Tournament of Roses Diversity Remains a Work in Progress

Summary

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PASADENA - Twenty years ago, this holiday season, the Southland stewed in a toxic slow cooker of racial animosity.

The videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black Altadena motorist, by four white Los Angeles police officers in March 1991 threatened to turn the simmer up to a boil.

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Extract

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Tournament of Roses Diversity Remains a Work in Progress

But in Pasadena, the Tournament of Roses marched merrily on, as it had every year for the last hundred or so, projecting a vision of suburban utopia.

"They'd have this idealized image of an all-white, very antiseptic, Midwestern old-fashioned community," former Mayor Rick Cole said.

In reality, racial tensions in Pasadena ran high. The city had recently paid out a reported $1.2 million in a police brutality case - involving white officers and black activist Michael Zinzun...

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