- We have to ask ourselves, when was the last time
we talked about race with somebody of another race?
And if the answer is never, we're part of the problem.
- Go home, niggers!
- It's just like a bomb. We're sitting on a bomb.
- You can have a black person killed with a video,
then this is what you will get.
- This is a revolution.
- We've got to increase the peace.
- Knock them all down.
- Should people be frightened? - I think people should wake up.
It's 1991. Wake up.
- We have talked at each other
and about each other for a long time.
It's high time we all began talking with each other.
[together] No justice, no peace.
- Can we all get along?
[light orchestral music]
♪ ♪
[music intensifies]
♪ ♪
- Thank you.
Bye-bye.
- In about 20 minutes from now,
David Dinkins, who is now Mayor Dinkins,
is scheduled to step out from city hall
to take a public oath of office
and become New York City's 106th mayor
and the city's first African-American mayor.
- I intend to be the mayor of all the people of New York.
- David Dinkins being inaugurated on New Year's Day,
1990, is sort of an auspicious start to the decade
and really the culmination
of some of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
People are starting to see tangible benefits
of that struggle.
- A grandson of slaves was sworn in today
as the nation's first elected black governor.
- Did you ever think you'd see the day
when a black man would be elected governor of Virginia?
- No, indeedy. See, I was born in the '30s,
so you know I didn't think nothing like that gonna happen.
- After we saw hundreds of black elected officials,
the reality set in that we made a step,
but we had not gotten all the way to where we wanted.
- In last year's mayoral campaign,
Dinkins ran as the candidate
who would heal New York's deep racial divisions.
Now he finds himself scrambling to keep ahead of a situation
that is becoming highly volatile.
- An angry crowd roamed through the Crown Heights
section of Brooklyn
demanding justice after a motorist,
a Hassidic man, ran a red light and hit two black children,
killing one and critically injuring the other.
A Hassidic student was stabbed
to death hours after the accident.
- For several days, there was rioting,
blacks attacking Jews,
and I got the blame for that.
We've got to increase the peace.
Increase the peace.
- When Mayor Dinkins went to Crown Heights
to try and ease tensions,
he was booed and forced to retreat.
- I think that too often, many black elected officials
have calmed white America
by telling them what they want to hear,
letting them go to bed feeling
everything is cool, and it's not cool.
- There was no one truth.
The blacks, of course, called that a murder.
The Jews called it an accident.
There were two completely different realities.
- David Dinkins was trying to please everybody,
and he was being pulled in all these different directions,
trying to prove that he wasn't just the black mayor.
- Your mayor works for you. - That's not true.
- You've got Commissioner Brown working for you guys.
- Dinkins works for the Jews. - You guys, come on. What?
- Similar tensions are simmering in cities across America.
Legions of young black men and women,
unemployed and losing hope,
believe they have been abandoned by the larger society,
and they are angry.
- New York City is symptomatic of what's happening
in the nation in the early 1990s
in what one writer describes as a "season of racial tension,"
and it really is complicated by the fact
that you have African-Americans dealing with stifling poverty
and inequality and police injustice
that's being perpetrated against communities of color.
Rodney King, in 1991, exposed some of that
when his beating is captured on camera.
- In Los Angeles, outrage grows over a videotape
of police beating an unarmed motorist.
- Another explosive case involving
white police officers...
- Beating a man they had just pulled over.
- And an amateur cameraman recorded it all.
- We here in Los Angeles was just struck
by the maliciousness of what we saw,
the inhumane sense of this person
struggling on the ground, being battered repeatedly.
- This is 1991, and things haven't changed
as far as minority is concerned.
If you're black, and you're Mexican,
you're gonna have a problem with law enforcement.
- City officials have received thousands of angry phone calls
from across the United States.
- When the Rodney King video hit,
everybody in the hood was like,
"Okay, finally, they caught them.
What's gonna happen now,
now that they have shown a lynching on TV?"
- Multiple officers from multiple agencies
witnessed this, and not one single officer
that night ever reported that anything had gone wrong.
That, to me, suggests that there's a deeper problem
than just a couple bad apples.
- Another widely publicized incident captured on videotape
has become a focus for ethnic tensions between the black
and Korean communities in Los Angeles.
- Two weeks after the Rodney King video goes worldwide,
a young girl in South Central Los Angeles
walks into a Korean-American owned grocery store
to get a bottle of orange juice.
- The security camera caught the dispute.
Store owner Soon Ja Du thought 15-year-old Latasha Harlins
was going to steal some orange juice.
There was a scuffle.
Harlins struck Du then turned to leave the store.
Du produced a handgun and shot Harlins
in the back of the head.
- That it should come so quickly after King,
and both should be on video,
I think really had the sense for many people of saying,
"Okay, now we finally have evidence
of what we've been complaining about."
- A jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter.
Judge Joyce Karlin sentenced
Du to parole and community service
but no jail time.
- She got away with murder. - You can have
a black person killed with a video,
with eyewitnesses, and this is what you will get.
[together] Stop killing our children.
We want justice.
- The case has become a symbol of tensions
between African-Americans
and the Koreans who've become successful merchants
in many of the poorest black neighborhoods.
- South Los Angeles had been kind of abandoned
by a lot of commercial entities.
There weren't many markets,
so liquor stores became, like, the stand-in,
the place that you would go
for cigarettes, diapers, milk, whatever.
- Why don't you open a market that we can use for our family?
- Or go back to Korea.
- ♪ Every time I want to get a fucking brew ♪
♪ I got to go down to the store ♪
♪ With the two ♪
♪ Oriental one-penny counting motherfuckers ♪
♪ That make a nigga mad enough to cause a little ruckus ♪
- Rapper Ice Cube continues to draw heavy fire
for the scabrous lyrics on his new album,
"Death Certificate."
On the album, he threatens to burn down
the stores of Korean grocers
if they don't treat black customers with more deference.
- That album was in my headphones for, like,
the whole year.
Cube was reflecting on his experiences with Koreans,
and a lot of Asians didn't have a voice at that time,
so there was no way for us to really talk back.
- ♪ We'll burn your store right down to a crisp ♪
♪ And then we'll see you ♪
♪ 'Cause you can't turn the ghetto into Black Korea ♪
- I just tell what's real, you know.
If the truth hurts, say, "Ouch,"
but I ain't sorry about it at all.
- Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall has announced
that he will retire.
He was the court's most forceful liberal voice
and the only black in court history.
It is the definitive end of an era.
- Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer
on Brown versus Board of Education.
He was on the Supreme Court
to give a voice to black Americans.
- I kept my word to the American people
and to the Senate by picking the best man
for the job on the merits, and the fact he's minority,
so much the better.
- Judge, what do you say to critics who say the only reason
you're being picked is because you're black?
- I think a lot worse things have been said.
I disagree with that, but I'll have to live with it.
- The Senate is scheduled to vote tomorrow
on the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas,
but now some lawmakers are concerned
about an accusation of sexual harassment
dating back ten years.
- Anita Hill enters the room now.
- Democrats were gonna challenge
Clarence Thomas on the basis of his conservative views.
His race was not gonna be an issue,
but I think the Anita Hill
allegations brought race back into the picture.
- The Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting to hear evidence
on sexual harassment charges
that have been made against Judge Clarence Thomas.
- He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films
involving such matters as women having sex with animals.
- This seemingly personal matter is being aired out
in front of this jury of all white men,
and it created a spectacle.
- This is a circus,
and from my standpoint as a black American,
as far as I'm concerned,
it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.
- Clarence Thomas decided to fight back by evoking
one of the most painful elements of black history,
which was designed to point out the burden of being black.
- The final count was 52 to 48.
It's the closest successful confirmation
vote in Supreme Court history.
- No matter how difficult or how painful the process has been,
this is a time for healing in our country.
- It's not exactly a rage,
but it's definitely a much-noted trend,
a whole new wave of black films
with black stars by black directors.
Right now in New York, a new black film
is being premiered just about every week,
but among those drawing impressive reviews
is "Boyz n the Hood," directed by 23-year-old John Singleton.
- I really wanted to make a film that was gonna voice
what I had seen growing up
as a young black man in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Police Department,
I mean, you know, they were a kind of an occupying force,
and it really became war zone.
- I didn't do nothing. - You think you're tough, huh?
- The four Los Angeles police officers
who appeared in that videotape
of the Rodney King beating went on trial today.
- Defense attorneys, claiming they couldn't
get a fair trial in Los Angeles,
got the case moved to more conservative
neighboring Ventura County.
- It felt like these officers were being sent
to a very friendly venue
and certainly a more friendly venue
than a downtown LA jury would've been.
- The defense picked apart the videotape,
and every image was turned around to say,
"See where King is threatening the police officers?"
And it's not about race.
It is about King resisting.
- You didn't see him to have any weapon, did you?
- Yes, I did see him to have a weapon.
- What kind of a weapon did Mr. King have?
- It was his body.
- We are ready. We are very well prepared
to take care of any eventuality, no matter what it might be.
- All right, the clerk will read the verdicts.
- "We, the jury, find the defendant, Stacey C.
Koon, not guilty of the crime of assault."
- This was a stunning verdict. I don't think many people
were expecting this, certainly not reporters.
- It struck us all with great disgust
because we thought that by those pictures,
even, fair-minded people
would know the injustice of what happened to him.
- There is no justice. There is no justice.
- The first and perhaps most spontaneous reaction
came from "Boyz n the Hood" director John Singleton.
- It's just like a bomb. It's a bomb.
We're sitting on a bomb.
- They let these people off from the attempted murder
of Rodney King; I told everybody.
I'm just like, "Listen, it's gonna go down."
[together] No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace.
- I was at Parker Center,
which was the police headquarters at the time,
when the verdicts were announced.
A crowd began to gather.
It began to turn more and more violent.
[together] Guilty, guilty.
- Parker Center has a glass entrance,
and people were throwing rocks at the doors.
I was inside with the police commissioners,
and they were frantically searching for Gates.
It turned out that Gates was unreachable
because he was at a fund raiser.
- I was standing in front of Parker Center
trying to protect the building,
and my wife called and said, "Are you watching television?
They're beating a guy up
in the middle of Florence and Normandie.
- Terrible, terrible pictures.
- In our living rooms,
we saw in real time Reginald Denny
smashed with a big cement block.
- And there's no police presence down here.
They will not enter the area.
- It sent a message to everybody else
that this is a free-for-all,
there are no police,
there's nobody who's gonna stop you,
and so people poured into the streets,
and the violence spread from that.
[together] No justice, no peace.
- Where's the LAPD? What the hell is going on here?
And once you don't control something like that early on...
[imitates explosion]
It explodes and continues to explode,
and that's what happened here.
- This is America!
- Martin Luther King Jr. said that riots are the language
of the unheard, and in the song
"The Day the Niggaz Took Over," they're saying,
"Look, this is how America gonna hear you.
"We're gonna take this thing over.
"We're gonna put our foot to the pedal,
"and were gonna drive this nation
in the direction we need it to go in."
- Dusk to dawn, citywide curfew is in effect in Los Angeles
at this hour, and still the fires burn.
- I didn't realize personally the extent of the damage
until I went home the next morning,
and I couldn't believe how many buildings were burned.
It was going on all over the city.
- Of 7,000 Korean-owned businesses, 1,700 were ruined.
- Can't people realize what they're doing is wrong?
This is not the way to overcome racism.
- People remembered the Latasha Harlins shooting,
and people said,
"You're the ones who come into our community
"and take our money
and don't give anything back to the community."
Those Korean stores were targeted,
and in some cases, those shop owners were targeted.
- Most Koreans came in the late '70s and early '80s,
so you're still dealing with the first generation of Koreans,
and in Korea, they all have to go through military service,
so they just became weekend commandos.
[gunshot]
- You!
- These Korean shop owners
defended their property with bullets.
- All the gun shops in Koreatown lent out all their guns,
and they just mobilized,
and then the young guys,
they told us to just patrol the streets.
We could make our parents proud,
or we could stick up for our community.
- It turned into the biggest rebellion riot in the history
of the United States of America since the Civil War.
- For the first time since the verdict,
the world heard from Rodney King.
- People, I just--I just want to say,
you know, can we--can we all get along?
Can we--can we get along?
- Rodney King is not a public spokesman.
He's not an activist.
He was a victim of a police beating,
and clearly he didn't know what to say.
I mean, what is there to say?
"You beat the shit out of me, and I'm still alive.
Fuck you." That's what you should say.
But he didn't say that.
He said, "Can we all get along?"
And a lot of people didn't want to get along.
- No justice, no peace.
- The death toll is now up to 43,
equaling the record set by the Detroit riots in 1967.
Now this city tries to recover.
- I grabbed a broom just to sweep
because the ashes were everywhere,
and all the sudden, coming right at me was Channel 9,
and they go, "What are you doing?"
I said, "I'm sweeping.
I don't know what else to do."
Half hour later, there was, like,
3, 5, 12 people with brooms.
"Well, we saw you on the news, man.
We came out to help you."
By 6:00 in the afternoon, there were thousands of people.
- As armed National Guard troops deployed,
these people armed themselves with trash bags
and brooms to begin the overwhelming job
of cleaning up
what's left of their burned-out neighborhood.
- We need to get the youth to understand that there
is another alternative for venting your anguish
and your frustration.
It took three days to destroy it,
and it took three days to clean it up.
I was very proud.
- "And if my survival means your total destruction,
then so be it."
You really feel that?
- Yes, I feel that way, only because that America
is giving black people no other choice.
- Sister Souljah is a rapper, she is an activist,
and she does not sanitize her message for the public.
- We all have to come together and find some common ground--
- How do you find a common ground
in an all-white United States Senate?
Show me a common ground. - You know, the problem is...
- As she rises in prominence
and becomes much more vocally outspoken,
a number of her statements
are held up of an example
of black hatred of white people.
- Sister Souljah told "The Washington Post"
about a month ago, and I quote,
"If black people kill black people every day,
why not have a week and kill white people?"
- In running for office,
the Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton,
decided to seize on that particular sentence
and pull it out of context.
- If you took the words "white" and "black,"
and you reversed them, you might think David Duke
was giving that speech.
- Bill Clinton denounced Sister Souljah
in front of Jesse Jackson,
so he's signaling to whites that he is not a typical liberal.
- I think that Bill Clinton is like a lot of white politicians.
They eat soul food, they party with black women,
they play a saxophone,
but when it comes to domestic and foreign policy,
they make the same decisions
that are destructive to African people
in this country and throughout the world.
- The next President of the United States of America,
Governor Bill Clinton.
- Clinton is the first Democrat to be elected since 1976,
he is a governor from a Southern state,
and he was representing himself as someone
who could speak to the African-American community.
- Our diversity can be a source of strength in a world
that is ever smaller, where everyone counts,
and everyone is a part of America's family.
[cheers and applause]
- It's a new day in America.
- Six women will serve in the new U.S. Senate,
including the first black woman.
- Most women credit Anita Hill
with starting this political movement.
They say the rage they felt
at her treatment by the Senate Judiciary
Committee fueled their campaigns.
- It was a hopeful time
when women began seizing some of these offices.
It sensitized women and minorities to the fact
that our voices have to be heard,
and the real way to have them be heard
is to be holding the reins of power.
- $2.4 million.
That's great box office for a Wednesday,
and that's what opening day crowds paid out
to see "Malcolm X."
- It's hard to miss the phenomenon called Spike Lee.
Spike Lee is a black man
who has reached the top of white culture,
and he's done it his way.
- "Malcolm X" is a really impressive achievement
in terms of not being one of these small,
independent, emergent new voices
connected to hip-hop, but instead a big budget,
3-hour, 20-minute epic
about a very important African-American figure.
- Take three, a mark.
- I asked him if he was ever worried
that the movie would not appeal to a broad audience.
- If it's good enough, people are gonna come.
But the minute black artists start thinking about crossover,
they start diluting the work, watering it down,
and the work suffers.
- When we look at the John Singletons and the Spikes,
all the way across the board,
this became the era
where we took charge of our own culture,
our own cultural icons,
and telling our own stories,
expressed either in music or in theater or in cinema.
- In Los Angeles, one woman is stirring memories
and trying to bring about an understanding of the events
that tore that city apart a little more than a year ago.
Her name is Anna Deavere Smith,
and she has taken the riot and turned it into theater.
- Twilight Bey, that's my name.
- Twilight is one of 26 people Deavere Smith becomes
in this one-woman tour de force.
- Then they said that we was over there looting in Koreatown.
That wasn't us. That was the Mexicans over there.
That wasn't us.
- I thought of the Los Angeles riots as, like,
this explosion of a--
like a trunk or a house that exploded,
and everything's all over the place.
Then, as an artist, it's this incredible opportunity
to put it together in a way that makes sense.
There are so many different kinds of us,
of Americans now,
with so many different kinds of ideas
about what is just and what is not.
- Whenever you have a volatile period
of racial strife in America,
there's always a big pop culture surge of black voices.
- I'm hopeful and heartened and flattered
that people want to come and see this,
which is about race, which is this big taboo.
It's the uncomfortableness of being different,
and that that is being paid attention to makes me happy.
- Good morning, everyone.
Homicide detectives in Los Angeles
are telling The Associated Press
that O.J. Simpson's arrest is imminent in connection
with the killings of his ex-wife and a friend.
- Today my office filed murder charges
against O.J. Simpson for the deaths
of Nicole Brown Simpson
and Ronald Lyle Goldman.
As of this time, approximately 3:00 p.m.,
no one knows where he is.
We thought that the evidence was overwhelming.
There was no doubt.
This is the man who committed the crime.
- You're looking at a live picture right now.
You believe that to be O.J. Simpson down there below you?
- O.J. was a guy who felt like he was above race.
He became the exceptional Hollywood negro.
Had a blonde wife; he lived in Brentwood.
He played the role very well.
- O.J.'s sitting there in the passenger seat
with a gun pointed at his own head.
- If the person that had murdered two
white people was a street thug,
it wouldn't have been a big case,
but it was this kind of icon.
- We understand O.J. is in custody.
- And you don't want to believe
that this kind of person would've done this.
- How do you plead to counts one and two?
- Absolutely, 100% not guilty.
- Legal analysts say Simpson's demeanor was orchestrated
by his newly expanded legal team,
which now includes Johnnie Cochran.
- Johnnie Cochran was a hero to the LA black community
because he had spent decades
exposing police misconduct
in the treatment of African-Americans.
- The eyes of the world are focused here in Los Angeles,
where the much-anticipated murder trial of O.J. Simpson
is about to begin.
- That trail of blood through his own Ford Bronco
and into his house in Rockingham
is devastating proof of his guilt.
- Clark showed the jurors pictures of the death scene,
bloody footprints, the knit cap,
one of the bloody gloves.
- The fact that blood mysteriously appears
on vital pieces of evidence
is devastating evidence
of something far more sinister.
- The notion that the Los Angeles Police Department
would unfairly treat an African-American suspect
in 1994 was far from outlandish,
and no one knew that better than Johnnie Cochran.
- Can you please describe the appearance of the glove, sir?
- A dark leather glove.
It appeared to be somewhat moist or sticky.
- We knew early on that Detective Fuhrman
had issues in his background.
- And you say on your oath that you have not spoken
about black people as niggers in the past ten years?
- That's what I'm saying, sir.
- The O.J. Simpson trial is in chaos tonight,
and today's free-for-all
could very well decide the ultimate outcome.
- The Fuhrman tapes, a ticking time bomb in the Simpson trial,
blew up today.
- It becomes evident late in the trial that Mark Fuhrman
has worked with a LA screenwriter
and made tapes of what police life is like.
- The defense offered 41 examples of Fuhrman
using the word [bleep],
something he swore on the witness
stand he has not done in the last ten years.
- The defense wants desperately to prove that Fuhrman
is capable of manufacturing evidence to bolster their claim
that he planted the bloody glove found
at O.J. Simpson's estate.
- All right, Detective Fuhrman, would you resume
the witness stand please?
- Was the testimony that you gave
at the preliminary hearing
in this case completely truthful?
- I wish to assert my Fifth Amendment privilege.
- The defense tried, successfully,
to turn this case into a referendum
on Mark Fuhrman in particular and the LAPD in general.
- Absolutely no one would've predicted it.
After a trial that has lasted 3/4 of a year,
the jury in the O.J. Simpson trial
has taken less than 4 hours to reach a verdict.
- All right, Mr. Cochran, Mr. Simpson,
would you please stand and face the jury?
- Most people can tell you where they were sitting
when that verdict came down.
- "We, the jury in the above entitled action,
"find the defendant, Orenth--Orenthal James Simpson,
"not guilty of the crime of murder in violation
"of penal code section 187a,
a felony upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being."
- Oh, my word.
[cheers and applause]
- The question wasn't whether O.J. was guilty or innocent.
The question was whether
the jury had been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt
that the prosecution had sustained its burden,
and at the end, they decided they had not.
- Nobody is celebrating the fact
that this horrific crime occurred.
They're celebrating what feels like payback
for Rodney King, even for Latasha Harlins,
for a system and for conditions that have just ignored them.
- O.J. is innocent, free as a bird!
- In recent weeks, every one of us
has been made aware of a simple truth.
White Americans and black Americans
often see the same world in drastically different ways,
ways that go beyond
and beneath the Simpson trial and its aftermath,
which brought these perceptions so starkly into the open.
Almost 30 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther
King took his last march in Memphis.
Well, today's march is about black men
taking renewed responsibility for themselves, their families,
and their communities.
- Welcome to the Million Man March!
- There are big goings-on in the nation's capital today.
This is an enormous crowd of black American men
and boys and yes, even some women.
- I remember the power of stepping out of the D.C.
Metro and seeing this sea of faces
of color on the National Mall.
- The Million Man March was called for by Louis Farrakhan,
who is head of the Nation of Islam.
- The basic reason that this was called
was for atonement and reconciliation.
- He's always been a controversial figure
because of his anti-Semitic utterances,
but the march becomes bigger than Louis Farrakhan.
- Why do we march?
Because we are trapped with second-class schools
and first-class jails.
- We've been locked up, we've been brutalized,
and this became the first mass expression
we could make together,
that we need to be regarded and respected
and heal this racial breach.
- We aren't all drug dealers and, you know,
around shooting each other and stuff like that.
We can come together and have a positive message.
- When you start standing with our mothers,
when you stick it out with your families,
when you start mentoring our young,
then we can build a new nation of strong people.
- I had to get out of that whole kind of,
like, time bomb mentality
that growing up in South Central LA
gives you, so I think that the march gave me
a sense of hope that things could get better.
[together] Long live the spirit of the Million Man March.
Long live the spirit of the Million Man March.
[together] Dinkins must go. Dinkins must go.
- It was a show of force on the steps of New York City Hall.
10,000 off-duty cops banded together in protest,
fed up and angry with a city they claim doesn't back them up.
- Knock them all down.
- David Dinkins pisses off the police
because he talks about civilian review boards,
he talks about accountability for police brutality,
and so we see predominantly white police officers
screaming overt racial slurs at the black mayor.
- That kind of language, racial slurs, separate and apart
from the destruction of property and whatnot,
that is why some people have an absence of confidence
in the police department.
- The reason the morale of the police department
is so low is one reason
and one reason alone, David Dinkins.
- In some ways, it was easy to blame David Dinkins for things
that were not his fault,
and along comes Giuliani with his pro-cop stance.
There was an audience for this sort of message,
as there often is.
- Today the New York police are being told
to take a very different tack,
to clean up the neighborhood aggressively,
to visibly improve the quality of life
as a first step in crime reduction.
- It's the broken windows theory, this idea
that there were small quality-of-life crimes,
and if you could stop that,
you would set up a very peaceful
and orderly society,
and that really becomes a process of racial profiling
that disproportionately targeted young black men
as potential criminals.
- We're out there. They have more foot posts out there,
more police officers walking the beat.
- Hi, how are you? - Hi.
- Hello. - If I were to put police
on every corner in America, of course crime would go down.
But the question is, at what cost?
For many black people, it was a sense of community,
a sense of dignity, a sense of respect from law enforcement.
- With a majority of Americans worrying about their quality
of life, in California,
the easygoing tolerance of earlier decades has frayed.
- At the ballot box, what we see in California,
which is sort of the leading edge of this trend,
is a whole number of different types of initiatives
that are meant to further contain communities of color.
- Tens of thousands of Californians
marched through downtown Los Angeles today
to demonstrate against Proposition 187,
which would bar illegal immigrants from public schools,
non-emergency medical services, and welfare rolls.
- We are as American as anybody else,
and we deserve an education.
- Opponents say the emotionally divisive measure plays
on voter prejudice against Latinos,
but supporters say it will help staunch
the flow of illegal immigrants to California.
- It has become the issue in the governor's race.
Pete Wilson is pinning his reelection
hopes on anti-immigrant sentiment.
- We are gonna take back California for the working,
tax-paying families of this state.
- The main undercurrent of all of the different measures
that were being held from 1994 onward dealt with fear,
fear of the other, of an expanding demographic.
- It's that kind of incident that has generated
so much heat in California,
where there's a controversial ballot
measure to end preference for minorities.
- Proposition 209 would end all race
and gender considerations in public education,
government contracts, and hiring.
- You begin to see all these policies
and all these bills against affirmative action
in attempting to address crime,
and all of it feels like
secret agent talk for "black people."
- There have been 376 murders so far this year in Washington,
many of them gang- and drug-related.
- It's another night of gang violence in Los Angeles,
two young men killed.
- In Chicago, eight people murdered since Friday.
Violent crime is an issue that haunts the president
and one he plans to address with new proposals next month.
- You gave me this job, and we're making progress
on the things you hired me to do,
but unless we deal with the ravages
of crime and drug and violence,
none of the other things we seek to do
will ever take us where we need to go.
- The crime bill became lock them up,
throw the key away, three strikes, you're out,
and in their zest to govern,
that "we can stop this," it was an overreach.
- In the bill, the penalties for powdered cocaine
and crack were different.
- Powder cocaine, a drug of choice among mostly middle-
and upper-class abusers.
Crack cocaine, a cheaper,
faster high for it's mostly poor users.
Chemically, the drugs are virtually identical
but not in federal court.
An arrest for 5 grams of crack brings a mandatory
five years in federal prison,
but you get just the same five-year sentence
for 500 grams of powder cocaine.
The law was designed to help clean up
crack-infested communities,
but instead has become another wedge
between blacks and whites.
- All of these absurd laws are putting people in prison
for lengthy terms,
and we all know the imbalances in the way people are imprisoned
and who gets incarcerated for the longer periods of time,
and it's always people of color,
so suddenly you had this massive
group of primarily black men going to prison.
- President Clinton had a political strategy of saying,
"We're gonna be tough on crime,
but we're gonna be socially receptive,"
and the Democratic Party started moving to the Right,
playing the racial-political lines.
- Welfare as we know it is now history.
President Clinton today signed the legislation
that ends a government commitment
made 61 years ago of federal aid
to the nation's poorest.
- What ultimately happens is that there
are the unanticipated consequences.
For example, they didn't take into account childcare.
If you're gonna put people back to work,
who's ultimately gonna take care
of the children that are left home?
And it was these questions
that exposed the weakness of the bill.
- I tried to go to work, but I really didn't have childcare,
but I was in school.
I was doing something, not just sitting around doing nothing.
- So you want to work.
- Of course.
- Welfare becomes racialized in a way
in which we begin to hear all of these stereotypes
being trotted out about the lazy,
dependant welfare queens.
There are more white people on welfare at that time
than there were black people, but there was this sense again
that welfare's helping those people,
it's a handout, and we can't do that.
So again, Bill Clinton turns on his base with welfare reform.
- 14 million Americans, mainly black in the cities,
white elsewhere, will be hit.
More than a million children will be thrown into poverty.
- There is a significant story of people
who have fallen below the radar screen,
and people care less and less
about what may actually happen to those people.
- Clinton is an extraordinarily complicated figure,
and his biggest legacies,
the crime bill and welfare reform,
are gonna be disproportionately impacting low-income
African-American communities.
Do I think that he was actively trying to do this?
No.
It was politically expedient,
and it helps him win reelection.
- We have committed this night to continuing our journey
to give the young people here
and those all across America the America they deserve.
- Do you know, do you know, do you know, do you know?
- These Nike sneaker commercials are an example
of just how strong black selling power is.
- ♪ If I could be like Mike ♪
- Black culture had always been influential,
but culturally speaking, the '90s is really the decade
when black culture is solidified
as the mainstream of American culture,
and you have this sharp rise in black superstars
making movies and music,
from Will Smith to Jay-Z.
- So how did it feel to be number one?
- It's a beautiful thing.
Like, number one in the whole country,
That's a major accomplishment.
- There was a lot of people experiencing success visibly.
- The most prestigious award for literature has gone today
to the American novelist Toni Morrison,
the Nobel Prize.
- I think I'm the first African- American to win the Nobel Prize.
- You are. - And that is astonishing.
- Suddenly, people who we looked to as heroes
and as markers of dignity and grace
and talent and success,
suddenly, America was looking at them too.
This represents a new understanding of diversity,
a new understanding of American possibility.
- Everybody wanted to be like us.
Everybody wanted to talk like us.
Everybody wanted to see our movies.
They wanted to listen to our music.
They wanted to wear our clothes.
And some people felt like we lost that war,
that revolution in the early '60s and the '70s,
but we won the war in pop culture in the '90s.
- Every city has cases of police brutality,
but few are as brutal as the alleged attack
against Haitian immigrant Abner Louima.
- Nearly 2,000 demonstrators
marched on the 70th Precinct yesterday,
where Abner Louima says police beat him and sodomized him.
The attack comes at a time
when New York has gained new respect
for its plummeting crime rate,
but complaints about police misconduct are soaring.
- The plastic cups cover the shell casings
from 41 bullets fired by police
after they confronted Amadou Diallo,
a 22-year-old West African immigrant
who may have been reaching for his keys.
- Amadou, Amadou.
- In many ways, the '90s ends the way it starts,
with a spotlight on violence
against black bodies by law enforcement.
Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo,
two people who did not deserve to be
on the wrong side of state violence, were.
- Justice! - No peace!
- In our community, we live with that fear
that it could be one of our brothers
or one of our nephews or one of our sons,
and I just wish everyone could understand.
- Diallo has become a martyr to some,
a symbol of a price paid in New York's war against crime.
Rudolph Giuliani has countered the outrage
with carefully selected statistics...
- Shots fired by police officers has decreased by 50%.
- And steadfast support for the NYPD.
- The New York City Police Department
is the most restrained.
Substantially more restrained.
It's among the most restrained police
departments in the country.
- Many people thought even though times had progressed,
in other ways, some of the images
were not that much different than images people
might've associated with the '50s and '60s.
- We thought maybe we'd gotten past all this stuff,
but it keeps happening, and it was a reminder that
while the '90s represented so much growth,
so much progress, we still had so much further to go.
- In every society, there is a fragile balance
between order and freedom.
In New York these days, a number of blacks
and Hispanics in particular feel
that it's their freedom
which has been sacrificed to achieve order.
They are the ones being stopped, frisked,
sometimes harassed, for no other reason
than that they are black or brown and therefore suspect.
- Although I would not call the '90s the best of times,
the worst of times, I see it as two train tracks
that dangerously went further and further apart.
- It's the time that America lost it's naiveté
and took the veil off
the underlying problems in American society.
- I marched in '63, I marched in '95,
and I'm gonna keep on marching for justice
and an even playing field for all of the American people.
- It was a decade of realignment.
We had some wins.
We had some losses.
But we redefined the collective culture of America.
- In one generation, we have moved from denying
a black man service at a lunch counter
to being a serious contender for the presidency.
- It was a seminal decade that paved the way for change
in a way that maybe no other one did
since the '60s.
- You know, we're a part of a hybrid culture,
and we can't deny that.
So in some ways,
the more obvious bi-racial identity
that I have to affirm,
African-Americans also have to affirm,
and white Americans have to affirm,
because they partake in a hybrid culture.
You know, the truth of the matter is,
is that American culture at this point,
what is truly American,
is black culture to a large degree.
Flip on the television set.
And it's had a profound influence
on this entire nation, and it has to be affirmed.