![]() The second reason I decided to open this book with an overused phrase is because King followed it up with something lovely, something rarely quoted. ![]() Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone. The first is because most Americans nowadays are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of cooperation across party lines. I therefore hesitated to use King’s words as the opening line of this book, but I decided to go ahead, for two reasons. King’s appeal is now so overused that it has become cultural kitsch, a catchphrase1 more often said for laughs than as a serious plea for mutual understanding. After a particularly horrific act of violence against a white truck driver, King was moved to make his appeal for peace. Much of the mayhem was carried live news cameras tracked the action from helicopters circling overhead. Fifty-three people were killed and more than seven thousand buildings were torched. The entire nation had seen a videotape of the beating, so when a jury failed to convict the officers, their acquittal triggered widespread outrage and six days of rioting in Los Angeles. ![]() “Can we all get along?” That appeal was made famous on May 1, 1992, by Rodney King, a black man who had been beaten nearly to death by four Los Angeles police officers a year earlier. ![]()
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