I remember talking about them in school a lot. I went to a pretty mixed raced school at the time. I'd love to hear more about why it was so significant to you MIR. I remember them well but there isn't much long term impact for me
The larger significance to me was for the first time I was forced to take a look at race and the role it played in the country and in my life. Because of a combination of my age and where I spent the previous six years of my life, I was kind of ignorant of such things. Black people, at the time were such a non-entity in Garden City, that I was on a racial island. There were lots of conversations about the Hispanic and the Southeast Asian communities but I had nothing. The Rodney Kind video, and subsequent evidence of how the officers viewed King and black people in general, made me scared, the verdict made me angry. The only outlet I had was to go home after working at Dillon's every day and watching television.
Honestly it was the event that led me to explore what it was to be black in America, it pushed me out of a shell; to use a term from today, I got woke, real quick.