For millions who’ve watched it since Monday, George Floyd’s final plea to the Minneapolis police officer now charged with his murder was an echo of Eric Garner’s dying words: “I can’t breathe.”
For the second time in six years, those words have become a rallying cry for protesters across the country, including hundreds in Los Angeles, where demonstrators stopped traffic on the 101 Freeway on Wednesday evening and again on Friday.
But for some black Angelenos, footage of Floyd’s killing and the civil unrest that has followed in Minneapolis are also painful reminders of a much older tape. Nearly 30 years after the police beating of Rodney King, the rage and despair remain familiar — but hope for justice has ebbed.
“I don’t feel better, and it troubles me to say that,” said Kerman Maddox, a public affairs consultant who lived near the epicenter of the uprising in 1992 and covered the riots as a reporter in South L.A. “It’s worse today than it was back then.”
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