Zoot Suit Riots Part II

 

Prelude

Following the Sleepy Lagoon case, U.S. service personnel got into violent altercations with young Mexican Americans in zoot suits in San Jose, Oakland, San Diego, Delano, Los Angeles, and smaller cities and towns in California. During this period, the immense war buildup attracted tens of thousands of new workers to factories and shipyards in the West Coast, including African Americans from the South in the second wave of the Great Migration.

The most serious ethnic conflicts erupted in Los Angeles. Two altercations between military personnel and zoot suiters catalyzed the larger riots. The first occurred on May 30, 1943, at around 8:00 p.m., four days before the start of the riots. A dozen sailors, including Seaman Second Class Joe Dacy Coleman, were walking down Main Street in Los Angeles when they spotted a group of Mexican women on the opposite side. The group, except for Coleman, crossed the street to speak to the women. Coleman continued, 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, about eleven sailors got off a bus and started walking along Main Street in Downtown Los Angeles. Encountering a group of young Mexicans in zoot suits, they got into an argument. The sailors later told the LAPD that they were jumped and beaten by this gang, while the zoot suiters claimed the altercation was started by the sailors. The LAPD responded to the incident, including many off-duty officers who identified as the Vengeance Squad. The officers went to the scene "seeking to clean up Main Street from what they viewed as the loathsome influence of pachuco gangs."

The next day, 200 sailors got a convoy of about 20 taxicabs and headed for East Los Angeles, the center of Mexican-American settlement. The sailors spotted a group of young zoot suiters and assaulted them with clubs. They stripped the boys of the zoot suits and burned the tattered clothes in a pile. They attacked and stripped everyone they came across who were wearing zoot suits. 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 of servicemen and residents joined the attacks, marching abreast down streets, entering bars and movie houses, and assaulting any young Mexican American males they encountered. In one incident, sailors dragged two zoot suiters on-stage as a film was being screened, stripped them in front of the audience, and then urinated on their suits. Although police accompanied the rioters, they had orders not to arrest any, and some of them joined in the rioting. After several days, more than 150 people had been injured, and the police had arrested more than 500 Mexican American civilians on charges ranging from "rioting" to "vagrancy".

A witness to the attacks, journalist Carey McWilliams wrote,

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

No soldiers were arrested as a result of the beatings. Many Mexican American youth, instead, were arrested after being attacked by the soldiers.

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

The Los Angeles City Council approved a resolution criminalizing the wearing of "zoot suits with reat [sic] pleats within the city limits of LA" with the expectation that Mayor Fletcher Bowron would sign it into law. Councilman Norris Nelson had stated, "The zoot suit has become a badge of hoodlumism." No ordinance was approved by the City Council or signed into law by the Mayor, but the council encouraged the WPB to take steps "to curb illegal production of men's clothing in violation of WPB limitation orders." While the mobs had first targeted only pachucos, they also attacked African Americans in zoot suits who lived in the Central Avenue corridor area. The Navy and Marine Corps command staffs intervened on June 8 to reduce the attacks, confining sailors and Marines to barracks and ordering that Los Angeles be declared off-limits to all military personnel; this was enforced by Navy Shore Patrol personnel. Their official position was that their men were acting in self-defense.

Reactions

As the riots subsided, the most urgent concern of officials was relations with Mexico, as the economy of Southern California relied on the importation of cheap Mexican labor to assist in the harvesting of California crops. After the Mexican Embassy lodged a formal protest with the State Department, Governor Earl Warren of California ordered the creation of the McGucken Committee (headed by Los Angeles bishop Joseph McGucken) to investigate and determine the cause of the riots. In 1943, the committee issued its report; it determined racism to be a central cause of the riots, further stating that it was "an aggravating practice (of the media) to link the phrase zoot suit with the report of a crime." The governor appointed the Peace Officers Committee on Civil Disturbances, chaired by Robert W. Kenny, president of the National Lawyers Guild to make recommendations to the police. Human relations committees were appointed, and police departments were required to train their officers to treat all citizens equally.

At the same time, Mayor Bowron came to his own conclusion. The riots, he said, were caused by Mexican juvenile delinquents and by white Southerners. The latter came from a region in which both overt legal and socially sanctioned racial discrimination held sway. Racial prejudice in Los Angeles, according to Bowron, was not a factor.

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

On June 21, 1943, the State Un-American Activities Committee, under state senator Jack Tenney, arrived in Los Angeles with orders to "determine whether the present Zoot Suit Riots were sponsored by Nazi agencies attempting to spread disunity between the United States and Latin-American countries." Although Tenney claimed he had evidence the riots were "[A]xis-sponsored", no evidence was ever presented to support this claim. Japanese propaganda broadcasts accused the U.S. government of ignoring the brutality of U.S. Marines toward Mexicans. In late 1944, ignoring the findings of the McGucken committee and the unanimous reversal of the convictions by the appeals court in the Sleepy Lagoon case on October 4, the Tenney Committee announced that the National Lawyers Guild was an "effective communist front."

Later scholars generally characterize the Zoot Suit riots as a "pogrom against the Mexican American community". Many post-war civil rights activists and authors, such as Luis Valdez, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright, have said they were inspired by the Zoot Suit Riots. Cesar Chavez and Malcolm X were both zoot suiters as young men and later became political activists.