Zoot-Suit Riots
| "The week-long 'zoot-suit' race riots which began in Los Angeles on June 3, 1943, touched off a chain reaction of riots across the country," McWilliams reported. "Similar disturbances were reported in San Diego on June 9; in Philadelphia on June 10; in Chicago on June 15; and in Evansville on June 27. Between June 16 and August 1, large-scale race riots occurred in Beaumont, Texas, in Detroit, and in Harlem. The Detroit race riot of June 20-21 was one of the most costly and bitter of the century: 25 Negroes and 9 white persons were killed and property worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was destroyed. The Harlem riot of August 1-2, 1943, was the most severe in the history of New York's Negro community: 5 Negroes were killed, approximately 565 persons received hospital treatment, over 500 arrests were made, and property damage was estimated at $5,000,000. Nor were these the only disturbances of those tense weeks in midsummer 1943."11 The so-called "Zoot Suit Riots" began when a few sailors were set upon by Mexican American youth; the next night about 200 sailors who called themselves a "task force" descended upon East Los Angeles and beat four Mexican Americans. "We're out to do what the police have failed to do," one of those sailors explained. "We're going to clean up this situation..." Over the next several days, sailors and soldiers roamed through Mexican American districts setting upon teenagers, stripped their clothes off and cut their hair, distinguishing marks of "zooters," and beat them up. On one night, instead of arresting the assailants, the police arrested forty-four Mexican Americans, all of whom had been severely beaten. African and Filipino Americans suffered the same fate as Mexican Americans when thousands of whites marched through Los Angeles to find and beat their objects of hate. Only after the military declared the downtown area out of bounds for those in uniform did the riots end, some four days after the first beatings. The Eagle Rock Advertiser bemoaned the military's intervention. "It is too bad the servicemen were called off before they were able to complete the job," the paper mourned. "Most of the citizens of the city have been delighted with what has been going on."12 Following a year and a half of tensions between Detroit's blacks and whites over housing and social services, on a sweltering June day about two weeks after Los Angeles' zoot-suit riots, thousands of whites and blacks gathered and scattered fighting erupted. Rumors spread through the city, and blacks looted stores, attacked whites, and beat to death a white milkman and a white physician making a house call. In turn, mobs of whites attacked and killed blacks. A white sixteen year old boasted: "There were about 200 of us in cars. We killed eight of 'em... I saw knives being stuck through their throats and heads being shot through... It really was some riot." And a white college student recalled that "whites were raving with hate." The Jackson, Mississippi Daily News blamed the wartime rhetoric of equality for the riot. "It is blood upon your hands, Mrs. Roosevelt," the paper asserted. "You have been...proclaiming and practicing social equality... In Detroit, a city noted for the growing impudence and insolence of its Negro population, an attempt was made to put your preachments into practice."13 |
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Footnotes
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