Rodney King, like Rosa Parks, was icon of ongoing struggle for racial justice in America

Few would consider nominating Rodney Glen King for civil-rights sainthood. He was, of course, no Rosa Parks, the black woman who politely yet firmly refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus in 1955 and thereby ignited the modern civil-rights movement and the landmark civil-rights laws of the 1960s that began to close this nation’s wide civil-rights divide.

After all, crime, alcoholism and illicit drug use clouded much of King’s life. He was on parole for a robbery conviction on that fateful night of March 3, 1991, when after attempting to elude police, he was captured, and four Los Angeles officers clobbered him more than 50 times with their batons, kicking him and Tazing him for the world to see on grainy but powerful videotape. King suffered a fractured facial bone, a broken ankle and numerous bruises and lacerations.

But for many, he — like Rosa Parks — has nonetheless become an accidental icon of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in this country. His beating and the deadly rioting sparked by the initial acquittal of the LA officers attach a legacy to his name that endures in the aftermath of his death this week and likely will endure for years and decades to come.

King was found dead Sunday at age 47 at the bottom of a swimming pool at his Rialto, Calif., home. Initial reports indicate no foul play was involved in the drowning and that his death was accidental, occurring after King had been smoking marijuana and drinking heavily. Final toxicology results and autopsy findings likely won’t be released for four to six more weeks.

Regardless of the final word on King’s death, a few fleeting moments of his life — the short but savage beating he endured 21 years ago — made an important and indelible imprint on the civil-rights time line of this country. His unintended legacy is multifold: King’s ordeal raised the collective national consciousness on racial profiling, fairness in the American justice system and the plight of the African-American adult male.

A march for Rodney?

Ironically, hours after his death, organizers of a Sunday march in New York City to protest that city’s “Stop and Frisk” policy had contemplated repurposing the march to honor King. The march, however, went on as planned to protest the policy that gives NYC police officers near carte-blanche leniency in stopping and frisking any and all who raise even the most remote suspicion of criminal activity. Some 300 groups endorsed the march, and tens of thousands participated to draw attention to the racial prejudice they see inherent in the policy. In 2011, nearly 90 percent of those stopped in the Big Apple were black or Latino.

Despite the continued presence of racial profiling in New York and elsewhere, Rodney King did make a difference. As current LA Police Chief Charlie Beck said after King’s death, his beating served as a springboard for reform. “What happened on that cool March night over two decades ago forever changed me and the organization I love. His legacy should not be the struggles and troubles of his personal life but the immensely positive change his existence wrought on this city and its police department.” The ripple effects of that change have reverberated in cities large and small nationwide.

Change has happened as well in U.S. courts in highly racially-charged cases. In King’s case, it took deadly and destructive rioting to bring the guilty LA police officers to eventual conviction. In the latest national controversy over race and justice, the Trayvon Martin shooting death in Sanford, Fla., in February, it took only peaceful rallies and dialogue to find probable cause that white Hispanic George Zimmerman criminally killed the unarmed teen and to charge Zimmerman with murder.

Black man’s plight

Finally, the Rodney King beating and its aftermath have placed a sharper focus on the plight of the American black man. The plight remains very real: One in four black men in the United States in the age group 20-29 is under the control of the criminal justice system — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — African-American males have the highest unemployment rate and black-American men have the lowest life expectancy of any American demographic group.

Over the past two decades, that plight remains but at least many states and communities have acknowledged its presence and have initiated programs to lessen it. In the Buckeye State, for example, the Ohio Commission on African-American Males has been formed to identify and promote strategies and policies to foster improvements in issues affecting black men.

Despite such progress in closing this country’s racial gap since King’s 1991 beating, insidious racism remains a thread — albeit a weaker one — in the fabric of this nation. With continued progress in the issues that King’s ordeal raised, we may yet see a day when Americans can answer King’s cry, “Can we all get along?”, with a collective and emphatic yes.