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KASCON
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Name: KASCON
Country: United States
State: California
Metro: San Diego
Interests: KASCON XIX at the University of Washington will once again bring together Korean America's most passionate leaders and talented entertainers for a weekend of education, empowerment, and fun.
Expertise: Inspiring progress.
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
6/16/2003
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| "Rodney" Glen King
On March 3, 1991, an African American male by the name of Glen King (mistakenly identified by the media as Rodney) was recklessly driving through Lake View Terrace, a residential neighborhood of southern California. King was pulled over by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department and resisted arrest, charging at one of the officers.
To subdue King, the officers twice attacked him with 50,000 volt tasers, more than enough to immobilize any man. The officers on site claimed that King was under the influence of PCP, a narcotic that numbs pain, and used this to justify their use of brute force. Later, evidence would prove that King tested negative for PCP. King was repeatedly kicked and struck 56 times with police batons as he attempted to raise his head. George Holliday, a bystander, was able to record footage of the latter portion of King's beating.
In addition to the three officers who had personally delivered blows, 24 other officers reportedly stood by and watched and some even helped detain King by pressing their feet into his back. Two other African American male passengers were in the vehicle King was driving. They cooperated with the police and were not harmed.
On March 15th, three LAPD officers and a sergeant were indicted on charges of "assault by force likely to produce great bodily injury" and with assault "under color of authority." Two were charged with filing false police reports. Three were Caucasian Americans:
Officer Laurence M. Powell
Sergeant Stacey C. Koon
Officer Timothy E. Wind
One was Latino:
Officer Theodore J. Briseno
The trial of The People of California vs. Powell was originally held in Los Angeles County, where a predominantly minority jury would determine the innocence of the four officers. The defense succeeded in moving the case to Simi Valley in Ventura County, arguing that a fair trial could not be conducted in Los Angeles County. Ventura County was very affluent, had a significantly less population of African Americans, and a high population of law enforcers.
The prosecution, sure that the local media's repeated airing of King's beating would incite enough anger and opposition to the four officers to secure a guilty verdict, did not complain.
The jury of the new venue in Ventura County consisted of ten Caucasians, one Latino, and one Asian American. On April 29, 1992, Koon, Wind, and Briseno were acquitted on all charges and the jury could not reach a decision on Powell.
Not one sentence was issued to Powell, Koon, Wind, or Briseno.
Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Chief Daryl Gates had both predicted at least one or two guilty verdicts and were thus only prepared for a small-scale demonstration as a worst-case scenario. They were not prepared for the destruction documented as the Los Angeles Riots. | | |
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| KASCON XIX Picture Recap
Courtesy of ImaginAsian TV
Click here to view ImaginAsian TV's 11-page gallery of photos from KASCON XIX.
You'll probably find yourself somewhere! | | |
| Congratulations to Princeton University for winning the honor of hosting KASCON XX in 2006!
More information on the 4.29 Truth Commission forthcoming. | | |
| The Los Angeles Riots
4.29 Truth Commission
Let's stop trying to forget about it. Let's bring out the truth.
Courtesy of the great K.W. Lee:
Where were you on April 29, 1992?
It doesn't matter where you were. What matters terribly is, What Sa-I-Gu means to us, our families, our community and our country. We are all children of 4.29, Sa-I-Gu, young or old, born here or there. It's our hope and destiny.
Perhaps it may take years, even generations, to fully understand and digest the impact of those horrible three days and nights, when the City of Angeles's South Central and the adjoining Koreatown burned, choked and wailed 13 years ago.
And KASCON'S upcoming spring break get-together may be your or our last chance to break away from its annual talk fest to undertake a generational mission, as the children of Jewish Holocaust survivors and the children of Japanese American internees did before us.
Back to the future, to the dawn of the last century. The 10th talented of the freed slaves at NAACP were engaged in the great Booker T. Washington vs. W.E. B. DuBois debate over the future course of black folks, as our own surrogate slaves were being dumped on the sugar plantations of Hawaii and the henequen peon haciendas of Mexico's Yucatan to fill the post-slavery labor market.
Now a century later, Sa-I-Gu deserves our collective soul searching in the social and political challenges the English-speaking generation confronts.
Never mind about my tongue-tied first generation - a generation of silence and sacrifice. They've done more than their share in blood, sweat and tears. They are already in their 60s and 70s well into twilight years. Collectively, though, as I have often lamented, they have behaved like a thousand frogs in a deep well, and, believe me, they will never, get to see the light above and beyond.
In these heady years, our post-1965 Korean America has evolved demographically so fast that it has become a diverse mosaic in dire need of a new value system of community consciousness in this nation of competing groups and interests. Sa-I-Go more than anything else dramatizes the urgency of sorting out what is at stake for our long-range survival as a cohesive and inclusive community in the coming century. Yet ours is a community without dialogue, debate or direction.
Your generation's destiny: the establishment of a 4.29 truth and reconciliation commission to bring truth, humanity and dignity to those tens of thousands of fellow Korean immigrants who have watched their American Dream go up in smoke overnight.
Today's Koreatown movers and shakers are in denial, however. More unsettling is the state of mind of your generation: Most of your peers don't even know what Sa-I-Gu is, much less about its meanings to our Diaspora in the New World.
Since the spring of 1993, when I gained a new lease on life with a donor's liver in the ruins of Sa-I-Gu, I've been invited to share my 4.29 experience at every KASCON meeting, where the lessons of Sa-I-Gu were earnestly debated.
The challenge facing KASCON during this spring break: no more time for rhetoric.
As the vanguard of the emerging Korean America, your English-speaking generation is called on to take the first step toward organizing the 4.29 Truth and Reconciliation Commission to set the 4.29 record honest and straight and mend and heal our wounded soul.
This daunting and monumental mission follows in the footsteps of the marathon 40-year Japanese American endeavors in the post-internment years resulting in the historic Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and the Japanese American National Museum.
Your Japanese American counterparts - second- and third-generations -- took nearly 40 years to accomplish their redress movement to restore truth, honor and compensations to their fellow JA internment victims, young and old, aliens ineligible to citizenship and native born citizens.
First, Children of the Camps launched investigation and then exposed a government cover-up of the fact that Japanese Americans were never engaged in subversive activities prior to Pearl Harbor attacks.
That became the basis of a successful Corum Nobis case - a writ of error filed by activist lawyers Dale Minami, Don Tamaki and Eiko and Jack Herzig on behalf of internment resisters Min Yasui, Fred Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi who challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066. That order led to the evacuation and internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans in desolate relocation camps during the war. Corum Nobis disclosed that General John DeWitt, in charge of the West Coast security and internment, ignored the government secret reports that Japanese Americans were not considered threats.
In 1983 the congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment ruled that "these actions were carried out without adequate security reasons and without any acts of espionage or sabotage … and motivated by largely by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership."
Young JA activists organized a national grass roots drive through petitions and letter writings with the widening support of other minorities, as Congressman Robert MatsuI, himself a former internee, successfully spearheaded a move to pass a law, apologizing to and granting $20,000 compensations to the 60,000 surviving internees. President Ronald Regan signed the law with a national apology.
Thus the Children of the Camps have accomplished their mission -an everlasting legacy for succeeding generations.
These are some hard questions still haunting the post-Sa-I-Gu Korean America cry out for answers and resolutions-a challenge confronting the Children of 4.29 through the proposed Truth commission in the coming decades:
1) Both LA County Sheriff Black and the local FBI chief publicly avowed to prosecute alleged massive civil rights violations against the Korean victims. Nothing happened. Why?
2) LAPD refused to respond to desperate pleas for help from Koreatown merchants and residents under attack for the first crucial two days. Instead they chose to draw the line of defense in the back of Koreatown, along the affluent West LA. How and Why?
3) LAPD knew through its extensive anti-gang task force sources -- and it was open street talk -- that gangs, especially Crips, Bloods, Mexican Mafia, 18th Street Gangs - were plotting to wreck havoc on Korean stores in South Central and Koreatown to get revenge for the shooting of Harlins two years before the Rodney King beatings. (Firebombing and looting and shootings by these gang-led mobs were published in mainstream media during and after the riots. (For instance, a feature story in Washington Post in the 10th anniversary of 4.29 quoted an "Ali" as saying he followed the lead of these gangs by filling up bottles at gas stations to make Molotov cocktails to get even with the Harlins killing.)
4) Why LAPD didn't pursue these intelligence reports on targeting Korean merchants. Tens of thousands of victims of all colors are entitled to access to these reports through future lawsuits.
5) LAPD prepared contingency plans in case of the acquittal of the four cops in the Rodney King brutality trial. What happened to those plans?
6) LAPD herded rampaging mobs like stampeding cattle into Koreatown through Western, Normandie, and Vermont. LAPD guardians just looked on mobs shooting and looting, although they were bent on arresting armed defenders who were under gunfire and violent assaults.
7) Which party - LAPD, DA or TV outlets - has altered the surveillance video tape at the Empire Market (owned and delivered by the Soon Ja Du family) showing only the last few seconds of the video tape in which Du was seen shooting the black teen-ager in the back. The full version of the tape shows that Du was severely beaten in a series of scuffles and that the shooting was not over the bottle of juice but rather because of the ensuing violence.
Prior to and during the height of the riots, the chilling TV video rolled on in fits and spurts in tandem with the Rodney King beatings. Nearly all the local TV stations including the ABC network and its affiliate KABC showed the sickening sequence ad nauseam. Who was responsible for showing only the shortened version?
The Lathasha Harlins slaying on March 16, 1991, a year prior to the riots, became the top news in the L. A. Times and other media as the case of "Korean grocer Soon Ja Du who shot a teenage black girl to death over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice." There were numerous killings of Korean merchants in the previous years, but they never made it to the local evening news.
8) A significant number of the Korean victims were insured by off-shore firms with no sufficient assets to pay and by non-admitted carriers, not subject to the supervision of the State Department of Insurance.
More than half of them were either underinsurance or insured by off-shore insurance firms that were not licensed in California. Did the insurance department investigate numerous complaints by the victimized? Have there been any efforts by the department to help recover whatever compensations or payments were due?
9) FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was a bitter joke among the victims. Only a fraction of the applicants were helped, and a significant number of the victims lost their homes and businesses through foreclosures and repossessions. What's the performance of FEMA?
10) Only a fraction of the looted or burned Korean liquor and grocery stores were able to reopen their stores through the public hearing process after City Council imposed prohibitive conditions on re-applicants for licenses. What happened to those who couldn't reopen their wrecked business? | | |
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