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| Demonstrations after Sa-I-Gu | ||||||||||||||||||
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| On May 2nd, 1992, a day after the riots ended, more than 30,000 Korean-Americans marched through Koreatown, protesting the police and criminal justice system in the Rodney King trial and calling for peace. The demonstrators sought reparations for the riots, because they believed that the police department was negligent in protecting Koreatown; rich, white, and Japanese areas of Los Angeles were the major areas where the police and the national guard were sent. Moreover, police watched looters and rioters break into and rob stores, and the LAPD took no action to stop the illegal activities. More specifically, many Korean-Americans blame whites for Sa-I-Gu. |
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| Reasons | ||||||||||||||||||
| 1. Racism by a mainly white jury in the Rodney King decision provoked the riots themselves 2. Whites were negligent in "watching over" and "supervising" blacks 3. Whites keep the gap between the rich and the poor large, resulting in a large number of looters in 1992 4. The mainly white police force could have stopped or prevented the looters and rioters 5. The (mainly white) media presents a black/Korean conflict while denying a similar black/white conflict, which builds animosity against Asian-Americans |
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| However, the demonstration was marked by a surprising lack of other Asian-Americans. Besides Korean-Americans, there were some African-Americans, Latino-Americans, and a scattering of Asian-American individuals. However, most Asian-American leaders were absent. As Brenda Paik Sunoo, then the news editor of the Korea Times English edition, asked, "Where is everybody, for God's sake?" | ||||||||||||||||||
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