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“The Forgotten Story

That Helped Spark the

LA Riots

by Tasbeeh Herwees
April 28, 2017

Footage of the beating was broadcast across the country, provoking national outrage and
forcing a public conversation about race and police violence in the United States. The
day the four policemen walked out of that Los Angeles courtroom scot-free, the city
flared up in insurrection.

But Rodney King wasn’t the only flash point for the LA riots. One year earlier, a Korean-
American named Soon Ja Du—the wife of the owner of Empire Liquor Market—shot and
killed a 15-year-old black girl named Latasha Harlins in South Los Angeles. Although
popular narratives of the LA riots have minimized, or completely erased, the role
Harlins’ death played in both rallying the community and fomenting anger over anti-
black violence, more recent retrospective accounts have returned her story to its rightful
place as a critical point in the LA riots’ history. Four new documentaries—John

Ridley’s Let It Fall, Showtime’s Burn, Motherf*cker, Burn!, A&E’s LA Burning: The Riots 25
Years Later, and National Geographic’s LA 92—use Harlins’ case to recontextualize the
events leading up to the riots. Brenda Stevenson, a professor of history at the University
of California, Los Angeles, is the author of The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins:
Justice, Gender and the Origins of the LA Riots, and appears in both the Showtime and A&E

documentaries. Stevenson spoke to GOOD about Harlin’s story and why the mainstream
media has largely ignored it—until now.

Your book—which came out in 2013, but is still very timely—examined the larger
mainstream narrative perpetuated in the media about the Rodney King riots and
why they happened, like the idea that it was a reactionary response to the beating of
King. It brings into view other events that led up to it, but focuses on the death of
Latasha Harlins at the hands of a Korean-American store owner. Can you talk about
what happened there?

Latasha lived in South Central LA, and she lived very close to the Empire Liquor Market,
which is why she went there to purchase some orange juice that Saturday morning. She
walks into the store, goes into the refrigerated part of the store and gets a bottle of
orange juice that costs a $1.79. She had $2 in her hand to pay for the juice. She sticks the
juice into her backpack and part of it’s sticking out of the top, and she proceeds to go to
the counter to pay for it.

Mrs. Du, the shopkeeper’s wife, is tending the shop that morning and immediately starts
to aggressively ask Latasha if she’s trying to steal her juice—this is from eyewitness’
accounts. Latasha says, ‘I’m trying to pay for it.’ Du grabs and tries to pull the backpack
off her to see what’s in it, and Latasha starts to fight back as a result of that. Du falls
down twice while they’re fighting. When she stands back up the second time, she has a
gun in her hand and she’s pointing it at Latasha. The juice has fallen out of the backpack
by now; Latasha bends down, picks up the juice, puts it on the counter, and turns to

walk out of the store to avoid any further confrontation. Du shoots her in the back of the
head.

This is in March. In November, Du is initially charged with first degree murder with
special circumstances. She’s found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. The
recommendation from the court, that’s the probation officer, is that she receive the
maximum sentence—16 years in prison, because she didn’t seem to show any remorse in
her interviews. But the judge in the case, Judge Joyce Karlin, decides that Du should not
spend any time in jail, and instead gives her probation, makes her pay for Latasha’s
medical and funeral expenses, gives her community [service], and lets her go—to the
horror and anger of the larger community, the black community, but also from all parts
of the city.

What’s even more painful to the community, and particularly to Latasha’s family, was
that the judge said that Latasha was the criminal and that Du was her victim. She said in
her sentencing statement that if Latasha was still alive, she’d probably be in her court
accused of assault on a shopkeeper. So we have one person who is alive and well—now
she’s the victim. And the person who’s dead and bleeding on the ground is the criminal.
And we see that happening over and over again. We saw it with Michael Brown, and we
saw it with Trayvon Martin—you know, on and on and on. It’s such a long list of names.

How did the community react at the time?

She was shot on a Saturday. That following Tuesday there were protests in front of that
store. And they continued to protest in front of the store to shut it down. There were a

lot of negotiations that went on over the summer about the relationships between the
black community and the Korean merchant community in South Central and South Los
Angeles.

There was a lot of angst in the black community towards merchants—Korean-American
merchants in particular. Right after [Du’s] trial, there was a lot of outcry, there were
protests at the courthouse where Judge Karlin routinely held her cases. There was a
recall measure, a petition that was circulated with hundreds of thousands of signatures.
The district attorney at the time, Ira Reiner, did send the sentence up to the California
Court of Appeals to see if they would change it. The California Court of Appeals came
back the week before the [Rodney King] trial ended, with, ‘We will not send this
sentence back to the court to be changed because of judicial discretion.’

In other words, the community never lost sight of this case. It continued to be discussed
in the churches in South Central Los Angeles, in the very traditional community activist
organizations like the Urban League and the NAACP, and, of course, the family’s own
organization, which is the Latasha Harlins Justice Committee.

Even though Latasha’s death wasn’t the precipitating event of the riots, it still played
a large role in fueling them. Why don’t people outside of Los Angeles know her name
as well as they know Rodney King’s?

For the older generation, people who live in South Los Angeles, her name is extremely
well-known. Anyone who was, at least 12 at the time, remembers who she was and what

happened to her. At the time of the event, it was a national news story, because the
tension between the Korean-American community and the African-American
community was not just [present] in Los Angeles, but also in New York, Chicago, San
Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

What happened is that five or 10 years later, the media fell back into thinking about the
LA rebellion in the way that we typically think about all racial conflict, which is that it’s
a male event. Rodney King is the kind of perfect victim of white male police brutality.
We don’t think about females who are involved. It’s the same reason why we don’t pay
so much attention to all of the women who have been killed in the last few years by the
police, like Miriam Carey or Kendra James. But everybody knows the names of Michael
Brown and Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and Philando Castile.

It seems like the Latasha Harlins story encapsulates so many issues we’re seeing play
out today. There’s, for example, the dynamic between the black community and the
nonblack immigrant community, and then there’s also anti-black misogyny—both of
which keep these kinds of stories from reaching the mainstream media in the ways
that other, similar stories do.

Or staying in the mainstream media. The nation is patriarchal and the black community
is patriarchal. Our imagination is [dominated] by male images—of what happens to men
and what men are doing. For example, in the case of Latasha Harlins, the judge is not
male. She is female. The person who killed Latasha is not male. She’s a woman. The
district attorney in that case is a woman.

But when we really think about the criminal justice system, we think about male police,
we think about male judges, we think about male juries, we think about male district
attorneys. We don’t think about the role that women play in the criminal justice system.
Latasha’s case is really important because it indicts the system versus indicting only the
police. The system failed because the judge decided to criminalize Latasha, versus the
person who had been found guilty of murder. It’s not the jury. It’s not the police. It’s not
the district attorney. It’s the judge. It’s the entire system—not just the policeman on the
street.

The fact that Latasha was killed by a civilian shows how the police state and state
violence extends beyond institutional borders.

But the good news is that the jury didn’t buy that. They were like, you don’t have a right
to kill somebody who’s walking out of your store.

What is Latasha’s legacy in South LA today?

One of the things that has happened, of course, is the hashtag #SayHerName. Latasha
has become one of the foundational pillars of that movement. Her case has really
become iconic in the sense that this was a girl who was killed, and people are not saying
her name anymore.

But the other thing, too, is that Latasha has been [memorialized] now in documentaries,
in books, in songs, and in law articles. That case is very important in the cases that are

taught in law school now. In terms of black culture, in terms of a culture of people who
are interested in the plight of the oppressed, she is well-remembered. Her family
continues to have commemorative events for her, on her birthday, and also on the day
that she was killed. She’s gaining the kind of recognition that she deserves. It gives her
some justice, but not the justice that her family wants her to have. “

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