Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Essay on the watts riots
Watts riots informative prompt essay
Rodney king verdict
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Essay on the watts riots
In the 1990s a series of riots and racial tension among the African American community was evident. In 1991, many people were stunned to see footage of a CHP police officer brutality beating a young African American named Rodney King, who was being chased by police for driving under the influence. The trial of Rodney King was held in Simi Valley, a white community. In 1992 the officer involved in the beating was found not guilty. The response from the African American community was terrifying and revealed the ways in which race divided Los Angeles, similarly like the 1960s Watts Riots. A serious a looting and mass violence swept Southern California. That same year, a Korean grocery woman named Soon Ja Du argued with an African American teenager
On March 17, 1955, more than 10,000 crazed hockey fans from inside the Montreal Forum and from the streets outside gathered together to protest the suspension of Maurice "The Rocket" Richard. An outraged fan slapped and punched the president of the National Hockey League, Clarence Campbell who was quietly sitting among the spectators. This "seven-hour rampage of destruction and looting" was a result of this attack that occurred during the game that opposed the Montreal Canadians and the Detroit Red Wings (Zacharias, 2000). During this riot, there were many people who were injured and over 100 fans were arrest.
Life for most homosexuals during the first half of the Twentieth century was one of hiding, being ever so careful to not give away their true feelings and predilections. Although the 1920s saw a brief moment of openness in American society, that was quickly destroyed with the progress of the Cold War, and by default, that of McCarthyism. The homosexuals of the 50s “felt the heavy weight of medical prejudice, police harassment and church condemnation … [and] were not able to challenge these authorities.” They were constantly battered, both physically and emotionally, by the society that surrounded them. The very mention or rumor of one’s homosexuality could lead to the loss of their family, their livelihood and, in some cases, their lives. Geanne Harwood, interviewed on an National Public Radio Broadcast commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, said that “being gay before Stonewall was a very difficult proposition … we felt that in order to survive we had to try to look and act as rugged and as manly as possibly to get by in a society that was really very much against us.” The age of communist threats, and of Joseph McCarthy’s insistence that homosexuals were treacherous, gave credence to the feeling of most society members that homosexuality was a perversion, and that one inflicted was one to not be trusted.
A timeline of the 90s features similar white on black hate discrimination as found in The Watsons. In 1991, Rodney King was brutally beaten by white LAPD officers following a car chase. 1993 saw members of the Fourth Reich Skinheads, who attempted to bomb a church in Los Angeles and kill Rodney King, get arrested for their plots (Ross). The year 1993 also featured the release of the very first black American Girl doll; her name was Addy Walker. This first doll was depicted ...
Chicago Riots Have you ever felt as if your government is doing the wrong thing? During the Democratic National Convention in 1968, an estimate of 5-7K protesters were not happy with the results on what was happening in the government. So a group called Yippies started an organized protest. They started to have riots in places like Chicago, where soon after the police came in and started to relentlessly beat the protesters with billy clubs.
The Newark riots of 1967 were very extreme and terrible time in Newark, New Jersey, one of the worst in U.S. history. The riots were between African-Americans and white residents, police officers and the National Guard. The riots were not unexpected. The tension between the city grew tremendously during the 1960's, due to lack of employment for Blacks, inadequate housing, police brutality and political exclusion of blacks from government.
The Watt Riots took place in 1965 in Los Angeles, the day after the Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. This is ironic because the Voting Rights Act made it easier for Southern Blacks to register to vote, simple bringing about more rights to the blacks. The riot took place for five days, and it costed for than forty millions dollars due to all of the property damage. The riot was started when a young African American, Marquette Frye, was pulled over and arrested by Lee Minikus, a white patrolman, for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. As people gathered around the scene, Frye’s mother approached along with another woman. The crowd thought the second woman was pregnant. The cop kicked the pregnant woman in the stomach, and this was the begin...
In the past decades, the struggle for gay rights in the Unites States has taken many forms. Previously, homosexuality was viewed as immoral. Many people also viewed it as pathologic because the American Psychiatric Association classified it as a psychiatric disorder. As a result, many people remained in ‘the closet’ because they were afraid of losing their jobs or being discriminated against in the society. According to David Allyn, though most gays could pass in the heterosexual world, they tended to live in fear and lies because they could not look towards their families for support. At the same time, openly gay establishments were often shut down to keep openly gay people under close scrutiny (Allyn 146). But since the 1960s, people have dedicated themselves in fighting for
This incident would have produced nothing more than another report for resisting arrest had a bystander, George Holliday, not videotaped the altercation. Holliday then released the footage to the media. LAPD Officers Lawrence Powell, Stacey Koon, Timothy Wind and Theodore Brisino were indicted and charged with assaulting King. Superior Court Judge Stanley Weisberg ordered a change of venue to suburban Simi Valley, which is a predominantly white suburb of Los Angeles. All officers were subsequently acquitted by a jury comprised of 10 whites, one Hispanic and one Asian, and the African American community responded in a manner far worse than the Watts Riots of 1965. ?While the King beating was tragic, it was just the trigger that released the rage of a community in economic strife and a police department in serious dec...
A Look Into the Chicago Race Riots The Civil War was fought over the “race problem,” to determine the place of African-Americans in America. The Union won the war and freed the slaves. However, when President Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation, a hopeful promise for freedom from oppression and slavery for African-Americans, he refrained from announcing the decades of hardship that would follow to obtaining the new “freedom”. Over the course of nearly a century, African-Americans would be deprived and face adversity to their rights.
On the night of August 11, 1965 the Watts community of Los Angeles County went up in flames. A riot broke out and lasted until the seventeenth of August. After residents witnessed a Los Angeles police officer using excessive force while arresting an African American male. Along with this male, the police officers also arrested his brother and mother. Twenty-seven years later in 1992 a riot known as both the Rodney King riots and the LA riots broke out. Both share the similar circumstances as to why the riots started. Before each riot there was some kind of tension between police officers and the African American people of Los Angeles. In both cases African Americans were still dealing with high unemployment rates, substandard housing, and inadequate schools. Add these three problems with policemen having a heavy hand and a riot will happen. Many of the primary sources I will you in this analysis for the Watts and the LA riots can be found in newspaper articles written at the time of these events. First-hand accounts from people living during the riots are also used.
On the night of March 2, 1991, Rodney King and two of his friends decided to go "cruising around looking for some girls." After a few drinks, the three men began cruising around the streets of Los Angeles. At about midnight, King was driving at speeds of up to 115 miles an hour on the freeway. Two California Highway Patrol officers clocked King's car, and began to pursue him. This, however, was not going to stop King. After a 7.8-mile pursuit on freeways and city streets, King was forced to pull over because another vehicle was blocking the street.
On July 27, 1919, a young black man named Eugene Williams swam past an invisible line of segregation at a popular public beach on Lake Michigan, Chicago. He was stoned by several white bystanders, knocked unconscious and drowned, and his death set off one of the bloodiest riots in Chicago’s history (Shogun 96). The Chicago race riot was not the result of the incident alone. Several factors, including the economic, social and political differences between blacks and whites, the post-war atmosphere and the psychology of race relations in 1919, combined to make Chicago a prime target for this event. Although the riot was a catalyst for several short-term solutions to the racial tensions, it did little to improve race relations in the long run. It was many years before the nation truly addressed the underlying conflicts that sparked the riot of 1919. This observation is reflected in many of author James Baldwin’s essays in which he emphasizes that positive change can only occur when both races recognize the Negro as an equal among men politically, economically and socially.
The Tulsa race riot changed the course of American history by actively expressing African American views on white supremacy. Before the events of the Tulsa race riot African Americans saw the white community taking justice into their own hands. Black citizens of Tulsa stood up against this sort of white mob. This escaladed into the Tulsa race riot. The Tulsa race riot and its effects weighed heavily upon the African Americans of this era.
In the 1990s a lot of crazy stuff happened such as the OKC bombing, riots in LA, and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The OKC bombing in 1995 was one of several terrorist events that happened in the 1990s and also the worst that ever happened on US soil at the time. It killed 168 people, injured over 680 people, and cause an estimated $652 million in damage (history.com). The LA riots aka the Rodney King riots happened in 1992 and caused 53 deaths, 2,000 injuries, and over $1 million in damage. The reason for the riots were that on March 3, 1991, Rodney King was in a high speed chase and when he came out of the car 5 white LAPD officers came over and King was tasered, struck with batons, and tackled to
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is a one-woman written play and originally performed by Anna Deavere Smith about the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Starting in 1991, Rodney King is severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers, a scene recorded and visualized by millions of Americans. However, the officers were acquitted the following year since they were only enforcing the law as excused by the jury leading to the beginning of the riots. After 200 hundred interviews of people connected to the riot, their testimonies are played together to make an astounding representation of the turmoil of emotions this case rose. Social identity was indeed at the core of these testimonial injustices portrayed in the play by the many brutal identity power events which were represented in Ms. Smith's piece in addition to King’s case: the attack on the truck driver Reginald Denny by rioters, shockingly videotaped; the shooting of Latasha Harlins a 15-year old girl by a Korean grocer who believed the girl was a thief; and the second trial of the Los Angeles police officers all related to the amalgam of racial issues among black, white, Asian and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. Indeed, race and racial prejudice were big themes of twilight where the consequences of the injustices were persistent and systematically harmed the people with less societal