A peace movement took hold in Los Angeles during the most deadly and destructive rebellion in American history. The uprising was a reaction to systematic injustice rather than a direct response to police violence. The acquittal of four police officers for the March 1991 beating of twenty-five-year-old Black motorcyclist Rodney King—a two-minute assault captured on video and watched by millions of Americans on the nightly news—set off a rebellion that lasted for five days, involved the deployment of 10,072 National Guardsmen and 2,000 federal troops, and caused an unprecedented $1 billion (just under $2 billion today) in property damage. Over fifty people died, surpassing Detroit’s grim record of forty-three. Yet in the Watts section of the city, where in 1965 stores had burned, helicopters had hovered, and police and National Guardsmen had killed dozens of Black residents, in 1992 warring Crip and Blood gangs understood the rebellion not as a moment of wanton destruction, but as an opportunity to transform themselves and their community. By moving to end the violence, the gangs hoped to win political influence and to control scarce resources on their own terms.
The Bounty Hunter Bloods, Grape Street Crips, Hacienda Village Pirus Bloods, and the PJ Watts Crips had intermittently discussed a ceasefire in the years leading up to the rebellion. But it took a series of discreet meetings supported by the Amer-I-Can program before any of the Crips and Bloods involved were prepared to make meaningful steps toward peace. Run by the former NFL star Jim Brown, Amer-I-Can offered “urban life management skills” classes based on the principles of responsibility and self-determination. Most of the young men in their twenties who would organize the truce in 1992 had participated in the program and had often met in Brown’s living room.
The Crips and Bloods in Watts had been at war with each other and with police in Southern California for three decades. In Los Angeles and other major cities, collective violence in the 1960s and early 1970s was directed against external state forces—most often the police, who represented the frontline of government authority in segregated urban communities. After the rebellions of that era were repressed by an increase in uniformed presence on the streets and by mass incarceration, an internal form of collective violence surfaced. With few opportunities for formal employment, even within the lowest levels of the service sector, young Black men began to form groups commonly referred to as gangs to claim and guard territory, protect themselves, and keep neighborhoods safe from outsiders. Gang members defaced businesses, schools, parks, churches, and public walls with graffiti. By force or theft, they acquired sneakers, leather jackets, and cash, establishing protection rackets to extort money from local businesses. And they clashed with one another, throwing Molotov Cocktails, attacking rivals with fists and switchblades, and firing cheap, “Saturday Night Special” handguns.