Where were you when the People of the State of California v. Stacey C. Koon, et al., aka Rodney King, verdict was announced? Today marks the 34th anniversary of that verdict. I was 21 days from completing graduate school at Clark Atlanta University. I remember people, some Atlanta University Students, marching downtown to protest, and there being property damaged. Maynard Jackson, the mayor of Atlanta, warned students not to go back downtown. Shops put up signs that said “Black Owned.” But on May 1, students feeling disenfranchised and on the edge of losing hope in police sworn to serve and protect, and a judicial system that sees their ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, and race, went back downtown.
Jackson, an alumnus of Morehouse College, had a hard decision to make. Protect the business that likely voted for him, Atlanta’s reputation as safe, given the Olympics were coming, or allow citizens to continue to express their frustrations as they saw fit. In a capitalist system, this is a no-brainer. In that moment, Atlanta was a case study in how elected officials quietly prioritize property rights and future Olympic tourists over the First Amendment rights of Black students and residents whose lives are already treated as expendable in everyday policy.
Soon, word spread around campus that the police were coming. I lived in Stone Mountain, about 20 to 30 minutes away, depending on traffic, and decided it was in my best interest to go home! As I headed to my car, I saw police in riot gear coming down Fair Street (Atlanta Student Movement Blvd). By the time I got home and turned on the TV, this was the scene.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archives. Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library. Contributors Bridges, W. A. (William Anderson), Jr.
It was not Los Angeles I was watching, but the Atlanta University Center being tear-gassed. I was studying applied mathematics. So I didn’t have the language or data skills to examine and name how poverty, policing, and policy converged in those neighborhoods.
But now I do.
Promises and Poverty
In the analysis that follows, I return to what I love about these United States: not the myth that the Constitution has already delivered on its promises, but the stubborn insistence of people who refuse to accept that equal protection and the Bill of Rights are reserved for other people’s neighborhoods. I examine changes in the poverty rate among adults in several cities that, like Los Angeles and Atlanta, experienced civil unrest that led to more arrests and property damage. This analysis on the 34th anniversary of the Koon verdict honors my fellow schoolmates whose decision to go back downtown was not just anger, but a demand that the First Amendment’s promise of free speech and the right “peaceably to assemble” apply to Black students in Atlanta as much as to anyone else, even when their speech called out police violence and judicial indifference. It honors the women who navigated these high‑poverty neighborhoods under the threat of both state violence and economic abandonment, and the unfinished work of turning constitutional language into lived protection.
Atlanta in 1992 was not Los Angeles, but the poverty told a familiar story. Double‑digit poverty rates for Black men and women were at least twice the rate of their white peers. Across cities like Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Seattle, which saw similar unrest, the poverty rates were in the double digits (see Table 1).
Table 1. Percentage of adults in poverty: 1992
Note: Poverty is determined using the Supplemental Poverty Measure. Source: Calculations by the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race using the 1992 Annual Social Economic Supplement, Current Population Survey. www. ipums.org
Between 1992 and 2025, poverty among adults fell in all four metros, but the benefits of capital investment were not evenly distributed across women by race and ethnicity (see Table 2). In the Atlanta metro, where billions were invested around the 1996 Olympics, and later film and entertainment production, the share of Black women in poverty declined from about 33 percent in 1992 to about 14 percent in 2025. Hispanic women were not separately reported in the 1992 Atlanta data, but by 2025, their poverty rate is about 23 percent.
In the Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue metro, where the region has been transformed by the tech and e‑commerce expansion of firms like Microsoft and Amazon, Black women’s poverty in 2025 is about 18 percent. There is no 1992 poverty rate estimate for Black or Hispanic women in Seattle. By 2025, the Hispanic women’s poverty rate is 17 percent. In the San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont metro, which has been reshaped by tech and finance wealth tied to Silicon Valley, the poverty rate for Black women declines from 36 percent in 1992 to 25 percent in 2025, while Hispanic women decreased from 36 percent to 20 percent over the same period.
Table 2. Percentage of adults in poverty: 2025
Note: Poverty is determined using the Supplemental Poverty Measure. Source: Calculations by the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race using the 2025 Annual Social Economic Supplement, Current Population Survey. www. ipums.org
Asian women in the San Francisco–Oakland–Fremont metro had a poverty rate of 12 percent in 1992 and 13 percent in 2025, essentially flat in the aggregate, underscoring that the broad “Asian” category may mask internal inequality among women whose livelihoods range from tech‑adjacent professional work to low‑wage service and care jobs that support the region’s growth. In the Las Vegas–Henderson–North Las Vegas metro, which has experienced a sustained mega‑resort expansion and a major league sports and stadium boom centered on Allegiant Stadium, the share of Hispanic women in poverty fell from about 41 percent in 1992 to about 17 percent in 2025, yet nearly one in six Hispanic women in the metro still lives in poverty even after this wave of capital investment. Black women in Las Vegas were not separately reported in 1992, but by 2025, their poverty rate was about 7 percent. Asian women’s poverty rate in 2025 is about 14 percent, placing them between white women and Hispanic women.
Across all four metros, Black women and Hispanic women remain in double digits everywhere, often with poverty rates two to five times those of white men (see Table 2). Asian women, Indigenous American women, and Multiracial women generally fall in between, with Indigenous women especially affected by data gaps that obscure their full economic conditions. Taken together, these findings show that even in regions shaped by large‑scale capital investments—Olympic‑driven development in Atlanta, tech and e‑commerce growth in Seattle, tech/finance expansion in San Francisco, and mega‑resort and stadium construction in Las Vegas—the hierarchy inside womanhood persists.
Hierarchy Inside Womanhood
Three decades after the Koon verdict, Black women and Hispanic women in Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Seattle are still more likely to be poor than white men and white women, even in cities transformed by Olympic projects, tech wealth, mega‑resorts, and stadium deals. The capital moved; the hierarchy stayed put. On paper, the First and Fourteenth Amendments belong to all of us, but the geography of poverty shows that Asian, Black, Hispanic, Indigenous American, and Multiracial women are still expected to clean the rooms, care for the children, and hold the neighborhoods together while others reap the return on investment.
Rodney King eventually won a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles and was awarded damages, a rare instance of financial accountability. However, his win did not translate into structural change for the communities whose poverty and policing made his beating legible. He died in 2012, long before many of the capital projects and tech booms were complete. But the conditions that led to his assault—aggressive policing of Black men and the economic neglect of Black neighborhoods—remain visible in the poverty rates for Black women and Hispanic women in 2025.
When Rodney King asked, “Can’t we all get along?” America answered with calls for calm. America did not respond with changes to policing, housing, or wages that align with the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. The persistent poverty of Black women and Hispanic women in Atlanta, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Seattle—despite Olympic projects, tech booms, mega‑resorts, and stadiums—shows that what we have really learned to get along with is inequality.
Rhonda V. Sharpe is the president and founder of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race. Her research focuses on gender and racial inequality, the diversity of STEM, and the demography of higher education.
