Between The Lines: LAPD’s MacArthur Park Melee-A New Southern Resistance

The nation, after 25 years, found its new Birmingham moment – in Los Angeles and to nobody’s surprise. The nation’s most abusive police department found a new way to capture the national headlines, trying to shut down the immigrants’ May Day march by firing 240 “rubber bullets” indiscriminately into a crowd. Depending on whose version you follow, the demonstrators either were told to disperse, or were not told to disperse, or were told to disperse in English but not Spanish, or were told too late, after some 600 L.A. police officers (including a 100 man Metro elite unit) began bowling over everyone in sight. Marchers, news media, families and children were all in the park that day, yet in typical LAPD paramilitary fashion, the LAPD took a “command and control” posture and aggressed on the crowd in the most disgusting way since, since…Birmingham almost 25 years. Watching people who were expressing their right to assemble and protest, suddenly being beat down in the streets and fired upon, as if L.A. were Rwanda or something, took us back to another place in time. It took us back to a time, back to the South, when raw abuse of massive resistance shocked the world. This time, it wasn’t fire hoses and police dogs turned on the crowd. It was rubber bullets.

Last week’s second annual immigrant reform demonstration, which took place nationwide, showed L.A. as the new South. And it is. Just as Alabama and Mississippi were the tipping for the 20th Century civil rights movement, Los Angeles is the tipping point for the new civil rights movement—the immigrant reform movement, bolstered by the nation’s most formidable Latino political agenda. That agenda enables the immigrant voice to be magnified in the nation’s second largest city (and second largest media market). Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is the state’s second most popular politician (behind Arnold) and one of the Democratic Party’s “rising stars.” He’s also over the “promised land” for immigrants, as Los Angeles has the nation’s largest alien resident population. Mexico has essentially eroded the nation’s southern border, making it literally impossible to determine where Northern Mexico ends and Southwest USA begins.

The blue beast escapes from its dark dungeon and manages to embarrass the city again.

Meanwhile, California, a state that is perceived as liberal, but is really anti-immigrant (Prop. 187), anti-race (Prop. 209), anti-youth (Prop. 14), anti-gay (defeated Prop. 22) and anti-redemption (Three Strikes) is now on record as one of the most conservative states in the nation. And now, with the MacArthur Park melee immortalized in newsreel history, we can add—the most socially intolerant as well. All we can say, here in L.A. is, “Welcome to the new South.”