Rodney King was no Rosa Parks or MLK

Let’s face some brutal truths. The only reason King is famous is that he got a beatdown from Los Angeles cops that was recorded on video. And he got that beating, let’s recall, because he’d led police on a high-speed chase while driving under the influence. He was on parole for a robbery conviction at the time.

All that happened in 1991. The next year, several of the police officers were acquitted of beating King in what must have been only jokingly described as a “trial.” Some on the streets of Los Angeles went ballistic; rioting, arson and looting resulted.

During the riot, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was dragged from his vehicle and beaten. One of the rioters then hurled a brick into Denny’s head and danced a jig as the truck driver collapsed into unconsciousness.

Somewhere some reporter — or a group of reporters — decided that many of us were dying to hear what King had to say about the rioting. Just as many, perhaps more, of us most certainly were not, but the reporters jammed their microphones in front of King’s face anyway.

And what was King’s profound observation about the rioting and mayhem that had resulted, in some small part, from his original reckless behavior?

“Can we all get along?”

That’s NOT what I wanted to hear, not after seeing that brick crash into Denny’s head. What I wanted to hear King say was something like this:

“I insist that those rioting stop this nonsense. You’re not helping me, you’re not helping African Americans, and you’re sure as hell not helping that poor truck driver that got his brains nearly beaten out.”

There are those who think otherwise about King’s statement. For them, King must have seemed like the second coming of Rosa Parks.

“Spoken as fires of rage and frustration wrecked huge swaths of Los Angeles,” trumpeted Jesse Washington of the Associated Press, “the plea distilled centuries of racial strife into a challenge — and a goal.”

Actually, King’s “plea” sounded much more like a rhetorical question to me, and not a particularly profound one. King just had no clue what else to say out of his mouth.

Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson went even further than Washington. Commenting in a story Washington wrote about King’s “legacy,” Dyson had this to say:

“It was a critical question at a moment of crisis that forged our human bonds with one another. It grew up out of the hope and the desire, especially of people of color, to see this nation come together.”

With all due respect to Dyson, this is the most egregious piece of flapdoodle I’ve ever read in my life, and believe me, I’ve read plenty.

Do you think Dyson could convince Denny — still alive but still not quite right after that beating – that “people of color, ESPECIALLY” — desire to “see this nation come together”? Wasn’t the guy that cracked Denny in the head with that brick and nearly killed him a “person of color”?

Oh, there’s more. According to Washington, Dyson “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.’ ”

So Rodney King — whose only “contribution” to the African American struggle in this country was to get clubbed into submission by cops — is, in Dyson’s eyes, now in the same class with DuBois, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X?

That’s an outrageous insult to DuBois, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane ([email protected]“>[email protected]) is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.