It was Jan. 17, 1989, when white supremacist Patrick Purdy murdered five children and wounded 32 people—mostly Southeast Asian refugees—at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. The tragedy would shock the nation, and occurred just a decade after the similarly-named 1979 Grover Cleveland Elementary School shooting in San Diego, California, when 16-year-old Brenda Spencer opened fire on schoolchildren from her apartment window. The Stockton shooting was particularly devastating for the mostly Vietnamese and Cambodian student body and community.
“When this happens, as far as a school, it’s not your child who’s been killed,” former Cleveland Elementary School second-grade teacher Julie Schardt said in 2013, recalling that fateful day. “But it’s one of the children you are responsible for. You are the main nourisher. You give them sustenance. Especially in primary—you are a parent. In loco parentis. You’re a counselor. You feed them. You’re a nurse. All of those things.”
Schardt was one of the teachers that had to identify bodies in the immediate aftermath of the carnage, and never forgot seeing the body of her 8-year-old student, Oeun Lim. “It was such a surreal experience. I remember it was cold, and I remember her red shoes.”
It was this horrific incident that inspired Janet Jackson’s topical fourth album Rhythm Nation 1814. A concept album from the production/songwriting duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, it remains a standout for Janet. Coming on the heels of the monstrous success of Control—an album that produced five Top-10 singles and landed a nomination for Album Of the Year at the 1987 Grammys—there were high expectations and tremendous pressure for what the youngest Jackson would do for a follow-up. A lot had changed in popular music: the rise of dance-pop divas like Jody Watley and Paula Abdul led to whispers that Janet had been usurped; the emergence of new jack swing had dominated black music in 1988 and into 1989, making the slick, classic Minneapolis sound-inspired gloss of Control seem like yesterday’s news; and perhaps most significantly, hip-hop was suddenly at the forefront of black music and culture, with Public Enemy’s magnum opus It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back courting commendation and controversy by giving voice to black rage at the end of the Reagan era as crack, guns, and the 1990s loomed.