Anna Deavere Smith - Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Messages- Tom Bradley, Former mayor of the city of Los Angeles) lyrics

(Fall, afternoon. His office at City Hall. He is in an armchair. I am on a sofa. It is a large office. A woman from the public relations office is there during the interview. He is dressed in a suit and tie. He entered the room after I had arrived, briskly and energetically. He has very long legs and sits with them outstretched, and his hands clasped to the side.) I was in my office in City Hall We had already decided on a strategy and, uh, an appeal to the press to go live with a statement at about 5pm that day. We learned that the verdict was coming in that afternoon. Um, we had four messages, depending on the verdict. If it was a guilty verdict, it was one message. If it was a partial verdict, some guilty, some not guilty, we had a separate message. The one that I had put down as just a …a precautionary measure, an acquittal on all counts, was something we didn't seriously think could happen, but we had a message and it did happen. And so within a matter of an hour and a half we had that message on the air, uh, directly to the public, and it was essentially to call for…to express my outrage at this verdict of not guilty for all of these officers, but to say to people we've come too far to make changes and to make progress. Let us not k** that effort by reacting with violence. Speak your…your heart, say what you feel in terms of your dissatisfaction with the jury verdict and the fact that it simply appeared to be something completely, uh, completely disconnected with the TV shots that you saw, but say so… do it in a verbal fashion and don't engage in violence.