UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS PART 1 : THE PATH TO FURY : On the Day That Will Linger in Our Hearts

From Simi Valley, where the verdict was rendered on a sunny afternoon, to South Los Angeles, where the Rodney G. King case held the rapt attention of everyone from gangbangers to ministers; from police station corridors to graffiti-stained street corners to restaurants quiet but for the mid-afternoon tinkling of water glasses, memories of this day--Wednesday, April 29, 1992--would linger forever.

It shook the city as fiercely as the Sylmar earthquake in 1971, shamed it as surely as the night in 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in the Ambassador Hotel. The verdicts imprinted a moment in many memories as vivid as the day John F. Kennedy died in Dallas, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis.

And eerily--no, predictably--the day the jury returned not guilty verdicts in the trial of four LAPD officers charged with beating King evoked memories of another hot Wednesday, in August, 1965, when Watts erupted with an earlier generation’s rage.