Milton Grimes, the man who served as the lead attorney for Rodney King 30 years ago has been paying close attention to the events that led to the death of George Floyd.
Grimes was responsible for winning a $3.8 million civil claim on behalf of King, the Black motorist who became the most infamous victim of police brutality in the history of America.
There was nothing new about what happened to King on March 3, 1991. Blacks in Southern California and throughout America had consistently suffered brutality and racism at the hands of police officers with regularity.
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What changed everything in 1991 when those four LAPD officers were having their way with an unarmed defenseless Black man was a white amateur filmmaker George Holliday who recorded the event on his then cutting-edge Sony Handycam 8-millimeter video camera.
“I had been receiving complaints from Black clients all the time, but I never could verify or document any of it, but Rodney King changed all of that, ” Grimes explained to Inglewood Today in an exclusive interview.
March 3, 1991 may not have ever been known if not for Holliday, it became the world’s first viral video, and he became an early example of citizen journalism documenting police brutality in the most graphic and disturbing terms.
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That was a time before police body cams, cell phones and social media crossed the thin blue line that has sacredly protected police from their worst behavior for decades. Holliday exposed it to the world.
King’s beating sparked the 1992 civil unrest, an event which Grimes said he understood how young Black people felt at the time.
Those four LAPD officers who beat Rodney King within inches of his life escaped punishment three years later with 12 Simi Valley jurors acquitted them in 1994.
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“That was a mule kick. I felt like I got hit by a Mack Truck, ” explained Grimes of the verdict. He blamed the Los Angeles District Attorney which allowed for the case to be moved to Simi Valley.
A month after the nation and world witnessed the cold blooded murder of Floyd by then Minneapolis Derek Chauvin, Grimes was accompanied by his 14-year old daughter for a protest march in of all places Simi Valley.
Mike Judge, a Simi Valley City Council member and 30-year police veteran posted on Facebook in advance of the march “Wanna stop the riots? Mobilize the septic tank trucks, put a pressure cannon on em… hose em down…. the end.” He apologized later, but for Grimes’s apprehension about Simi Valley was being verified. After all this was the same place that made him feel like he had been kicked by a mule.
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“This was important because I wanted to see where the Simi Valley jury was from. I saw four or five white men declaring support for the police. Marchers were relegated to the side walk and then all of a sudden, I recognized that white people were waving in support of us. Then an older white man declared this police brutality has to stop, ” added Grimes.
Grimes and his daughter both became emotional during a march that consisted of one percent Black people. They would attend another two weeks later in North Hollywood.
After jurors in a Minneapolis court room convicted former police Derek Chauvin of the murder of George Floyd on April 20 it galvanized a nation of advocates against police brutality and it also brought back candid memories of Los Angeles motorist Rodney King.
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Both Floyd and King were large Black men who measured 6’4 and 6’3, respectively. The two of them also had a history of drug addiction. They both became the symbol of police brutality and racial injustice.
Collectively albeit separately, they are individuals whose fate at the hands of police inspired all of us to go beyond burning down the neighborhood and transforming our activism into legislative change.
We are still quite far from getting there, but the beating of Rodney King and the killing of George Floyd is pressuring the scales of justice that has always been tilted towards injustice.
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“I’ve been following what’s been happening all across the nation. The Chauvin verdict is just a drop in the bucket, but because of George Floyd we are at a better place. Simi Valley gave me a sense of hope that perhaps we can end racism, ” Grimes concluded.Copyright © 2023, Los Angeles Times | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | CA Notice of Collection | Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
Rodney King speaks during a news conference in Los Angeles pleading for the end to the rioting that plagued the city in 1992 after four police officers were found not guilty beating case. Attorney Barry Kowalski later won convictions against two of the officers.
Attorney Barry F. Kowalski was often considered the best of the best of the Department of Justice’s many prosecutors, who for decades chased hate and advocated for civil rights across the country.
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Kowalski, along with former Assistant U.S. Atty. Steven D. Clymer, was the handpicked prosecutor in one of the defining civil rights cases of the 1990s: the trial of four Los Angeles police officers charged in the 1991 beating of Rodney King, an incident that ultimately inflamed the city.
Kowalski was the Justice Department’s assistant chief in the criminal section in its civil rights division when a grainy video emerged of four white police officers beating King with batons and kicking him while he was on the ground after being stopped for speeding.
But an all-white jury in Simi Valley found the officers not guilty of excessive force and hours after the verdicts, rioting broke out in the streets of Los Angeles. More than 50 people died, and there was an estimated $1.5 billion in damages. As the Watt riots had done, the street violence exposed the racial fissures that crisscrossed L.A.
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After the not guilty verdicts, Kowalski moved to L.A. from Virginia as a prosecutor in the federal civil rights trial that followed. His work and that of other Justice Department lawyers resulted in the indictment of four police officers charged with violating King’s civil rights.
King struggled with substance abuse in the years that followed and was in and out of jail. He was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool June 2012. He was 47.
Along with Clymer, Kowalski convinced the jury that the officers — whom he called “bullies with badges” — had lied about what had happened that night. Two officers were convicted and sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison. He went on to prosecute police brutality cases in Texas, Tennessee and Puerto Rico.
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Kowalski, once called “Justice’s Pit Bull, ” died June 30 at his home in Arlington, Va., from complications of two strokes, his wife, Katie Zimmerman Kowalski, told the New York Times. He was 74.
Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Law School and a former prosecutor, said that through Kowalski’s efforts, “civil rights really became a reality. He protected people who had been victimized and who had no one else to protect them, or at least advocate in their name. He was not afraid of the big case. He took justice personal.”
Kowalski was born Aug. 26, 1944, in Hartford, Conn. His father, Frank, was a former congressman and his mother, Helen, an artist and homemaker.
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He grew up in Washington, where his family settled after his father was elected to Congress in 1958. He worked briefly for Vice President Hubert Humphrey between his junior and senior years at Brown University, where he earned a degree in political science in 1966. In 1973, he received his juris doctor from Catholic University Law School.
Kowalski, a former Marine who served a year in Vietnam, once said that if he hadn’t joined the Marine Corps, he would’ve been a hippie.
“I am a very unconventional lawyer. I am a lawyer who prosecutes criminal civil rights cases. I don’t prosecute drug dealers and bank robbers, violent crime and corporate crime. I prosecute those who violate the United States Constitution and commit crimes in the course of it. So that’s a rather hippie-like kind of lawyer I guess, right?...although I do it in a gray suit, ” he said.
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In one of his first cases, Kowalski investigated the abduction and death of Michael Donald, a 19-year-old black man who was kidnapped in Mobile, Ala. Donald was found hanging from a tree, his body beaten. His throat slashed.
Kowalski’s expertise and hard work resulted in the convictions of two Ku Klux Klan members: James Knowles, who was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty, and Henry Hays, who was convicted of murder and executed in the electrical chair in 1997.
Donald’s mother later filed a civil suit against the United Klans of America in 1987, and the organization was found liable in the death of her son and ordered to pay $7 million, causing the UKA to go bankrupt.
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And in 2000, 32 years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he led the investigation that concluded there was no evidence proving that there was a conspiracy to kill King.
But his career successes
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