Rodney king riot death toll
Rodney king riot death toll, A quarter-century ago, Roger Guenveur Smith cajoled his friend Spike Lee into writing him into the script for “Do the Right Thing.” (He played Smiley, the mentally disabled man clutching a photograph of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.) Now Mr. Smith, who has since constructed stage monologues around figures like Huey P. Newton and Frederick Douglass, has turned his wry attentions to an even more ferocious racial conflagration, this one all too real.
In his sinuous, complicated, deeply moving “Rodney King,” Mr. Smith seems at first to harshly judge his title character, the black construction worker whose beating at the hands of white police officers in 1991 in Los Angeles provoked fury culminating in riots after the acquittal of three officers at trial a year later. The opening lines of this 60-minute monologue denounce Mr. King as an Uncle Tom whose remarks in his memorable “Can we all get along?” news conference amid the riots made him worthy of assassination.
These lines, it turns out, are from a rap song that the former Geto Boys member Willie D released at the time. Once Mr. Smith has gotten this atypically strident material out of his system, he adopts a far more nuanced, even admiring view of a man whose personal demons colored much of the coverage he received, all the way up to his death in 2012.
The result is nearly as impassioned and insightful as “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” Anna Deavere Smith’s own monologue dedicated to the riots. Where she found compelling details by speaking with and then quoting the participants (though not Mr. King himself), Mr. Smith’s third-person narrative focuses on offbeat nuggets of information that would do any historian proud. Mr. King donned a Bob Marley wig during the 1992 riots and drove — in the same white Hyundai he had driven that fateful night a year earlier — to see them firsthand. Bill Cosby urged rioters to stay home and watch the final episode of “The Cosby Show” instead. And, most shocking of all, Mr. King was a fleeting acquaintance of Reginald Denny, the white truck driver whose own beating was caught on film during the riots.
Mr. Smith’s syncopated, hypnotic delivery finds room for these factoids within a gorgeously paced narrative that is marred only slightly by a pair of superfluous codas. By restoring a sense of humanity to a tremendously flawed human being, he has done a heartfelt and extremely right thing.
In his sinuous, complicated, deeply moving “Rodney King,” Mr. Smith seems at first to harshly judge his title character, the black construction worker whose beating at the hands of white police officers in 1991 in Los Angeles provoked fury culminating in riots after the acquittal of three officers at trial a year later. The opening lines of this 60-minute monologue denounce Mr. King as an Uncle Tom whose remarks in his memorable “Can we all get along?” news conference amid the riots made him worthy of assassination.
These lines, it turns out, are from a rap song that the former Geto Boys member Willie D released at the time. Once Mr. Smith has gotten this atypically strident material out of his system, he adopts a far more nuanced, even admiring view of a man whose personal demons colored much of the coverage he received, all the way up to his death in 2012.
The result is nearly as impassioned and insightful as “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” Anna Deavere Smith’s own monologue dedicated to the riots. Where she found compelling details by speaking with and then quoting the participants (though not Mr. King himself), Mr. Smith’s third-person narrative focuses on offbeat nuggets of information that would do any historian proud. Mr. King donned a Bob Marley wig during the 1992 riots and drove — in the same white Hyundai he had driven that fateful night a year earlier — to see them firsthand. Bill Cosby urged rioters to stay home and watch the final episode of “The Cosby Show” instead. And, most shocking of all, Mr. King was a fleeting acquaintance of Reginald Denny, the white truck driver whose own beating was caught on film during the riots.
Mr. Smith’s syncopated, hypnotic delivery finds room for these factoids within a gorgeously paced narrative that is marred only slightly by a pair of superfluous codas. By restoring a sense of humanity to a tremendously flawed human being, he has done a heartfelt and extremely right thing.