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On 1943 Anti-Mexican “Zoot Suit” Riots (Quote of the Week) This June marks the 75th anniversary of anti-Mexican (and anti-black) riots in Los Angeles, dubbed the “Zoot Suit” riots by the bourgeois press. Whipped into a frenzy by the media, mobs of sailors and soldiers, wielding clubs, rampaged through L.A.’s barrios for a week while cops arrested youth dressed in zoot suits. Hundreds were stripped naked and beaten senseless. We print below an excerpt from an article in the Militant, newspaper of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, describing the pervasive atmosphere of racist reaction amid World War II that fed into the violence. Such reaction also included the internment of Japanese Americans during the war. Today, as racist attacks continue to rise, we underline that it is in the vital interest of the multiracial labor movement to mobilize in defense of minorities and all the oppressed. In and around Los Angeles a considerable minority of the population is Mexican or of Mexican descent. They are and for years have been the victims of discrimination in much the same way that Negroes are in the South. They are not wanted in many restaurants, etc.; they are segregated in housing, and consequently in the schools; they are barred from many jobs; they are the victims of police persecution and brutality. Many of the youth form together in gangs; some of them wear zoot suits as a form of self-expression, as many Negro and white youth do. The capitalist press, largely anti-Mexican, has labored to create the impression that everyone wearing a zoot suit is a gangster, just as the New York press recently tried to smear every Negro as a mugger. As a result of their propaganda, lies, and half-truths they whipped up a certain hysteria against all dark-skinned people and helped to inflame the servicemen into vigilante action, praising them after the fighting had begun for doing a better job against the “gangsters” and “petty crooks” than the cops had done. The servicemen, joined by anti-Mexican elements, went after everyone with a dark skin. Carey McWilliams, author and president of the National Lawyers Guild in Los Angeles, reports that at least half of the people seriously injured were not wearing zoot suits and that the same proportion holds true for the hundreds arrested by the police. The city council voted to make the wearing of zoot suits a misdemeanor; the police arrested a lot of Mexicans and Negroes; Los Angeles was declared out of bounds for the servicemen. For the time being the violence has subsided, and the press—seeing a decline in the city’s business with the servicemen barred—is sanctimoniously calling for peace. But it is perfectly plain that no problems have been solved and that at the slightest provocation the whole thing may flare up again, if not through servicemen then through civilians. What is necessary, if the situation is really to be corrected, is an end to all discrimination and segregation practices against Mexicans and Negroes in industry, in social life, in housing, in the press, plus enforcement of their democratic rights, plus a widespread and deepgoing educational program on the meaning and effect of race discrimination; such a campaign can be launched most effectively under the leadership of the labor movement. —“Coast-to-Coast Wave of Violence Strikes at Negroes and Mexicans,” Militant, 19 June 1943, reprinted in Fighting Racism in World War II (1980)
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