cool. and it's not cool. >> those things necessary to protect everyone. >> there was no one truth. the blacks, of course, called that a murder. the jews called it an accident. there were two completely different realities. >> david dinkins was trying to please everybody, and he was being pulled in all these different directions trying to prove that he wasn't just a black mayor. >> your mayor works for you. you have commission brown working for you guys. >> similar tensions are simmering in cities across america. legions of young black men and women, unemployed and losing hope, believe they have been abandoned by the larger society, and they are angry. >> new york city is symptomatic of what's happening in the nation in the early 1990s and what one writer described as a season of racial tension. it really is complicated by the fact that you have african-americans dealing with stifling poverty and inequality and police injustice being perpetrated against people of color. rodney king exposed some of that when his beating was captured on