Faith Leaders Remember ‘92 Riots in Solidarity While Calling Out Anti-Asian Hate
On June 19, Juneteenth 400 and the Korean Friendship Bell Preservation Committee will be partnering on this year’s Juneteenth celebration at Cabrillo Beach. Random Lengths News interviewed San Pedro resident and community activist, Najee Ali and Rev. Hyepin Im of FACE-LA about reconciliation and healing from the 1992 civil unrest, known as Saigu, in the wake of the current iteration of anti-Asian hate across the country.
The Korean American community’s recollection of Saigu is comparable to their collective memory of the Japanese occupation of Korea, the division of the country into north and south, and the murderous shooting spree by Robert Aaron Long across three spas and massage parlors in metropolitan Atlanta.
“I have to say the uprising or LA riots is a very important backdrop and is what motivates me to do the work that I do,” Rev. Hyepin Im explained.
Rev. Hyepin Im will be one of the keynote speakers at the bell ringing ceremony hosted by the Korean Friendship Bell Committee on June 19. Im has been engaged in the work of building community, relationships, and communities since the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Im is the executive director of the Korean Churches for Community Development, which in recent years has changed its name to FACE-LA.
As the organization’s name and mission suggest, she leans deeply into her identity as a Christian and her desire for the church to be a light in the world. Im observed that when and if there’s any media coverage about Christians, it’s usually negative.
“I really want to equip and empower churches that are already doing great work but really take them to the next level, where their good works are visible and recognizable and people value their contribution,” Im explained. “I also want to increase their impact. I got that model from First AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church.”
Indeed, that journey has continued. The number of people Im counts as mentors could fill whole books of who’s who of prominent African Americans, with Rev. Mark Whitlock near the top of that list. Whitlock even toasted at her wedding. Despite her affinity to and close relationship with Whitlock, she admitted that for a long time she didn’t feel safe talking about the relationship between the Korean store owner and the Black customer in the LA riots story.
“I felt unsafe because I valued that relationship and I wanted to bring peace,” Im explained. “It felt like having a boyfriend whom your parents didn’t approve of, with the boyfriend the Korean community and the parents, the Black community. And not having the confidence that if I were to raise my concerns, that it would lead to a stronger and better relationship.”
Anti-Asian Hate and the Turning Point
In the years since the fires have been extinguished, parts of the city have been rebuilt and otherwise redeveloped for better or worse. The ‘92 riots following the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers charged in the arrest and beating of motorist Rodney King a year prior. The civil unrest that ensued afterward had sprung up in several areas in the Los Angeles metropolitan area as thousands of people rioted over six days. Two weeks after the video of the Rodney King beating was released, a Black teenager Latasha Harlins was killed by a convenience store clerk, Soon Ja Du.
The 51-year-old store-clerk received a 10-year suspended sentence for manslaughter and five years probation. Often when Black Angelenos recount this history, Korean American store owners are cast as the villains alongside Chief Daryl Gates of the LAPD and the institutional racism that continued to discriminate against Black people acquiring home and business loans.
Im explained that because she valued her relationship with leaders such as Whitlock she had to sit in an uncomfortable space whenever the discussion about Korean store owners and their devastation and loss came up.
“They would have this very hard look on their face, which is inconsistent with what they normally would respond when someone says their livelihood, their life was devastated,” Im explained. “If I thought they were bad people, I would have just blown them off as just bad people. But I knew otherwise and that’s what caused the confusion.”
Im explained that because she aspired to continue in relationships with her friends, a dissonance she says caused her a lot of pain, she held back. But then the Golden Spa Massacre in Atlanta happened.
“And Mark called me and asked, ‘How can I help?’” Im said.
Other key members of nationally recognized Black clergy who have done work in Los Angeles also called, including Bishop Kenneth Ulmer, Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, and others.
To make a long story short, those phone calls led to a very small gathering, a gathering she intentionally kept small to make sure that trust was there.
“Out of that discussion, Mark volunteered to write an op-ed entitled, Asian Lives Matter. And for me as a Korean American who felt our experience continued to be erased …”, Im said, trailing off. “Then Mark [Whitlock] said he didn’t want to be guilty of doing to Asians what white people have done to the Black community.”
“So, when Mark [Whitlock] coined the term, “Asian Lives Matter,” there was a part of me that felt I was being seen and the pain was being released because I saw that he got it.”
At the same time, Im imagined the backlash and thought to call him to make sure that’s what he wanted to do.
“And so I did and asked him, ‘Mark, are you sure you want to title it that?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’”
He was the one who called the LA Sentinel to have it published. They retitled it Black Church and Asian Lives Matter … Whitlock even got it published on the front page of The Christian Recorder, the oldest existing periodical published by African-Americans in the United States — a publication that pre-dates the Civil War.
“This newspaper goes to every AME Church in the world,” Im said. “He didn’t say it in some dark corner with some bunch of Asians. I’m so grateful for him.”
Im recounted another instance in which her friends and allies showed up in solidarity. Dr. Williams-Skinner, CEO and co-founder of Skinner Leadership Institute, spearheaded a two-minute Asian and Black Solidarity public service announcement video posted to YouTube. A collection of Black and Asian American clergy published a joint op-ed on behalf of Dr. Ketanji Brown Jackson for her nomination and confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, and worked together on COVID-19 and voter suppression efforts.
Then Ali connected Im to Shinise Harlins-Kilgore, a cousin of Latasha Harlins.
Ali said he thought it important that we not only acknowledge what happened 30 years ago, which was the largest civil unrest in the history of our country with over a billion dollars in property damage, and more than 60 lives lost but that we also don’t repeat the mistakes of the past so that the younger generation can see what we learned.
“At the end of the day, no matter how much trauma any community faces, you can’t take that trauma out on another group of Angelenos,” Ali said. “I encouraged Hyepin to reach out directly to the Harlins family. And that I’d already spoken to them and laid the groundwork because the Harlins family has always wanted peace and unity.”
April 29 and the Reconciliation
Ali said that once that was set in motion, it was just a matter of inviting Mayor Eric Garcetti, Rep. Karen Bass, and Operation Hope founder, John Hope Bryant, who sponsored the unity events Ali organized.
“We were determined to lay out a blueprint for reconciliation and unity,” Ali said. “We wanted to show that we can move forward together so that what happened 30 years ago will hopefully never happen again.”
The ball started rolling when friend and ally Im called Ali as they began preparing for the commemoration of Saigu and asked him to be a part of it. Ali immediately agreed.
Ali said he wanted to ensure that the event he organized was on April 29 at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. He wanted to take ownership of it and put on an event that the whole city would not only talk about but be proud of the show of unity between Blacks and Koreans and answer in the affirmative to Rodney King’s plea 30 years ago, “Yes, we can all get along.”
The longtime activist explained that Operation Hope led a bus tour filled with a diverse multicultural group of leaders to show the progress South LA has made with new businesses that have opened up three years post-civil unrest. The culmination of it all was the press conference at Normandie and Florence with the family members of Rodney King, Latasha Harlins, as well as Korean American leaders with our political leaders. Ali said everyone left that press conference with renewed hope for each other that they can do better … must do better and will do better.
Ali said when he learned of the overture made by the Korean Friendship Bell Committee, it made him smile.
The veteran community organizer said he thinks such concrete gestures aren’t just symbolic but are a sign of the effort that goes with ensuring that there’s a healthy relationship, understanding and tolerance between cultures and people.
The Power of Forgiveness
Im and Harlins-Kilgore have stayed in touch. After the April 29 display of unity and reconciliation, Im said Harlins-Kilgore had sent her a thank you text and called the day’s events a major breakthrough, expressing massive love and respect.
Harlins-Kilgore, who owns a floral business, expressed a desire to become a homeowner and find a storefront for her floral business. Im connected her to business incubator training, including one with a Korean church that’s been working with a cohort of South LA residents. Another is called New Economics for Women.
It seems like all that pain is coming to a point where there’s healing. One other piece is Latasha Harlins’ family. Im recounts seeking advice around the 30th anniversary of Saigu.
“I just want to do better and ask the question, ‘How can we do better?” Im said.
She sought the advice of her friends among Black clergy leaders. One of them mentioned that it would take something like what Charleston’s historic Emanuel AME Church did: they forgave the shooter Dylann Roof both publicly and in their hearts.
The message Im received back was that the act of forgiving is more than just an expression of grace toward the person or persons who wronged you. It’s an effective way for people touched by tragedy to speed up the healing process. This message rang true for Im.
“It felt like it was an assignment from God and that’s what gave me the pressure/courage to reach out to Shinise,” Im said.
The only question was, how to express her empathy for the loss that Shinise and her family had suffered and doing so in such a way that they feel they received healing without erasing the hurt Korean Americans had experienced.
While Korean store owners had been killed during robberies of their stores in the years leading up to the civil unrest in 1992, those killings weren’t deemed as racially motivated. During the riots, Koreatown was specifically targeted and 25 Korean store owners were killed.
Im noted that the Rodney King beating video and the store owner shooting of Latasha Harlins’ video were shown day in and day out leading up to the verdict. She wonders if the media had also shown footage of store owners who were also killed if there would have been a different outcome.
“Mark Whitlock said he worked at a 7-Eleven and he quit after two weeks because he realized how dangerous it was,” Im recalled. “It’s the second most dangerous job next to being a taxi driver.”
Im says that in some ways they were pawns in this game to the powers that be who pit us against one another — manipulated by media narratives.
She used the hit Netflix series The Squid Game as an analogy. In this series, hundreds of cash-strapped players accept a strange invitation to compete in children’s games. If you win, you get a cash prize. But if you lose, it could cost your life.
By the end of the series, after nearly everyone has killed each other off, two lifelong friends remain and they are at each other’s throats. Both are in dire straits and in desperate need of the grand prize money. It’s only at the very end when one of the finalists is about to grab the prize money that it dawns on him that the prize money is going to come at the cost of his sacrificing his humanity and the life of his friend. In this moment of awakening, he turns to his friend and says, “we don’t have to do this. Let’s go home.” In response to his friend’s overture, the once-losing friend decides to sacrifice himself for his friend’s sake, and ultimately, they both come out as better winners.
“I think it’s a great analogy to our communities where we’re just killing each other off for a prize at the cost of our own humanity and integrity,” Im said. “If we could connect, awakened to this reality and switch up the rules, the outcome will be so much better than if we choose to stay in the game that’s been set up to pit us against one another.”
