When Wearing a Suit Could Get You Beaten to Death - The Zoot Suit Riots - YouTube.

Viewer warning, this video uses terms and phrases that are historically accurate and relevant to the story and are cited from sources and are not originating from the producers. The year was 1943, World War II was raging across the globe. Americans were fighting and dying along with the Allies to liberate the world from crippling brutality. Civilians back home dealt with gasoline, clothing, and food rationing. Many waited for the dreaded Western Union telegram delivery man to hand them very bad news about their loved ones, which often happened. Tensions were often high, and the US was still dealing with racism and a segregated military. But of all the air, land, and sea battles being fought, there was another that erupted, and this was over fashion. Let's explore why. What were Zoot Suits? Was there a public rejection of those who wore them? Was racism part of the problem? How was it resolved, if at all? Was there a positive result? Hello, I'm Colin Heaton, former History Professor, Army and Marine Corps Veteran, and welcome to this episode of Forgotten History. The Zoot Suit was a style of clothing with very loose, even baggy trousers with pegged legs and a loose-fitting long coat with wide lapels and pork pie hats. The style had originated in the Harlem district of New York among the black jazz scene in the 1930s. Such notable jazz greats as Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, and Lionel Hampton made the style famous, and it set the trend. It soon became extremely popular with young black and Latino males. Even Italian and Irish mobsters sometimes adopted the style due to the comfortable feel. The style spread rapidly across the country, but it really took root in California, primarily Los Angeles, which had an exceptionally large Mexican-American community. Although Zoot Suits certainly earned the ire of those serious about rationing during the war, they would soon become affiliated with crime and delinquency. Mexican immigrants populated Los Angeles during the early 20th century seeking job opportunities in the burgeoning urban area, while white migrants from the South and Midwest also arrived at the height of the Great Depression. While Mexican-Americans built a strong community in Los Angeles in the pre-war years, they were consistently met with discrimination, including a program that forcibly removed even Mexican-American citizens from California and deported them to Mexico in 1929. More Mexicans arrived in Los Angeles at the beginning of World War II, along with black and white defense workers and thousands of service members. Sailors were stationed at the Naval Reserve Armory at Chavez near a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood. The city's exploding population led to shortages in housing and disrupted other services like transportation. As Los Angeles grew, so did racial and ethnic tensions. Young Mexican-American men and women formed gangs for territorial control and protection, including the notorious 38th Street Gang. Members often embraced the Pachuco style and Zoot Suit, and Pachuco soon became shorthand for gang. The young Latino men adopted the style and called themselves Pachucos, which they associated with their cultural rebellion, criminality, and gangster image. They believed that it displayed a more masculine, machismo look. Even Mexican-American women borrowed the Zoot Suit's pants to create their own style. As with many fads, older generations didn't quite understand the appeal but chalked its popularity up to youthful expression and rebellion. They opposed the existing discriminatory Juan Crow laws and practices that often limited the rights of Mexican-American men within white society, much like blacks with the Jim Crow laws. However, older, more conservative blacks, Latinos, and whites were not very receptive to the fashion style and the images it supported. These negative opinions only escalated during World War II when the rationing of wool and cotton starting in early 1942 led the ban on manufacturing Zoot Suits and wearing them was seen as being very unpatriotic. The national media, especially in Los Angeles, gave the public image of the Pachucos as corrupt, un-American, and dangerous. This was really brought to the forefront after the Sleepy Lagoon murder of August 1942. On August 2, 1942, a 22-year-old agricultural worker, Jose Gallardo Diaz, was found dead near the Sleepy Lagoon Reservoir, frequently used as a picnic spot by Mexican-Americans. The official autopsy revealed that Diaz was intoxicated and the cause of death was blunt force trauma. However, the Los Angeles Police Department asserted that Diaz was murdered by members of a rival Mexican gang. The LAPD pulled a dragnet and rounded up several hundred Latino Zoot Suit suspects based upon questionable eyewitnesses and hearsay statements. They arrested 24 members of the 38th Street Gang, 17 of whom were tried and found guilty in January 1943 on charges of manslaughter and assault despite dubious evidence. The convictions were later overturned in 1944 as the defendants' constitutional rights to a fair trial had been violated due to unsubstantiated evidence and biased media reporting. The public at large viewed that reversal of the convictions as a major injustice and that only heightened racial tensions. But things were going to get worse for the Zoot Suit Collective. Then, a verbal confrontation between a small group of US sailors and a group of Zoot Suiters occurred on May 30, 1943. The military often equated Zoot Suiters to be draft dodgers and illegal aliens. One of the sailors was jumped and severely beaten by the Latino gang members. Another event, on May 31 near Chinatown, a fight broke out between 12 sailors and a group of Mexican-American teenagers wearing Zoot Suits. No one knows exactly what prompted the fight, but Seaman Second Class Joe Dacey Coleman emerged with a broken jaw. When men back at the Naval Reserve Armory heard of Coleman's injury, 50 sailors and a group of Marines formed a vigilante group on June 3 and moved into downtown Los Angeles with concealed weapons in search of Zoot Suiters. They carried clubs, crowbars, and other field-expedient weapons and attacked anyone wearing a Zoot Suit, even teenagers. The service members tore through the streets, finding any Mexican-American wearing a Zoot Suit and viciously beat them after throwing them to the ground and tearing off their clothes. But it was not over. On the second night of rioting, the sailors visited the city's Mexican-American communities, barging into cafes, restaurants, bars, and theaters looking for Zoot Suiters. Then the carnage just exploded. Meanwhile, local and national newspapers praised the attackers, hailing them as protectors of the city against the dangerous Zoot Suiters. On June 4, the Oakland Tribune described the vigilante mob as a vengeance squad of volunteers gathered by the LAPD to clean up the crime caused by the Pachucos in the city. The Bayon Times reported on the gentlemen in blue as men who were merely responding to vicious attacks by the Zoot Suit bums on the wives of Navy men. We are out to do what the police have failed to do. We're going to clean up, a petty officer explained when interviewed. Over the next week, the Zoot Suit riots spread throughout Los Angeles, especially in the Mexican-American neighborhood of East Los Angeles and the black neighborhood of Watts. The riots marked the culmination of simmering racial tensions in Los Angeles, set against the backdrop of World War II. Journalist Kerry McWilliams was a witness, standing in the crowd gathered on Broadway in Los Angeles, and he watched the riot happen firsthand. McWilliams reported the following, Thousands of Angelenos turned out for a mass lynching. A mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, marines, and civilians stopped streetcars carrying patrons throughout the metro area, jerked Mexicans and some Filipinos and Negroes out of their seats and beat them with sadistic frenzy. McWilliams was stunned as the mob continued moving through downtown Los Angeles in an unstoppable wave of violence and searching for targets and wreaking havoc. McWilliams soon learned that the attackers that night were looking for every Zoot Suiter they could find. Other military personnel and civilians also joined in the violence, with many arriving in Los Angeles from elsewhere around the state to take part. While news media of the day reported the rioters as law-abiding American heroes confronting an alien Mexican invasion, the crime wave and the truth were quite different. LAPD officers stood by as the assailants claimed they were acting as self-defense, instead arresting bloodied and bruised Mexican-American men for disturbing the peace. Al Waxman, editor of the East Los Angeles newspaper, the East Side Journal, was at the scene and pleaded with officers to step in, but they simply explained that it was a matter for the military police and refused to get involved. The attacks were clearly racist in nature, targeting Latinos, African-Americans, and other minorities, even those not wearing Zoot Suits. Meanwhile, the police arrested hundreds of young Mexican-Americans, many of whom had themselves been viciously attacked, while very few sailors or civilians involved in the rioting were arrested. Author Seldon Cowles Menifee reported, Zoot suits smoldered in the ashes of street bonfires, where they had been tossed by grimly methodical task forces of servicemen. On June 6th and 7th, the military mob encountered direct resistance when they moved into the black neighborhood of Watts looking for Zoot Suiters. Rudy Levis, a teenager at the time of the riots, remembered setting traps with his friends. He said, Toward evening we started hiding in alleys, then we sent about 20 guys right out into the middle of the street as decoys. They started coming out after the decoys, then we came out. They were surprised. It was the first time anybody was organized to fight back. Parents afraid that their children might be attacked simply because they were young Mexican-Americans asked the police for help. One mother pleaded with a police officer to leave her son alone. She begged, Don't take my boy, he did nothing, he's only 15 years old, don't take him. But the officer only hit her across the face with his nightstick. Another group of boys turned themselves in to police in a desperate attempt for protection. Charge me with vagrancy or anything, but don't send me out there, one of them yelled. As other children, most not wearing zoot suits, were still beaten by a group of sailors. By June 8th, the riots started to simmer down after military officials banned all military personnel, soldiers, sailors and marines from entering Los Angeles and the military police patrolled the city looking for violators. So shocking was the event, the L.A. City Council subsequently passed a resolution prohibiting the wearing of zoot suits in public and on city streets. The only good news was that no one was killed during the zoot suit riots, though many people were injured, some badly. The event displayed what many already knew was just beneath the surface of society in Los Angeles and in fact across the country. Racism and bigotry were alive and well. When it was over, the excuses were given. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Brown blamed lawlessness and juvenile delinquency among Mexican-American teenagers. Senator Jack Tinney of the California State Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities suggested that the riots were the work of communist agents and Axis spies, stirring up racial trouble among the black and Mexican-American communities. The Governor of California, Earl Warren, who served in that capacity from 1943 to 1953 and later became a Supreme Court Justice, commissioned an Independent Citizens Committee with investigating the riots and determining their cause. The committee determined that, although there were many contributing factors, racism was the actual catalyst, which was exacerbated by the inflammatory biased media coverage and an imbalanced and prejudiced response by the Los Angeles Police Department. The report highlighted the lack of resources available to Mexican-Americans that contributed to unrest, but ultimately concluded that it is significant that most of the persons mistreated during the recent incidents in Los Angeles were either persons of Mexican descent or Negroes. In undertaking to deal with the cause of these outbreaks, the existence of race and prejudice cannot be ignored. During a June 16, 1943 press conference on the riots, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt echoed the same sentiment, stating that race problems were growing in the United States and that we must just begin to face it. Senator Tinney responded by calling her a communist. The tragic event did have a positive outcome. Warren, a staunch Republican and opponent of racial intolerance, would be the most critical voice in the Supreme Court during his tenure, and he decided such landmark cases as Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, and Loving v. Virginia. Warren opposed the Ku Klux Klan and was staunchly against racial discrimination. The zoot suit riots only invigorated him to fight against such oppression. On his decision in Brown v. Board of Education, he wrote, On segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Warren led the charge on educational equality. Also, because of the riots, where hundreds were arrested and were sometimes handled brutally by law enforcement, Warren decided Miranda v. Arizona. This case addressed four different cases, all similar to the Mexican-Americans arrested during the riots, involving custodial interrogations. In each of these cases, the defendant was questioned by police officers, detectives, or a prosecuting attorney, in a room in which he was cut off from the outside world without access to a defense attorney. And none of these cases were defendants informed of their rights. In all the cases, the questioning often occurred over many hours and even days, where the suspect was food and sleep deprived, and psychologically and physically abused, eliciting coerced and even false confessions, and in three of them, signed statements of guilt that were admitted at trial. The Zoot Suit cases highlighted these problems, hence the decision as stated, QUOTE "...whether statements obtained from an individual who was subjected to custodial police interrogation are admissible against him in a criminal trial, and whether procedures which assure that the individual is accorded his privilege under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not to be compelled to incriminate himself are necessary." On May 16, 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors officially condemned the Zoot Suit riots. Supervisor Hilda Solis declared the wartime violence a dark chapter in Los Angeles County's history, but it is also a moment in America's history that highlights the struggle of fighting racism on the home front during World War II. In essence, racial tensions rose to a dangerous level, bigotry and ignorance fostered violent action, and the pathetic excuse was a fashion statement.