21 Leaders 2015: Brenda E. Stevenson: Los Angeles' Challenger of the Accepted History

[niyad]

21 Leaders 2015: Seven Who Interrupt Legacy Narratives

Brenda E. Stevenson: Los Angeles' Challenger of the Accepted History
Recipient of the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism





Three women, each of vastly different heritages, each with their own experiences of being an outsider in the United States, were central players that set the stage for the 1992 Los Angeles riots, touched off by videotape of the brutal police assault on Rodney King and the videotaped murder of Latasha Harlins. This is the case made by historian Brenda E. Stevenson, recipient of the 2015 Women's eNews Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism.

"This riot was boiling forth from the moment Latasha Harlins was shot," Stevenson said.
Stevenson's careful and nuanced examination of race, gender and class in the book "The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the LA Riots" provides the family history of three women most deeply involved in a moment of violence in a small grocery store in Los Angeles: the teen victim, the shooter and the trial judge. Each one's family left their homes to seek freedom and economic opportunity, one each from the U.S. South, from pre-war Europe and from South Korea.

Stevenson documents how each one's heritage and experiences gave them much in common and how their differences in family stature played a significant role in the outcome of the criminal trial of the store owner who shot unarmed Harlins point-blank but was acquitted of murder and served no jail time for a felony manslaughter conviction.

A tenured history professor on the faculty of UCLA, Stevenson is in the first generation of her family to attend college, receiving her doctorate in American history at Yale University. She grew up in a Virginia coastal town listening to her mother, Emma Gerald Stevenson, tell tales of life in South Carolina.

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http://womensenews.org/story/21-leaders-the-21st-century/141220/21-leaders-2015-seven-who-interrupt-legacy-narratives