I’ve always been more interested in radical, aggressive, and militant forms of activism. Often times rioting is dismissed as unproductive and uncalled for. Throughout my thesis I have continuously gathered evidence for why rioting is an extremely valid form of activism. There is a lot I can tell you about how the media shapes public perception of rebellion! This thesis is my first step to analyzing riots and rebellions to understand why it happens and the relationships that show up within it. Especially socio-politically.

This was an excellent exercise in understanding how the media portrayed black voices during times of rebellion. I noticed in my research the lack of black voices and also the lack of cultural references (like songs, poetry) post riot in contrast to the 1992 LA Riots. In 1965 there was little to no platform for black voices to voice their concerns and motives.

I developed a lot of strategies to help me setup and understand exactly what my goal was.

I initially did some reading about the riot to understand the timeline, the tone—basically everything about it. It was interesting to see conflicting points of view come through. I looked to unbiased retellings and retellings that were on the side of rioters. The people tell the most candid and real stories. Police reports at this time felt extremely biased. They were also obviously extremely unemotional and lacked any sort of empathy toward the townspeople turned rioters.

I fueled most of my research through books, academic articles, interviews, and lots and lots of newspapers! This thesis is a lot of things and it does focus on quantifying the rebellion but also investigating the relationship between the media and the reporting of the riot. I wish I let the large amount of timestamps i found in my research guide my work but i couldn’t find a fit solution in time.

Most of this information is sourced from reading books and writing and noting things like timestamps and the names of the dead. It took 3 books to get the names of all 34 people who were murdered during the riot.

To organize all of the found information, i developed a rudimentary system to log the information for each day.

Specifically for the headlines, I downloaded what I could find and then logged the the headlines and other necessary/important information. I later logged everything in a more organized matter, for easier scanning and usage.

There is a lot of rich information captured about the riot, i had no issue finding resources. I did however, keep running into resources about the LA Riot in 1992. Which in reading, there are a lot of sources relating the two. This is something i’d love to investigate further.

The way it’s laid out is that I have the catalysts first, then 2 spread per day all about that day, the deaths, the damage, and the newspapers released about that day. The collages I created reflect the intensity and severity of the riot day by day.

A design system was developed to showcase found elements, from newspapers and books, throughout the different days.

The color choice needed to feel start and inflicting of violence. That’s why I chose to work with reds and bright primaries against black.

I found a topic i felt invested in and look forward to continue to investigate.