Real Crime/Paranormal/Conspiracy Theories Book III

Zoot Suit Riots Part II

Prelude

Following the Sleepy Lagoon case, U.S.service personnel got into violent altercations with young MexicanAmericans in zoot suits in San Jose, Oakland, San Diego, Delano, LosAngeles, and smaller cities and towns in California. During thisperiod, the immense war buildup attracted tens of thousands of newworkers to factories and shipyards in the West Coast, includingAfrican Americans from the South in the second wave of the GreatMigration.

The most serious ethnic conflictserupted in Los Angeles. Two altercations between military personneland zoot suiters catalyzed the larger riots. The first occurred onMay 30, 1943, at around 8:00 p.m., four days before the start of theriots. A dozen sailors, including Seaman Second Class Joe DacyColeman, were walking down Main Street in Los Angeles when theyspotted a group of Mexican women on the opposite side. The group,except for Coleman, crossed the street to speak to the women. Colemancontinued, walking past two zoot suiters; one of them raised his arm,and the sailor turned and grabbed it.

Riots

Attacks begin

On the night of June 3, 1943, abouteleven sailors got off a bus and started walking along Main Street inDowntown Los Angeles. Encountering a group of young Mexicans in zootsuits, they got into an argument. The sailors later told the LAPDthat they were jumped and beaten by this gang, while the zoot suitersclaimed the altercation was started by the sailors. The LAPDresponded to the incident, including many off-duty officers whoidentified as the Vengeance Squad. The officers went to the scene"seeking to clean up Main Street from what they viewed as theloathsome influence of pachuco gangs."

The next day, 200 sailors got a convoyof about 20 taxicabs and headed for East Los Angeles, the center ofMexican-American settlement. The sailors spotted a group of youngzoot suiters and assaulted them with clubs. They stripped the boys ofthe zoot suits and burned the tattered clothes in a pile. Theyattacked and stripped everyone they came across who were wearing zootsuits. Media coverage of the incidents then started to spread,inducing more people to join in the mayhem.

Attacks spread

During the next few days, thousands ofservicemen and residents joined the attacks, marching abreast downstreets, entering bars and movie houses, and assaulting any youngMexican American males they encountered. In one incident, sailorsdragged two zoot suiters on-stage as a film was being screened,stripped them in front of the audience, and then urinated on theirsuits. Although police accompanied the rioters, they had orders notto arrest any, and some of them joined in the rioting. After severaldays, more than 150 people had been injured, and the police hadarrested more than 500 Mexican American civilians on charges rangingfrom "rioting" to "vagrancy".

A witness to the attacks, journalistCarey McWilliams wrote,

Marching through the streets ofdowntown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors,and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot suiter they couldfind. Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, themob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ranup and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats.Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos andNegroes, were jerked from their seats, pushed into the streets andbeaten with a sadistic frenzy.

No soldiers were arrested as a resultof the beatings. Many Mexican American youth, instead, were arrestedafter being attacked by the soldiers.

The local press lauded the attacks,describing them as having a "cleansing effect" torid Los Angeles of "miscreants" and "hoodlums". As the riots progressed, the media reported the arrest of AmeliaVenegas, a female zoot suiter charged with carrying a brassknuckleduster. While the revelation of female pachucos' (pachucas)involvement in the riots led to frequent coverage of the activitiesof female pachuca gangs, the media suppressed any mention of thewhite mobs that were also involved.

The Los Angeles City Council approved aresolution criminalizing the wearing of "zoot suits with reat[sic] pleats within the city limits of LA" with theexpectation that Mayor Fletcher Bowron would sign it into law.Councilman Norris Nelson had stated, "The zoot suit hasbecome a badge of hoodlumism." No ordinance was approved bythe City Council or signed into law by the Mayor, but the councilencouraged the WPB to take steps "to curb illegal productionof men's clothing in violation of WPB limitation orders." Whilethe mobs had first targeted only pachucos, they also attacked AfricanAmericans in zoot suits who lived in the Central Avenue corridorarea. The Navy and Marine Corps command staffs intervened on June 8to reduce the attacks, confining sailors and Marines to barracks andordering that Los Angeles be declared off-limits to all militarypersonnel; this was enforced by Navy Shore Patrol personnel. Theirofficial position was that their men were acting in self-defense.

Reactions

As the riots subsided, the most urgentconcern of officials was relations with Mexico, as the economy ofSouthern California relied on the importation of cheap Mexican laborto assist in the harvesting of California crops. After the MexicanEmbassy lodged a formal protest with the State Department, GovernorEarl Warren of California ordered the creation of the McGuckenCommittee (headed by Los Angeles bishop Joseph McGucken) toinvestigate and determine the cause of the riots. In 1943, thecommittee issued its report; it determined racism to be a centralcause of the riots, further stating that it was "anaggravating practice (of the media) to link the phrase zoot suit withthe report of a crime." The governor appointed the PeaceOfficers Committee on Civil Disturbances, chaired by Robert W. Kenny,president of the National Lawyers Guild to make recommendations tothe police. Human relations committees were appointed, and policedepartments were required to train their officers to treat allcitizens equally.

At the same time, Mayor Bowron came tohis own conclusion. The riots, he said, were caused by Mexicanjuvenile delinquents and by white Southerners. The latter came from aregion in which both overt legal and socially sanctioned racialdiscrimination held sway. Racial prejudice in Los Angeles, accordingto Bowron, was not a factor.

On June 16, 1943, a week after theriots, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt commented on the riots in hernewspaper column. "The question goes deeper than just suits.It is a racial protest. I have been worried for a long time about theMexican racial situation. It is a problem with roots going a long wayback, and we do not always face these problems as we should." The Los Angeles Times published an editorial the next day expressingoutrage: it accused Mrs. Roosevelt of having communist leanings andstirring "race discord".

On June 21, 1943, the State Un-AmericanActivities Committee, under state senator Jack Tenney, arrived in LosAngeles with orders to "determine whether the present ZootSuit Riots were sponsored by Nazi agencies attempting to spreaddisunity between the United States and Latin-American countries."Although Tenney claimed he had evidence the riots were"[A]xis-sponsored", no evidence was ever presentedto support this claim. Japanese propaganda broadcasts accused theU.S. government of ignoring the brutality of U.S. Marines towardMexicans. In late 1944, ignoring the findings of the McGuckencommittee and the unanimous reversal of the convictions by theappeals court in the Sleepy Lagoon case on October 4, the TenneyCommittee announced that the National Lawyers Guild was an "effectivecommunist front."

Later scholars generally characterizethe Zoot Suit riots as a "pogrom against the Mexican Americancommunity". Many post-war civil rights activists andauthors, such as Luis Valdez, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright, havesaid they were inspired by the Zoot Suit Riots. Cesar Chavez andMalcolm X were both zoot suiters as young men and later becamepolitical activists.