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When Los Angeles burned: 'LA 92' returns us to the Rodney King riots

It was 25 years ago Saturday that the not guilty verdicts were announced and the beatings and burnings marked South Central Los Angeles as a war zone that the police refused to enter.

Buildings burned, businesses were looted and 34 people died. Los Angeles became the reluctant locus of international attention, its residents left to wonder how this could have happened here.

These were the 1965 Watts riots (or Watts Rebellion, depending on your perspective), which rocked L.A. just five days after President Lyndon Johnson signed a comprehensive Voting Rights Act into law. The searing new documentary LA 92 begins and ends with Watts, bookending a brilliantly edited mosaic of the Rodney King riots (or Los Angeles uprising, depending on your perspective).

In LA 92, as in so much history, the past is very much prelude. Or, in the words of the Frederick Douglass quote that begins the film, "We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and future." Sounds simple enough, if only we could make it so.

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A shoe store in the Watts area of Los Angeles collapses in flames as the city's wave of...
A shoe store in the Watts area of Los Angeles collapses in flames as the city's wave of violence moves into it's fourth day on Aug. 14, 1965.((The Associated Press))
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Airing on the National Geographic channel Sunday after premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, LA 92 is rich in historical context. It takes us from Watts, a conflagration that began when a black driver was arrested for suspicion of drunk driving, through the rise of Los Angeles police Chief Daryl Gates, whose department extended the militaristic tactics of his predecessor and mentor, William H. Parker. Much as Parker described enraged Watts residents as "monkeys in a zoo," Laurence Powell, one of the four police officers who beat King, described a black family's domestic dispute as "right out of Gorillas in the Mist."

Racist? What would make you think that?

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We see the beating, of course, and it still looks not just excessive but barbaric, the relentless pummeling of an unarmed man who can scarcely stand up. And we're left to consider the novelty of a time when everyone didn't have a cell phone with a camera. It took a neighbor with a video camera, George Holliday, to shoot the footage that ignited a literal firestorm. It may have been the original viral video.

And then, 34 minutes into the film, comes the verdict that started an explosion of rage pent up of over weeks, months, years. It was 25 years ago Saturday that the not guilty verdicts were announced and the beatings and burnings marked South Central Los Angeles as a war zone that the police refused to enter. The footage still sends a shudder down your spine. Young black men pull white motorists from cars and beat them into the ground. They shout instructions: "Let the Mexicans pass." "No pity for the white man. Lay your white ass down."

A Korean store owner is comforted by a resident after she returned to find her business...
A Korean store owner is comforted by a resident after she returned to find her business looted and burned in South Central Los Angeles, during day two of the Los Angeles riots on April 30, 1992.((Steve Grayson / WireImage))

This is what unbridled anger looks like. Already seething from the Latasha Harlins killing and verdict — in which a Korean grocer did no jail time after shooting a 15-year-old black teenager in the back of the head over a bottle of orange juice — black Angelenos set the city ablaze, often targeting Korean businesses. The unrest lasted six days, left more than 60 dead and destroyed more than $1 billion in property. It remains the most destructive riot in U.S. history. It was, to borrow the title of James Baldwin's 1963 book, The Fire Next Time.

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The directors, Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, wisely steer clear of narration and talking heads. LA 92 is a media collage of TV coverage, radio broadcast and video shot by those who were there. It enters your veins undiluted and raw. It doesn't belabor the point that, in many respects, 1992 was also past as prelude, to Ferguson, to Philando Castile, to any number of black neighborhoods and individuals that feel besieged and neglected by police. LA 92 is, indeed, about L.A. '92 and L.A. '65.

The film arrives on the heels of the Oscar-winning documentary O.J.: Made in America, and it's hard not to think about that film's strongest section. Made in America makes a strong argument that Simpson's 1995 acquittal was a makeup call for the King verdict, ironic given Simpson's famous proclamation, "I'm not black. I'm O.J." For many blacks he was also a symbol, guilty or not, of past injustices finally righted.

A sampling of early-'90s black pop culture spotlights the environment surrounding the King beating, verdict and response. Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton's debut film in which young black men endure constant police harassment, came out after the beating but before the verdict. The Hughes brothers' Menace II Society arrived in 1994; it shows a young black man (Larenz Tate) shooting a Korean grocer, a sort of inverse of the Harlins incident.

The era's hip-hop provides a useful road map as well. Dr. Dre's landmark album The Chronic was released at the end of 1992, and the song "The Day the N****z Took Over" speaks directly to the riots. Da Lench Mob titled their 1992 debut Guerillas in Tha Mist. The title song includes a sample of Powell's "Gorillas in the Mist" quote, bringing the whole thing full circle.

Perhaps the finest work to emerge from the King saga was Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, in which she plays everyone from Chief Gates to U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (featured prominently in LA 92) to an anonymous member of the trial jury. Smith presents us with an array of individual voices, much as LA 92 creates a Greek chorus of media accounts.

Now LA 92 joins this body of work, with the hindsight of an eventful quarter-century, but also a strong dose of immediacy. The film makes pretty clear why it all happened, and leaves us to wonder if and when it might happen again. Do we make use of the past for the sake of the present and future? On this question, the jury is still out.

"LA 92" airs 8 p.m., April 30, on the National Geographic Channel.