Thirty years ago Friday, riots broke out in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the four white Los Angeles police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. Jarvis DeBerry recalls watching the footage of the beating on television as a teen, and one emotion stands out along with the horror: “a sense of relief,” he writes. Because with actual visual evidence of the crimes, surely justice would finally come for a Black person brutalized by the police. But that’s not how things work in America, even today.
“Whether it was the case of the Scottsboro Boys for my grandparents, the lynching of Emmett Till for my parents’ generation or, for the Black people behind me, acquittals following the killings of Amadou Diallo or Trayvon Martin, every generation of Black folks seems to have at least one moment when its already fragile faith in the courts is dashed against the rocks of American racism,” writes DeBerry. And still, three decades later, “the Rodney King case showed that some proof doesn’t prove anything to the members of a jury.”
Read Jarvis DeBerry’s full analysis in your Saturday MSNBC Daily.
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