The infamous beatdown.

Apparently Rodney King had been smoking weed and drinking and he fell into his swimming pool and drowned.  The cause célèbre from 1991/92 is dead at 47 and the Associated Press runs an article about him titled “Rodney King’s plea measures his lasting meaning.”

Of course, the article brings Trayvon Martin together with Rodney King:

Twenty years later, Rodney King’s simple yet profound question still lingers, from the street where Trayvon Martin died all the way to the White House:

“Can we all get along?”

And it came from an unemployed construction worker who, through an accident of history, now stands among the unforgettable names of America’s racial journey — names like Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and even larger figures who died too young.

Before Mr. King’s famous beat down he had three children, an ex-wife, and was sent to jail after he robbed a convenience store.  What really stuck me was the note Mr. King wrote his judge after he was sent to jail:

‘I have seriously been thinking about what happen and I think if it is possible that you can give me another chance, your honor. I have a good job and I have two fine kid who wish me home. Have so much at stake to lose if I don’t get that chance. My job and family awaits me. So please reconsider your judgment, your honor. The sky my witness and God knows.

Rodney King would have been 25 years old when he wrote that.

It’s tough to see how any person could live in a First World nation and succeed in life with those kind of literacy skills.

And so it was his entire life that led him and four LAPD officers to their rendezvous with Fate and the video taping of Mr. King getting whacked repeatedly for resisting arrest.

I remember being in high school watching his beating and wondering what in the hell was going on in California?  Then, after the criminal trial, the LA riots began.

Trayvon.

My parents were living in Washington, D.C. when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and, like the LA riots, blacks living in the city set fire to their environs and caused great damage.  I heard many stories from them about their time in the nation’s capitol when the city burned.  In the case of Los Angeles, 53 people would die and over $1 billion in damage was done.

Both the MLK Jr. and LA riots were the result of pent up frustrations in the black community but, ultimately, they did more harm than good.  Many part’s of Washington, D.C. (like LA) remained vacant after fires swept through the areas and all the blacks did was burn down their own communities and, in the case of the Rodney King riots, earned the animosity of Korean shopkeepers who were serving the areas.

After the Martin-Zimmerman shooting Rodney King injected his thoughts:

“It’s about bullying a black man,” says King, 47, who is traveling the country to promote his memoir, The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption. “This time, a young man was bullied to death. I’m still alive; Trayvon Martin is not here.”

What links King and Martin, aside from both being black, is that they appeared to have little discipline to walk the straight-and-narrow in life.  Judging by Trayvon Martin’s Twitter account name, “NO_LIMIT_NIGGA” and some of his Tweets it was only a matter of time before he, like King, tried to rob a store or commit some other crime and ended up in jail.

It could very well be that had a little more discipline been present in King and Martin’s life things would have turned out differently for them.

But the message of “Can we all get along” is what people will remember, not why the forces in King and Martin’s lives carried them to their Destiny.

Washington, D.C. riots in 1968.