap music and resurgence of political conservatism at the time of Ronald Reagan's election represented the decline of the traditional Civil Rights Movement. Tuck contends that the fight for racial equality became a more localized, grass-roots effort.[5] While contemporary critics contended that gangsta rappers reinforced negative stereotypes by glorifying violence and wearing heavy jewelry and politicians claimed it as an attack on traditional family values, Tuck believed that the critics of gangsta rap "missed the point." According to him, rap raised many of the issues on the ground such as unemployment, poor housing, prison, and the police while simultaneously illuminating the tensions between black Americans by marginalizing groups such as women, homosexuals, and middle to upper-class blacks.[6] My work will differ from Tuck's insofar as I will focus on the Rodney King beating and riot—issues that he does not even mention. I will combine his approach of looking at cultural politics with a popular culture approach by studying the lyrics of the music itself. I also want to further investigate an idea that he just mentions which is that "hip hop was a reflection of existing [inner-city] tensions."[7] While this is just an aside in Tuck's writing I want to explore this idea as it pertains to the Rodney King issue, the LAPD, and gangsta rap specifically.
While Tuck only briefly examines the history of hip hop, Jeff Chang's book Can't Stop, Won't Stop: a History of the Hip Hop Generation deals specifically with the rise of rap over time. His chapters "The Culture Assassins: Geography, Generation, and Gangsta Rap" and "Gonna Work It Out: Peace and Rebellion in Los Angeles" specifically cover gangsta rap's rise and the LA riots. Chang, a journalist and hip-hop critic, while presenting the history of the rise of NWA argues that while they had political ideas worked into their songs, the group had no intention of becoming role models for the black community.[8] They wanted to simultaneously use shock and excess in order to gain sales and to express the unheard voice of the "brother on the corner."[9] My thesis diverges from Chang's work because I want to focus on the way that, though the group had no intention of becoming leaders, in a paradoxical way their songs are a source of cultural politics. This ironically caused them to become the leading voice for expressing urban tensions in a way other artists could not. In a later chapter Chang treats the riots and building of LA, but he does so from a gang perspective. In my own work I will not focus on gang activity whatsoever. I will look at the roots of the rioting and the cultural clash between gangsta rap and the LAPD.
Brad Martin's, The Other Eighties: a Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan is a history of popular culture during the 1980s and how it can explain oppositional events and movements that occurred during the Reagan era to challenge the conservative ascendency. Pertinent to my work is his chapter "Fighting the Power: The Response of African American Politics and Culture." In this chapter Martin, a political historian, claims that policies of urban industrialization, cuts to social welfare, and "white flight" to suburbs did not make the urban underclass passive but that it made the black community more active in cultural realms, particularly the arts, to achieve political goals.[10] Martin goes on to claim that gangsta rap is a West Coast extension of the consciously political, militant rap style of Public Enemy and therefore an extension of historic black resistance to white authority. Gangsta rap dealt with themes such as police oppression and criminalization of black youth. I want to build on Martin's closing notion that through gangsta rap "African Americans used hip-hop and the cultural realm to thrust ideas and messages into the public consciousness."[11] He, like all of the source material that treats gangsta rap as simply a force of cultural politics from the perspective of African Americans, but this neglects any analysis of the opposing LAPD culture and the ways in which rap music shaped the views of white police officers toward the African American communities they patrolled. My research examines gangsta rap culture and LAPD culture together to more thoroughly understand the perceptions of the "other" by each community. This more comprehensive analysis will illuminate more fully the tensions that begot the riots following the acquittals in the Rodney King case.
Gil Troy's Morning in America uses a cultural-political approach to examine events that occurred during Reagan's administration from a national lens. Troy's justifies his approach by virtue of his focus, Reagan, who himself was a dominating political figure and believed in a top-down approach. Troy analyzes an event in each year of Reagan's presidency in a different location each time. He uses this strategy to illustrate that the 1980s were a "time of high drama, great progress, and intense frustration." His own caveat is that even though this was time when many realized the American Dream there were still many others that "demanded liberty and justice and equality and prosperity and meaning and morality and community for all."[12] This caveat is where my work adds on to his because of its civil-rights focus. The approach used by Troy is important for me in building my thesis because by combining my grassroots political approach with a national, top-down approach such as his I am able to juxtapose the national and local political rhetoric to strengthen my work and further situate it historically.
I will use a variety of primary sources to narrate my thesis and answer my research questions. These sources include songs, memoirs, legislative reporting, and newspaper and magazine articles. The songs I will use are from the most influential gangsta rap group, NWA, and from the solo work of its leading member Ice Cube. The group was based in Los Angeles and started to gain real fame and notoriety with the release of their album Straight Outta Compton (1988) just a few years prior to the beating of Rodney King. The songs relay the daily experiences of these young black men with law enforcement. Songs I have chosen to use in my writing include "Fuck Tha Police" (1988), "Gangsta Gangsta" (1989), and "We Had to Tear This Muthafucka Up" (1992). I chose these songs because they give the most forward accounts of the intersection of police and rap culture or because they manipulate the feelings that surfaced following the beating and reached their zenith during the riots. There are two memoirs I will examine to understand the context of the Rodney King beating and subsequently the riots. The first is the memoir of Rodney King, The Riot Within, which gives me great insight into what happened during the beating and the rioting from the central figure of both events.[13] The other memoir I will study is Presumed Guilty: the Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair. It conveys the perspective of Stacey Koon, the police officer who tasered Rodney King twice and abetted his beating.[14] This memoir is valuable to my project because it offers insight into culture of the LAPD. Another source that will give me both quantitative and qualitative information to use to analyze the culture of the LAPD. The Report of the Independent Commission on the LAPD presents statistical data about crime reporting and response as well as testimony of police officers and transcripts of the communication between officers.[15] The Commission collected this data while investigating abuses of police force by the LAPD, and the investigation resulted solely because of George Holliday's nationally broadcasted footage of the King beating. Finally I will analyze a myriad of articles from newspapers and magazines.[16] I will primarily look at music and rap related magazines to help contextualize NWA's music. I will be able to see how influential they were as well as read their own words to see how they viewed their music. In terms of newspapers I will study primarily the Los Angeles Times in order to get a sense of how the riots played out and how the media framed the objects of my thesis: the beating, the acquittals, the riots, and the music.
My project will contribute to our understanding of gangsta rap and the LA riots in several ways. I will explain how gangsta rap culture critiques the oppressive LAPD culture in order to contextualize a style of music that many people do not understand. While many scholars and contemporary journalists have condemned gangsta rap for its vulgarity, sexism, and negativity, I examine it as both a cultural source and legitimate form of political activism. By treating seriously a popular culture source that shaped local and national perceptions of minority lifestyles and political frustration, my work will bridge a gap in historical scholarship between music history, cultural history, and political history to show the important connection between the values expressed in gangsta rap and their ultimate fomentation in the form of the LA riots.
[1] Jeff Chang, Can't Stop, Won't Stop: a History of the Hip-Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), 376.
[2] Ice Cube, "We Had to Tear This Muthafucka Up," The Predator (Priority Records, 1992), compact disc.
[3] Stephen Tuck, "Reagan, Rap, and Resistance," We Ain't What We Ought to Be (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010); Chang, "The Culture Assassins," 299-329, and "Gonna Work It Out," 357-379; Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: a Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
[4] Tuck, Ain't What We Ought; Chang, Can't Stop; Martin, Eighties; Troy, Morning.
[5] Tuck, Ain't What We Ought, 376-378.
[6] Tuck, Ain't What We Ought, 377-379.
[7] Tuck, Ain't What We Ought, 377.
[8] Chang, Can't Stop, 318.
[9] Chang, Can't Stop, 328.
[10] Martin, Eighties, 139.
[11] Martin, Eighties, 143.
[12] Troy, Morning, 23.
[13] Rodney King, The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption (New York: HarperCollins, 2012).
[14] Stacey Koon, Presumed Guilty: The Tragedy of the Rodney King Affair (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1992).
[15] Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, "Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department" (July, 1991).
[16] D. Russell, "N.W.A. displays a winning attitude; stickered album is nation's top seller," Billboard 103, June 22, 1991, 7; S. Scott and W. Cole, "Rapid rap rise," Time 137, no. 25, June 24, 1991, 67; Steve Hochman, "Police Don't Give Rappers Bad Rap," Los Angeles Times, Apr 02, 1989; "The Jury's View." The Washington Post, May 1, 1992.