Mass protests in response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade have raised comparisons to the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion.

On April 29, 1992, a jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers of assault against Rodney King, a black man whose 1991 brutalization by the police — which lasted for at least fifteen minutes — had been recorded from an observer’s apartment balcony. 

The video circulated nationwide. Protests began a few hours after the verdict was announced, with significant momentum building in South Central Los Angeles and Koreatown. Along with the acquittals, a key spark of the rebellion, as Brenda Stevenson documents, was the sentencing by a white judge in the case of Korean storeowner Soon Ja Du. A few weeks before Rodney King’s assault, Du shot and killed Latasha Harlins, a fifteen-year-old black girl, during a dispute over a bottle of orange juice. Convicted of voluntary manslaughter in October 1991, Du was sentenced by Joyce Karlin to probation, community service, and a fine.