Rodney King “it’s hard to live up to some people’s expectations”

Posted: June 19th, 2012

“People look at me like I should have been like Malcolm X or Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. . . . But it’s hard to live up to some people’s expectations, which [I] wasn’t cut out to be. I didn’t go to school to be “Rodney King” and [be] beat up by cops and thrust into the limelight. . . . One of the cops in the jail [in a later encounter] said: You know what? People are going to know who you are when you’re dead and gone. A hundred years from now, people still going to be talking about you.”  Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2012.  Rest in Peace.

View the complete video of the Rodney King Beating and more in Riots & Rebellions at 20 by Robert Garcia on KCET’s Departures, an online documentary series mapping the cultural history of Los Angeles.