Liberals with Attitude: The Rodney King Beating and the Fight for the Soul of Los Angeles

(Hardback)

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LIBERALS WITH ATTITUDE DOCUMENTS THE SIXTEEN MONTHS IN 1991-92 between the brutal beating of Rodney King by four police officers that was captured on a home video camera and the resignation of LAPD chief Daryl Gates. Gates was reviled by the local Black and civil liberties communities because of the pattern of racism and brutality in the department, and he was uniquely powerful because of the structure of the Los Angeles City Charter and the secret files he kept on local politicians. The effort to get Gates to step down after thirteen years as chief and to amend the City Charter to prevent another unaccountable chief from amassing that much power was led by Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, a former LAPD officer and the first Black mayor of the city. To overcome Gates's entrenched power, Bradley assembled a team that included future US secretary of state Warren Christopher, the local ACLU, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and activists who saw the struggle against Gates as an important chapter in the civil rights movement. Much of the local media, especially the Los Angeles Times, was supportive of Bradley's agenda, as was the burgeoning 'gangsta rap' culture of LA, much of which emerged in reaction to the LAPD. Author Danny Goldberg was the chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California during those years and was personally acquainted with the leaders of the fight against Gates. He interviewed several dozen people who are still alive and got access to thousands of pages of documents among the papers of Stanley Sheinbaum, who was married to the heiress of the Warner Bros. film fortune. Sheinbaum was chosen by Mayor Bradley to be the president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, with the specific mission of getting Gates out of office. Goldberg's insider saga demonstrates that cooperation between the political left and center is required to overcome white grievance and unaccountable power.

Reviews

An extraordinary autopsy on a traumatic inflection point in the contested history of Los Angeles, Danny Goldberg's tough-minded investigation of how Los Angelenos grappled with institutional racism and the desire to reinvent the city itself is written with smarts and verve and is destined to take its place alongside Mike Davis's City of Quartz.--Steve Wasserman, author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie
[Goldberg's] newest book, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea, explores and fuses together the musical, political, and spiritual revolutions of the time into a narrative about a moment when 'there was an instant sense of tribal intimacy one could have even with a stranger.'-- "Rolling Stone, on In Search of the Lost Chord"

Author Bio

DANNY GOLDBERG is the author of five previous books including In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea and the national bestseller Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain. He is a political activist who serves on the boards of Public Citizen, Americans for Peace Now, and Brave New Films. He was the chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California from 1987-1994, during which the events described in his newest book, Liberals with Attitude, took place. He is currently president of Gold Village Entertainment and has worked in the music business since the early 1970s as a personal manager for Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Bonnie Raitt, the Allman Brothers, and Steve Earle, among others; and as president of three major record companies: Atlantic, Warner Bros., and Mercury.