As L.A. observes the 80th anniversary of the unrest, which largely unfolded from June 3 to June 8, 1943, much will be said about wartime xenophobia and bigotry. How thousands of white servicemen and civilians assaulted anyone who wore the flamboyant zoot suits — Black, white, Filipino, but especially Mexican American.
Less known is the story told in the Bass mural.
On June 10, 1943, the Eagle’s front-page headline screamed “Zoot Riot Jolts Watts.” Next to it a photo showed a young Black man with a bloodied lip. Dispatches from across the city painted the ugliness of a week of mayhem.
In an open letter to Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Bass decried the riots as “a white heat of lynch fury” and blamed the city’s dailies — including this paper — for kindling hatred over the previous year. “Nothing in my experience,” she wrote, “has been so vicious, deliberate, or disruptive as the campaign of our city’s metropolitan papers against” Mexican Americans.
The Eagle’s anger extended to its ads — the reason why I came to the Central Avenue Farmers’ Market.
The back page of the Eagle’s June 10 edition featured a full-page spread for the People’s Victory Market, a grocery co-op started by the Rev. Clayton D. Russell, one of the most prominent preachers in Black L.A. at the time.
Russell’s ad urged Black Angelenos to stand with Mexicans, who it said had been “shamefully attacked” by the press and police for far too long.
“Because we in the Negro community are more unified and have greater political power,” it read, “we must lead in the demand for FULL POLICE PROTECTION OF THE MEXICAN COMMUNITY IN LOS ANGELES. ... We must say to our great United Nations neighbor, Mexico — SALUDOS AMIGOS! And, by Heaven, we must MEAN IT!”
The Black community responded — and not just locally.
Coverage of the riots appeared in the most prominent Black newspapers in the country, the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier. Legendary poet Langston Hughes used his Defender column to describe Los Angeles as a city where Mexicans were “shoved around like Negroes.”
NAACP head Walter White said zoot suiters were “almost invariably the victims of poverty, proscription and segregation.” In the organization’s magazine, the Crisis, Chester Himes ridiculed rioting servicemen as Nazi storm troopers and Klan members, while attacking the white supremacy in Los Angeles that made the riots possible.
“What could make the white people more happy than to see their uniformed sons sapping up some dark-skinned people?” wrote Himes. “Los Angeles was at last being made safe for white people — to do as they damned well pleased.”