1992

Twenty years ago I lived in a small 1950's era house in Torrance, raising my children, gossiping with neighbors and watching my mother die of ovarian cancer. The week of the riots in Los Angeles my mother was in Cedars Sinai hospital after undergoing a second look surgery.  Complications from surgery kept her there a month. Sadly, I couldn't visit due to the danger to anyone passing through the riot zone. 

One evening my neighbors gathered in the fading light gazing northward having heard rumors of the riots spreading to the city of Hawthorne just a few miles away.  We searched the sky for signs, smoke maybe, or helicopters. Nothing appeared, just fear. Fear that after the rioters had destroyed their own neighborhoods they might come after ours. Whether rioting had actually spread to Hawthorne I have no recollection but it never reached us.

Once the National Guard, the U.S. Army and the Marines had been called out and enforced law and civility in Los Angeles I drove up to Cedars to visit my mother, relieved and grateful that law enforcement had stood between the rioters and the hospital. Honestly, I don't remember the street I drove from the freeway to the hospital but I have vivid memories of burned out buildings and military personnel patrolling the streets. It was a war zone.  I entered another country, one that chilled me to the bone.

I might not remember the riots with such clarity if my mother had not been in a hospital close to the violence. Certainly I would have had no reason to drive into LA as soon as the streets were quiet again. Seeing the destruction and military presence in person rather than on television shattered my sense of safety and belief in civil society.  In more ways than one I lived  far from Florence and Normandie where Reginald Denny was pulled from his truck and assaulted and yet it seemed close, too close.

Once the riots were quelled military personnel were housed at the LA Coliseum near the Natural History Museum, our Mother's Day destination despite the very recent violence. The museum was filled with military personnel and their families.  But outside, groups of black males wandered through the grounds shouting racist epithets to those military families. Was I scared? No, strangely not. Guns were not in evidence and it just didn't seem possible that those groups of stringy, sagging  young men would or could take on the well-muscled, disciplined men dressed in camouflage.

Today the news shines a light on the 1992 riots, the violence, destruction, and racial divides. More personally the remembrance of those times reminds me of my mother who died that year and how my own life was thrust into an upheaval as great and long lasting as that of the riots.