(The Root) — Monday morning I was sitting on an exercise bike in a hotel gym, listening to a drum-and-bass song from the '90s while I pedaled furiously and watched the morning TV news on mute. That's when I learned that Rodney King had drowned. The song Horizon, by LTJ Bukem, samples parts of Maya Angelou's inaugural poem for President Bill Clinton: "Each new hour holds new chances/For a new beginning ... /The horizon leans forward/Offering you space to place/New steps of change."

It would be easy to call this a moment of irony: the pulsing music, with its inspirational message, in my ears while images of King being mercilessly beaten, Los Angeles aflame and an older King with his family flashed before my eyes. I came to the news later than many, having spent the day before traveling and largely disconnected from television and the Internet. But as I sat in the hotel gym, I felt there was something deeper here than irony. Rodney King, for all his faults, was a man of new beginnings and of tragic flaws exacerbated, if not caused, by the circumstances of his life.

On the television show Celebrity Rehab, he was shown so drunk while working as a day laborer that he nearly fell off the back of a truck that he was helping to load. Later he wrote the book The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption. King, who grew up in Altadena, Calif., died on Father's Day.

His book begins with a moving paean to his own father, which starts with a memory of them going fishing together and his father pulling Rodney out when he panicked after getting stuck in deep mud. "Dad's arm reached around my waist like a steel cable and pulled me out of that muck as easy as a greased pole." Safety in a father's arms. 

But not too long later, King was out at a swimming hole with other kids. A rock whizzed by his head, then another. For the first time he heard the words, "Run, nigger!" He didn't even know until then what the word meant, let alone the violence that could go with it. 

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 (Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)