Center Talk! Stevenson Book Traces Role of Gender in ’92 Riots

New Book by Brenda Stevenson

Traces Role of Gender in 1992 Los Angeles Riots

In her new book, Brenda Stevenson, professor of history at UCLA and a Bunche Center affiliated faculty member argues that although many of the images of the 1992 Los Angeles riots feature men, a women’s story was behind the so-called Rodney King riots, a civil disturbance that she suggests had earlier origins in the earlier Latasha Harlins shooting.

“Most people believe that the LAPD beating of Rodney King sparked the Los Angeles riots of 1992,” says Brenda Stevenson, author of The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins:  Justice, Gender and the Origins of the LA Riots (Oxford University Press, 2013). “But this riot was boiling forth from the moment Latasha Harlins was shot.”

The book explores the Harlins case, which brought a felony manslaughter conviction but no jail time for Soon Ja Du, the Korean shopkeeper, a middle-aged woman, who shot the 15-year-old Harlins in the back of the head after a dispute over a bottle of juice Du believed the girl was shoplifting.

The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins examines the details of the case while it explores the  personal and group histories of three women — an African-American high school girl, a Korean-American shopkeeper and a Jewish-American judge, Joyce Karlin, whose controversial sentence not only tainted her career, but helped to spark the Los Angeles riots.

Stevenson is the author, editor and co-editor of many scholarly books and articles on African American history.  She is a recognized authority on Southern history, slavery and women, and wrote the award-winning book, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South.  Stevenson also received critical praise for editing the journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, a 19th-century free black woman from Philadelphia, as well as for her co-editorship and contributions to the three-volume encyclopedia “Black Women in America.”

For information on the book, click HERE.

Also, for the Los Angeles Times interview of Professor Stevenson by Patt Morrision, click HERE.