1. 'Tasha: "Always Energetic, Positive, Full of Energy"
2. Soon Ja Du: "She Had a Good Life in Korea"
3. March 16, 1991: Not Just Another Saturday in South Central
4. People v. Du: The Trial
5. Judge Joyce Karlin: "I Would Dream of Closing Arguments "
6. The People v. Du: Sentencing
7. Whose Fire This Time?
Epilogue: Justice?
Brenda Stevenson is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her books include The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke and Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South, selected as an Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America.
"Contested Murder makes it clear the tragedy inside the Empire
Market and the violence that followed in South L.A. and Koreatown
should be remembered by all Angelenos as a turning point in their
history."--Los Angeles Times
"A child's murder, a judicial outrage, and a city on fire: Brenda
Stevenson unlocks the secret history of the 1992 Los Angeles riots
in this meticulously fair but disturbing account of the Latasha
Harlins case."--Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz
"As an element of the Los Angeles Riots, the shooting of Latasha
Harlins finally gets the attention it deserves from renowned
historian Brenda Stevenson. Stevenson gives us fascinating and full
portraits of each of the three women involved: the teenage
African-American victim, the Korean immigrant shooter, and the
Jewish American judge. She traces all three lives deep into the
past and forward to that fateful moment in the South Central
convenience store in
March 1991. A gripping read and a revealing perspective on the
varied and intersecting lives of American women at century's
end."--Ellen Carol DuBois, author of Through Women's Eyes: An
American
History
"Not since J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground has a book so
sympathetically and powerfully traced personal and group histories
to recover the roots of an American tragedy. To Lukas's elucidation
of race, ethnicity, religion, and class, Stevenson's excavation of
the lives of three women-the decedent, the defendant, and the
judge-adds a gendered understanding that explains anew the eruption
of violence in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992 and the traumas
of
inequality in the modern United States."--Stephen Aron, Chair,
Autry Institute for the Study of the American West
"The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins is a deeply moving account
of the shooting death of a Black female teenager at the hands of a
Korean female shopkeeper. With an elegant and elegiac tone,
Stevenson charts the biographies of those involved in the outcome
of the case-including the presiding Jewish female judge. Stevenson
also plumbs the cultural and historical contexts of race, class,
and gender in the lives of the women and men who were brought
together by the caprice of history as well as its seemingly
inevitable designations. She has encompassed all of our histories
in an epic manner and written about an episode in our national
history to which we
should all pay attention."--Lois W. Banner, University of Southern
California
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