Actor Roger Guenveur Smith Tackles Rodney King

Roger Guenveur Smith

Roger Guenveur Smith
photo: Ani Yapundzhyan

Roger Guenveur Smith has spent a career going after intense characters-complex personalities that perhaps ease his own complexities. In theatre and on film he portrayed Huey P. Newton-capturing Newton’s nuances, quirks and neuroticism in chillingly accurate form. His other credits include plays on Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frederick Douglass, among others.

This week, I saw him tackle Rodney King– and more accurately, the fears, attitudes and feelings of the world as they understood Rodney King.

With the sound of a police radio preceding  “Can’t we all get along?” on loop,  Smith steps on the small stage and begins his one-man monologue with a powerful quote from Geto Boys’ Willie D:

 “Fuck Rodney King in his ass When I see the motherfucka, I’mma blast Boom in his head, boom, boom, in his back, just like that…”

The actual song itself sounds like a Public Enemy-style track-the beat, the intense rhythm, the style of rap. But Smith is vocalizing it theatrically. The words are clear, loud, and hit home.

A couple of people walk in late and take their seats in the front row, Smith stares at them and improvises, “Fuck y’all, too.”

Afterward, in a discussion proceeding the monologue, an older white lady in the crowd will say that she was repulsed by the hostility of those words yet attracted to them at the same time.

“Thank you for your repulsion,” Smith will respond.

Back to the monologue that transports Smith through the many layers of Rodney Glen King’s persona.

A major, ironic point that surfaces again and again is King’s love of the water-Rodney-“Glen” as he was known as a youngster-had an affection for the water-his father taught him how to swim up above the Altadena reservoir. His father, whom King found drowned in a bathtub, taught him how to swim in an Altadena reservoir.

Smith weaves in and out of the seemingly conflicting parts of King’s existence.

He touched on King’s prior criminal history before the LAPD beating. Referring to a 1989 convenience store robbery in which King knocked over a pie rack, he says, “Assault with a deadly apple pie, you know that’s an All-American offense.”

As he begins to speak of the night of King’s beating, he mentions what King and his two friends were listening to as they drove around that night: “NWA, that would be cliche. You were playing De La Soul, from the soul.”

“They said that you lose more blood than any man had ever lost and lived on.”

In a Gil-Scott Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”-eque manner, Smith exclaims:

“Your’e spitting blood like that great white whale in that great white novel by that great white novelist.”

11 skull fractures.

Then he speaks the obvious truth:

“You went viral before viral was viral…before you know it, Rodney King, you’re the first reality star.”

Focusing on the social implications that went beyond the actual beating, the events afterward that fucked up the entire country, he goes down the list of the victims of the LA Riots that followed:

-15 year old Latasha Harlins, who was shot in the head by a Korean liquor store owner while attempting to buy orange juice.

-Edward Song Lee, 18, who was mistaken for a looter and shot and killed by other Korean-Americans.

-A 68-year old man who was strangled to death.

“Rodrigo Rivas, such a beautiful Shakespearean name. Rodrigo Rivas, shot down by the national guard.”

“John Doe #50, burned to a crisp in the back of a Pep Boys. They don’t know if his name was Manny, Moe or Jack.”

After poignantly telling the stories of these victims of murder during the riots, Smith says,

“Let it go, Glen…let it go…”

Is he speaking of the guilt that King probably carried with him in the aftermath and after so many people lost their lives?

Two dates are inscribed along the pool wall in which King drowned: 3/3/91, the day King was beaten, and 4/29/92, the day a jury acquitted three of the four officers who beat him.

“Let it go, Glen…let it go…”

In the discussion following his monologue, Smith says to the audience: “This is not so much a performance as it is a prayer. Thanks, Rodney King for providing the scripture….and there’s things that he meant to say that he never got to say, things that he wanted to say that he couldn’t get to, his brain wouldn’t make the connect, but his heart was there. And isn’t it ironic that he had an abnormally enlarged heart? And he shared it with us.”

At his death, King’s heart weighed 480 grams, normal person of his stature’s heart weight is 360 grams.

“I think that Rodney King’s speech on May Day 1992 was one of the great American speeches. It’s right up there with the other King…I think that what he left us was a fundamental guide for survival…what a magnanimous statement coming from a man who had the shit beat out of him.”

Rodney King was born in 1965, same year that Malcolm X died, same year as the Watts Riots, and year that Bill Cosby became the first black man to win an Emmy.

King died on “Father’s Day night”

Rodney-King-2-500-Ani

Actor Roger G Smith playing Rodney King
photos by: Ani Yapundzhyan

“I knew that he had an affinity for water,” Smith continues in the discussion,  “there was a cover story on him in the LA Times Magazine some years ago, that was a beautiful picture of him with a surfboard on the beach, and it was all about him surfing. and I knew that his father taught him how to swim, I didn’t know that he skied, he was a skier, but yes, to have met his fate in tragically the same way that his father met his fate as well, his father drowned in a bathtub, and he found him. And he drowned in a swimming pool, on Father’s Day.

It’s a tremendously tragic circumstance. I hope that there’s a lesson there somewhere, I don’t know what that lesson might be, but I know that again, he’s left us with a tremendous legacy of Wisdom and I also think that the beating that began on March 3rd, 1991, was not complete until Father’s Day 2012, that was the final blow. It may have been self-inflicted, but it was part of the same process.”

Ronald King, Rodney’s father, drank himself to death in a bathtub at the family home. Rodney struggled with alcohol his whole life, most of his troubles with the law stemming from it.

Roger Smith finishes his monologue with movements that are as powerful as the words he has now ceased to speak:

He is standing in silence on a white mat. He begins making surfing motions, a smile on his face, as if riding the waves. After a few moments, he is drowning, his face becoming scared and haggard.

As he takes his leave, Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools” booms from the speakers:

“Pour up (drank, drank), head shot (drank, drank)

Sit down (drank, drank), stand up (drank, drank)

Pass out (drank, drank), wake up (drank, drank)

Faded (drank, drank), faded (drank, drank)

Now I done grew up

Round some people living their life in bottles

Granddaddy had the golden flask

Back stroke every day in Chicago…

I got a swimming pool full of liquor and they dive in it

Pool full of liquor I’ma dive in it”

As I walked back to my car after the show, shook, I felt it appropriate to put my Gil-Scott playlist on shuffle.

What do you suppose was the first song that came on?

“The bottle.”

“See that black boy over there runnin’ scared

His old man in a bottle

He done quit his 9 to 5

He drink full time and now he’s livin’ in a bottle.”

Rodney King loved the water. He felt alive in the water and lost his life in the water. The drowning in his swimming pool was maybe his final release from a lifetime of drowning in a bottle.

written by Ani Yapundzhyan

/photos by: Ani Yapundzhyan

twitter.com/anigza

Below are some clips of Roger Guenveur Smith and the various roles he’s played. He is indeed an actor’s actor..

Roger Guenveur Smith playing Black Panther leader Huey P Newton

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpLpvAhZinc

Roger Guenveur Smith playing Abolitionist leader Fredrick Douglass

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUPsfRSomj4

Roger Guenveur Smith playing Big Willie in the Spike Lee movie He’s Got Game

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PisRLqlDq58

A Few Thoughts on the Passing of Rodney King…He Symbolized Naive Belief in a Broken Justice System

The news of Rodney King being found dead in his swimming pool Sunday morning came as a shock. The man who became the face of the ’92 LA Uprisings was seen damn near everywhere over the past couple of months as many of us looked back at what progress we made or didn’t make on the 20th anniversary of LA exploding in the wake of 4 LA officers shown on film beating King being acquitted.

King seemed like a man who had turned a corner after years of a troubled past. He seemed like a man on a mission. Since early April of this year, we saw him doing interview after interview from coast to coast. In some he was seen and heard promoting his new book  ‘The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption ‘. In others he was discussing his prominent role in the MTV/VH1 documentary  Uprising: Hip Hop and the LA Riots. In still others he was weighing in on the recent slaying of Trayvon Martin and how that was impacting race relations in comparison to what he went through.

King appeared on national news shows, syndicated radio shows and local outlets..For the most part he seemed upbeat and centered. He seemed focus and on his way to doing some big things… It was good to see him in good spirits moving onward and upwards. Many like myself were rooting for him.. We wanted Rodney King to win.

We wanted King to win, because the system that he wound up challenging failed him and it failed us miserably on so many levels. It’s hard for people of younger generations to really understand what it meant when we saw the horrific footage of King being brutally beaten LA police officers after a traffic stop in ’91.

Despite its unsettling nature and the anger it conjured up, the video gave us all a sense of hope. At long last all those stories Black and Brown folks told of over the top police brutality which were routinely dismissed, said to be outright lies & exaggerations or somehow justifiable police actions was finally caught on tape. The whole world got to see the truth before their eyes. We felt vindicated and we knew those cops were gonna pay.

Rodney King and that tape of his beating had many of us buying into the belief that justice would be served. Those responsible would be punished and substantial changes would come within LAPD and police departments all over the country. On April 29 1992, the acquittal of those 4 officers moved Rodney King from a symbol of Hope to a symbol Naivety. Sadly he underscored that naivety when he stood before the world as LA was being burned down by folks angered by the verdict and asked in a halting voice.. Can We Get Along?

Him asking that famous question had many of us concluding that we can’t trust the system nor could we trust Rodney King to toe the line for the people when we needed it most… It disappointed and angered us  that King still was believing in the justice system when were all given a clear message it would not ever work for us.. It certainly didn’t work for him..

For those of us who lived in LA or the West Coast in general, seemingly not a year went by that we didn’t hear a news report about King getting arrested for driving drunk, crashing his car or getting shot at.. Many around the country became got wind of how deeply troubled King was when he showed up on a couple of reality TV shows including; Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. At first the incidents left us shaking our heads asking how could King be messing up after all he been through?  As we matured, we began to see King as a man who needed help.

Those who knew him, they say  Rodney King never truly got over the beating. He always seemed ill at ease as if he was in search of  something like he was under duress.  I recall the first time I met King. It was at a movie premier in Oakland.. I was struck at how large of man he was. At the time he was jovial and had a bright smile, but he seemed haunted. One can only wonder how much help he really got in the aftermath of that beatings.

In recent years I began to wonder if all the widespread media coverage of his transgressions was simply par for the course or payback for King exposing how sadistic LAPD could be.. At times it seems like the message being sent to the world at large with the highlighting of King’s brushes with the law was; he deserved that vicious beating. He’s a constant screw up and LAPD and the police in general did nothing wrong.

Last month 17-year-old Alan Bluford, 2 weeks from graduation, was killed by Oakland police who claimed he shot them. Investigation showed the police officer shot himself and lied. He’s still on the force with pay..This exemplifies the type of progress made since Rodney King

20 years after Rodney King we haven’t seen a whole lot of improvement with the police.  Since the King beating we’ve seen numerous video tapes of police beatings and even killings with no punishment at all.. The one exception might be the cops recently sent to jail for murdering two men on the Danzinger Bridge in New Orleans during the Katrina floods, but nowhere else.. and even then alot of that was the result of some serious investigative reporting by white journalist who would not let the coverup around that case go.

Everywhere else things have been ramped up.. Police killing Black & Brown people under questionable circumstances are all too common from Amadou Diallo to Sean Bell to Kenneth Walker, Nathaniel Sanders, Danroy “D.J.” Henry, Anette Garcia, Daniel Rocha to Oscar Grant.  More recently we’ve had the slaying of Rekia Boyd NFL star David Turner, Kenneth Chamberlain, Kendrac McDade and Alan Bluford to name a few, at the hands of police.. There’s a long list of names with little or no improvement within America’s police departments or her justice system in terms of prosecuting and bringing out of control cops to justice.

Even, in Los Angeles the place where Rodney King’s beating was supposed to spark improvement within LAPD we see that police killing civilians is up a whopping 70%. There was the revelation of a group of rogue LA cops recently suspended called the Jump Out Boys.. This is all on top of LA’s Rampart Scandal which was one of the largest police corruption cases in the country, leading to the disbanding of the departments CRASH Unit.

One would think after the King beating we would’ve witnessed a sea change of improvements within the police departments. sadly what we’ve seen is fast track to enhanced, new and improved forms brutality and harassment. Since the killing of Trayvon Martin we’ve had over 30 Black people alone killed by police. That speaks volumes.

Rodney King

Rodney King started off being a symbol of hope for better days to come.. In his death which ironically came on the same day we saw massive silent marches in New York City to protest their outlandish Stop-and Frisk program, King came to symbolize that even when atrocities by the police are committed in plain view for all to see there will be no justice.. As a fitting reminder to this assertion, yesterday’s large peaceful march ended with violent arrests. NYPD used the tactic of intimidation and force to break up the large groups of protestors.

Hopefully Rodney King is at peace for real..As for the rest of us the struggle continues in a very real way.. King should be reminder the systems of oppression never sleep and never forgets.

written by Davey D