Tom Bradley showed political courage during the 1992 Los Angeles riots by condemning police brutality while taking decisive action to restore order and push for police reform.

From a window seat, America scrolls by—the Grand Canyon, the Rockies, Chicago’s skyline, Washington’s monuments. Another landmark goes largely unremarked: Los Angeles’s international terminal, named for a former patrolman who became mayor and, in crisis, chose the hard path of principle. The Tom Bradley International Terminal is not just a transit hub for millions each year; it honors a civil-rights pioneer who helped define modern Los Angeles.

Bradley’s biography reads like a précis of the American century. The grandson of enslaved people and the son of Texas sharecroppers, he rose through the LAPD—absorbing both the possibilities and the prejudices of the institution—before winning City Hall. His governing coalition, an alliance of Black voters, Jews, Latinos, and white liberals, made him a symbol of multiracial urban politics.

That project collided with a national trauma. On March 3, 1991, Rodney King, a Black motorist, led police on a high-speed chase while intoxicated. When he stopped, officers pulled him from his car and beat him with batons as a bystander filmed. King was unarmed; he left with a fractured facial bone, damaged ankles, and a map of bruises across his body. President George H. W. Bush called the footage “sickening…outrageous.” But on April 29, 1992, a Simi Valley jury acquitted the four officers.

Bradley governed a city already fraying. Relations between the LAPD and Black Angelenos had soured under Chief Daryl Gates, who defended the chokehold and presided over years of racially freighted policing. The mayor’s coalition strained against a bloc of white conservatives who felt the city’s center of gravity had tilted away from them. When the verdicts landed, Bradley spoke with plain moral clarity: “The jury’s verdict will never outlive the images of the savage beating seared into our minds and souls.” He urged what sounded, in that moment, like a paradox—express profound outrage, but do it peacefully.

The city did not listen. In late April, the unrest erupted, first as a grievance, then as an inferno. More than 50 people were killed; more than 2,300 were injured; losses ultimately topped $1 billion. In neighborhoods already battered by deindustrialization and joblessness, the smoke carried despair—and opportunism—black-owned shops burned alongside Korean-run groceries. A white truck driver, Reginald Denny, was dragged from his cab and beaten on live TV. Bradley watched a movement for justice hijacked by mayhem.

He moved as a mayor, not a movement leader. He declared a state of emergency on the first day, coordinated with Governor Pete Wilson to bring in 2,000 National Guard troops, imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew, and asked President Bush to invoke the Insurrection Act. Federal troops and Marines soon reinforced the Guard. To critics on the right, Bradley had helped light the fuse by denouncing the verdicts; to critics on the left, he had answered righteous rage with militarization. Both charges miss the point: his first obligation was to keep Angelenos safe while the law caught up.

The criticism came anyway. White conservatives wanted faster, heavier policing. Activists within Bradley’s base worried that soldiers on the streets would repeat old harms. Bradley—once an LAPD lieutenant—knew how quickly force can slide into excess. But he also saw that restraint, without capacity, becomes abandonment. His job was to stop the bleeding. The speed with which he mobilized city, state, and federal resources demonstrated an executive who understood that decisiveness in a crisis is its own form of leadership.

The work did not end when the flames died. Bradley championed Charter Amendment F, shifting greater oversight of the police to civilians—an institutional answer to the grievance that had sparked the unrest. He secured hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid and launched Rebuild L.A., an initiative to channel public and private capital into damaged corridors. The program never met its loftiest promises, but it signaled that post-riot policy had to be more than plywood and insurance checks; it had to change how power was exercised.

None of it protected Bradley from the bill that followed. By mid-May, his approval rating sank to 38 percent, and after five terms, he chose not to run again. The easy story casts this as a failure. The truer one is that Bradley paid retail for a decision many leaders dodge: to condemn a grievous injustice and still insist that the city hold together long enough to fix it.

What, then, is the measure of his courage? Not the commentariat’s approval or the cleanup’s speed. It is that, in the most combustible episode of modern Los Angeles, Bradley refused to trade principle for posture. He spoke plainly about a verdict that mocked the evidence. He called people into the streets—and called them to discipline once they were there. And when the streets convulsed, he chose the unglamorous burden of public order over the applause lines of purity politics.

The echoes are with us still. In an era marked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Eric Garner, the moral geometry of protest and policing remains fraught. The Bradley example suggests a way through: name the harm, protect the city, reform the system. It is a sequence, not a contradiction. Civic peace is not capitulation; it is the ground on which accountability stands.

From the cotton fields of Texas to the mayoralty of America’s second-largest city, Tom Bradley lived a version of the American Dream capacious enough to include those the Dream often excludes. The terminal that bears his name greets travelers with steel and glass; more importantly, it reminds Los Angeles that courage can be as administrative as it is heroic. Bradley did not save the city from pain. He gave it a chance to recover with its conscience intact.

Political courage, John F. Kennedy warned, “looms larger than ever before.” Bradley met that challenge not by choosing between justice and order, but by insisting on both. In the end, that insistence is why millions pass through an airport named for a mayor—and why his legacy still argues, quietly but firmly, for the defense of equality under law.