point blank.
Some jails got things
called
the red room
and the blue room,
you get what they call an attitude adjustment.
What Rodney King …
It been—
it’s been twenty, thirty years,
and people suffered beatings from law enforcement.
It ain’t nothin’ new.
It was just brought to the light this time.
But then it showed what—
it showed that it doesn’t mean a thing,
It doesn’t mean a thing.
Now if that was an officer down there gettin’ beat,
it would a been a real national riot thing—
you hear me?
Just imagine how many people woulda been out there
clappin’;
it wouldn’t a been no sad sorry, hot …
it woulda been a happy hot line.
Everybody makin’ emotion out of somethin’:
Rotney King, Rotney King, Rotney King.
It’s not Rotney King.
It’s the ghetto.
I was at one of these swap meets
and a bubble gum machine man pulled a gun out.
Now what a bubble gum machine man doin’ with a pistol?
Who wanna rob a bubble gum machine?
Because we live here, the conditions are so
enormous and so dangerous,
that they have to be qualified to carry a firearm.
What is the purpose?
You got to live here to express this point, you got to live
here to see what’s goin’ on.
You gotta look at history, baby,
you gotta look at history.
It wasn’t …
Anything is never a problem ’til the black man gets his hands on it.
It was good for the NRA
to have fully automatic weapons,
but when the Afro-American people got hold of ’em,
it was a crime!
Aww …
He’s a problem
in the neighborhood;
he has a AK-47 assault weapon.
We didn’t bring them guns here.
We didn’t make up—
they was put here for a reason:
to entrap us!
Point blank.
You gotta look at history, baby,
you gotta look at history.
This Reginald Denny thing is a joke.
It’s joke.
That’s just a delusion to the real
problem.
A Weird Common Thread in Our Lives
Reginald Denny
(In the office of Johnnie Cochran, his lawyer. A conference room. Walls are lined with law books. Denny is wearing a baseball hat and T-shirt. His friend, a man, is there with a little girl. One of Cochran’s assistants, a young black woman attorney, sits, in on the interview. Denny is upbeat, speaks loudly. Morning, May 1993.)
Every single day
I must make this trip to Inglewood—no problem—
and I get off the freeway like usual,
taking up as much space as I can in the truck.
People don’t like that.
Because I have to.
That little turn onto Florence
is pretty tricky,
it’s really a tight turn.
I take two lanes to do it in
and
it was just like a scene
out of a movie.
Total confusion and chaos.
I was just in awe.
And the thing that I remember most vivid—
broken glass
on the ground.
And for a split second I was goin’
check this out,
and the truck in front of me—
and I found out later—
the truck in front of me,
medical supplies goin’ to Daniel Freeman!
(He laughs)
Kind of a
ironic thing!
And the, uh,
the strange thing was
that what everyone thought was a fire extinguisher
I got clubbed with,
it was a bottle of oxygen,
’cause the guy had medical supplies.
I mean,
does anyone know
what a riot looks like?
I mean, I’m sure they do now.
I didn’t have a clue of what one looked like
and
I didn’t know that the verdict had come down.
I didn’t pay any attention
to that,
because that
was somebody else’s problem
I guess I thought
at the time.
It didn’t have anything to do with me.
I didn’t usually pay too much attention of what was going on in
California
or in America or anything
and, uh,
I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was goin’ on.
Strange things do happen on that street.
Every now and again police busting somebody.
That was a street that was never …
I mean, it was always an exciting …
we,
lot of guys looked forward to going down that street
’cause there was always something going on, it seemed
like,
and the cool thing was I’d buy those cookies
from
these guys
on the corner,
and I think they’re, uh,
Moslems?
And they sell cookies
or cakes,
the best-tasting stuff,
and whatever they were selling that day,
and it was always usually a surprise,
but it was very well known
that it was a good surprise!
Heck, a good way to munch!
But when I knew something was wrong was when they bashed in the
right window of
my truck.
That’s the end of what I remember as far as anything
until five or six days later.
They say I was in a coma.
And I still couldn’t figure out,
you know,
how I got here.
And
It was quite a few weeks after I was in the hospital
that they even let on that there was a riot,
because the doctor didn’t feel it
was something I needed to know.
Morphine is what they were givin me for pain,
and it was just an interesting time.
But I’ve never been in an operating room.
It was like …
this is just …
I ’member like in a movie
they flip on the big lights
and they’re really in there.
(He laughs)
I was just goin’ “God”
and seein’ doctors around with masks on
and I still didn’t know why I was still there
and next thing
I know I wake up a few days later.
I think when it really dawned on me
that something big might have happened
was when important people wanted to come in and say hi.
The person that I remember that wanted to come in and see me,
the first person that I was even aware of who wanted to see me,
was Reverend Jesse Jackson,
and I’m just thinkin’:
not this guy,
that’s the dude I see on TV all the time.
And then it was a couple days later that
Arsenio Hall came to see me
and he just poked his head in, said hello,
and, uh,
I couldn’t say nothin’ to him.
And then, about then I started to, uh,
s
tarted to get it.
And by the time I left Daniel Freeman I knew what happened,
except they wouldn’t let me watch it on TV.
I mean, they completely controlled that remote-control thing.
They just had it on a movie station.
And if I hadn’t seen some of the stuff,
you know, of me doin’ a few things after everything was done,
like climbing back into the truck,
and talking to Titus and Bobby and Terry and Lee—
that’s the four people
who came to my rescue,
you know—they’re telling me stuff that I would never
even have known.
Terry
I met only because she came as a surprise guest visit to the hospital.
That was an emotional time.
How does one say that
someone
saved
my life?
How does a person,
how do I
express enough
thanks
for someone risking their
neck?
And then I was kind of …
I don’t know if “afraid” is the word,
I was just a little,
felt a little awkward meeting people
who
saved me.
Meeting them was not like meeting
a stranger,
but it was like
meeting a
buddy.
There was a weird common thread in our lives
That’s an extraordinary event,
the ones in the helicopter—
and they just stuck with it,
and then you got four people
who seen it on TV
and said enough’s enough
and came to my rescue.
They tell me
I drove the truck for what? About a hundred or so feet.
The doctors say there’s fight or flight syndrome.
And I guess I was in flight!
And it’s been seventeen years since I got outta high school!
I been driving semis,
it’s almost second nature,
but Bobby Green
saw that I was gettin’ nowhere fast and she just jumped in and
scooted me over
and drove the truck.
By this time
it was tons of glass and blood everywhere,
’cause I’ve seen pictures of what I looked like
when I first went into surgery,
and I mean it was a pretty
bloody mess.
And they showed me my hair,
when they cut off my hair
they gave it to me in a plastic bag.
And it was just
long hair and
glass and blood.
Lee—
that’s a woman—
Lee Euell,
she told me
she just
cradled me.
There’s no
passenger seat in the truck
and here I am just kind of on my knees in the middle of the floor
and, uh,
Lee’s just covered with blood,
and Titus is on one side,
’cause Bobby couldn’t see out the window.
The front windshield was so badly broken
it was hard to see.
And Titus is standing on the running board telling Bobby where to go,
and then Terry,
Titus’s girlfriend,
she’s in front of the truck
weaving through traffic,
dodging toward cars
to get them to
kind of move out of the way,
to get them to clear a path,
and next stop was
Daniel Freeman Hospital!
Someday when I,
uh,
get a house,
I’m gonna have one of the rooms
and it’s just gonna be
of all the riot stuff
and it won’t be a
blood-and-guts
memorial,
it’s not gonna be a sad,
it’s gonna be a happy room.
It’s gonna be …
Of all the crazy things that I’ve got,
all the,
the
love and compassion
and the funny notes
and the letters from faraway places,
just framed, placed,
framed things,
where a person will walk in
and just have a good old time in there.
It’ll just be
fun to be in there,
just like a fun thing,
and there won’t be
a color problem
in this room.
You take the toughest
white guy
who thinks he’s a bad-ass
and
thinks he’s better than any other race in town,
get him in a position where he needs help,
he’ll take the help
from no matter who the color of the guy across …
because he’s so self-
centered and -serving,
he’ll take it
and then
soon as he’s better
he’ll turn around
and rag on ’em.
I know that for a fact.
Give me what I need and shove off.
It’s crazy, it’s nuts.
That’s the person I’d like to shake and go,
“Uuuh,
you fool,
you selfish little shit”—
those kind of words.
“Uhhh, man, you nut.”
(Pause and intense stare, low-key)
I just want people to wake up.
It’s not a color, it’s a person.
So this room,
it’s just gonna be
people,
just a wild place,
it’s gonna be a blast.
One day,
Lord
willing, it’ll happen.
A Badge of Courage
Captain Lane Haywood Compton Fire Department
(Morning, August 1993. A fire station in Compton. Mr. Haywood is a tall, dark-skinned, muscular, attractive man, with a huge smile and a very positive manner. He is dressed in uniform. There were various sounds of the firehouse.)
So … it was just an enormous amount of fire.
It was just difficult for the amount of men that I have to completely
extinguish that fire.
So I made a decision to get to the ruf [sic],
cut a firebreak, and the firebreak is … is a gap
in the ruf that we cut in the ruf
between two adjoining buildings to try to stop the fire at that point.
And while we were up on the ruf, me and my firefighters,
we received gunfire.
Now, I don’t know if it was directed at us, but, you know, when you’re
up on the ruf
and you hear rat-tat-tat-tat, the first thing you do is you hit the
deck.
So we hit the deck.
And then I … I just give the word to
“Let’s get down the ruf.”
So we abandoned that
and got down the ruf,
came to find out later that it
was a gang of people on the back side
of the mall that were trying to rush the police,
who were trying to protect the fashion center.
And the police officers fired shots in the air to make them get back.
Needless to say, it took us a considerable amount of time
just to even get that fire under control.
And subsequently,
while we were fighting that fi
re …
You can see on Long Beach Boulevard
there’s a Pep Boys across the street
and other stores throughout the boulevard.
You hear gunfire down the street
and the next thing you know
you see all these cars backing down the street,
tryin’ to … you know, run.
And the police were there blockin’ the street
and they didn’t respond to the gunfire.
They just let people back out and tryin’ to get away.
And at the same time, you had looters breakin’ in,
breakin’ the windows of Pep Boys,
tryin’ to get in, With the police there,
you know, and the thought came to my mind is,
“Wow, this is ridiculous! Right in front of the police!”
And then …
and then shortly after that,
uh, the police on the back side of the mall …
’cause
there’s Long Beach Boulevard and on the other street
to the east of that is
Bolis Road.
From Bolis Road you can drive naturally to the parking lot.
They redirected the traffic.
And they started coming through from the driveway to where we
were.
I tell you,
I’ve never seen so much anger and hostility in females.
In my life.
I mean, I dealt with that out in the street.
I’ve been here nineteen years. I mean
they’re sitting in the windowsills,
both front and back windows of these cars
maybe sitting in the back
or in the beds of pickups,
driving through hollering a slogan,
“Let the motherfuckers burn.”
There’s another fire, cleaners,
barbershops, and a laundromat across the street.
That was fully involved.
And I looked up.
I saw a task force of engines
coming from Huntington Beach.
So … the task force,
they had three engines
and they had a battalion chief
and they had a police escort,
all white guys,
escorted in, and they had the name of the city,
and they had it blocked off with cardboard.
So they couldn’t really tell what city it was from,
but in fire service you know who’s who.
They, eh, had the protection,
they had the manning,
they had the equipment.
And they started to extinguish the fire across the street,
and I’m standing there with four guys
and this big old truck.
No help, no vests, no police,
no nothing.
And see, the irony of it is they had the vests for us.
Because what happened …
FBI, from what the police officers tell me,
pulled into the parking lot with a truckful of vests,
and all the police officers
and all the nonessentials grabbed ’em