Fifty years ago, Watts erupted. A white traffic officer stopped a black driver named Marquette Frye, suspecting him of drunk driving. The stop led to an altercation. A crowd gathered and tensions that…
Thanks to all of our listeners who shared stories of the LA Riots. Here are some of them.
Listener Loanie Huynh Fulton remembers being eleven-years-old when the LA Riots broke out. She says, “It was a particularly tense time in terms of social interactions and in some sense…
KCRW listener, Ted Brennan had just gotten out of the army when the 1992 riots broke out. He was with the National Guard and was deployed from San Diego to…
KCRW listener and bassist Michael Blair shares his memory of the LA Riots on our Facebook page. I was playing with Lou Reed when everything went weird. During sound check…
KCRW listener Adriana Rivera says she was in the eighth grade when the riots broke out. Her local neighborhood store had been looting and she went down to check it…
Entrepreneur and community gardener, Eve Fouché grew up in Los Angeles. She reflects on being one of three African-American girls in a Korean school when the LA Riots broke out.…
When the verdict was announced, I was in the lower-level cafeteria at USC. I remember the entire cafeteria going silent when the news was read on the four televisions that…
What do you remember most? I remember how the news portrayed the riots as complete chaos, but for a young Black boy, there was a different reality. For the first…
What do you remember most? How frightened I was. I had a naive faith that people would do the right thing. It was a period in my life that dispelled…
What do you remember most? The fires and the smoke. Watching the craziness on television, then going outside and smelling the smoke. For days and weeks afterwards you could still…