The TV camera pans the crowd of protestors outside Parker Center, the old LAPD headquarters on Los Angeles Street. It is 1991, three days after the beating of Rodney King.
Mark Ridley-Thomas is among them.
“His time has ended,” he declares of the LAPD’s notorious leader at the time, Chief Daryl Gates. Hours earlier, Ridley-Thomas was part of a delegation that met with Gates during a “candid exchange” with “sharp disagreement.”
“We wanted to look him in the eye and make it clear that he knew where we stood.”
For more than four decades, Ridley-Thomas was in the middle of some of the biggest political battles in L.A. He didn’t limit himself to local issues.
Audio from the Pacifica Radio Archives features Ridley-Thomas at a 1980s-era protest outside a Century City fundraiser for President Ronald Reagan. He rails against Reagan’s support of the apartheid regime in South Africa and against the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government’s human rights abuses.
“We have to say no to apartheid as well as say no to intervention in Central America,” he shouts into a bullhorn.
A jury found Ridley-Thomas guilty of corruption
Ridley-Thomas is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court today for corruption. In March, a jury found the former county supervisor guilty of conspiring to support a county contract for USC in exchange for one of the school’s deans providing his son a full scholarship and faculty job. The dean also helped funnel money from a Ridley-Thomas political fund to one operated by his son through the university.
Ridley-Thomas, 68, has appealed his conviction.
To be sure, there have been harsh words for Ridley-Thomas in the wake of his conviction.
Ridley-Thomas “defrauded the people of the county,“ U.S….
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