The Riot Within

The Riot Within
Author: Rodney King
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2012-05-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0062194623

On a dark street, what began as a private moment between a citizen and the police became a national outrage. Rodney Glen King grew up in the Altadena Pasadena section of Los Angeles with four siblings, a loving mother, and an alcoholic father. Soon young Rodney followed in Dad's stumbling steps, beginning a lifetime of alcohol abuse. King had been drinking the night of March 3, 1991, when he engaged in a high-speed chase with the LAPD, who finally pulled him over. What happened next shocked the nation. A group of officers brutally beat King with their metal batons, Tasered and kicked him into submission—all caught on videotape by a nearby resident. The infamous Rodney King Incident was born when this first instance of citizen surveillance revealed a shocking moment of police brutality, a horrific scene that stunned and riveted the nation via the evening news. Racial tensions long smoldering in L.A. ignited into a firestorm thirteen months later when four white officers were acquitted by a mostly white jury. Los Angeles was engulfed in flames as people rioted in the streets. More than fifty people were dead, hundreds were hospitalized, and countless homes and businesses were destroyed. King's plaintive question, "Can we all just get along?" became a sincere but haunting plea for reconciliation that reflected the heartbreak and despair caused by America's racial discord in the early 1990s. While Rodney King is now an icon, he is by no means an angel. King has had run-ins with the law and continues a lifelong struggle with alcohol addiction. But King refuses to be bitter about the crippling emotional and physical damage that was inflicted upon him that night in 1991. While this nation has made strides during those twenty years to heal, so has Rodney King, and his inspiring story can teach us all lessons about forgiveness, redemption, and renewal, both as individuals and as a nation.

Riot

Riot
Author: Walter Dean Myers
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab ®
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2009-08-01
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1606841963

As the Civil War rages, another battle breaks out behind the lines. During a long hot July in 1863, the worst race riots the United States has ever seen erupt in New York City. Earlier that year, desperate for more Union soldiers, President Abraham Lincoln instituted a draft—a draft that would allow the wealthy to escape serving in the army by paying a $300 waiver, more than a year's income for the recent immigrant Irish. And on July 11, as the first drawing takes place in Lower Manhattan, the city of New York explodes in rage and fire. Stores are looted; buildings, including the Colored Foundling Home, are burned down; and black Americans are attacked, beaten, and murdered. The police cannot hold out against the rioters, and finally, battle-hardened soldiers are ordered back from the fields of Gettysburg to put down the insurrection, which they do—brutally. Fifteen-year-old Claire, the beloved daughter of a black father and Irish mother, finds herself torn between the two warring sides. Faced with the breakdown of the city—the home—she has loved, Claire must discover the strength and resilience to address the new world in which she finds herself, and to begin the hard journey of remaking herself and her identity. Addressing such issues as race, bigotry, and class head-on, Walter Dean Myers has written another stirring and exciting novel that will shake up assumptions, and lift the spirit.

Understanding the Riots

Understanding the Riots
Author: Los Angeles Times (Firm)
Publisher: Los Angeles Times Books
Total Pages: 172
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN:

The causes and the aftermath of the 1992 riots.

Official Negligence

Official Negligence
Author: Lou Cannon
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 744
Release: 1997
Genre: Current Events
ISBN:

How Rodney King and the riots changed Los Angeles and the LAPD.

Flak-Catchers

Flak-Catchers
Author: Lindsey Lupo
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2010-12-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 073913812X

Flak-Catchers explores the ways in which riot commissions-the institutional bodies appointed by an executive in the aftermath of a race riot to determine a riot timeline, investigate causes, and offer prescriptions for change-have dealt with racial violence in the United States over the last century. In studying five American riots and their commissions this book shows that riot commissions only serve to give the appearance of strong and responsive government action during uncertain times. They primarily benefit the instituting body by focusing on a restoration of law and order while undermining any larger civil rights message.

Race Riot

Race Riot
Author: William M. Tuttle
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1970
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780252065866

Portrays the race riot which left 38 dead, 537 wounded and hundreds homeless in Chicago during the summer of 1919.

Dressed Up for a Riot

Dressed Up for a Riot
Author: Michael Idov
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2018-02-20
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374715920

A memoir of revolution, reaction, and Russian men’s fashion In this crackling memoir, the journalist and novelist Michael Idov recounts the tempestuous years he spent living alongside—and closely observing—the media and cultural elite of Putin’s Russia. After accepting a surprise offer to become the editor in chief of GQ Russia, Idov and his family arrive in a Moscow still seething from a dubious election and the mass anti-Putin rallies that erupted in response. Idov is fascinated by the political turmoil but nonetheless finds himself pulled in unlikely directions. He becomes a tabloid celebrity, acts in a Russian movie with Snoop Dogg, befriends the members of Pussy Riot, punches an anti-Semitic magazine editor on the steps of the Bolshoi Theatre, sells an autobiographical sitcom pilot that is later changed into an anti-American farce, and writes Russia’s top-grossing domestic movie of 2015. Meanwhile, he becomes disillusioned with the splintering opposition to Putin and is briefly attracted to a kind of jaded Putinism lite—until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine thoroughly changes his mind. In Dressed Up for a Riot, Idov writes openly, sensitively, and stingingly about life in Moscow and his place in a media apparatus that sometimes undermined but more often bolstered a state system defined by cynicism, corruption, and the fanning of fake news. With humor and intelligence, he offers a close-up glimpse of what a declining world power can become.

The Detroit Riot of 1967

The Detroit Riot of 1967
Author: Hubert G. Locke
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2017-07-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814343783

Eyewitness account of the civil disorder in Detroit in the summer of 1967. During the last days of July 1967, Detroit experienced a week of devastating urban collapse—one of the worst civil disorders in twentieth-century America. Forty-three people were killed, over $50 million in property was destroyed, and the city itself was left in a state of panic and confusion, the scars of which are still present today. Now for the first time in paperback and with a new reflective essay that examines the events a half-century later, The Detroit Riot of 1967 (originally published in 1969) is the story of that terrible experience as told from the perspective of Hubert G. Locke, then administrative aide to Detroit's police commissioner. The book covers the week between the riot's outbreak and the aftermath thereof. An hour-by-hour account is given of the looting, arson, and sniping, as well as the problems faced by the police, National Guard, and federal troops who struggled to restore order. Locke goes on to address the situation as outlined by the courts, and the response of the community—including the media, social and religious agencies, and civic and political leadership. Finally, Locke looks at the attempt of white leadership to forge a new alliance with a rising, militant black population; the shifts in political perspectives within the black community itself; and the growing polarization of black and white sentiment in a city that had previously received national recognition as a "model community in race relations." The Detroit Riot of 1967explores many of the critical questions that confront contemporary urban America and offers observations on the problems of the police system and substantive suggestions on redefining urban law enforcement in American society. Locke argues that Detroit, and every other city in America, is in a race with time—and thus far losing the battle. It has been fifty years since the riot and federal policies are needed now more than ever that will help to protect the future of urban America.

A Massacre in Memphis

A Massacre in Memphis
Author: Stephen V. Ash
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0809067986

An unprecedented account of one of the bloodiest and most significant racial clashes in American history In May 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, Memphis erupted in a three-day spasm of racial violence that saw whites rampage through the city's black neighborhoods. By the time the fires consuming black churches and schools were put out, forty-six freed slaves had been murdered. Congress, furious at this and other evidence of white resistance in the conquered South, launched what is now called Radical Reconstruction, policies to ensure the freedom of the region's four million blacks-and one of the most remarkable experiments in American history. Stephen V. Ash's A Massacre in Memphis is a portrait of a Southern city that opens an entirely new view onto the Civil War, slavery, and its aftermath. A momentous national event, the riot is also remarkable for being "one of the best-documented episodes of the American nineteenth century." Yet Ash is the first to mine the sources available to full effect. Bringing postwar Memphis, Tennessee to vivid life, he takes us among newly arrived Yankees, former Rebels, boisterous Irish immigrants, and striving freed people, and shows how Americans of the period worked, prayed, expressed their politics, and imagined the future. And how they died: Ash's harrowing and profoundly moving present-tense narration of the riot has the immediacy of the best journalism. Told with nuance, grace, and a quiet moral passion, A Massacre in Memphis is Civil War-era history like no other.

The Riot at Bucksnort and Other Western Tales

The Riot at Bucksnort and Other Western Tales
Author: Robert Ervin Howard
Publisher:
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2005
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Robert E. Howard turned to writing comic and dialect Western tales only late in his career, but he found an immediate and continuously successful market for them, and they are in many respects his most accomplished and polished works. The sixteen tales collected here are some of the best of his stories, featuring Breckinridge Elkins, Pike Bearfield, and Buckner J. Grimes—three inimitable characters who lead well-intentioned lives of perpetual confusion, mischance, and outright catastrophe. Fifteen of the stories were published between 1934 and 1937 in Action Stories, Argosy, or Cowboy Stories; the other remained unpublished for more than thirty years. Many of these stories were rewritten for book publication and have never been reprinted in their original form. They are reminiscent of traditional southwestern tall tales, told in dialect, featuring larger-than-life characters, swift action, broad satire, and wry humor.