Race Related - La Riots

Race Related”

After hearing about the four police officers who were acquitted of the police brutality charges towards Rodney King, a sense of anarchy floated around the Los Angeles basin. Many different races of shopkeepers (including my father, Stuart a.k.a. Skip Hunter) defended themselves and their possessions while angry mobs attacked the streets with total disregard for the law. The majority of these rioters were African American (Black) and Latin Americans (Latino) (Stuart Hunter Interview). Local fire fighters had too few workers for the number of calls they were receiving, and the police force was largely outnumbered for the task at hand. Thousands of citizens used this ability to riot to their advantage in order to acquire many different everyday supplies by looting their local shops, which they relied upon before the riots started. Also, many people felt that because local authorities were outnumbered and many other people were looting and destroying property, rationalization or justification was easy to come by. An article in the Los Angeles Times titled “L.A. Rioters Set Fires, Loot Stores; 4 Die in Violence” informed the general public about the crimes that were being committed and the devastation that riddled Los Angeles, although they lacked the specific information to better inform the citizens about specific details.

Before my father, Skip Hunter, owned his own construction business he was the full owner of a hardware supply store named “Hunter Hardware”. He owned the store for seven years until the riots began. He had many different “regulars,” people who often came to the store to purchase supplies for their businesses. Most of the people who purchased his products were either Black or Latino and he never suspected anyone who committed a crime in his store (petty theft), based on the color of their skin.

“Unlike many store owners who closely watch certain people snoop around their store and not purchase anything, I was more trusting than most others in my situation. I developed a relationship with these “regulars,” many of who were younger African-American or Latin American men. Little did I know I would come to confront some of these people who I saw often during the riots” (Hunter Interview).

As a shopkeeper, when my father heard news of the jury’s verdict to acquit the police officers who took the action they did, he was obviously startled and worried about the reaction the rest of the public would have on the subject, especially in a place like East Los Angeles. My father knew the black community would be outraged because of the hostility of the area around the time of the trial, although he did not think that it would escalate to a massacre of the city. The Los Angeles Times staff writers Lacey and Hubler also state that he city’s long-standing racial tensions… were exacerbated by the beating of King,” (par. 31) Again, the staff writers use neutral terms like “racial tensions” in comparison to my fathers first hand account of “the black community was fuming after being informed about the verdict.” Upon hearing that there was a great deal of unrest among the Black citizens living in the Los Angeles area, my father put his head manager in charge of the store and rushed to the local sporting goods store to purchase bullets for his rifle in case he needed to take the law into his own hands. “It was the first time I had ever purchased bullets for my gun knowing that I was not going to be at a shooting range when I would fire off these rounds. I was afraid. I have never been scared for me or my employees like that, I would not like to relive it” (Hunter Interview). My father knew that the riots were spreading across Los Angeles because of the aerial news coverage and he said that his employees would have the rest of the day off but he would stay to watch over the store. Although he had insurance, my father did not want to go through the hassles of rebuilding what he had managed to build.

When the riots eventually spread into the streets where his place of business was, he and his manager opened many of the chains and locks he would normally sell from their packages and locked all possible entry points to the store. He also moved a large cabinet in front of the main window in order to protect the store from the various objects that could potentially be thrown through the window. He withdrew all of the money from the safe and the cashier drawer and placed it in a janitorial supply closet under various items. His intent was to set the valuables in a place where a rioter would not think to look. My father and his head manager, still today a good friend and partner in his construction business, were the only people who stayed at the hardware store to defend it from the angry rioters. They ran an extension cord for a television and a telephone cord to the roof of the building and secluded themselves from the people who were on ground level. With a loaded gun in hand, my father repeatedly called my concerned mother and informed her of the situations that arose.

When the actual rioters flowed into the streets where my father ran his business, my father chose to stay below eyesight on the roof until people began to destroy his store. “People were yelling and throwing rocks but there was no looting in the beginning. Once news broke out that the cops were outnumbered and there was too much to handle, people began looting and tearing down buildings. White people who were looting and rioting were few and far between in comparison with the amount of Black people I witnessed breaking the law. The only white people I saw were running from their cars into buildings in order to evade the heated Black people” (Hunter Interview). When in the Los Angeles Times article the writers use more “middle-of-the-road” terms when referring to the crowd like “racially mixed” group of people (Lacey and Hubert par. 15) as opposed to my fathers account of a “group of black people and a few Mexicans” (Hunter Interview). In comparison to many of the other stories heard on the news about the rioters’ brutality towards citizens, my father claims that he did not witness any actual violence or pain inflicted on a non-participant by a rioter. “It sounds funny to say this but the district my business was in was relatively calm during the riots, compared to the devastation felt by many, many other businesses during the riots” (Hunter Interview).

The most devastating part about the entire incident