Riots are the result of the unheard trying to be heard so I get it. People are angry and frustrated. But we need to find a way to be constructive with that anger and frustration. Not destructive
Every location where there has been a riot has set us back 50-100 years, and then
led to black residential dislocation and gentrification.
We burn down our own vital institutions to "send a message"? (see below)
And the firms that are brought in to reconstruct the damaged areas are owned
by those from outside of our communities. They economically profit from our "frustration."
Los Angeles Journal; Riot Leveled a Font of Black Culture
By SETH MYDANS,
Published: August 5, 1992
LOS ANGELES, July 27—
Fifty years of accumulated wisdom burned with the Aquarian Bookshop, one of the nation's oldest black-owned bookstores, and its owner, considering its loss, has come to the conclusion that there is no lesson to be learned from the Los Angeles riot.
On a final visit to the ashes of his bookstore in search of some memento of his half-century of labor, the owner, Dr. Alfred Ligon, found only one water-damaged magazine to take away with him, a copy of a socialist publication he had never cared to read.
The bookshop, with its 5,000 volumes, burned on April 30, the second day of the riot. When he heard that it was burning, Dr. Ligon, who is a physician, told his wife: "There's no need to go down there now. There's nothing we can do."
Three months later, the owner, who is 86 years old, has come to view his loss philosophically.
"I understand that it is wrong to make attachments to material things," he said. "We must try to reverse this attitude. Everything is for the better."
Or perhaps Dr. Ligon is simply numb.
Starting with a handful of metaphysical volumes in 1941, Dr. Ligon (pronounced lih-GON) later became an obsessive collector of small-press black literature many years before interest in black consciousness and black studies surged around the country.
Energized by the Watts riot of 1965, he made his shop an early outlet for the Harlem writers and a gathering place for the tiny community of black artists in Los Angeles.
"When I was just a teen-ager it was one of the few places where you could have access to black literature in Southern California," said Wanda Coleman, a black writer. "It was more than a bookstore; it was a community center. It was one place you could meet and talk and not feel you were being intruded on by interlopers from the dominant culture."
Los Angeles Journal; Riot Leveled a Font of Black Culture