Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
Watts was first subdivided in the 1880s. Mexican laborers moved into the area to work on the Southern Pacific Railroad, forming the village of Tujuata. When Watts was incorporated in 1907, Tujuata disappeared. Blacks who moved into the area settled in a district called Mudtown, which, as part of Watts, was annexed by Los Angeles in 1926.56 Later, the Federal Housing Administration sought to contain Blacks who were part of the increased WWII and postwar migration to Los Angeles and used the system of racially restrictive housing covenants; these covenants continued legally until 1948 (and de facto thereafter)57 to designate Watts a “Negro area.” Between 1940 and 1960, therefore, the Black population of Watts increased eightfold. After WWII, returning Mexican veterans became resentful about the striking changes that had occurred during their absence, and in some cases they threatened to band together to expel the “Negro invaders.”58
Writing in 1947, Lloyd H. Fisher observed that there was “for the Negro and Mexican, inequality in income, employment opportunity, educational opportunity and housing, for the white, ignorance, prejudice, insecurity and a thousand and one personal frustrations. Add to these an irresponsible press, the policies of real estate agencies and mortgage companies and a prejudiced police force.” In Fisher’s formulation, these social forces heightened residential tensions between Black and Brown people, particularly as returning Mexican veterans—resentful over city officials’ selection of Watts as “an area of Negro segregation”—perceived the influx of Blacks into portions of Watts as a threat to employment and residential opportunities.59
The forced removal of Japanese Americans, restrictive covenants, industrialization, suburbanization, and migration patterns all affected the spatial geography and cultural politics of minority experiences, but they also gave rise to an interrogation of official postwar narratives of democracy. Bass rejected the divisiveness engendered by economic racism. She considered how civil disobedience and other forms of legal resistance might expose and question such practices.
Regina Freer locates the beginning of Bass’s housing activism in the California Eagle’s organized response to a Black woman’s eviction from her home by her racist neighbors in 1914: Bass led a discussion with Black club women on the issue, and “‘that evening a brigade of a hundred women marched to the Johnson home. The women were ultimately successful in getting the sheriff to help Mrs. Johnson back into her home.”60
Bass remained involved in Black homeownership rights from this point forward, but her historic battle against restrictive covenants took full shape in the 1940s, as Black migration to Los Angeles increased and as white xenophobia received legal sanction through city officials’ containment of the growing Black community into 5 percent of the city’s residential space. Bass’s efforts and those of the LA National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) waged the restrictive covenant issue all the way to the California Supreme Court. Bass and her contemporaries in this struggle maintained pressure on local and federal authorities, in part shifting their focus to a fight for public housing and rent control because of their belief that aggrieved minority groups had the right to occupy the literal and figurative space of Los Angeles.
The strategic philosophies of Luisa Moreno’s activism likewise provide us with understandings of the way that space can be used to both suppress and empower workers and women. Moreno’s work in the cigar rollers union in Texas, with the SLDC in Los Angeles, and with El Congreso in the Southwest constitutes a recuperation of the dignity and humanity of working-class women, namely Brown and Black women, and more broadly, the Mexican-American community. Her demand that Black and Brown women take themselves, and be taken, seriously suggests a symbolic spatial assertion that bell hooks articulated in her seminal book Feminism: From Margin to Center.61 Moreno’s legitimation of the production of valuable knowledge from the margin made it “much more than a site of deprivation . . . it [was] also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.” Moreno modeled one of the basic themes of Chicana feminism—leadership that empowers others—decades before people articulated it in those terms.62 Moreno, like Emma Tenayuca, Dorothy Healey, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ella Baker identified this discarded source of knowledge as a space of possibility, one that hooks later described as a “radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”63 Further, as I explore later in this chapter, Moreno’s work with El Congreso recalls an important intersection between the philosophies of liberation shared by Black and Brown people in the United States.
In their mutual and separate struggles, Bass and Moreno produced spaces of what bell hooks calls “radical openness”—a space that “affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.”64 In this way, these women foregrounded Afro–Chicano struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, through which young people sought to legitimize cultural identities reflecting symbolic and material histories of interracial interaction.
Black and Brown women activists of this period in Los Angeles have received far less attention than their male counterparts. As female activists, Bass and Moreno refused traditional domesticity at a time when the available categories of acceptable womanhood were dominated by discourses of political and domestic containment, in both local and national contexts. Yet women like Bass and Moreno helped to shape the civil rights struggle and subsequent social movements in the region; their activism helped to define Black and Mexican-American languages and epistemologies of resistance. As historical actors engaged in fair housing, integration, labor, and youth struggles, they crafted counter-narratives that emphasized Black and Brown humanity and entitlement. Catherine S. Ramirez has observed that until recently, “only a handful of writers or artists acknowledged the roles that women, especially Mexican-American women, played in the Sleepy Lagoon incident and trial.”65 Studying the impact of these women together reveals a significant and overlooked combination of strategic resistance that was fundamental to the success of the SLDC.
THE SLEEPY LAGOON DEFENSE COMMITTEE
While the SLDC was not the most radical coalition of the 1940s, the antiracist legacy engendered by its members and their respective communities provides an inheritance that informed both the histories and the futures of interracial struggle among Mexican-American, Black, and Anglo working-class people in Los Angeles. Cochaired by Luisa Moreno, labor organizer Bert Corona, and writer/activist Carey McWilliams, the SLDC included among its members and supporters labor organizer Josefina Fierro de Bright, Congress of Industrial Organizations activist Alice McGrath, and Charlotta Bass. For two years, the SLDC fought for the release of twelve young Chicanos convicted of murder by an all-white jury in People v. Zamora. In this “highly publicized and deeply flawed trial,” twenty-two Chicanos were originally charged with criminal conspiracy in the murder of José Díaz, a twenty-two-year-old farm worker whose body was found at the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir in southeast Los Angeles. Díaz, on his way home from a neighbor’s birthday party early on the morning of August 2, 1942, was seen leaving with two young men who were never questioned during the investigation or the ensuing trial. One “expert witness” (who was actually a member of the LA County Sheriff’s office) testified that Mexicans possessed a “blood thirst” and a “biological predisposition” to crime and killing. The evidence, he argued, was in the history of human sacrifices among the youths’ Aztec ancestors.66 Moreover, presiding judge Charles W. Fricke allowed attorneys to make routine racist references toward Mexicans while arguing for the prosecution. At the end of the trial, three of the defendants were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison; nine were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to five years to life in prison, five were convicted of assault and released for time served, and five were acquitted. It was the largest mass conviction in California history.67 In the original and appellate cases, the juries were all white. The defendants began serving their sentences in January 1943.68
The Los Angeles police used Díaz’s murder to launch a widespread attack on what they perceived as unruly Mexican-American youth. More than 600 youths were arrested, most of them Mexicans. The press consistently referred to Díaz—as well as his assailants—as gang members. During the trial, labor activist LaRue McCormick established an ad hoc committee to publicize the events surrounding the case. After the defendants were sentenced, the committee reorganized as the SLDC. Carey