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Can we all get along? Giordano says yes. "What has changed is more the meat and potatoes, day-to-day things," he said. "For every instance like a Trayvon Martin, I do see things routinely that indicate that we are getting along, that we are moving past racial tensions." A few weeks ago, Giordano had King on his show, which draws a largely conservative audience, to promote his new autobiography. Nobody called in to revisit the trial or to say that King deserved what happened to him. "That's progress," Giordano said. "I think the audience would have rejected him 20 years ago." But Michael Coard, a Philadelphia attorney and activist who has brought numerous police brutality charges against police, is not so hopeful. "That videotape showed white America what black America already knew," he says. "But the sad part is, it showed what white America has been and still is in denial about." Coard named several unarmed blacks who were killed by police in the past 20 years
-- Amadou Diallo, Elanor Bumpurs, Sean Bell, and others. "Nothing has changed," he said. But what about the election of the first black president? "Barack Obama had to get Secret Service protection before any other candidate," Coard responded. "He got four times the amount of death threats as George Bush. Why is that?" "The video and the verdict grabbed America by the throat and said, what are you going to do about this?" Coard said. "And the answer was, not a damn thing." Los Angeles' police department certainly changed. Years of investigations revealed corruption and "a significant number of officers in the LAPD who repetitively use excessive force," according to a federal government report. The Justice Department forced the LAPD to implement reforms. "Some good came out of a very tragic situation. There have been positive changes," said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who attended the officers' trials. "(King) himself was never viewed as a hero. But what happened in that case changed the LAPD and Los Angeles forever. And what about the nation? Did it heed King's challenge? "The jury is still out," said Dyson. He places King's question alongside some of the seminal black expressions of the past century, from W.E.B. DuBois identifying "the problem of the color line," to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" and Malcolm X's "by any means necessary." "You ain't got to be highly educated and deeply connected to a bourgeois black infrastructure," Dyson said, "to make a statement that articulates and summarizes the hopes, aspirations, dreams and determination of a people."
[Associated
Press;
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