Leonard Pitts Jr.: 'Can we all get along?'

There was always something hapless about Rodney King. He entered the nation's consciousness -- and its conscience -- as a shambling drunk, an unemployed black construction worker who tried to outrun L.A. police rather than be arrested for drunk driving.

The result was a police beating, surreptitiously captured on video, so profoundly vicious that the chief of police himself said it made him sick. In 1992, when a suburban jury, bleached of black jurors, acquitted four white police officers of any crime, the City of Angels went to hell, erupting in one of the worst urban riots in modern American history.

Haplessness thereafter attached to King as he bounced in and out of the news for domestic violence, drunken run-ins with police, driving into a tree under the influence of PCP. Even the manner of his death Sunday has that familiar odor of haplessness: King is believed to have accidentally drowned in his backyard pool.

If true, isn't that about what you would have expected? But there was a moment, a signature moment, when Rodney Glen King was not hapless. You remember it, of course: Los Angeles is burning, the death toll is mounting, property damage is approaching $1 billion, and there comes King, pleading for peace and asking a question deceptive in its simplicity: "Can we all get along?"

There was something almost unforgivably earnest about that question. It came from the heart, and some of us did not know how to process that. Perhaps that's why they removed it from the realm of serious things, made it a cliché, the punch line to a joke no one had told.

There is a reason Shakespeare put wisdom into the mouths of fools. The fool could get away with saying what others could not.

No, King was not a fool. But he was taken less than seriously -- in part because he asked the question that others would not. Yet that question is the defining question of the American experiment. It follows us down 236 years of slavery, restrictive housing covenants, lynchings, suffragettes, Trails of Tears, English Only debates, No Irish Need Apply signs, Stonewall uprisings, sexism, anti-Semitism, racism, riot, wreck and ruin.

King, a more reflective man than stereotype -- and his own behavior -- would lead you to believe, understood the symbolism his life and that question had conferred upon him.

"I sometimes feel like I'm caught in a vise," he told the Los Angeles Times earlier this year. "Some people feel like I'm some kind of hero. Others hate me. They say I deserved it. Other people, I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to the destruction, like I'm a fool for believing in peace."

But if the man who believes we must all get along is a fool, then you really have to wonder: What word is left for the man who does not?

Email: lpitts@miamiherald.com.

THE MIAMI HERALD

This story was originally published June 21, 2012 at 12:26 AM with the headline "Leonard Pitts Jr.: 'Can we all get along?'."