Story highlights Peniel Joseph: If Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and dozens of now-familiar names tell us anything, it's that we still have lessons left unlearned from the Los Angeles uprising in 1992

Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Political Values and Ethics and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently "Stokely: A Life." The views expressed here are his.

(CNN) This week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, which exploded following the acquittal of four LAPD officers charged with the brutal videotaped beating of black motorist Rodney King. The riot, which activists characterized as an urban rebellion, triggered echoes of the past with an updated twist: Similar allegations of police brutality had sparked massive unrest in Harlem, Watts, Newark, and Detroit during the 1960s. In Los Angeles, the instigating incident aired on national television in a manner that anticipated the technologically-connected era of Black Lives Matter and the upsurge of racial violence in 21st-century Ferguson, Baltimore, and other cities.

Peniel Joseph

While the video recording of Rodney King may have been a forerunner to what we have watched unfold live (on screens large and small) with the Black Lives Matter movement, it's also clear that we need to take a harder look at what happened in L.A. 25 years ago. Because if Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and dozens of now-familiar names tell us anything, it's that we still have lessons left unlearned from the Los Angeles uprising in 1992.

In an era before social media and smart phones, most Americans relied on newspaper, radio, and television reports to understand the scope of the unrest that gripped a panicked city for several days after the April 29 not guilty verdict of four white officers.

Arsenio Hall, the popular black late night television host, insisted on taping his show at First AME Church over the objections of studio executives skittish over outbreaks of violence that law enforcement seemed unable to contain. During the hour-long taping, Hall presided over one of the most powerful hours of television produced during the 1990s, opening the show with an excerpt of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at 1963's March On Washington, interviewing Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, and trying to parse the connections people were just beginning to make among racial violence, poverty, the drug war, and institutional racism.

The riot's second night coincided with the finale of "The Cosby Show," the long running sitcom about an upper middle class black family that became for several seasons the most watched show in the nation. The show, which premiered during Ronald Reagan's first term, inaugurated the nation's initial flirtation with the post-racial ideal that would be in full bloom with the election of Barack Obama. Los Angeles' explosion of violence cast doubt on the idea of colorblindness a quarter of a century ago, just as Ferguson permanently exploded this myth in our time.

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