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Be vigorous but not brutal: race, politics, and police in Los Angeles, 1937-1945

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Be vigorous but not brutal: race, politics, and police in Los Angeles, 1937-1945

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Content BE VIGOROUS BUT NOT BRUTAL;
RACE. POLITICS. AND POLICE IN LOS ANGELES. 1937-1946
by
Kristi Joy Woods
A Dissertation Presented to the
Faculty of the Graduate School
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(United States History)
December 1999
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
K r i s t i J o j r Woods
under the direction of h.&x Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements for the degree of
DOCTOR œ P H lL O ^g P H Y ^
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date ....
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
\wl . . Q , '
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Be Vigorous but not Brutal; Race, Politics and Police in Los Angeles,
1937-1945
by
Kristi Joy Woods
University of Southern California, December 1999
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
This dissertation proposes that the excesses of the LAPD in the
second half of the twentieth century, particularly under Chief William
Parker (1950-1966) and Chief Daryl Gates (1978-1992) are rooted in the
complex interplay of race, politics and police in the chaotic years of the
city’s economic, political and demographic transformation beginning in
1937 through the close of World W ar II in 1945. Beginning with a
t>ackground analysis of the political reforms of the Progressive Era, this
dissertation explores the tense and distrustful relations between African
Americans and the police in the city of Los Angeles and how municipal
politics mediated that relationship The central argument is that the
emergence of a politically independent police department in 1937, the
advent of a progressive, reform-minded municipal government at about
the same time, and the dramatic expansion of the Black population during
World War II led to the shaping of a new paradigm for policing and social
control within the city. This tripartite relationship, laden with the potential
for trouble, has often produced just that. Based on an analysis of city
politics— particularly mayoral leadership, the police department's own
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p o lié i— .la r iy .M a y m ra l ifta r iA T ^ ip th o p o liT !^
history, and characteristics and experiences of the Black residential
population of Los Angeles from 1937 to 1945, this dissertation will show
how vital this period was for the transition between old (pre-1937) and
new (post-1950) paradigms of policing and social control in the city of Los
Angeles.
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CONTENTS
Introduction..................................................................................................... 1
Part I; Background and Beginnings
Chapter
1. Itchy Palms: Reforming City Hall and the Police Department. . 23
2. “ The Old Settlers”:
African Americans in Los Angeles Before World War I I ............ 77
Part II: Wartime Transformations
3. The Playground that Went to W ar.................................................. 112
4. The Influx and the Impact: The Third Wave of Black Migration .. 171
Part ill: Confluence
5. Mayor Bowron and His Chiefs of Police................................. 226
6. Be Vigorous but not Brutal:
Race, Politics and Police in Los Angeles......................................... 259
Epilogue: The Paradigm Perfected.......................................................... 319
Selected Bibliography.................................................................................... 327
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Introduction
The big-city police have always done more than just enforce the law,
keep the peace and serve the public. They have also decided, or at
least helped to decide, \A^ich laws to enforce, whose peace to keep,
and which public to serve
(Robert Fogelson, Big City Poiioe)
This dissertation explores the foundations of the tense and
distrustful relations between African Americans and the police in the city
of Los Angeles. Essential to this relationship is the mediating role of
municipal politics. The central argument is that the emergence of a
politically independent police department in 1937, the advent of a
progressive, reform-minded municipal government at about the same
time, and the dramatic expansion of the Black population during World
War II converged in a way which shaped a new postwar paradigm for
policing and social control within the city.
As part of the reform mandate which brought him into the mayoral
office in 1938, Fletcher Bowron and his fellow reformers tended to
measure police department success by the degree to which it controlled
and reduced illegal vice activities and the protection rackets they
spawned. Compelled by reformers and utilizing an aggressive policing
style already developed in earlier years, the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) worked to bring graft and corruption under control
and generally contained vice activity in heavily segregated African
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American neighborhoods. But with vice reduced and contained, the
LAPD's hostile and heavy-handed methods, never really a target of the
reformers, remained largely intact, and “peace-keeping” by officers,
especially in Black areas, would continue to be harsh and prone to
malpractice. Thus, the practices and style of policing in minority
residential areas of Los Angeles are to a good degree the residual effects
of a long-term playing out of progressive-type reforms of local politics and
the police department— coupled, of course, with the penchant for social
control which some Progressives shared with the local business elite. In
its early years, the LAPD became an instrument for controlling labor
organizers and political radicals, but in the racial cauldron of World War II
with Japanese American interment, sensationalized conflicts with the
Mexican American population, and the two-fold growth of the African
American population, the city administration and the LAPD added
minorities as a primary target for control. The foundations for the
interrelationship of race, politics, and police which operates today was
thus laid during the war years. This tripartite relationship, laden with the
potential for trouble, has often produced just that.
On March 4, 1991, four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
officers were captured, on videotape by an amateur cameraman, in the
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act of beating prone motorist Rodney King. The videotape was
repeatedly played on media outlets across the nation and throughout the
world. Citizens everywhere were outraged. United States President
George Bush decried the beating incident as "outrageous."' The LAPD
chief, Daryl Gates, immediately referred to the videotape as "shocking"
but called on the public to withhold from making a judgment against the
police department based on this particular incident. At a press
conference held in the week after the t)eating. Gates declared that the
incident was an aberration.^
Tom Bradley, the city’s first African American and longest-serving
mayor, was in office at the time. A former lieutenant in the Los Angeles
Police Department, Bradley expressed "shock and outrage " in the wake of
the broadcast of the videotape of the beating. Despite suggestions from
close aides to characterize the Rodney King beating as "an extraordinary
departure from normal practices,” Bradley made persistently strong public
statements against the beating and the department that would allow such
activity. A few weeks after the incident, Bradley said, "the people of this
city have been slapped in the face by the attitude and bigotry of these
officers. . . . It is no longer possible for any objective person to regard the
' Washington Post, March 22, 1991.
^ Hector Tobar and Leslie Berger, "Tape of L. A Police Beating Suspect Stirs
Public Furor," Los Angeles Times, March 6,1991 ; “ Grim Gates Faces Heated
Questions,” March 8,1991.
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4
King beating as an 'aberration'."^ By April 1, Bradley had assembled and
formally charged a blue ribbon commission to investigate the
circumstances surrounding the fifty-four baton blows used to force King
into submission. The Independent Commission on the Los Angeles
Police Department, known as the Christopher Commission, had a
mandate to conduct an examination of "any aspect of the law enforcement
structure in Los Angeles that might cause or contribute to the problem of
excessive force . . .
And finally, many African American residents of the city— from
working poor Watts to middle and upper-class Baldwin Hills (the area with
the highest concentration of Black wealth in the country)— breathed a
collective sigh of relief. With all due empathy toward Rodney King, many
of the city's African American residents felt that their collective
experiences and complaints about the LAPD would finally be vindicated.
^ Frank Clifford and John Mitchell, Incident Gives City a National Black Eye,"
Los Angeles Times, March 7,1991 ; Hector Tobar and Rich Connell,
"Pressure by Bradley, Others On Gates Grows," Los Angeles Times, March
20, 1991.
Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police
Department (Los Angeles, 1991 ), ii (hereinafter cited as Christopher
Commission Report). The chair of the Independent Commission, Warren
Christopher, former Deputy Attorney General of the U. S. and former Deputy
Secretary of State of the U. S., was, at the time of his appointment to this
Commission, the chairman of O'Melveny and Myers, one of Los Angeles' elite
law firms. Christopher, who went on to serve as Secretary of State under the
Clinton Administration, had served previously on the Governor’s Commission
on the Los Angeles Riots— a panel assembled to investigate the underlying
causes of the Watts Riot in Los Angeles in August 1965.
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After all, here now— on videotape— was incontrovertible proof of brutality
by LAPD officers.
Even so, it is a telling point that it was not the instance of the
beating of King that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Rather, it
was the acquittal of the four officers who had participated in the beating
that fueled the flames of outrage in Los Angeles. Sergeant Stacey Koon
and officers Lawrence Powell, Theodore Briseno, and Timothy Wind had
been charged, in sum, with assault with a deadly weapon, assault under
color of authority, filing a false police report, and inflicting great bodily
injury. An additional charge of accessory after the fact was levied against
Sergeant Koon. Yet, videotape notwithstanding, the Simi Valley jury did
not convict them.
Why was the violent and reactionary release of such obviously
pent-up outrage even necessary if the Rodney King Beating Incident was
truly an aberration, as indicated by Chief Gates? The fact is, there
appears to be a history of such “aberrations” in Los Angeles. In
particular, many African American Angelenos can cite a litany of such
incidents, which have occurred in and against their communities. Upon
this community history is based a shared recognition, as voiced by Mayor
Bradley, that "there appears to be a dangerous trend of racially motivated
incidents running through at least some segments of our Police
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6
Department."® How long has this "trend" existed and why? One can, of
course, point to the simple facts of racism, prejudice, and bigotry to
answer this question; the insidious impact of racism in the form of
discrimination and segregation in this country has been well documented.
African Americans have historically been underserved, undereducated,
underhoused, underemployed, underfed, and even underprotected. But
given the complicated nature of race relations in the United States, in
what other ways can the complexity of the manner in which African
Americans are policed in Los Angeles be explained? In addition, how can
the different perceptions and understandings that others have of this
situation be explained? What role does the political leadership of the city
play in this regard? In other words, what happens at the conjuncture of
race, politics, and police in Los Angeles? These are the underlying
questions of this dissertation.
Police-community relations are not a new interest of academics. In
the academic arena, sociologists, criminologists, political scientists,
journalists, legal scholars, and urban policy experts have dominated the
discussion of the more prominent law enforcement issues.® Historical
® Statement released by Mayor Tom Bradley, "Bradley Blasts Bigotry" of
Police Officers," Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1991.
® Examples of such works include, Egon Bittner, The Functions o f Police in
Modem Society: A Review o f Background Factors, Current Practices and
Possible Role Models (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975); Donald Black, The
Manners and Customs o f the Police (New York: Academic Press, 1980);
(continued on next page)
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research in the area of policing has not been as extensive, thus leaving
the field wide open for innovative forays into this important dimension of
urban history. The key works in the field can be characterized as either
urban studies or social histories. The former discuss the growth of
nineteenth century police departments in the context of the rise of
industrialization and the development of cities. Analyzing factors such as
the advent of new municipal services, increased immigration, and new
economic functions, the city studies argue that urban police forces are a
product of these developments and consequently were shaped by the
needs of both municipal leaders and the citizenry. ^
The broader social histories of urban police departments look at
municipal law enforcement organizations in various ways. James
Richardson, in the second of his monographs on policing. Urban Police in
the United States (1974), constructs an argument that Americans have
never agreed on the proper function of the police even though the primary
stated purpose of most forces is to preserve order and render service to
David J. Bordua, ed.. The Police: Six Socrâ/og/ca/Essays (New York; John
Wiley & Sons, 1967); Jerome Skolnick, Justice Without Trial: Law
Enforcement in Democratic Society (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967);
Jerome Skolnick and James Fyfe, Above the Law: Police and the Excessive
Use of Force (New York: The Free Press, 1993); and James Q. Wilson,
Varieties o f Police Behavior The Management o f Law and Order in B'ght
Communities {Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
^ See, for example, Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston 1822-1885 (New
York: Athenaeum, 1971) and James Richardson, New York Police: Colonial
Times to 1901 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970).
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8
people. The quandary, according to Richardson, occurs because police
have subordinated their service orientation to fighting crime, law
enforcement, and regulation of public morals. Eric Monkkonen suggests
that over time the public’s expectations of and demands on the police
Increased as police departments became more bureaucratic and more
formal. In Police in Urban America (1981 ), he asserts that these changes
were tangential to, not consequences of, urban growth. In Big City Police
(1977), Robert Fogelson offers an analysis of the changes In policing
which occurred In two reform waves during the first half of the twentieth
century. The first such reform wave moved urban police forces away from
the manipulations of local political machines toward their Institution as
quasl-mllltary adjuncts of local government. The second reform wave was
a move toward the professionalization and unionization of police. The
professionalization movement was spearheaded by Los Angeles police
chief William Parker who spread the gospel of professionalization
throughout the nation. ®
Fogelson argues that urban police were Initially manipulated and
reformed by outside forces. Monkkonen posits that the transformation
® Key among the social histories are James Richardson, Urban Police in the
United States (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974); Eric
Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 1860-1920 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981); Robert Fogelson, Big City Police (Cambridge, MA.
Harvard University Press, 1977).
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from the constable-watch system to contemporary urban law enforcement
agencies came from within. Richardson characterizes the paradox of
urban police forces: preserving order and providing public service versus
crime fighting and prevention. This dissertation will actually merge these
three viewpoints into an urban study which focuses on social control as a
political issue as well as a law enforcement strategy. In the introduction
to Police in Urban America, Eric Monkkonen writes:
Historians have begun to ask questions about social
bureaucracies in a new way, and although the specific
institution or bureaucracy under analysis varies, this new
way of looking at the past usually comes out with
predictable results, fitting under the heading of social
control. . . . Ironically, the study of police as social
control agents has been neglected, yet a systematic
examination of the police demonstrates that even in its
boldest forms, social control is more complex than it has
appeared to historians. It still remains for a study of an
institution that has, as one of its explicit purposes, the
social control of a specific group of people, to deal with
this aspect of institutional behavior in a sophisticated
manner.®
Sophistication notwithstanding, this dissertation is an initial foray into the
complexity of which Monkkonen writes.
Like all major urban police departments, the LAPD functions as an
institution of social control. As such, all police-community interactions are
played out on a grander scale than are commonly perceived as routine
intimate encounters between individual police officers and local citizenry.
® Monkkonen, Police in Urban America, 8.
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10
This argument is supported to some extent in Frank Donner’s Protectors
o f Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America
(1990). He convincingly characterizes American police departments as
the "protective arm[s] of the economic and political interests of the
capitalist system.“’° Donner introduces five variables which parlay these
interests into repressive police behavior; power structure, political
culture, ethnic considerations, the role of the press, and industrial
development. In order to assess the LAPD's relationship with African
Americans, my analysis will borrow these variables as mediating
influences in this relationship.
The tension and mistrust between police officers and African
Americans is, of course, by no means unique to Los Angeles. There is a
broader literature emerging on police/minority community relations in
older cities in the Southern, the Midwestern and Northeastern sections of
the United States, as well as in newer sunbelt cities like Miami that reveal
similar situations. Nor is the problem confined to the United States,
Frank Donner, Protectors o f Privilege: Red Squads and Felice Repression
in Urban America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1990), 1 ; for example, see also, Bittner, The Functions o f the Police; Maureen
Cain, Society and the Policeman's Role (London and Boston: Routledge and
Regan Paul, 1973); Sydney Marring, Policing a Class Society: The
Experience o f American cities, f 865-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1983); Isidore Silver, The Crime Control Establishment
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974).
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11
problems of excessive police aggression against Black people are clearly
international concerns also.”
There is also a long literature on the social control of Black bodies
which is rooted in the institution of slavery and its consequent American
crucible racism. Codes governing free Black as well as slave behavior
emerged early in the colonial period along with the slave patrols to
regulate the movement of both free and enslaved African people. As
Vincent Harding writes, “the unsupervised black presence . . . was a
” See for example, U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Florida Advisory
Committee, Race Relations in S t Petersburg, Florida (Florida Advisory
Committee, December 3 & 4, 1996); Wesley Skogan, Community Policing,
Chicago Style (New York; Oxford University Press, 1997); James Cavallaro,
Police Brutality in Urban Brazil (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1997);
Simon Holdaway, The Radalisation o f British Policing (New York St. Martin’s
Press, 1996); also Robert J. Lopez, “Police Slaying Protest Draws Large
Turnout in Riverside,” Los Angeles Times, April 28, 1999 regarding the
policing slaying of a nineteen-year-old motorist in medical distress;
Christopher John Farley, “A Beating in Brooklyn,” Time, August 25, 1997,
regarding the jailhouse sodomy of a Haitian immigrant by New York city
police officer; Mike Clary, "A Case No One Wants is Still Shopping for a
Courtroom," Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1992 regarding a police slaying of
two Black men in Miami; Eric Harrison, 'Two White Policemen Fired in
Beating of Black Colleague", Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1992,
regarding race incidents and the police in Nashville; J. Michael Kennedy,
"Sheriff Rescinds Order to Stop Blacks in White Areas," Los Angeles Times,
December 4, 1986 regarding practices of sheriff in New Orleans suburb,
Jefferson Parish; "Police in Detroit Beating Asserted Raw, Naked Poweri,
Lawyer Says," Los Angeles Times, August 13,1993; Joe R. Feagin, The
Continuing Significance of Race: Antiblack Discrimination in Public Places,"
American Sociological Review 56 (February 1991): 101-16; J. J. Fyfe, "Blind
Justice; Police Shootings in Memphis," Journal of Criminal Law and
Criminology 73 (1982): 707-22, 1982; See Los Angeles Times, July 28-29,
1992 for articles regarding Canadian criminal justice system and
controversies surrounding South African police practices.
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12
threat, a challenge,” and Richard Wade has argued that the threat of the
“black presence” was a precursor to the formation of urban police forces.
It became incumbent upon law enforcement agencies to mediate against
the threat of Negro unrest and to mitigate white fears of growing numbers
of free Africans in their midst, an important aspect of policing that
continued beyond the ante-bellum period. Developing police departments
and the country thus had ample precedent for social control of African
Americans and other minorities.’^
Scholarly investigation of the LAPD itself is more limited— there are
a couple of good monographs, a number of articles in journals and
popular magazines, and several dissertations and theses. The one
scholarly attempt to distill the complex history of the LAPD that
researchers most consistently cite is the 1973 dissertation of Joseph
Gerald Woods, “The Progressives and the Police: Urban Reform and the
Professionalization of the Los Angeles Police.”’^ Woods looks primarily
at the pre-World War II reforms instituted to rid the department of
corruption, he assesses the pros and cons of external political influence
Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in
America (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 32-33; Richard Wade, The
Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington,
Louisville, and St. Louis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 88,
225, 287-89.
Joseph Gerald Woods, “The Progressives and the Police: Urban
Reform and the Professionalization of the Los Angeles Police” (Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1973).
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13
over the LAPD, and he illuminates the significance of the department's
earned autonomy in 1937. Woods’ dissertation, while foundational, does
not specifically explore police-community relationships, but rather police-
political relationships through 1950.
Joe Domanick and Mike Davis provide two critically analytical
perspectives of the LAPD and offer provocative insight into the LAPD's
role In the governance of Los Angeles. Journalist Joe Domanick's
treatise on the LAPD, To Protect and To Serve: The LAPD's Century o f
War in the City o f Dreams (1994), presents a long-view assessment of the
LAPD's ascension to its mythical yet real, "all pervasive policing . ..
power, autonomy, and ability to silence its critics dead in their tracks."’^ '
Domanick has approached the complexity of the department's existence
and influence in ways not dissimilar to my own. His central argument is
that the "all powerful" LAPD is precisely the type offeree that many of Los
Angeles' more "established" residents desire, the city’s power structure
was pivotal in shaping it, and it functions as intended.’® In City o f Quartz:
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1991), writer and activist historian
Mike Davis offers a leftist analysis of the meanings of post-modern Los
Angeles. One chapter is particularly critical of the LAPD's apparent
’" ‘Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD's Century o f War in the
City o f Dreams {tiev/York: Pocket Books, 1994), vii.
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 5.
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14
military-like occupation in the ever-expanding area of "South Central Los
Angeles.”’®
One striking feature of scholarly attempts to explain the genesis of
the glaringly evident antipathies between the LAPD and African
Americans in Los Angeles is that the starting point for most is William
Parker’s assumption of the helm of the LAPD in 1950. In fact, some
researchers have looked to define the LAPD’s relationship to the
community by its chiefs, particularly William Parker and Daryl Gates, the
two who have epitomized the LAPD since World War II. Others have
suggested that the LAPD’s reputation regarding police-community
relations is based on the antagonism incurred by civil rights activism, and
cultural and/or militant nationalism, which emerged in Los Angeles in the
early 1960s. Both perspectives essentially neglect the years before
William Parker became police chief in 1950.
In 1965, in the aftermath of the Watts Riot, Chief Parker suggested
to the McCone Commission, the Governor's Commission on the Los
Angeles Riot, that the rise of black nationalism and the culmination of
years of civil rights activism were the primary causes of contention
between African Americans and the police. The final report of the
commission, "Violence in the City— An End ora Beginning?" (1965)
Mike Davis, ch. 5 "The Hammer and the Rock," in City o f Quartz:
Exœvating the Future in Los Angeles (New York; Vintage Books, 1991 ).
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15
adopts this theory as the fundamental basis for the rioting as well.
Although not as rigidly or uncritically as the McCone Commission report,
Robert Conot's seminal chronicle of the 1965 riot, Rivers o f Blood, Years
o f Darkness (1967) and Bruce Tyler’s dissertation, "Black Radicalism in
Southern California, 1950-1982" (1983) also support the idea that
developing Black nationalism was the grist for the antagonistic relations
between the LAPD and Black Los Angeles residents. Additionally, Gerald
Home's Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (1995)
contends that Black nationalists were forcefully repressed by a law
enforcement and political establishment combine mired in its acceptance
of Cold War and Red Scare propaganda.
Other scholars have suggested that Chief William Parker, whose
tenure lasted for sixteen years from 1950 to 1966, should be viewed as
the one person most responsible for bequeathing the legacy of
problematic relations between the LAPD and the Black community.
Domanick, for example, argues that Parker carefully cultivated the
concept of "proactive policing." He contends this is actually a policy of
Violence in the City— An End o ra Beginning? Report by the Governor's
Commission on the Los Angeles Riots (Sacramento; State of California,
1965); Robert Conot, Rivers o f Blood, Years o f Darkness {New York: Bantam
Books, 1967); Tyler, “Black Radicalism in Southern California” (Ph.D.
dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1983); Gerald Home, Fire
This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville; University of
Virginia Press, 1995).
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16
directing law enforcement aggression and hostility toward the Black
community, a practice that persists to the present. In this respect,
Parker's leadership has been considered to embody a calculated offense
against rising Black activism, and thus, there Is considerable overlap
between those who consider Parker responsible for police repression of
African Americans in Los Angeles and those who relate police repression
to emerging Black radicalism and or civil rights activism. But outside of
Domanick and Woods few have given significant attention to the growth of
the LAPD between the onset of departmental autonomy In 1937 and the
ascension of Parker in 1950.’® It is this thirteen year period, however,
which I contend is critical in shaping a new policing paradigm in Los
Angeles.
The period from 1937 to 1950 in Los Angeles has not suffered from
a complete scholarly blackout. During the last thirty years, many scholars
have examined Los Angeles in the context of World War II. Historian
Domanick, To Protect and To Serve, 110, 230. The aforementioned Tyler
dissertation and the Home book on the Watts uprising (see above) give
both interpretations attention as does George O'Connor, "The Negro and
the Police in Los Angeles " (Master's thesis, University of Southern California,
1955). Two informative articles, Edward J. Escobar, "The Dialectics of
Repression: The Los Angeles Police Department and the Chlcano
Movement, Jouma/ o f American History 79 (March 1993):1483-
1514; and Martin SchlesI, "Behind the Badge: Police and Social Discontent
in Los Angeles Since 1950," in Norman Klein and Martin SchlesI, eds. 20th
Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion and Soda/ Conflict (Claremont, CA
Regina Books, 1990) also fall Into this grouping.
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Gerald Nash extensively discusses the impact of the war on Los Angeles
in The American West Transformed: The Impact o f the Second World
War (1985), as does Arthur Verge in Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles
During World War II (1993). Both Nash and Verge address industrial
growth, racial conflicts, and the interaction and cooperation between
municipal and federal governments during the war.’® The Black Los
Angeles experience during the 1940s has been the subject of a number of
notable dissertations including Lawrence De Graaf, “Negro Migration to
Los Angeles, 1930-1950” (1962); E. Frederick Anderson, “The
Development of Leadership and Organization Building in the Black
Community of Los Angeles From 1900 Through World War 1 1 ” (1976); and
Keith Collins, “Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-
1950” (1980).^
’®Gerald Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact o f the Second
World M/ar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Arthur Verge,
Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles During the Second World War
(Dubuque, I A: Kendall Hunt, 1993); see also Arthur Verge, “The
Transformation of Los Angeles During World War 1 1 ” (Ph.D. dissertation.
University of Southern California, 1988).
Lawrence De Graaf, “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930-1950,” (Ph.D.
dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1962); E. Frederick
Anderson, “The Development of Leadership and Organization building in the
Black Community of Los Angeles From 1900 Through World War 1 1 ” (Ph.D.
dissertation. University of Southern California, 1976); Keith Collins, “Black
Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950” (Ph.D. dissertation.
University of California, Los Angeles, 1980).
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Other scholarly attention to this period includes a number of
studies pertaining to relocation of Japanese Americans under the
auspices of Executive Order 9066 which disproportionately affected Los
Angeles due to its significant Japanese-American population.^^ There
have also been a number of books and dissertations written about the
many-layered meanings of both the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder case
and the 1943 Zoot Suit Riot. Both these incidents highlighted the
tensions between Anglo Americans and Mexican Americans in Los
Angeles, exacerbated no doubt by the home front anxieties of the war
and, I contend, help provide a context for understanding political and law
enforcement social control decisions based on class and ethnicity.^
The existing scholarship, nevertheless, does not explore the
confluence of race, politics, and police beginning in the late 1930s that I
Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History o f Asian
Amencans (New York: Penguin Books, 1989) ch. 10; Nash, The American
West Transformed, John Modell, "The Japanese of Los Angeles: A Study in
Growth and Accommodation, 1900-1946," (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia
University, 1969); Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Thai: Japanese
Amencans in World War if (New York Hill and Wang, 1993).
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and
Identity in Chicane Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993); Mauricio Mazon, The Psychology o f Symt)olic Annihilation: The
Zoot Suit Riots (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1984); Ronald Lopez, “The
Battle for Chavez Ravine: Mexican Americans and Public Policy in Los
Angeles, 1945-1962” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Berkeley,
1997); Eduardo Pagon, “Sleepy Lagoon: The Politics of Race and Youth in
Wartime Los Angeles, 1940-1945” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University,
1995).
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see as shaping a new policing paradigm by the time William Parker
became police chief in 1950. My thesis began to take shape as I worked
through two collections at the Huntington Library in San Marino,
California. The papers of local politicians. Fletcher Bowron, mayor of Los
Angeles from 1938 to 1953, and John Anson Ford, Los Angeles County
supervisor from 1934 to 1958, revealed quite clearly that the politics and
standards of law enforcement in Los Angeles are not limited to police
administration or law enforcement culture alone. The Bowron papers,
especially, convinced me that socially and politically World War II was
pivotal in shaping post-war police-community interaction. I came to
understand that municipal politics is at the hub of the complex interplay of
race and police.
It became clear that during Bowron’s administration racial conflicts
were either managed as political problems or law enforcement problems
(or both), but rarely as solely social problems. This realization led me to
look again at Los Angeles politics, police, race, and class during the first
decades of the century. As I worked my way through this material, I
became aware that I was no longer simply discussing the formation of a
paradigm for policing but examining the dynamic interaction of three
distinct yet conjoined elements of Los Angeles history. The argument
that emerges here further contributes to the discussion that the LAPD
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before William Parker became chief in 1950 is well worth investigation. In
order to understand the interactions of the police department with Black
Angelenos in the late 20th century one must comprehend the evolution of
reformers’ notions of social control and the role of the LAPD with an
understanding of the history of the police department, of the growth and
development of the African American community, and of the Progressives’
efforts to reform the political administration in Los Angeles. Then one can
recognize how these dynamics interacted from the turn of the century
through World War II.
In three sections this dissertation first establishes the context for
understanding how these dynamics come together with a discussion on
pre-1930s municipal politics, police administration, and the early Black
community settlements. “Section One: Background and Beginnings”
initially examines the relationship of the Progressive reform movement’s
moral imperative to the LAPD s earned autonomy in 1937 and to Fletcher
Bowron’s mayoral tenure beginning in September 1938. The second
chapter highlights the prewar development of the Black community in Los
Angeles.
“Section II: Wartime Transformation" turns to the catalyzing events
which establish the new paradigm, the World War II transformation of the
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city industrially and demographically. Chapter Three looks at the effects
of World War II on Bowron’s good government leadership and on
interracial/interethnic relations among the city’s Anglo, Japanese
American, and Mexican American residents. Chapter Four is devoted to
an analysis of the responses of city leadership to the dramatic growth of
the Black population during the war.
In the final section, “Confluence,” I explore how, during the war, the
Rubik’s cube-like interplay of race, politics, and police prompted the
emergence of a new paradigm for policing in Los Angeles. The fifth
chapter discusses the particular dynamics of the post-reform relationship
between city hall and the police department. During the 1940s one of the
critical features was stability in the offices of the mayor and the chief of
the LAPD, which had never occurred before in Los Angeles history. The
concluding chapter is about convergence: the nature of police
department interaction with, and control of the Black community; mayoral
control of the police department with respect to overall police strategy;
and most particularly, the standard set by mayoral responses to requests
from Black residents to investigate and rectify police brutality and
malpractice.
In this dissertation, I contend that the political and reform focus in
the city of Los Angeles regarding the LAPD had concentrated on
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22
overcoming the corrupt Influence of vice rackets for so long, that the
mayor could not see beyond the resolution of those issues to recognize
that significant policing problems, which had festering along with the anti-
vice crusades, still existed within the LAPD. In addition, the reform
agenda was sidetracked by the war, and further complicated by one racial
conflict after another. From 1937 until 1945 a new urban paradigm was
carved out of a municipal police department that had succeeded in
achieving political independence in 1937; a recall election in 1938 which
sent a popular reform mayor to city hall; and rapid demographic change
during the war.
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Part One: Background and Beginnings
Chapter 1
Itchy Palms: Reforming City Hall and the Police Department
It was particularly difficult to get rid of police officers who were
generally known to have had itchy palms, who shut their eyes or
walked around the other side of the block from places where
commercialized gambling was going full blast. . . . Unless it was
possible to actually prove a case of bribery, a police officer is
practically immune from punishment and is secure in his job.
(Mayor Fletcher Bowron, 1946)
The Progressive reform movement spread rapidly across the nation
in the early twentieth century with results both immediate and long term.
In Los Angeles, “good government" Progressives had organized to reform
local government beginning in the late 19th century. In 1911, they had to
ally with the business community, in the form of the powerful Merchants
and Manufacturers Association, in order to forestall even greater reform
challenges from the Socialists. Together, Progressives and local blue
chip business leaders lobbied for morals legislation, crusaded against
vice, and amended the city charter. Due to their reform successes, the
Merchants and Manufacturers exerted a tremendous amount of control in
using police against labor organizing efforts. Reformers had set a vision
for the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 20th century: a police
force free of corruption and vice that would serve the local citizenry in a
fair and efficient fashion. In reality, however, the primary function of the
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"reformed” LAPD was to protect and serve the moralistic reformers and
the class interests of the business community in Los Angeles.
Reform efforts mixed with periods of relapse finally culminated in
the late 1930s when two significant events occurred. In 1937 the LAPD
gained full departmental autonomy when voters passed a charter
amendment which granted the police chief a “substantial property right” to
his position. The following year, on the strength of a recall campaign
against Mayor Frank Shaw, superior court judge Fletcher Bowron rode
into office with a pledge to return good, clean government to Los Angeles
by eliminating corruption in the police department.
These two significant reform coups set the stage for a new
paradigm for the confluence of police and politics in Los Angeles in the
nineteen forties. No longer subject to the whim and will of whoever
occupied city hall at a particular time, the LAPD, with iron-clad civil
service protection from the bottom of the ranks all the way to the chief,
was finally free to get about the business of developing its own policies
and practices for policing the vast city of Los Angeles. The police
department, under new leadership, would now control its own internal
discipline, insulate itself from the political affairs of the city, and replicate
itself (and its command structure) in perpetuity with a civil service
provision which offered most city employees a “substantial right" to their
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25
positions. At the same time, reformers had finally succeeded in making
the mayor’s office less attractive to those with vested interests in "city
business" and placed a man in city hall who was dedicated to the
progressive principles of good government that had been espoused by
patrician, Anglo-American, Protestant civic leaders since the turn of the
century. Within this context, politically-aware Los Angeles residents in
the late 1930s believed that a once vigorously manipulated police
department was no longer susceptible to external influence. With the
mayor’s proclaimed agenda being good government, he would see that
that would be the case.
The “good government” movement in Los Angeles played a crucial
role in solidifying the impact of the simultaneous reforms in city hall and
the LAPD— especially in regard to the relationship between the mayor and
the police chief— and the perception of that relationship to others.
“[P]eople who were supposed to be important used to carry around
honorary police badges,” recalled Rabbi Edgar Magnin in a conversation
with a then retired Fletcher Bowron in 1965. “When you were installed,
we all put the badges in a basket— which was right. . . . ”’ Fletcher
’ Transcript of taped interview of Rabbi Edgar Magnin (grandson of I.
Magnin, the founder of an upscale Los Angeles department store) with
Judge Fletcher Bowron, February 4, 1965, Fletcher Bowron Collection,
Special Collections, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Hereinafter cited as Bowron Collection.
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Bowron's 1938 mayoral installation at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles
was symbolic on many fronts. At the time, no one knew just how
significant the turning in of those honorary police badges would actually
be, but this gesture was indicative of a new era in Los Angeles politics.
The waning years of the 1930s represented the culmination of nearly four
decades of persistent efforts to reform the political entanglements
between city hall and the police department. Such entanglements,
commonly blamed on the political machine in Los Angeles, had allowed
graft and corruption to flourish throughout the city— publicly and privately.
Yet reform had not succeeded in permanent change in all these years.
Machine politics appeared in Los Angeles as early as 1865.
Participation in local politics had become a vehicle for ensuring the
successful operation of private utility companies, street transit and
railroad companies, as well as such illegal activities as gambling and
prostitution, and the highly-regulated saloon business. Those interests
that were legal, but reliant upon a favorable political climate, were mostly
referred to as the “machine.” Those that courted influence for illegal
enterprises were mostly referred to as the “syndicate” or “protection
rackets" or “organized crime.” These interests needed lax law
enforcement, sympathetic assessors, predictable licensing practices, and
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27
the like. Early on, as Robert Fogelson contends, "all these groups
attempted to protect their livelihood by devising a political accommodation
between the morality and the appetites of the townspeople."^
Historians have argued over whether, in general, political
machines existed primarily to assimilate and acculturate Eastern
European immigrants into American society or primarily to benefit
entrepreneurs in both legitimate and illegitimate businesses. And the
question of who attempted to reform and why becomes dependent on
one’s perspective of the function of the machine. Richard Hofstadter, for
example, argues that the generations-old, middle class, Anglo American
felt displaced amidst the “status revolution" which began with the rise of
big business and industry in the late 19th century when wealth itself
became a proxy for social status. Hofstadter suggests that this elevation
of wealth to par with the patrician ethos of position and industriousness in
the determination of ones’ social status made reformers insecure about
their role and place in the body politic.^
Rather than fitting Hofstadter’s status anxiety model, Samuel Hays,
for example, proposed that reformers were primarily composed of upper
class business leaders— owners, rather than middle-class managers, and
^ Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 207.
^ Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. (New
York: Vintage Books, 1963), 134.
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their motivation was not even as “noble” as that of simply attempting to
reassert the accustomed criteria for status elevation. Instead, Hays
contends, reform of the political machines was motivated by self-interest.
Those who formerly had unfettered access to political power and who now
were left to compete or pay were impelled to reform the new political
paradigm because they wanted to wrest control from the political machine
and regain their business and political primacy.'* For example, the leading
civic reformers in Los Angeles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
formed organizations such as the Direct Legislation League (1896),
League for Better City Government (1896), the Committee of Safety
(1899), the Municipal Reform Association League for Better City
Government— also known as the Municipal League— (1902), the Non
Partisan City Central Committee (1906), the City Club (1907), and the
Good Government Organization (1908). These organizations were
primarily composed of prominent attorneys and leading businessmen
who were neither ultraconservative nor ultrawealthy.® As one of the
members of the League for Better City Government told the Los Angeles
Herald in July 1896, “[let us] take municipal politics out of machine politics
and provide a government run by businessmen on business principles.”
* Samuel Hays, “The Politics of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,”
Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (October 1964): 157-69.
^ Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive
Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 228.
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29
In his 1971 dissertation on prominent progressive Charles Willard,
Donald Ray Culton, in accordance with the thesis of Samuel Hays,
contends that the goal of Los Angeles reform organizations was to regain
control of city government to further their own Interests. One way for
them to do this was to get their own candidates elected to public office in
order to adopt a new city charter which would put more power in the
hands of a non-partisan mayor.®
Progressive reformers in Los Angeles were, for the most part,
native-born Anglo Americans. And unlike in comparable midwestern and
eastern cities, the machine in Los Angeles benefited mostly native-born
Americans. Los Angeles just did not have the large Eastern European
population that was bound to machine politics as occurred elsewhere.^
To be sure, despite its Spanish and Mexican heritage, natlvist sentiments
did exist In Los Angeles. As Fogelson notes, “The commitment of the
native white majority to homogeneity undermined the position of the
foreign and colored minorities In Los Angles between 1885 and 1930.”
But the combined population of southeastern Europeans, Mexicans,
® Donald Ray Culton, “Charles Dwight Willard; LA City Booster and
Professional Reformer, 1888-1914” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of
Southern California, 1971), 114; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, ch.
10, “The Politics of Progressivism.”
^ Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 210; Starr, Inventing the Dream, 236-
39; Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 120.
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30
Asians, and Negroes was still only about fifteen percent of the total
population as late as 1930.® Whatever their Social Darwinist beliefs
about “others,” at least outwardly Los Angeles reformers could not be
criticized on the grounds that their attempts to rid the city of powerful
political machines was in any way shaped by ethnocentrism. They could
also count on a groundswell of approval and support from a large part of
similarly composed electorate when they began aggressively attempting
to return politics back to “popular control.”®
By the late nineteenth century Los Angeles had become quite an
attractive haven for eastern and midwestern WASP Americans. In its May
1898 inaugural issue. Sunset Magazine, founded by the Southern Pacific
Railroad, stated that its aim was to “promote and glorify the west."^° The
Southern Pacific, and its competitor the Santa Fe Railway, had lines that
needed paying passengers. Newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times
had to sell advertising in order to see profit. Real estate speculators and
developers desired to sell land. Citrus growers and oil producers wanted
to sell their products. These type of businesses needed more people in
® Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 198.
® Starr, Inventing the Dream, 245.
Judith Elias, “The Selling of a Myth; Los Angeles Promotional
Literature, 1885-1915” (Master's thesis, California State University,
Northridge, 1979), 53.
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31
town in order to see profits grow. And so, "Boosting became an integral
part of [city] life."” The sale of Los Angeles was directed particularly to
hardworking midwestern farmers and wealthy northeastemers. Los
Angeles residency was touted as a lifestyle— a place with an enviable
climate, a place of unlimited potential for business and professional
opportunities, a place for land development, home ownership, and the
"enjoyment of ones' wealth." Advertisements lured individuals and
families to Los Angeles to escape harsh eastern winters. Boosters
wanted to attract "industrious and ambitious" homeseekers and
hardworking individuals to seize the opportunities inherent in the
availability of abundant and inexpensive land.’^ By the early 20th
century, city boosters, led by the Chamber of Commerce and the All Year
Club, had carefully crafted and cultivated an image of Los Angeles as a
safe haven for Anglo American Protestants.
There is no denying the impact of civic boosterism on Los Angeles'
growth. The early 1900s was a time when European immigrants were
arriving in "teeming hordes" in the East and wreaking havoc with nativist
sensibilities, values, and mores. Los Angeles boosters offered an
antidote for that. With its most marketable asset being climate, Los
” Ibid., 3, 63-66.
Ibid.; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 84; Starr, Material Dreams, 93,
95-96, 100-104.
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32
Angeles, the City of Angels, became known for sunshine, oranges,
abundant land, and a place free of the distractions of the “teeming”
eastern cities.
With respect to reform, the Direct Legislation League, led by Los
Angeles millionaire progressive John Randolph Haynes, began the call to
change the city charter in 1900. The League supported the institution of
the initiative, referendum, and recall as methods of diminishing the power
of the political machines, and in 1902 placed on the ballot a proposition to
include direct legislation in the city charter. According to Haynes, direct
legislation “is simply the principle of the American town meeting applied to
the conditions of city life.”’^ Haynes and other reformers also supported
municipal ownership of public utilities, the institution of civil service, city-
wide, at-large elections, and the formation of boards made up of
appointed commissioners to oversee city departments. From these
beginnings, the reform mandate became a constant in the political life of
Los Angeles. And the equally constant impediment to reform was the pull
and influence of machine politics. The Progressives introduced ballot
measures, formed committees, supported reform-minded candidates, and
initiated all-out efforts to eliminate the kinds of conflicts of interest and
Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 212.
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33
patronage that were inherent in a system of politics where favors and
popularity were considered to be important qualifications for office.’" *
Yet for every measure or candidate put forth by the Progressives,
the machine countered v/ith a candidate or anti-initiative campaign of its
own. This constant tug between the reformers and those who wanted to
maintain the status quo would last through the next four decades.
Indicative of this tension is the election of eleven mayors from 1900 to
1937, three attempted mayoral recalls of which one was successful,
twenty-five chiefs of police— when even just a three month stint in office
was not uncommon; and major city charter reform efforts as well— with five
attempts to write a new charter from 1889 to 1925 and charter
amendment proposals seemingly every few years.’® While the reformers
and their antagonists would come and go— the efforts to clean up city
government would continue to pervade city politics from day-to-day as
well as at election time.
The Los Angeles Police Department was the hotly contested prize
in the tug of war between reformers and the political machine. Those
’"Ibid., 216.
’® There was an attempted recall of Mayor Arthur Harper in 1909, but he
resigned rather than face a recall election; an attempted recall of John
Porter occurred in 1932; and in 1938 Mayor Frank Shaw was recalled.
See A Study of the Los Angeles Charter: A Report o f the Municipal and
County Government Section o f Town Hall, Town Hall (Los Angeles:
Haynes Foundation, 1963) for the number of charter amendments and
charter revision attempts over the years.
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34
businesses which operated outside the law, or in conjunction with illegal
activities, clearly needed sympathetic and favorable relations with those
responsible for enforcing the law— the police department and elected
officials. So while a saloon may have been a legal business, a saloon
owner may also knowingly conduct illegal activities such as bookmaking,
fronting for a prostitution ring, or avoiding health department inspections.
A madam may not want the activities of her prostitutes interrupted by
raids from the vice squad. Friendly relations with the police department
would determine the extent to which the law is enforced under such
circumstances. And if such favors are being fulfilled with impunity, then
there are inevitably others who suffer from lack of police protection, from
unregulated criminal activity, and who are morally offended by the level of
vice activities allowed to flourish in the city. And thus, reform in Los
Angeles which began with a focus on municipal politics, came to be
associated with efforts to eradicate the incestuous, and often illegally-
conducted, relationship between city hall and the police department.
With a desire to address the allegations of abuses and corruption
in the police force and to appease their anxiety about crime in Los
Angeles, an organization of "several prominent businessmen and
professionals" known as the Committee on Safety was formed in late
1899. According to Robert Fogelson, an additional concern of the
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35
committee was the makeup of the police force. “Most policemen gained
their appointments through political influence,” Fogelson writes, “and,
many of them were overage, undersized, debt-ridden, immoral and
otherwise unfit.”^ ® The committee appeared before the Los Angeles city
council in June 1900 requesting better police protection and
recommending that a good start might involve removing the entire board
of police commissioners. Although the machine-influenced city council
refused to heed this recommendation, the committee's report on
incompetence and corruption within the police department caused quite a
stir when it was published in the Los Angeles Herald in November 1900.
Containing information acquired with the aid of private investigators, the
report detailed police department protection of gambling houses and
opium dens in Chinatown, protection of prostitution, improper control and
lax enforcement of saloon regulations, and bribe taking by police
officers.^^
Within two years after the appearance of this report, a more
permanent iteration of the Committee on Safety was established. The
Municipal League, led by activist reformer, impassioned booster, and Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce secretary Charles Dwight Willard,
Robert Fogelson, Big City Police (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press), 9.
17
Culton, “Charles Dwight Willard,” 193; Fogelson, Big City Police, 9.
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36
supported a charter amendment which in addition to giving Los Angeles
voters opportunities for direct legislation also would institute civil service
provisions for city employees.’® Los Angeles voters passed the
amendment in 1902 making Los Angeles the first city in the nation to give
its electorate such a privilege. With the charter amendment, most city
employees' positions became classified civil service posts. No longer
could city jobs be given as rewards. Instead, qualifications for public
employee positions, including the police department, became
standardized. With the introduction of civil service procedures came
mandated competitive promotional exams (also for promotion to police
chief) and salary schedules. Workers would now be protected from
undue firings— they could only be removed for cause. Certain managerial
employees were exempted from these provisions— among them were the
chief of police. The police chief remained appointive (from a pool of
candidates that had passed the promotional civil service exam)— hired to
serve at the will of another appointed body, the board of police
commissioners.’®
’® Winston Crouch, “John Randolph Haynes and His Work for Direct
Government," National Municipal Review 27 (August 1938): 434-40, Starr,
Inventing the Dream, 230.
’® Los Angeles Civil Service Department, Second Annual Report, 1904,
23-24; Lorin Peterson, The Day o f the Mugwump (New York: Random
House, 1961 ), 234-46; Joseph Gerald Woods, “The Progressives and the
Police. Urban Reform and the Professionalization of the Los Angeles
Police" (Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1973),
(continued on next page)
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37
According to LAPD historian Joseph Woods, despite the
introduction of civil service, which was intended to instill the concept of
employee promotion based on merit rather than favoritism, “the reformed
[police] department consisted of the unreformed force given civil service
tenure.Another observer noted that applying civil service to
subordinates while allowing the leadership to remain appointed allowed
the machine to continue to control the department.^’ Regardless of the
advent of civil service, the critical problems concerning a machine-run city
government remained the same: the rackets still existed, the machine still
existed, and too many susceptible city employees with itchy palms who
predated civil service requirements still held their positions.
Since the problems remained, reform activists continued to agitate
for change. In 1909 the Good Government Organization and the Non
Partisan City Central Committee, were responsible for rallying the public’s
support for the passage of yet another charter amendment; this one
abolished the ward system and established nonpartisan local elections.
Among its other ramifications the elimination of ward politics worked to
further marginalize segregated minorities from meaningful participation in
local government. While Progressives are often praised for their success
25.
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 25.
H. W. Marsh, “Civil Service and the Police,” National Municipal Review
10 (May 1921): 286-91.
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in eliminating political machines, this and other achievements often came
at the expense of the institutionalized marginalization of minority residents
in Los Angeles.^
The scandals associated with machine politics most likely helped
the Progressives achieve their charter amendment victory in 1909. While
they were campaigning to destroy the power of Democratically controlled
ward politics, the Good Government Group began to gather signatures to
recall Los Angeles Mayor Arthur Harper. They accused the mayor of
conspiring with police chief Edward Kern and “a notorious gangster” to
monopolize the flourishing prostitution trade in Los Angeles. In response.
Mayor Harper removed Chief Kern from office and subsequently
appointed him to the board of public works. Kern, who as a city
councilman in 1906 had supported the River Bed franchise— a private
utility (which implies machine-influence), would now, with his appointment
Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 192. For a discussion of how
progressive municipal reform made the reformed governments less
responsive to the publics’ needs, see Robert Lineberry and Edward
Fowler, “Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities,” in James Q.
Wilson ed.. City Politics and Public Policy Politics and Public Policy (New
York; John Wiley & Sons, 1968), 122; and regarding the “nadir” of
American race relations, coincident with Progressive movement in
America, see Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought:
The Nadir, 1877-1901 (New York: Dial, 1954); William M. Banks, Black
Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Ufe (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1998), 59; and James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told
Me (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 161-68.
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39
to public works, oversee this same project.” Conflict of interest, machine-
influence— whatever the case. Mayor Harper’s actions revealed that his
sympathies did not lie with the incipient changes in local politics
anticipated by organizations such as the Direct Legislation League and
the Municipal League and the recently organized Good Government
Group. Rather than face a recall. Harper resigned. Progressives Edwin
Earl, a citrus shipper and publisher of the Los Angeles Evening Express,
and Charles Willard of the Good Government Group declared victory as
they brought their mayoral candidate George Alexander into office in
Alexander appointed a new police chief, Edward Dishman, a
former police reporter and instructed him to clear the city of prostitution.
Dishman made some headway but was fired by the police commission
less than one year later due to lack of suitable progress in ridding the
department of its ties to protection rackets.”
Dishman’s firing revealed to the police commission and its good
government backers that this civilian board should have the power, as
civilian heads, to assert more control over the LAPD. The most salient
reform concerns at this time had to do with authority and responsibility—
” Fletcher Bowron, "Los Angeles Charter Amendments and Political
History," summary written for Los Angeles History Project which Bowron
headed from 1962 to 1968, Bowron Collection, 6; Fogelson, Fragmented
Metropolis, 213; Starr, Inventing the Dream, 250-51.
Starr, Inventing the Dream, 250-52.
” Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 40.
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40
who should have it? How should the mayor, the chief, and the police
commission work together in this regard? With another charter
amendment in 1911, the city's leading reformers continued their efforts to
clarify the lines of authority between city hall and the police department.
They proposed that the mayor become a full-fledged member, rather than
an ex-officio member, of the police commission. They also proposed that
the police commission decrease from five to three members— the
remaining two would be appointed by the mayor and approved by the city
council. This reduction in size and the inclusion of the mayor would
ostensibly make the commission more able to work together, less likely to
be held up by filibustering reform opponents. In addition, the ballot
measure to amend the charter gave the police chief full authority for
supervision and control of the police force while the mayor was allotted
full power to appoint, direct, and dismiss the chief of police.^® Reformers
were slowly working toward their ideal— a city in which the leadership,
serving the public at-large, would have strong authority and responsibility
for the management of city departments. And city departments would be
led by managers who had acfiieved their position based on merit and
experience and accountability as well. These years of reform efforts
appeared to pay off initially. Charles Sebastian, well known as an anti-
Ibid., 40-41; Fletcher Bowron," Los Angeles Charter Amendments,”
7-9, Bowron Collection.
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41
vice crusader in Chinatown while a police lieutenant, became the chief of
police in January 1911 and served in that position for four years. This
was the longest period of stability in the leadership of the department—
ever. Sebastian may even have been chief of police longer had he not
successfully run for mayor in 1915.^^
The Progressives, beginning with the initial efforts of the Direct
Legislation League of Los Angeles in 1900, had successfully changed, if
not the nature, at least the entrée into city politics. With the initiative and
referendum, Los Angeles voters were ostensibly able to more fully
participate in developing and approving the legislation which would
directly affect them. With the power of the recall, they were able to hold
local politicians accountable for the wisdom and popularity of their
actions. And, with the establishment of nonpartisan, at-large elections
and the elimination of the ward system, they curbed the power of the
bosses. With the introduction of civil service, patronage was sure to
become a relic of the past. The reformers’ efforts resulted in
simultaneously strengthening the role of the mayor and weakening that of
the city council by giving the mayor the power to appointment and remove
both department heads and the members of the citizen commissions.
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 6; Fletcher Bowron, “Notes
Relating to Early History of Los Angeles Police Department” (June 1968),
Bowron Collection, 16-17.
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42
These commissions had been introduced to municipal government in
order to further constrict the influence of the machine on city departments
such as the police department and public works. In other words, the
Progressives had removed partisanship from city politics.^®
Despite the enormity of the changes their movement had brought
to Los Angeles, the reformers were seriously challenged by the Socialist
Party and by the conservative business oligarchy. To maintain their
influence and to counter the Socialist challenges from the left, Los
Angeles Progressives had to side with the Merchants and Manufacturers
Association, led by Los Angeles Times scion Harrison Gray Otis.^ This
alliance worked with the election of George Alexander, but was not
sustained against the Socialist challenger in the 1913 mayoral campaign
when a Socialist-Democratic alliance brought Judge Harry Rose into the
mayor’s office.” The death in 1914 of Charles Dwight Willard, one of the
most active advocates for reforming Los Angeles politics, also no doubt
hurt the Progressives' prospects. With Willard’s death, according to
Fogelson, disappeared “the Progressive leadership.” The California
Starr, Inventing the Dream, 268-69; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis,
215-16.
” For an overview of the establishment of the Merchants and
Manufacturers Association and the Socialist challenge in the 1911
mayoral campaign, see Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class
Violence in America (New York: Chelsea House, 1983), chs. 19-23.
” Starr, Inventing the Dream, 269-70; Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis,
215.
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43
Outlook, the Progressive weekly newspaper that Willard edited, went out
of business in 1918. Thereafter, reform organizations such as the Good
Government Organization and the City Club changed their focus from
combating the machine to promoting efficiency in political
administration.^’ Also, and perhaps more importantly, the Merchants and
Manufacturers took over the reform agenda and made it their own.
The journalist and LARD historian Joe Domanick contends that
because of the heavy-handed response of the LAPD to labor protesters in
the aftermath of the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing, the battle between
industry and labor in Los Angeles proved “as momentous in shaping the
character of the Los Angeles Police Department as would the puritanical
nature of the city's middle c la s s .T h e Merchants and Manufacturers
were not the self-interested Progressive reformers who sought to
democratize political power amongst themselves. Instead this
organization represented the wealthy conservative power brokers (and
anyone who wanted to do business with them), tied in some ways to the
railroads— those who had interrelated interests in land, water, banking,
and manufacturing and a common antipathy toward unionized workers.
Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 218-19.
^ Joe Domanick, To Protect and To Serve: The LAPD's Century of War
in the City of Dreams (New York; Pocket Books, 1994), 38; Frank
Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in
Urban America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1990), 33-35.
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44
The Merchants and Manufactures hated the Socialists for different
reasons than did the good government types, but once the Progressives
opened up their alliance to the oligarchs, their reform agenda was
changed. The new reform element was less concerned about the vice
rackets and more concerned about the Socialist-leaning labor radicals
who could seriously impact their profits. And thus, while the new wave of
reformers focused on union busting, introduced new municipal legislation
such as anti-picketing ordinances, and set limits on free speech, the
problems of racketeering and bribery began to surface once again.“
Charles Sebastian's popularity as police chief did not follow him
into the mayor’s office. Sebastian served only one term and was
succeeded by another one term mayor, Frederic Woodman, who in turn
was succeeded by “perennial mayor” Meredith Snyder in 1919. Snyder, a
well-known businessman, had previously served as mayor from 1897 to
1899 and from 1903 to 1905. In 1919, major scandal again revealed the
strong yet illicit ties between the mayor and the police chief. Shortly after
his July 1919 appointment by Mayor Snyder, Chief George Home hired
two former police officers with questionable backgrounds as his
"unofficial" advisors. One of these advisors, the former police chief of the
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 35-39; Donner, Protectors of
Privilege, 25-26.
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45
Venice, California department, had been fired after a grand jury
indictment for extortion, accusations of false arrest, and assault against a
department officer.^ Vice flourished in the city, graft flourished in the
department. A barrage of editorials about Home’s activities and the
insidious corruption within the police department finally forced the chief to
resign in September 1920— slightly more than one year after his
appointment. The Los Angeles Times was not as vocal a critic of Home
as were other more reform oriented publications such as the Los Angeles
Record, the California Outlook, the Los Angeles Express, and the
Hollywood Citizen-News. According to the LAPD's own self-published
history, the Hollywood Citizen-News printed the following editorial during
the scandal-plagued term of police chief George Home:
When a mayor accepts campaign funds from the
gamblers and prostitutes and in return therefore appoints
members of a Police Commission who are approved by
the vice leaders, and the Police Commissioners in turn
appoint a Chief of Police approved by the vice leaders,
and the Chief of Police in turn appoints members of the
vice squad approved by the vice leaders, a situation
exists which makes it impossible for the Mayor,
members of the Police Commission, the Chief of Police,
^ LAPD Commemorative Book, 1869-1984 (Los Angeles: LAPD Revolver
and Athletic Club, Inc., 1984), 57. Hereinafter referred to as LAPD Book.
As mentioned in the introduction, the secondary source material regarding
this period in LAPD history is weak. I have relied on the LAPD Book (and
its evident biases) simply to establish this chronology and get some sense
of the reasons why— however sanitized. However, I must add that I was
also surprised by this document's frankness concerning the protection
rackets which flourished among the ranks.
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46
and members of the vice squad to face charges of open
35
vice without attempts to falsify.
Mayor Snyder was also caught up in this latest series of scandals. As
writer John Morgan explained in the National Municipal Review, Snyder
“was charged, rightly or wrongly, with being too close to elements which
had a great deal to gain from police leniency. Snyder's third term as
mayor was doomed as he was distrusted by both sides— the conservatives
and the syndicate.”*
The advent of prohibition was a particularly devastating blow to
political reform. “Prohibition added a new field of endeavor for men on
the make, a new vein to be mined by men already established,” explains
Woods. “How well the reformers understood this idea is not clear.”^^ In
the decade of “Normalcy,” nine police chiefs rotated through office. The
shortest term was Chief Alexander Murray’s one month stint in October
1920 and the longest was James Davis’ three year and nine month tenure
from April 1, 1926 to December 29, 1929. The average length in office of
the remaining chiefs during the 1920s was about ten months. Although
he only served one two-year term. Mayor Snyder appointed two police
chiefs in addition to George Home. Chief Lyle Pendegast (November 1,
* LAPD Book, 57.
* John Morgan, “Our American Mayors VIII; George Cryer of Los
Angeles,” National Municipal Review 17 (January 1928), 28.
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 112.
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47
1920 to July 4, 1921 ) was an attorney hired from outside of the police
department. He introduced a merit rating system for performance
evaluations but his reform efforts were strongly resisted and he was
replaced with Chief Charles Jones. In turn, Jones grew disgusted with
what he called "meddlesome reformers" who interfered with police work.
Although he abolished the tantalizingly corruptible vice squads and
returned that responsibility back to the patrol units in each division, the
ever vigilant Los Angeles Record ran stories that vice remained wide
open in the city. Jones, who became chief of police in July 1921,
resigned just after New Year’s Day, 1922 with the announcement, “The
job isn’t worth the grief that attends it.”“
George Cryer succeeded Meredith Snyder as mayor. A former Los
Angeles County district attorney, Cryer had also been a United States
attorney and a city attorney in Los Angeles. He was supported by the old
guard— the Los Angeles Times, Southern California Edison, and other
enemies of municipal ownership. Cryer, however, turned out to be more
sympathetic to progressive rather than to conservative causes. He was a
popular mayor and was reelected in 1923 and again in 1925.^
^ Starr, Material Dreams, 171; LAPD Book, 58-59. Concerning the police
department during the early years of prohibition, see Woods “The
Progressives and Police,” chs. 2-4 and Domanick, To Protect and to
Serve, 45-47.
Morgan, “George Cryer,” 27-32.
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48
Cryer appointed and removed the next two police chiefs. James
Everington and Louis Oaks. Both of these men were reform-minded, but
felt as if their efforts were thwarted by the police commission. In
Everington’s case, the commission would not support his decisions to fire
a captain and a lieutenant on charges of dereliction of duty. Everington
was also not enamored of the idea that, due to civil service provisions, he
would essentially have a subordinate in the assistant chief position whom
he could not fire— so he refused to fill the position.^ The Los Angeles
Record supported the chief, as did the mayor initially. Nevertheless,
when rumors of poor police administration and a nascent crime wave
surfaced, the already disenchanted police commission forced the mayor
to remove Everington from office.'*’ Louis Oaks, Everington’s successor,
was promoted from detective sergeant. He didn’t fare much better,
although he lasted sixteen months compared to Everington’s three and
one-half months as police chief. Once he had appointed Oaks, Mayor
Cryer declared that he would have a hands-on approach to running the
police department. Cryer also proposed a charter amendment to make
the police chief a certified civil service position— yet it would still be
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 128; LAPD Book, 59.
Starr, Materia! Dreams, 171.
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49
appointive, and the chief would still serve at the pleasure of the police
commission, the council, and the mayor/^
Louis Oaks was viewed favorably for his organizational skills. He
reinstated the position of deputy police chief and established the position
of inspector of police— an officer who would handle personnel complaints.
He also reorganized the detective bureau into special squads— robbery,
burglary, and homicide. His biggest achievement in the eyes of the
Merchants and Manufacturers Association, however, was most likely the
suppression of the San Pedro Harbor strike in 1923. The LAPD’s Red
Squad, an anti-labor, anti-Socialist intelligence unit had infiltrated the
International Workers of the World in order to gain information about
potential labor strikes at the Los Angeles Port and San Pedro Harbor.
The Merchants & Manufacturers was forever grateful for the LAPD's
intervention (and didn’t consider the busted heads of the workers as
cause for concern).^ Nevertheless, no amount of gratitude could protect
Chief Oaks from the continuing allegations of police payoffs from liquor
smugglers and prostitutes, nor of allegations of the chiefs own drunken
indiscretions with women.^
Bowron, “Los Angeles Charter Amendments,” 11.
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 63, Woods, “The Progressives and
the Police,” 156.
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 47-48; Starr, Material Dreams, 171.
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50
Some members of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association
evolved into yet another group of influential, reform-minded citizensknown
as the Citizens Anti-Crime Commission of Los Angeles or more simply as
the Crime Commission. The Crime Commission was put together by the
Community Development Agency in 1922 to investigate organized and
protected crime in the city. Yet the Crime Commission was also
concerned about the types of crimes which affected business. They
sought to limit the exercise of individual rights. They proposed stiffer jail
sentences for such crimes as jay walking and exceeding the speed limit
because these were “first degree” crimes (a sort of “entry” crime which, if
not enforced, could escalate into more serious and flagrant disrespect for
the law). Among the members were Harry Chandler (son-in-law of
Harrison Gray Otis), publisher of the Los Angeles Times and Herald,
presidents of a local life insurance company and a major oil company, the
vice president of a national bank, heads of the men’s and women’s city
clubs, and local conservative attorneys.^ This was clearly not the same
group of civic leaders that had initiated municipal reform in Los Angeles.
With Mayor Cryer's support, the Crime Commission played a key role in
bringing the foremost expert on professional policing at the time, August
Vollmer— the police chief in Berkeley, California— to head the LAPD and
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 156-168; see Fogelson, Big
City Police, 46-48; and Bowron, “Los Angeles Charter Amendments,” 16.
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51
try out his theories of crime prevention and police administration. The
machine did not contest the one year appointment, from August 1923 to
August 1924, because, according to Woods, the machine knew his reform
administration would make no lasting or detrimental changes to its
influence.^
The Crime Commission was quite pleased during Vollmer's year in
Los Angeles. He reorganized the command structure within the LAPD by
centralizing power back to the chief. He added seven new special
divisions and improved employment qualifications through more rigorous
training and additional “mental” testing. He statistically reviewed high
crime areas and based deployment on those data. Finally, Vollmer
proposed the implementation of a city tax in order to enable the police
department to raise the salaries of its officers, which would, in turn attract
a higher caliber of officer. Vollmer's 1924 annual report was filed but
never officially published and distributed.^^ Had his indictments of the
recruitment methods, promotion practices, and competencies of individual
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 161 ; Starr, Material
Dreams, 171-72. Fogelson contends that the city council compelled
Vollmer to resign by not approving funds for his professionalization
program— one element of which was that the police force become well-
paid. Vollmer argued that Los Angeles could not rid the department of
graft unless the city reduced the incentive, which would mean replacing
low salaries with higher ones; Fogelson, Big City Police, 76, 100.
Law Enforcement in Los Angeles, Los Angeles Police Department
Annual Report, 1924, August Vollmer, Chief, with an introduction by
Joseph G. Woods (New York; Amo Press, 1974).
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52
police officers been too strong? Was there concern that Vollmer’s
assertions would reflect unfavorably on Incumbent politicians? Vollmer’s
recentralization of the police chiefs authority succeeded where earlier
efforts to do the same by previous chiefs had failed. But, it seemed, as
yet, that there was no clear way to combat the outside influences in
departmental affairs. Perhaps the problem was not just with the police
chief then, but with the police commission as well. Two police
commissioners were appointed by the mayor, with the approval of the city
council, the third was the mayor. How could reform-minded chiefs
operate efficiently under such an adversarial system? So therefore,
despite concessions from the syndicate to support centralization in the
police department, reformers would again look to restructure the police
commission to make sure that the chiefs authority would not be externally
undermined.
As explanation for the cyclical and impermanent nature of
progressive political reform, Robert Fogelson, in Fragmented Metropolis
argues that the reformers did not know how to sustain their achievements
or
how to perpetuate their power. Clearly, the reformers
could not imitate the machine. Committed to municipal
ownership, they could not solicit funds from public
utilities, and bound to civil service, they could not
impress government employees during local elections.
Nor could they count much on organizational discipline
or loyalty. The leaders, for whom politics was not a
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53
livelihood, were often unwilling to compromise
differences, and their followers, for whom party regularity
was anathema, were— in [reformer Charles Dwight]
Willard’s words— always, “ready to flare up at the
slightest dictation.” Finally, the progressives could not
expect to escape future challenges. Despite their
expectations, Los Angeles was still embroiled in political
controversy, and despite their reforms, municipal
government was still subject to political pressures.'*®
And perhaps due to these characteristics, the reformers unwittingly
allowed their agenda to be subsumed by the conservatives on the political
right. Nevertheless, surviving Los Angeles Progressives persistently
attacked the protection syndicate and the commercial interests that
continually resisted their efforts to clean up Los Angeles. The reformers’
attempts to release the stranglehold that the rackets held on the LAPD
resulted in a successful campaign for a new city charter in 1925 when
voters approved major changes impacting the relationship between mayor
and police department. Section 202 of the charter now protected police
officers from indiscriminate removal and the mayor was removed from the
police commission which returned to a five member rather than a three
member board, in addition, under the new charter, police commissioners
were given staggered terms so as to prevent any one mayor from having
power to appoint a complete slate of commissioners at any one time. The
police commission also regained the power to appoint the chief of police
Fogelson, Fragmented Metropolis, 215.
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54
as well as the right to remove him/^ The role of the board of police
commissioners (as well as all city commissioners) was clearly defined in
Article VI, Section 78 of the 1925 charter:
The Board of each department shall have power. . . . to
supervise, control, regulate and manage the department
and to make and enforce all necessary and desirable
rules and regulations therefore and for the exercise of
powers conferred upon the department by this charter.^
The first chief of police appointed by the first police commission to
serve under the new city charter was James E. Davis in 1926. During his
tenure, Davis introduced the famed dragnet system and dismissed at
least 250 corrupt officers from the ranks.^’ Davis was also the first LAPD
chief to serve more than two successive years as chief since Charles
Sebastian's four year tenure from 1911 to 1915. Nevertheless, despite
efforts to rid the police department of all the “bad apples”— Davis’ term as
police chief was continually marred by scandal from which he could not
effectively distance himself. In addition, narcotics usage, gambling, and
vice-related crime continued to increase. In his first annual report to the
0. A. Dykstra, “The Pending Los Angeles Charter,” National Municipal
Review 3 (March 1924): 148-51; Los Angeles Charter (1925), art. 19, sec.
202, (Los Angeles, 1948).
“ Los Angeles Charter (1925), art. 6, sec. 78 (Los Angeles, 1948).
Los Angeles Police Department, Annual Report, 1925/1926 (hereinafter
cited as LAPD Annual Report), 29; LAPD Book, 67-69. The Dragnet
System was a strategy of staking the city off into sections which enabled
officers to systematically stop and examine motorists in order to pick up
"suspicious characters."
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55
board of Police Commissioners, Davis decried the low ratio of police
officers per square mile in Los Angeles. This had been a consistent
complaint of his predecessors as well. Despite having an undermanned
police department, Davis touted increased police efficiency and a ninety
percent conviction rate on all vice arrests. “Those familiar with
newspaper accounts of the major crime activities here during the past
year,” Davis argued, “will readily recognize the fact that our Department
has brought justice to nearly all of those who have attempted to commit
their depredations within the municipality.
In the next year’s annual report, Davis addressed the growth of
vice by highlighting the effects of narcotics usage on local crime and gave
himself kudos for having come up with the resourceful solution of
arresting “suspicious characters” on vagrancy charges before they had
the opportunity to commit any criminal acts. Within the department,
nevertheless, police officers who were accused of protecting illegal
gambling establishments and prostitution rings, prohibition law violations,
and having underworld contacts continued to hold or regain their jobs
after civil service disciplinary hearings. Facing increasing demands for
accountability, the police commission charged Chief Davis with
“ LAPD Annual Report, 1925/1926, 1.
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56
incompetence and neglect of duty. He accepted a demotion to deputy In
charge of traffic in December 1929.“
As mayor, George Cryer had the unique distinction of serving the
people of Los Angeles under two charters. His third reeiectlon In 1925,
under the newly rewritten city charter, garnered him a four year rather
than two year term. John Porter, however, was the first mayor to come
Into office under the new charter when he was elected In 1929. A
prohibitionist and anti-vice crusader. Porter arrived with a public mandate,
spurred on by Daily News and Los Angeles Times editorials to clean out
the LAPD, and with the support of crusading minister Robert Shuler.
Porter had previously served as foreman of the grand jury that had
convicted District Attorney Asa Keys for allowing well connected criminals
to go free.^ It was Porter's police commission appointees who demoted
Chief Davis. However, it should be noted that "shortly after taking office.
Mayor Porter evaded the Intent of the 1925 charter and placed three of
his own selections on the [Police] Commission. To keep the new
“ Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 207-12; see Los Angeles
Times October 15-17, 25, 26, 29; November 16-21, 28, 29; December 14,
15, 28-31, 1929. Of James Davis' first term as Chief of the LAPD, Robert
Fogelson wrote, "Mayor John Porter's administration compelled Chief
Davis to step down . . . by threatening to bring charges which, if sustained
would probably have cost him his service pensions," Fogelson, Big City
Police, 76.
^ Woods, “The Progressives and the Police," 264; Domanick, To Protect
and to Serve, 56-57; Starr, Material Dreams, 88, 138-39.
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57
commissioners under control, he had them submit resignations prior to
serving. This gave him almost unlimited freedom to meddle in the affairs
of the Department."®®
Porter’s distrust of the police department ran deep. He hired a
former LAPD detective to work in his office and serve as a watchdog over
the department. He also began the practice of handing out captain's
badges to private detectives, and others of his liking, as a way of "spying"
on high city officials suspected of being corrupt.®® Porter was nonetheless
the subject of a recall petition for an intractable problem having nothing to
do with city hall corruption. He was charged with not providing leadership
in solving the depression-induced unemployment problems in Los
Angeles. Some people also questioned who really was running the
LAPD-the chief, Roy Steckel, or the mayor. Still others suggested that
Porter’s administration was doomed by his opposition to municipal
ownership of the Los Angeles power plant and his apparent disregard for
civil service regulations. Overall, it just seemed as if Porter was just not
suited to the job of mayor. The recall attempt failed but Porter, not
surprisingly, failed to win a second term as mayor in the following year.®^
® ® LAPD Book, 70.
® ® Ibid., Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 57.
® ^ Bowron, “Los Angeles Charter Amendments,” 16; LAPD Book, 69;
Francis Ahl, “Los Angeles Mayor Survives Recall,” National Municipal
Review 21 (June 1932); 400; Stanley Rogers, “The Attempted Recall of
the Mayor of LA,” National Municipal Review 21 (July 1932):416-19;
(continued on next page)
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58
Porter’s administration most likely compelled the reform agenda to
continue to instigate change. Section 202 of the city charter was again
amended with a voter-supported ballot measure in 1931. The inspiration
for this measure came not from outside reformers but from within the
police department. The amendment allowed the police chief to suspend
an officer for cause and a board of inquiry was created whereby an officer
could appeal a disciplinary action imposed by a superior. (Notably, there
were no provisions for making the chief accept the board of inquiry’s
opinions. )“ Furthermore, Los Angeles police officers gained, through this
charter amendment, a substantial right to their positions in Article XIX,
Section 202:
The right of any such officer or employee in the police
department to hold his office or position is hereby
declared to be a substantial right of which he shall not be
deprived arbitrarily nor summarily otherwise than as
herein the charter provided.^
With the groundwork laid by the Progressives and the earlier business
industry-inspired reforms, the LAPD in its 1931 charter amendment victory
gained another degree of independence and autonomy. While having
civil service protections for their departmental jobs, LAPD officers were
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 56-57; Starr, Material Dreams, 172.
“ Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 281-283; LAPD Book, 70.
“ Los Angeles Charter (1925), amended, 1931, art. 19, sec. 202 (Los
Angeles, 1948); Los Angeles Police Commission, Minutes, May 1 and
June 21, 1933, Los Angeles City Archives, Los Angeles, California.
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59
not subjected to the civil service oversight of internal personnel—
especially disciplinary— matters.
When Mayor John Porter failed to win a second term in the 1933
election he was succeeded by Frank Shaw, a former city council member
and Los Angeles county supervisor. Shaw campaigned with the slogan,
"Throw the Grafters Out," pledging to eliminate "all graft, gangsterism,
and commercialized vice in Los Angeles.”® ® Shaw’s commitment to reform
was seemingly firm when, as one of his first actions as mayor, he asked
for the resignations of the standing police commission. Replicating the
previous mayor's circumvention of the city charter in this regard, Shaw
offered assurances that this decision was motivated by his desire to
reorganize the police department and not to control it.® ’ Yet within
months of Shaw’s election, his newly-appointed police commission
members demoted the current chief, Ray Steckel, to deputy chief of police
and reappointed the previously demoted James Davis. How could this
happen? The LAPD's retrospective interpretation of Davis' second
appointment was that the action was "a concession to the city's ultra
conservative business interests who called for a chief with unquestioned
respect of property rights and one who knew how to keep labor in line."®^
® ° Bowron, "Los Angeles Charter Amendments,” 16, Domanick, To Protect
and to Serve, 57; “Sun and Shade,” Time, 26 September, 1938, 12.
LAPD Book, 72.
Ibid. For a prove
(continued on next page)
® ^ Ibid. For a provocative characterization of James Davis and description
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60
Domanick suggests that Shaw needed to appease the Merchants and
Manufacturers crowd due to his own pro-labor position. He wanted to be
mayor and he needed James Davis whose commitment to utilizing the
LAPD in support of the anti-union stance of the corporate oligarchs had
been established in his first term. “Keeping Harry Chandler and the men
of the Breakfast Club happy was James Davis[‘] . . . easiest task,“
Domanick contends. “They may have been at opposite ends of America’s
economic and class structure, but they couldn’t have been more in tune
ideologically. . . . Dissent was to be squelched. The Red and Vagrancy
Squads unleashed.
The Shaw regime did much worse than hire a previously ousted
police chief, however. Mayor Shaw hired his brother, Joe Shaw, as his
personal secretary. Joe Shaw was essentially the “tax collector” in the
Shaw brothers’ spoils system. The brothers’ racket included awarding city
contracts without competitive bidding then requiring monthly payments
from those contractors. Joe Shaw also sold LAPD promotional exams for
of his influence on the LAPD both as he rose through the ranks and when
he served as chief of police, see Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 40-
45, 50-65.
“ Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 52-53. The Breakfast Club was a
gathering of “the richest, most powerful, most prestige-laden men in Los
Angeles whose preeminent member, Harry Chandler owned and
published the Los Angeles Times, and about two million acres of real
estate as well,” Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 50-51; Starr, Material
Dreams, 172; Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 62.
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61
a price— ensuring that the administration would have friendly officers
within the ranks.^ The two together were rumored to have connections to
organized crime, gambling, and vice in Los Angeles. Methodist Minister
Robert Shuler began a campaign to recall Frank Shaw less than a year
after Shaw took office but this effort never got off the ground. Shuler, in
his failed recall movement, charged that there was "more crime, more
debauchery, more graft in this city than there ever was before. .. .
Shuler's charge proved to be true. Woods labels the Frank Shaw mayoral
administration as “the most corrupt in local history.”® ®
There was a faction of officers within the police department who
were fed up with the corrupt behavior which characterized the relationship
between city hall and the LAPD. Continuing to mold the department into
the agency they would like to see and in order to enhance the strengths of
the provisions of the recently established board of inquiry, the LAPD
sponsored a ballot measure to further amend Section 202 of the city
charter in 1934. The measure added two new clauses which essentially
"awarded the department complete autonomy over its internal disciplinary
procedures."®^ The first was the inclusion of a one year statute of
^ Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 72; LAPD Book, 73.
Bowron, "Los Angeles Charter Amendment and Political History," 16.
® ® Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 13.
^ Ibid., 284-85; Los Angeles Charter (1925) amended 1935, art. 19,
sec. 202 (Los Angeles, 1948).
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limitations for departmental actions against police officers and the second
ruled that no officer could be discharged unless found guilty by the board
of inquiry (three captains chosen by lot).
Perhaps due to an astute awareness that the political winds were
changing, and with the natural assumption that they intended to protect
their own best interests, Deputy Chief Homer Cross and Lieutenant
William Parker proposed one more charter amendment, Proposition 12A—
as a June 1936 voter initiative— to even further strengthen departmental
autonomy over its own discipline. They ostensibly believed that once the
police were not only able but also responsible for policing themselves, the
question of whether or not the department would or could be influenced
by external politics would become merely an academic exercise.
Proposition 12A proposed that the LAPD’s board of inquiry become a
legal entity. Also included in the proposition was the right of the chief to
suspend an officer for up to thirty days without adjudication. Additionally,
in order to restrain the biases of any particular chief, the officers included
a clause in the ballot measure which restricted the police chief to
lessening but not increasing disciplinary penalties. And finally, as a
matter of ensuring the fairness of internal disciplinary proceedings as
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63
well, accused officers gained the right to counsel and to a public hearing
should they desire one.®®
The LAPD could thank the reform efforts of such organizations as
the Good Government Group for setting the foundation for its
Independence and thus the incipient realization of police professionalism
in Los Angeles. The municipal reform agenda which transitioned from
external efforts to eliminate corruption to internal goals of promoting
efficiency was the key to the LAPD’s autonomy. “Incompetence,
corruption and lawlessness of the big-city police were only partly a
function of political interference in departmental policy,” writes Fogelson
in Big-City Police. The internal reformers argued for “professionalization”
as well; tighter discipline, physical, mental and moral qualifications,
research and planning and analysis, specialized units, clear lines of
command and a crime prevention orientation.®®
While the police department assumed greater control of its internal
affairs, the city's political establishment was also close to achieving its
own sort of freedom. Both elected officials and the LAPD were on the
verge of loosening the grip of a political culture which had, for the
® ® LAPD Book, 80. Regarding the new generation of internal reformers of
urban police departments see Fogelson, Big City Police, 142-45, and see
pages 169-71 regarding rank and file police officers’ growing annoyance
with constant push and pull between machine and reformers.
® ® Fogelson, Big City Police, 150-57; see also Fogelson, Fragmented
Metropolis, 211-12.
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64
formative years of the 20th century, prevented them from breaking free of
scandals, upheavals, and cyclical reform efforts. Frank Shaw withstood
the scrutiny of his first mayoral term and was elected to a second term in
1937. Yet in his second term, the incestuous relationship between the
mayor's office, the police department, and the protection rackets would be
radically attacked and severed with a degree of finality heretofore unseen
in Los Angeles.
The scourge began with the 1934 Los Angeles County grand jury.
Fletcher Bowron, the presiding judge of the superior court, impaneled the
1934 grand jury with a mandate to probe into "official crookedness." The
grand jury itself had been the contested focal point of many conflicts
between the political machine and the city's reform leaders for years.
Bowron had first been elected to the Superior Court in 1926. Prior to that,
he had been executive secretary to the governor of California and before
that, while a beat reporter for the Herald, covering the Los Angeles
County courthouse, Bowron had studied law.^’
Bowron, like so much of LA's Protestant middle-class,
was not seeking to right past injustices or engage in
great social causes. His Christianity was not that of
redemption through utopian transformation. He was a
decent, plodding, honest man who seemed to take
visceral offense at vice, corruption and the
weaknesses of human nature.^
70
71 ,,
72
Culver City Evening Star-News, June 6, 1934, Bowron Collection.
Sun and Shade,” Time, 26 September, 1938, 12.
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 74.
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65
Bowron's 1934 judicial reelection campaign had highlighted the
issue of official corruption. He was supported by a broad array of the
citizenry even though he had only lukewarm support from the
conservative downtown business establishment. After all, Bowron was
apt to get rid of illegal vice by cracking down on the LAPD, even though
the chief of the LAPD at the time was a favorite of the power brokers.
“There is an effort to defeat Bowron, and the reasons behind it are exactly
the reasons why he is entitled to the support of good citizens, “
proclaimed an editorial in the Culver City newspaper, “in official circles, it
represents the attempt to have him [Bowron] ousted at the behest of the
crowd that fears him. If people understand the motive of this political
crew, its attacks on Bowron will strengthen him because of the enemies
he has made.”^
As Bowron’s name became increasingly well known while he
directed the grand jury investigation of official corruption, Frank Shaw was
spending his time in office perfecting just what Judge Bowron intended to
eliminate. Although both Shaw and Chief James Davis had publicly
avowed that organized crime and vice had been virtually eliminated in Los
Angeles, the 1937 grand jury determined that the opposite was true.
^ Culver City Evening Star-News, June 6, 1934, Bowron Collection.
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66
Indeed, it identified "1800 bookmakers, 200 gambling houses and 600
brothels" within the city limits/"*
One of the grand jurors of 1937 was Clifford Clinton, a Bowron
appointee and owner of the downtown restaurant, Clifton’s Cafeteria.
Clinton was so alarmed by the revelations of protected gambling and
crime which came out of the grand jury's investigation that he formed a
group called the Citizens Independent Vice Investigating Committee
(CIVIC). The Progressive Era legacy of moralistically-defensive,
organized, citizen-based, crime reform efforts which began with the
Committee of Safety in 1899 continued. CIVIC assumed the attack on
illegal racketeering in Los Angeles beginning in 1937 when it launched an
investigation into the protected vice which still existed in Los Angeles.^^
Clinton paid (both literally and figuratively) for a large part of the group's
efforts. He was so intent on purging the city of prostitution and gambling
and the rackets associated with them that he actually utilized an honorary
police badge that Mayor Shaw had handed to him. In reference to the
police badge which helped him gain access to prostitutes and gamblers,
Clinton reportedly said, "They thought that I was one of the boys when I
flashed that badge. CIVIC enlisted private detective Harry Raymond
LAPD Book, 81.
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 70, 74-75.
Bowron, "Los Angeles History," 17.
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(an ex-LAPD detective and former chief of police in San Diego and
Venice) to gather information in support of its crusade to clean up the
police department. With intelligence collected from Raymond, and that
which he discovered himself, Clinton soon acquired a large amount of
incriminating information against the Shaw administration.
It is no surprise that Clinton, Raymond, and other members of
CIVIC became the victims of a harassment campaign engineered by the
Shaw administration. Their telephones were tapped, threatening phone
calls became the order of the day. Clinton's business was especially hard
hit. With no clear explanation from the city, his business taxes were
increased. The police commission refused to give Clinton a permit to
open a second restaurant. A greater number of customers than usual
began to complain about the food service in the cafeteria and personal
injury complaints against the business increased as well. None of this
harassment compared to the bombing of Clinton's home on October 27,
1937, however. There were no injuries to Clinton nor his family but rather
than diminish the current harassment campaign, the bombing merely
served as fodder to escalate the pernicious attacks against CIVIC’s
reform efforts.^
^ Ibid.; LAPD Book, 81 ; George Creel, “Unholy City,” Colliers, 2
September, 1939, 52.
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Amidst the tumult of the Shaw administration, the LAPD quickly
and quietly achieved full departmental autonomy by placing one final
charter amendment proposal on the June 1937 ballot. The amendments
to Section 202 of the city charter had, over the previous twelve years,
given the department full authority over its internal discipline. The Board
of Inquiry had been established as a legal entity. Sworn officers had
gained protection from capricious removal by the police chief. And the
civil service job protections granted to city employees in 1902 were
solidified when LAPD officers were given a "substantial right" to their
position with the 1931 charter amendment. The department could now
police itself and essentially guarantee its officers lifetime jobs. It is likely,
then, that 1937's Proposition 14A which extended the civil service
protections of all sworn LAPD officers to the chief of police as well was
considered by the voting public to be a logical extension of the charter
revisions that had come before.Mayor George Cryer had first proposed
See Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 369. The 1937
Amendment to Article XIX, Section 199 of 1925 Los Angeles City Charter
reads;
"The chief administrative officer of the Police Department shall be
known as the Chief of Police of the Police Department, who shall be
appointed by, and may be removed by, the Board of Police
Commissioners, subject in appointment to the civil service provisions of
section 202 hereof provided, however, the provisions of Section 202
hereof shall apply to the Chief of Police of the Police Department with
respect to his right to office, the compensation attached hereto, and the
proceedings for his removal, suspension and discharge, except that the
powers and duties conferred upon the Chief of Police and the Board of
(continued on next page)
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69
this sort of job protection be extended to the chief in 1923. At long last,
the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department— at least on paper— was
now completely insulated from the whims of political expediency in Los
Angeles.^
The establishment of full autonomy of the police department,
however, could not prevent a transformation that already been set in
motion by CIVIC. It is clear that the problems of corruption so closely
identified as the entanglement between city hall and the police
department did not immediately end once the department became
ostensibly free of external influence. The lines of accountability and
responsibility had been drawn— and they clearly conflicted. The police
commission, which was appointed by the mayor, supervised the chief of
police who oversaw the police department, yet the civil service
commission ensured the employment rights of all LAPD members,
including the chief. The police commission could hire the chief but could
not fire him. The chief had the ultimate authority in internal disciplinary
matters through the board of inquiry which adjudicated personnel disputes
Rights respectively therein are hereby, with respect to the Chief of Police,
conferred upon the Board of Police Commissioners and the Board of Civil
Service Commissioners respectively." Charter of the City of Los Angeles
(1925) amended, 1937, art. 19, sec. 199 (Los Angeles, 1948).
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 338.
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free of civil service intrusion. No longer beholden to anyone, the
department was nevertheless, not yet strong enough to "hold its own."
Reform-minded jurors like Clifford Clinton were in the minority on
the 1937 grand jury. He had even requested that six of the jurors be
dismissed because of their connection to “gambling interests supporting
the city machine."®® On the other hand, according to one reporter,
“Clinton’s fellow jurors denounced him as a smut hound, a notoriety
seeker, a Peeping Tom and an ill bird; and the daily press ridiculed him
as a one-man grand jury.’”® ’ The grand jury’s investigation into
protection rackets which sparked the formation of CIVIC and the
subsequent harassment of its members culminated with the presentation
of a so-called machine-controlled final report which proclaimed that there
was "no evidence of corruption in Los Angeles."®^ Nevertheless, Clinton
tenaciously held on to his reform mission and along with the three other
"reform appointments" to the grand jury, attempted to issue a dissenting
report for the record. Judge Charles Fricke refused to file the document
and subsequently, Clinton and the other dissenting members printed the
report on their own. The report read in part:
® ° Clinton Taft, “City of Fallen Angels,” Forum & Century, May 1938, 263.
® ’ Creel, “Unholy City,” 52. For an additional scathing depiction of Clinton,
see Rena Vale, “A New Boss Takes Los Angeles,” American Mercury,
March 1941, 299-307.
^ LAPD Book, 81 ; Creel, “Unholy City,” 13.
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71
The public in large part has been kept in ignorance of
deplorable conditions through:
(a) Clever propaganda in radio broadcasts and
the sinister control of news sources.
(b) Seemingly vigorous prosecution of various
offenders, thugs and mobsters who are not
members of the protected crime syndicates—
prosecuted as an example to those who are
not in on the pay-off.
(c) Campaigns to discredit or terrorize every
sincere citizen who raises his voice in warning
to the public.
(d) Gifts, campaign employment with generous
compensation, the subsidizing of certain
newspaper attaches with emoluments from
secret service funds, the cajoling of police,
citizens, civic and religious leaders by the
conferring of honorary police and sheriff
officers’ courtesy cards and shields, and
promises of special favors or protection.”
The CIVIC investigation had obviously already put some political
insiders on alert. Nevertheless, the heat was not enough to forestall
attempts to silence CIVIC. None of the Shaw syndicate’s previous
harassment campaigns compared to what occurred on January 14, 1938.
On that morning, Harry Raymond, the private investigator Clinton hired on
behalf of CIVIC, was seriously injured when he triggered a bomb rigged to
the ignition of his car. He was on his way to court with evidence about
Frank Shaw’s promises of political appointments and payoffs during the
” Taft, “City of Fallen Angels,” 264; LAPD Book, 81; Domanick, To
Protect and to Serve, 75.
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72
1933 election campaign.®^ Of necessity and for appearances sake, the
LAPD launched an investigation into the bombing. Not surprisingly, Chief
Davis found no fault on the part of the LAPD. The district attorney
launched his own investigation into the bombing and presented evidence
to the grand jury which revealed that Raymond had been under the
surveillance of LAPD captain Earl Kynette. Kynette headed the
Intelligence Squad— which was, in the words of one critic, the renegade
LAPD unit given free reign to “spy on, compromise and intimidate critics
and foes of the department and the mayor.”® ® The Intelligence Squad
worked out of the mayor’s office.®® Captain Kynette was tried and
convicted and sentenced to ten years at San Quentin prison for his role in
the Raymond bombing. Kynette’s trial revealed the depths of corruption
within the LAPD and the mayor’s office. Joe Shaw, the mayor’s brother,
was convicted of sixty-six offenses related to the sale of city jobs and
promotions, one accused police lieutenant fled to Mexico to escape
prosecution, and a prostitute serving time in state prison testified about
protection payoffs to LAPD officers.®^
® ^ Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 70.
® ® Ibid., 76; Taft, “City of Fallen Angels,” 259; Donner, Protectors of
Privilege, 62-63.
® ® Although there is no clear evidence of the evolution of this unit, one
could perhaps assume that the Intelligence Squad was an outgrowth of
the “LAPD watchdog” that Mayor John Porter created in 1929; Donner,
Protectors o f Privilege, 62.
® ^ LAPD Book, 73-74; Henry G. Bodkin, transcript, December 11, 1968,
(continued on next page)
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73
Despite his efforts to circumvent the revelations, Mayor Shaw did
not survive this full-scale assault against his administration. CIVIC and
the recently formed umbrella organization known as the Federation for
Civic Betterment (a reform group whose members represented various
business, professional, religious, and charitable organizations) circulated
a petition to recall Shaw in the wake of the Kynette trial. Police Chief
James Davis resigned in November 1938.“ Meanwhile, this coalition
persuaded Judge Fletcher Bowron to run against Mayor Shaw on a
platform of good government in a recall election which was favored two to
one by an “indignant public.” Bowron had already established himself as
a crusader for good government while serving on the bench. As mayor,
he would be able to guide the city out of the shadow of the Shaw regime
and lead this newly reformed city into a new era. Bowron was endorsed
by the Committee of 25 (the steering committee of the Federation for Civic
Betterment), was wholeheartedly supported by labor, tepidly by the Los
Angeles Times, and not at all by the influential Merchants and
Manufacturers Association.“
transcript, Bowron Collection; “Reform Over Los Angeles,“ Time,
5 December, 1938, 14.
“ Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 77-78; LAPD Book, 82; “Sun and
Shade,” Time, 26 September, 1938, 12; “Reform Over Los Angeles,”
Time, 5 December, 1938, 14.
“ Creel, “Unholy City,” 53; Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 78. A
recall election is essentially a no-confidence vote. The current office
holder is subjected to an in-term election— in competition with a candidate
(continued on next page)
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74
Bowron initially resisted being drafted as a candidate because no
recall campaign had ever been successful. He also knew that he was up
against entrenched problems at city hall and the police department which
were largely personnel issues. And these problems he could not resolve
because of civil service protections afforded to city employees. Bowron
spoke to his supporters in no uncertain terms about what he could and
would be able to do as mayor with respect to corruption. Cautiously,
Bowron explained to the Committee of 25;
This is a large community; and necessarily, a
metropolitan community of this size cannot be made lily
white. You, I think, appreciate that. . . . I of course,
want to do everything within my power to stamp [out
protection and vice], because I feel that that is the very
thing that is the seat of the corruption of our government.
On the other hand, of course, as practical men and
women, you must understand, and I think that you do,
that we cannot make a large community, such as this,
chemically pure. All that we can do is to do the best that
we can to enforce the law equally as to every one. And
may I ask if that is understood? Do you expect anything
more: Is there anyone that expects more than that?
(silence).“
who is most likely supported by the same individuals who want to see the
elected office holder removed from office. In previous mayoral recalls in
Los Angeles, the current office holder won more votes than the
opposition— thus retaining their elected position despite the recall
campaign.
^ Transcript of meeting of Committee of 25, August 9, 1938, Bowron
Collection.
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75
The reluctant candidate, Fletcher Bowron, handily won the September
1938 recall election by a two to one margin.
Although a long time in the making, the municipal and police reform
movements introduced important changes in Los Angeles politics.
Early on, the Progressive focus on ridding the city of crime and corruption
was paramount, but social control was also a concern. Labor union
organizing, striking, and picketing were antithetical to corporate interests
and the police department became their instrument to control the masses.
As yet social control was a class, not ethnic concern. Although in other
cities reformers argued that “ethnic life-styles, as well as attitudes and
mores underlying them, were incompatible with the country’s values and
that wherever necessary the authorities should employ the criminal
sanction to bring them into line with conventional morality,” the minority
population in Los Angeles was quite small, but growing, during the
Progressive years.®’ The European ethnic immigrant population was also
Inconsiderable. Therefore, social control in Los Angeles developed along
class lines— creating a situation where, in later years, ethnicity and race
could be added to class and no one in civic leadership would recognize
the potential for new kinds of trouble. Since social control was the direct
Fogelson, Big City Police, 130.
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76
result of reform, there would be no reason to place complaints about
social control on any future reform agenda.
The advent of the Bowron administration represented the
culmination of the Progressive Era-inspired efforts to reform municipal
government in Los Angeles. The police department, after its momentous
1937 reforms, did not immediately find a chief whose reputation and
impact would hold up in the same way as Fletcher Bowron's did for city
hall. Nevertheless, due to the confluence of reforms in city hall and the
LAPD, the transition to long term stability and "purity" was at last, well
under way. But the coming transformation of World War II presented
problems that Bowron and the reformers could not have anticipated.
Although the crusade to stamp out vice and corruption continued, as did
the thrust against labor radicalism, the war brought heightened problems
with “others”— Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, and finally with
the dramatically increasing presence of African Americans.
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77
Chapter 2;
The “Old Settlers":
African Americans in Los Angeles Before World War II
Everything happened on Central Avenue. I remember one day I
was walking down Central and I saw all these Negroes lined up
outside the Dunbar Hotel I said, “Man, what’s the line for?” they
said, “We re going to be in the movies. Tarzan is making another
picture."
(Leroy Laws, August 22, 1982)
While the progressives attempted to reform municipal
administration and simultaneously embarked on a moral crusade to
rehabilitate individual lifestyles rather than focus on systemic social
issues, like racism and poverty, the Black community in Los Angeles
quietly built itself up. A small group of Black Angelenos, largely ignored
by the larger community, thrived in predepression Los Angeles, building
churches and banks, insurance companies, medical and legal practices—
working hard to achieve the American dream. Understanding the
dynamics behind the growth and development of Los Angeles segregated
Black community is obviously important as a foundation for coming to
grips with the emergence of a paradigm of race, politics, and police in Los
Angeles from the late 1930s through World War II. This paradigm that
emerged is rooted in the reforms of the Progressive Era, affected by class
interests of the business elites of the city, and transformed by race as the
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78
number of Black residents in Los Angeles grew from an almost invisible,
self-contained minority community to one that exceeds the growth of all
other segments of the city population during World War II.
The Black Los Angeles resident population had just about doubled
with every decennial census enumeration from 1900 on. This group,
though, represented a relatively small percentage of the total city
population (two and one-half to four percent) through 1940. In 1900,
there were 2,841 Black residents in Los Angeles, by 1940 that number
had grown to 63,744. (Negro residents in Los Angeles represented
twenty-eight percent of statewide Negro residents in 1910, forty-eight
percent in 1930, and thirty-seven percent in 1950.)’
Los Angeles Population
1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950
Total
Black
102,479
2,841
319,198
7,599
576,673
15,579
1,238,048
38,894
1,504,277
63,774
1,970,358
171,209
Table 1
Black Los Angeles residents set the pace for political activism for
all Black state residents in the years following California statehood in
1850. Overcoming racist barriers. Black Californians gained the right to
’ Keith Collins, “Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-
1950” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1980),
41.
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79
testify In court and to serve as jurors. They first gained political
representation at the state level in 1916 with the election of assemblyman
Frederick Roberts. Los Angeles resident Augustus Hawkins won Roberts'
seat in 1934 and served until 1962, representing five different Los
Angeles districts over the course of his career. With congressional
redistricting based upon the 1960 census results, Hawkins became
California's first Black representative in Congress in 1962.^ Despite
having achieved political representation at the state level, it would not be
until 1962 that a Black man, Gilbert Lindsay, would serve on the Los
Angeles City Council.^
Among those African Americans residing in Los Angeles around
the turn of the century were the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of
^ See James Fisher, 'The Political Development of the Black Community
in California, 1850-1950," California Historical Quarterly 50 (September
1971) 256-66; Susan Anderson, "Rivers of Water in a Dry Place— Early
Black Participation in California Politics," in Byran Jackson and Michael
Preston, eds. Racial and Ethnic Politics in California (Berkeley: IGS
Press, University of California, 1991). 55-69; Mary Ellen Bell Ray, The
City of Watts, California 1907-1926 (Los Angeles: Rising Publishing,
1985), 13.
^ Lindsay was appointed to the 9th District to replace Ed Roybal, a
councilman who won a seat in Congress in 1962. In the 1963 city council
elections Lindsay was reelected to retain his seat and two other black
men were elected to the Los Angeles city council as well: former LAPD
lieutenant and attorney Tom Bradley won a seat in the 10th district and
Billy Mills was elected to represent the 8th district; Beeman Coolidge
Patterson, “The Politics of Recognition: Negro Politics in Los Angeles,
1960-1963” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles,
1967), 185-190.
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80
slaves who had sought freedom, had come searching for gold, or to fight
in the war against Mexico. Once settled, they earned some measure of
material success along the way. As a way of touting the success of its
small residential community, the Los Angeles L/berafor published an
article in 1904 highlighting the professional achievements of local Black
residents. The Liberator's publisher, J. L Edmonds, who had been bom
into slavery, was “intensely devoted to the creation of good government
and the advancement of the African American.”” * On Lincoln's birthday in
1909, the Los Angeles Times emulated The Liberator by paying tribute to
the successful members of the Black community with the running of a
special section entitled, "The Emancipated Negro." One of the persons
profiled was Robert Owens, a landowner and proprietor of a successful
livery stable in the downtown area. Owens was the son-in-law of Biddy
Mason, a former slave, who had successfully sued for freedom in 1856.®
Mason herself had worked hard and successfully invested in real estate in
the downtown area. Known as the city’s first Black philanthropist. Mason
established a nursery to provide day care for the children of working
mothers. She also fed poor, indigent, newly arrived Negroes to Los
* Octavia Vivian, “The Story of The Negro in Los Angeles County,"
Federal Writer’s Project, Works Progress Administration, 1936 (San
Francisco; R and E Research Associates, 1970), 17.
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81
Angeles. In 1871, in Biddy Mason’s living room, a small group of Black
pioneers founded First African Methodist Episcopal (F A M E.) Church of
Los Angeles.®
The First African Methodist Episcopal Church in turn, spawned the
Forum in 1903— a civic organization whose sole purpose was to hold
weekly meetings so that Black community residents would literally have a
forum for developing their sense of race pride and self, community, and
have a safe place to discuss social, economic, and civic matters. The
Forum became instrumental in welcoming and assimilating new Black
migrants into Los Angeles. While a unique organization in its own right,
the Forum was also significant, according to E Frederick Anderson,
because it “also was the first civic and social association which held its
meetings and public interest discussions in a building that was not a
church.” The Forum had no official power or sanction within or without.
® Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1909; "Pioneer Describes Early LA:
Lauds Eagle Publishers," letter from Joseph Mesmer to California Eagle
publisher, Charlotte Bass, California Eagle, March 23, 1939.
® E. Frederick Anderson, “The Development of Leadership and
Organization Building in the Black Community of Los Angeles from 1900
Through World War 1 1 ” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern
California, 1976), 32. This church would become a leading institution in
the religious, cultural and political lives of Black Los Angeles residents. It
is still reputed to be the seedbed of Black political activism in Los
Angeles. F A M E was a central distribution point for the Red Cross and
other charitable contributions as well as a major information center during
the 1992 Los Angeles Riot.
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82
yet, "it was clear that a new dimension of behavior had been added to the
black community."^
Many of the Black residents who settled in Los Angeles in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century were urban, Eastern émigrés. This
group had been attracted to the city for the same reasons as most other
newcomers: the perpetual sunshine and the great expanses of land that
were equated with real estate investment opportunities for personal
farming or for commercial development. The local Black press likened the
Los Angeles area to the "Promised Land" mostly due to limitless housing
and employment opportunities. Bunch cites Liberator real estate
advertisements with such luring copy as "Splendid chance out there for
colored man and wife for steady work, fine climate.”® Additionally, for
some African Americans, Los Angeles offered an opportunity to live freely
without the strict racial constraints of the South.®
These early settlers were a mixture of educated professionals who
came to hang shingles as doctors, lawyers, dentists, small shopkeepers.
^ Anderson, “The Development of Leadership,” 35, 53; Lonnie G. Bunch,
"A Past Not Necessarily Prologue: The Afro American in Los Angeles," in
Norman Klein and Martin SchiesI, eds., 20th Century Los Angeles: Power,
Promotion and Con/7/cf (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1980), 107.
® Bunch, “Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 102-103.
® Emory Tolbert, The UNI A and Black Los Angeles: Ideology and
Community in the American Garvey Movement (Los Angeles: Center for
Afro-American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 1980), 28;
Bunch, “Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 102.
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83
and working men and women. One of these new settlers was neither from
the East nor the South, however, but from the island nation of Jamaica.
John Alexander Somerville emigrated to the United States in 1905 when
he was not yet eighteen. The son of a preacher, he had never thought of
himself as anything other than a Jamaican and upon his leaving home, a
man. Yet in the United States, a new identity— Negro— was thrust upon
him. “Never before had any occasion ever arisen for my ethnological
classification,” Somerville wrote in his autobiography.
Somerville would become a major figure in the development of the
Black Los Angeles business and professional community and a leading
fighter in the struggle against racial oppression as well. Although a
woman by the name of Mamie Cunningham has the distinction of being
the first Black female graduate to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree at the
University of Southern California in 1909, Somerville preceded her in
1907 to not only become the first Black graduate of the School of
Dentistry, but also the first Black graduate of the u n iv e rs ity .U p o n his
entrance to the dental school, Somerville’s classmates had initially
John Alexander Somerville, Man o f Color: An Autobiography (Los
Angeles: Lorrin L. Morrison, 1949). 50; Sarah Lifton, “The Incredible Life
of Man of C olor John Alexander Somerville,” USC Trojan Family
Magazine (1994): 35-41.
” Somerville, Man o f Color, 71; Vivian, “The Story of the Negro in Los
Angeles,” 7.
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84
threatened the dean that they would resign en masse unless he was
dismissed from the school.’^
Somerville opened a dental practice in an office at 4th and
Broadway immediately after graduation. Shortly thereafter, he joined the
Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. He and his friend, Eugene W alker—
a tailor who was already a member of the chamber— were the only black
men in that organization for some time. Somerville helped organize the
Los Angeles chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) in 1913 and began his active civic fight to end
discrimination and segregation. The sociologist, philosopher, historian
and cultural critic, W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the instrumental founding
members of the national NAACP, visited Los Angeles that same year. He
stayed at Somerville's home while conducting speaking engagements
which drew capacity crowds at Pomona and Occidental Colleges, the
University of Southern California, and Temple Auditorium in downtown
Los Angeles. After his visit to Los Angeles, Du Bois reported in the
NAACP journal. The Crisis, “Los Angeles is wonderful. Nowhere in the
United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed, nor the
average efficiency and intelligence in the colored population so high.”’'*
Somerville, Man o f Color, 65.
Somerville, Man o f Color, 96.
As cited in Bunch, “Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 101.
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85
The Los Angeles NAACP’s early successes were removing the barriers
for Black nurses to train at Los Angeles General Hospital and to open
public playgrounds and pools to Black children/^
The Los Angeles historian Lawrence De Graaf proposes that the
first definable wave of Black migration to Los Angeles preceded the
depression, running from about 1910 to 1930. He cautions that this
phase of migration should not be considered part of the Great Migration in
which rural, southern African Americans moved in massive numbers to
northern, urban industrial centers in response to aggressive job
recruitment campaigns by major industries. Instead, De Graaf suggests.
Black migrants were attracted to California by boons in home construction
and in the oil and motion picture industries. Jobs in these areas were not
available to Black workers, but the tangential impact of these industries
was a growth in service jobs to which Black men and women were usually
relegated due to discrimination. According to the 1910 census, the
majority of Black workers, eighty-three percent of whom had migrated to
Los Angeles, worked as domestics and unskilled la b o re rs.In te re stin g ly,
of this first wave of migrants, a significant number and a majority of those
Ibid., 81-82.
Bunch, “Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 105; Lawrence De Graaf,
“Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930-1950” (Ph.D. dissertation.
University of California, Los Angeles, 1962), 12.
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86
in the fifteen to forty age range were female. This most likely reflects the
availability of domestic work and even suggests, according to Bond, that
many female domestics may have moved to California with their
employers. W hile wages in California were higher than the national
average, it was costly to migrate to California by car or train, and without
the extensive kinship networks which existed between South and North,
Black migration westward was steady, but not massive.
The small cadre of professionals and entrepreneurs established
themselves along Central Avenue in the early twenties. The area's
renown as the hub of Black life in Los Angeles solidified in the thirties and
forties. The Progressive Business League, a sort of Black chamber of
commerce, promoted buy-Black campaigns and had a roster of 186 Black-
owned businesses and professionals— most in the area of Central Avenue
and 22nd Street— in 1920.’® Among these were J. B Loving Real Estate
Offices, Noah Thompson Realty, Los Angeles Van and Storage,
Shackelford’s Furniture Store, Donnel's Blacksmith Shop, Owens Livery
J Max Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles” (Ph.D. dissertation. University
of Southern California, 1936), 30.
18
De Graaf, “Negro Migration,” 12; Collins, “Black Los Angeles,” 8
’® Tolbert, The UNIA and Black Los Angeles, 29; Lawrence De Graaf,
“The City of Angels; Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930,"
Pacific Historical Review 3 (1970): 336.
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87
Stables, Central Flower Shop, Blodgett Motors, Dawson Cafe, May’s Ice
Cream Parlor, and Victory M arket.^
Jobs In entertainment were another arena for employment.
Cabarets and jazz clubs popped up all along Central Avenue providing
jobs for musicians and dancers. Even Hollywood’s Central Casting Office
opened a satellite on Central Avenue for fourteen major studios to have
quick access to extras and laborers when needed. In later years, one
long-time Black resident would recall, “Few moviegoers outside of Los
Angeles ever knew that the JuJus, Kibonies, and W atusis chasing Johnny
Weismuller through the jungle were really Black people from Watts, or
that the Senegalese so ld ie r. . . was actually Alfred Laws of Ruby
Street.
The number of extras cast out of the Central Avenue office by three
Black casting directors hired just for that purpose rose from 3,464 in 1924
to an all time high of 10,916 in 1929. Although activity at the Central
Avenue office slowed down with the onset of the depression. Central
Casting continued to recruit extras for Hollywood's jungle, sea island, and
Bunch, “Past Not Necessarily Prologue,” 105; Vivian, The Story o f the
Negro, 32-36; “Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles,
1850-1950” (Los Angeles: California Afro-American Museum Foundation,
1988), 30-33.
Ron Harris, “A Family Mirrors the Roots of Black LA,” Los Angeles
Times, August 22, 1982.
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88
Tarzan motion pictures well into the nineteen-forties.^ Six hundred extras
were used on the set of Universal Picture’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927).”
Other opportunities for Black laborers in Hollywood were as porters and
chauffeurs for the stars, as domestics and janitors, and as set musicians.
Extras earned $7.50 per day on the average. Contract actors like Hattie
McDaniels earned $25.00 per day while domestic workers in Los Angeles
at the time were earning only fifty cents an hour. All was not well in
Hollywood though. The California Eagle reported local criticism
surrounding the release of racist movies like Birth o f a Nation and Gone
With the Wind. The Eagle reported that extras on the set of Gone With
the Wind repeatedly endured racial taunts and adverse working
conditions. At one point, there was actually a m ini-riot on the set in
reaction to the ongoing repressive conditions during the filming of the
m ovie.^"*
The number of black residents in Los Angeles reached 15,579 by
1920 and was concentrated in three of twelve LA-area assembly districts.
This residential concentration was a contributing factor in the 1916
election of Frederick Roberts, a Forum Member, as California's first Black
” Vivian, The Story o f the Negro, 39-42.
” J. MacFarlane Ervin, "The Participation of the Negro in the Community
Life of Los Angeles” (Master’s thesis. University of Southern California,
1931), 55.
California Eagle, April 27, 1939
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89
assemblyman representing the 43rd district, which encompassed the city
of Watts.^®
The predepression years have been referred to as the "Golden
Era" of Black Los Angeles. The experiences of Black Angelenos during
this period provide a clear example of triumph over adversity. This first
wave of migrants would meld with the longer-term residents to become
members of a group distinctively known as the "old settlers." Together
they would come to define Black Los Angeles.^ The older Los Angeles
Liberator and the more recently established California Eagle (1912) were
two newspapers upon which Black Angelenos could rely for straight news,
analysis of both state and local politics, social and cultural events,
business news, and sports and entertainment. The publishers of the
Eagle. Joseph and Charlotte Bass, were seemingly omnipresent in local
affairs and organizations. W riting in 1936, Bond argues, however, that
the Black press dedicated more space to sports, entertainment, and social
news than to news and public opinion. And he criticized the leading Black
De Graaf, "The City of Black Angels,” 336; Anderson "The Development
of Leadership," 39; John and Laree Caughey, “A New Force— The Blacks,”
in John and Laree Caughey, eds , Los Angeles: Biography o f a City (Los
Angeles and Berkeley; University of California Press, 1976), 463.
For an illuminating discussion of the "Golden Era" of Black Los
Angeles, see Bunch, " Past Not Necessarily Prologue.”
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90
newspapers for relying on support from utility companies and political
candidates.
The old settlers founded churches such as the activist People's
Independent Church of Christ led by the passionate pastor, Reverend
Clayton Russell. The People’s Church was started in 1915 by former
F.A.M.E. congregants who wanted a church to address, in a more active
way, the survival needs of the Black community and a church that would,
according to Anderson, “respond to continuing opposition from the white
community.”^ ®
The National Urban League and the Universal Negro improvement
Association (UNIA) established Los Angeles branches in 1921. The UNIA
met the need of those who desired just a little bit more activism in the
struggle for equality of citizenship rights for Black Americans. Forum
members John Coleman, the owner of an employment agency. Eagle
publishers Joseph and Charlotta Bass, J. D Gordon, and W. H. Sanders
organized the founding convocation of the Los Angeles UNIA chapter in
January 1921. UNIA historian Emory Tolbert argues that.
Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” 156.
^ Anderson, “The Development of Leadership,” 83.
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91
The Los Angeles UNIA became, if only for a short time,
an umbrella organization that included community
activists who had long seen themselves as instruments
of change in the Black community. Garveyism
represented the hope for change through the sheer
collective strength of blacks, and there were many in
Los Angeles who had accepted that formula for change
before the advent of Garveyism.^
The National Urban League was established in New York City in
1911 as an organization to help facilitate the relocation of participants in
the Great Migration. Graduates of the famed Tuskeegee Institute formed
the Los Angeles chapter in June 1921 and provided the first organized
social work thrust for Black Los Angeles residents. The Urban League's
members organized caseworkers, provided job placement and referral
assistance, and instituted health and recreation program s.^
In 1928, John Somerville opened the Somerville Hotel. This
grandly-built, four story, 100-room hotel was located at the comer o f 43rd
Street and Central Avenue. After years of frustration at not being able to
lodge visiting Black guests from out of town, including dignitaries like Du
Bois, Somerville opened his hotel with great fanfare and a built-in
clientele. Although the Somerville Hotel was really about thirty blocks
south of the pulsing heart of the Black business district in Los Angeles at
Emory Tolbert, The UNIA and Black Los Angeles, 52.
“ Anderson, “The Development of Leadership,” 39.
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92
the time, within six months of its opening, the Hotel had catalyzed
business development in the surrounding area and soon Central Avenue
between 42*^ and 43"^ Streets was the hub of Black social and
professional life in Los Angeles.^’
By 1930, Black residents of Los Angeles had inaugurated
fraternities and sororities at both the University of Southern California and
the University of California at Los Angeles; witnessed the appointment of
the first Black motorcycle officer, the first Black detective lieutenant, and
the first Black detective captain in the LAPD; benefited from the ambition
and foresight of W illiam Nickerson, Norman Houston, and George
Beavers to found the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company
(1925), and established businesses to serve their needs in segregated
Los Angeles such as Liberty Building and Loan (1924) and Angel us
Funeral Home (1925). Black Angelenos would even have the pride of
hosting the 1928 national convention of the NAACP whose attendees
stayed at the newly completed Somerville H otel.^ In the years leading up
Somerville, Man o f Color, 125-27. Somerville lost the hotel with the
stock market crash of 1929. It was purchased by investors, renamed the
Dunbar Hotel and continued to build a historical legacy which is currently
being resuscitated by local historians in Los Angeles.
“ Vivian, The Story o f the Negro in Los Angeles County; Tolbert, The
UNIA and Black Los Angeles] Anderson, "The Development of
Leadership;" Homer F. Broome, LAPD's Black History 1886-1976
(Norwalk, CA: Stockton Trade Press, 1978); "A Brief History of the
Founding and Development of Golden State Mutual Life," unpublished,
(continued on next page)
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93
to the depression, Black Angelenos worked tirelessly to build businesses,
to encourage social and cultural enrichment, and to establish a collective
voice with which to diminish the insidious effects of racism on their
segregated lives.
Due to strict residential segregation, enforced primarily through
restrictive covenants, Los Angeles was a divided city. It had a Chinatown
and an area known as Little Tokyo while Mexicans were relegated to the
northeast side and Negroes to the Central City and the “Eastside.” There
was a section along Los Angeles Street, which was referred to as "nigger
alley" as far back as 1876 and still used as a reference point throughout
the 1940s. This area was within a part of a larger district called the
Tenderloin.^ The most prominent of the Black districts was known to be
the Central Avenue District on the Eastside.
(Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, 1978), African Americans
in Los Angeles, Manuscript Collection, Black Resource Center, A. C.
Bilbrew Library, County of Los Angeles.
“ According to veteran reporter Dan Green, The Tenderloin was known
as a protected district (i.e. protected vice). W hile on the police beat for
the Los Angeles Herald, Green once wrote a front-page story with a
seven column banner headline about a fire in the Tenderloin. The Los
Angeles Times only wrote 100 words about the same conflagration.
Green and his editor were suspended by the Herald's publisher. General
Otis (the hidden owner of the Herald, as he also owned its chief
competition, the Times) for giving such prominent coverage to this section
of town. In their defense. Green's editor said, " everybody in Los Angeles
should be interested in that story' 1964 interview with Fletcher Bowron
for Los Angeles History Project; Fletcher Bowron, “Notes Relating to Early
History of Los Angeles Police Department," 2, all in Bowron Collection.
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94
Beginning with the first wave of migration, the Eastside was the
point of entry for most Black migrants to Los Angeles. As they prospered,
they tended to move south and west. Alameda Avenue, along the railroad
tracks, was the easternmost boundary of this primary Black district.
Central Avenue was the axis from 9th Street with the southern boundary
continually moving until it reached the previously far-flung Black outpost
known as the Furlong Tract which ran from 50th Street to 55th Street
between Central and Alameda Avenues. By 1925, the "line in the sand"
was drawn at Slauson Avenue, which would remain an impenetrable
barrier to Black advancement until 1948 when the United States Supreme
Court ruled that racially restrictive residential covenants were
unconstitutional.^
Other dispersed "Black pockets" were two areas on the west side
bounded by Jefferson Boulevard on the north, 36th and 37th Streets on
the south, Budlong and Normandie Avenues on the west, and Western
Avenue to the east. Another, smaller, westside area was immediately
adjacent to this one. It was bordered with Jefferson Boulevard on the
^ Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles, 1850-1950 (Los
Angeles; California Afro American Museum Foundation, 1988), 34;
Bunch, "Past Not Necessarily Prologue," 110, 114; Howard Nelson and
William Clark, The Los Angeles Metropolitan Experience: Uniqueness,
Generality, and the Goal o f the Good Life (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger
Publishing Company, 1976), 36-38; Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,”
60-80; De Graaf, “The City of Black Angels," 346.
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95
south, Adams Boulevard on the north, Western and Arlington Avenues to
the east and west respectively. These two areas housing the elite
leadership class of Los Angeles' Black community, eventually came to be
known as the W est Adams and W est Jefferson Districts. The old settler
families in these districts had lived at least two generations in Los
Angeles. Among them were actors and actresses, ministers,
schoolteachers, and law yers.*
Statistically one might have viewed Black Los Angeles as a
successful community in the years prior to the depression. At three
percent of the population in 1930, or 38,894 residents, they had a home
ownership rate roughly equivalent to that of whites (about one in three
Black families owned homes). W ith the smallest median family size of all
identified groups in Los Angeles, seventy-four percent of Black
households in the city were male-headed. Black families were "the
smallest percentage of families with no gainful workers; and the highest
percentage of fam ilies having two or more w orkers."* These numt)ers,
however illustrative of success, belie the hard work it took to overcome
obstacles to achieving some semblance of the American Dream.
* For insight into the transition of the West Adams District from
predominantly white to predominantly Black to integration and
gentrification conflicts in the 1980s; see Sandy Banks, “The Battle' of
West Adams,” Los Angeles Times, December 1,1985.
* Bond, "The Negro in Los Angeles," 54-58.
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96
Residential segregation, employment discrimination, and pervasive
prejudice were the realities of the day for the majority of Los Angeles'
Black residents.
In addition to the oppressive residential restrictions and blatant
employment discrimination. Black Angelenos survived a political climate
hostile to their presence as well. To city one prime example, in 1912 city
attorney John Shenk ruled it legally acceptable for businesses such as
restaurants, cafes, and saloons to charge higher rates to Black patrons
than to white patrons. The attorney's ruling stated that "it was neither
extortion or [sic] a violation of [California’s] Civil Rights Act to charge a
Negro more for an article than a white man.”^ This so-called Shenk Rule
was based on an incident in which two business acquaintances— one a
white man, the other a Black man— joined each other for a drink at a
saloon. The bartender charged the white customer five cents for his beer
and he charged the Black customer one dollar.^ Although Los Angeles
Progressives had a penchant for legislating morality, the Shenk Rule was
neither considered immoral nor criminal by those same Progressives.
Los Angeles Liberator, May 30,1913, as cited in Bunch, “Past Not
Necessarily Prologue,” 116.
^ Bunch, 105-106; Mary Ellen Bell Ray, The City o f Watts, Califomia
1907-1926 (Los Angeles: Rising Publishing, 1985) 23.
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97
The Shenk Rule was an early point of convergence for race,
politics and police in Los Angeles. Some citizens questioned whether this
ruling constituted illegal discrimination, and if so, should not or could not
the police commission, as the grantor of business operating perm its to
liquor-serving establishments, do something about it? In a 1914 editorial
the California Eagle exhorted the police commission to respond to the
following question; “Has the police commission power to make and
enforce a rule to the effect that whenever the holder of a liquor license or
permit in the exercise of that license or permit unlawfully discriminates
against a citizen of the state, such a license or permit shall be revoked by
the commission?”* The commission’s response was that the city charter
clearly allowed it to revoke the permit of any business conducted in an
illegal manner, and that it also considered racial discrimination itself to be
Illegal. Therefore, in response to the question presented, the police
commission replied, “the Board will make the rule that the holder of a
* California Eagle, August 12, 1914; Section 203 of the city charter reads:
The Board of Police Commissioners shall have power to grant permits, in
the manner described by ordinance, authorizing the city clerk to issue
licenses to persons desiring to engage in any business required, under
the ordinances of the city, to secure such permit commission. The council
may authorize the board of Police Commissioners to revoke permits
granted by the board in exercise of police powers.” A Study o f the Los
Angeles City Charter, A Report of the Municipal and County Government
Section of Town Hall (Los Angeles: Haynes Foundation, 1963), 118.
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98
license who discriminates shall have that license revoked.”^ The police
commission thus responded appropriately to the Eagle’s query, but illegal
discriminatory business practices sanctioned in part by the Shenk rule
continued unabated.
The issue o f political incorporation for Black residents in
predepression Los Angeles was most clearly contested in Watts. This
town’s inauspicious beginning was as a housing subdivision built in 1903
at the junction of the Pacific Electric Rail running north to Los Angeles
and Pasadena and southward to Torrance, Gardena, San Pedro, and
Long Beach. It also had spikes going west toward the beach areas of
Newport, Balboa, Huntington, and Redondo. The new Watts subdivision
attracted Anglos, Mexicans, and Negroes with its inexpensive homes.
Segregation was evident within Watts in just a few short years, however.
By the time W atts was incorporated in 1907, white residents mostly
populated the section north of Main Street, while Mexican and Black
residents were relegated to the southern section of town and west of the
railroad tracks.'*’
The advent of the prohibition movement brought together a
coalition of “drys" that was Black, Mexican, and white. This coalition
40
41
California Eagle, August 22, 1914.
Patricia Adler, “W atts; From Suburb to Black Ghetto" (Ph.D.
dissertation. University of Southern Califomia, 1977), 91.
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99
selected a Black man to a leadership position and thus revealed the
growing political power of Black W atts residents/^ Simultaneously, in
Watts, as elsewhere, the Ku Klux Klan reemerged, this time in the guise
of a moral crusade against alcohol serving establishments which began to
pop up as they were pushed outside of Los Angeles city limits beginning
in 1917. W hile interpretations of the incorporation of Watts differ
according to perspective, there is no doubt of the KKKs activism there or
in the efforts of nearby cities like Southgate, Lynwood, Bell, and Compton
to keep Black residents out during this time period.^ The racial overtones
of the annexation debate were readily apparent. The racist film. Birth o f A
Nation, released in 1915 had already strengthened Klan audaciousness
in the Los Angeles area, according to Emory Tolbert.** The Imperial
Wizard of the local Klan branch, the Knights of the White Camellia, had
purportedly made plans to thwart growing black political influence in
Watts. When in 1925, the Califomia Eagle published an expose
regarding the KKICs intentions, the Knights of the W hite Camellia sued
the paper for libel. Undaunted, Charlotte Bass and the Eagle waged a
Ibid., 181 ; De Graaf, “The City of Black Angels," 347.
Adler contends that Watts was annexed to Los Angeles because of
water, while Bond, De Graaf, Bunch, and Tolt)ert suggest that the
annexation was based on a fear of Negro political power. Gerald Home,
Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1995), 26-27, synthesizes both perspectives.
** Tolbert, The UNI A and Black Los Angeles, 45.
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100
successful defense.^ Finally, In April 1926 writes Bunch, “to avoid the
consequences of a Black mayor, many whites sought to persuade Los
Angeles to annex Watts; they were successful.”^ And with the
annexation of W atts came another far-flung segregated outpost of Black
Los Angeles.
Economic isolation, in addition to employment discrimination, was
also an obstacle for both the individual and collective advancement of Los
Angeles’ Black residents. In his autobiography. John Somerville recalls
his interest in the building boom occurring in Los Angeles from 1925-
1928. He had purchased some property on Central Avenue, even prior to
building the Somerville Hotel, with the intent of building an apartment
house. The president of the bank where Somerville applied for a loan
informed him that his loan application was denied t>ecause, “The Eastside
does not meet the improvement standard; therefore, we cannot make you
a loan.” Discouraged, but undeterred, Somerville secured the names of
potential tenants in order to persuade the bank to make the loan. W ith
that substantiation of likely income from the property, the bank granted
Somerville a two-mortgage, $75,000 loan.^
^ Emory Tolbert, The UNI A and Black Los Angeles, 35; Los Angeles
Times, February 22, 1993.
^ Bunch, “Past not Necessarily Prologue,” 114-15; J. Max Bond, “The
Negro in Los Angeles,” 45.
J. A. Somerville, Man o f Color, 123.
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101
The old settlers escaped flagrant intolerance in the South and East
only to find it in varied forms in Los Angeles as well. As they embarked
on a long and hard struggle to gain and maintain fundamental liberties,
the long-term Black residents became increasingly protective of their
status and reputations as a new wave of migrants began to arrive in Los
Angeles. The old settlers did not want anyone in their community to
provide fodder for continuing bigotry and discrim ination.^
The second period of Black migration to Los Angeles occurred
during the 1930s. Califomia had a large in-migration, the greatest of any
state.'*® The Black migrants of the thirties were important in the emerging
schism between old and new settlers. "The [Negro] vanguard have
already come into our community," wrote J. McFarlane Ervin in his 1931
master's thesis, "bringing with them every provincialism known throughout
the United States, a classic picture of a social melting pot within their own
race."“ Some of the newcomers had urban backgrounds, but many more
were from the rural South. They came prim arily from Texas, Louisiana,
Arkansas, Georgia, and Alabama.®' As a group, the second wave
Tolbert, The UNI A and Black Los Angeles, 33.
^ De Graaf, "Negro Migration," 78.
“ Ervin, “The Participation of the Negro,” 23.
Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” 80.
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102
encompassed unskilled farm laborers as well as unemployed teachers.
They were young and old. They came singly and with their families.
They were not necessarily inclined to seek entrance into the agricultural
labor force which would have drawn them to farming regions outside of
Los Angeles. Due to its growth in earlier periods, Los Angeles had
become one of the few cities in the W est with a significantly-sized Black
population. It attracted families interested in better educational
opportunities for their children and those who sought freedom from overt,
brutal prejudice. De Graaf suggests that this second wave of migrants
also considered Los Angeles as a primary destination target because,
according to the Wickersham Commission Report of 1931, it was a city
where “police were charged with illegal practices, of which Black people
were chief sufferers.” This seemingly illogical rationale for choosing Los
Angeles is at least partially explained by migrant reasoning that at least in
Los Angeles cops are punished for their misdeeds. Yet despite the
Wickersham Commission’s findings. Black residents would find the reality
of illegal practices, but little punishm ent.^
De Graaf, “Negro Migration,” 85. The Wickersham Commission, named
for Attorney General George W. Wickersham was the National
Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. President Hoover
created the commission in 1929 as a response to national anxiety about
violent crime, racketeering, bootlegging and a generally perceived
disrespect for the law. The Commission's final report criticized police
departments which utilized "the third degree and other lawless forms of
(continued on next page)
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103
"By increasing the size of their community to one of the largest
outside the South," De Graaf writes, "it provided later migrants with a
racially homogenous center in a region which otherwise had very few
Negroes."^ From 1930 to 1940 the number of Black residents in Los
Angeles grew from 38,894 to 63,774.
As the depression set in and the political battles downtown
escalated, life on the Eastside continued as it had. Black residents
continued to seep through the borders of the previously established,
separate Black districts thus slowly coalescing into one large swath of
Black urban dwellers. At the onset of the 1930s, seventy percent of Black
people in Los Angeles resided within one state assembly district (District
62), accounting for slightly more than one-third of the population of that
district.^ Slauson Avenue remained the dividing line: south of it (until
one reached 103"^ Street in the W atts area) no Black family dared
purchase and/or attempt to live in a home. The South Vernon
neighborhood was one of the first areas near Slauson to tip in balance
law enforcement," it called for the expulsion of corrupt police officers, and
urged the destruction of political machines. For more on the Wickersham
Commission and Report, see Robert Fogelson, Big City Police
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), ch. 4; Elizabeth Poe,
“Nobody was Listening," in John and Laree Caughey, eds., Los Angeles:
Biography o f a City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Califomia
Press. 1976), 428.
” De Graaf, “Negro Migration," 90.
^ Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” 34.
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toward a predominance of Black homeowners. The conflicts arising from
white residents’ anger and confusion over this “Negro encroachment"
impelled both white and Black residents to call on the LAPD “to settle
controversies and neighborhood infringements.”®
The employment picture during the depression was bleak for all
Angelenos. It was exacerbated no doubt by the numbers of migrants
arriving in Los Angeles seeking respite from their bleak lives in other
depressed parts of the country. The Urban League Employment Center’s
record showed that a vast majority of both Black men and women looking
for work listed previous occupations as janitors, laborers, chauffeurs,
butlers, cooks, housemen, domestics, maids, waiters, and seamstresses.
Those seeking employment in manufacturing, transportation, and
communication had even more difficulty being placed. Immigrant Mexican
laborers were their main competition in the work force, and some
industries such as apparel manufacturers, and paints and varnish
companies were simply unwilling to consider using Negro labor.® Both
Black men and women had unemployment rates higher than thirty percent
while only 18.4 percent of white men were similarly unemployed.^ A
1933 University of Southern Califom ia survey of 267 employers regarding
55
Ervin, “The Participation of the Negro,” 73.
® Ibid., 50-53.
^ Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” 81-82, 91.
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105
their excuses for not hiring Black workers revealed the extent of racial
discrimination. The Department of W ater and Power said it had “No
separate camp facilities” on its construction project. The Los Angeles
Unified School District cited objections from white parents and refusals
from white instructors to share eating and toilet facilities as justification for
keeping Black teachers out of junior high and high schools in the district.
Other excuses cited by employers were; 1 ) prefer white labor, 2) Negroes
not skilled workers; 3) white workers won't work alongside Black workers;
4) can’t mix Black and white workers; plant not set up for mixed labor;
plant too small for mixed labor; 5) occasion for use of Negro workers has
never arisen; 6) fear of public sentiment; 7) tried it once; 8) none have
applied; 9) few live near place of employment; 10) can't hire Black
workers because white girls are employed there; 11 ) prefer Mexicans for
unskilled work; 12) can't attract best white workers if Negroes are
employed; 14) Negro employees would give work a poor reputation; 15)
not prejudiced— just choose not to employ them.“
In 1934, the publisher o f The Sentinel, Leon Washington, began a
“Don’t Spend Your Money W here You Can't work” campaign. Although
the Central Avenue businesses between 28**’ and 43"* Streets had over
“ Harris, “A Family Mirrors Roots of Black LA;” Ervin, “The Participation of
the Negro,” 45-49.
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106
eight-five percent Black patronage, white proprietors owned many of the
stores. And only about one fourth of these stores would hire Black clerks.
Washington was arrested for violating the city's anti-picketing
ordinance.®
Yet, while the struggle and hopes of the second wave of Black
migrants melded with the old settlers, the second wave also had the
misfortune of bearing the blame for the increasing social problems
occurring within the tight Black community. On October 12, 1939, the
Eagle ran an editorial addressing this dissonance by calling on old
settlers to help assimilate the newcomers, and by exhorting the
newcomers to recognize and respect the struggles that the old settlers
had undergone and which paved the way for their arrival in Los Angeles;
Veteran Black citizens of Califomia must take an active
part in training incoming Negroes from the South in
basic rules of culture and impart to them an
understanding of the racial progress that had been
achieved on the W est Coast during fifty years of hard
fighting for political and economic rights.®
W hile social service organizations like the Urban League and the YWCA
and churches were feverishly working to help house, educate, and employ
people—they couldn't also conquer the social dislocations which occurred
® The Sentinel, January 26, 1934; Black Angelenos, 37; Bunch, “Past Not
Necessarily Prologue,” 115.
“ Califomia Eagle, October 12, 1939.
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107
from family dissolution, juvenile delinquency, crime, and neglect which
became increasingly prominent on the city's Eastside. Juvenile
delinquency was a concern because most Black families had to rely upon
two wage earners to survive. As a result, there was not much adult
supervision and few opportunities for supervised recreation. There were
also a number of juveniles who arrived in Los Angeles on their own—
runaways seeking their own work and excitement far from the rural
South.^^ The social dislocations these families underwent in their move
from rural South to urban West were significant. The strict social controls
of family, extended family, and community did not function well enough in
the anonymity of Los Angeles, many people found. One man recalled his
arrival in Los Angeles in a 1973 interview with Keith Collins;
I did not know anyone when I came to Watts; while I
was able to enjoy a good deal of cultural camaraderie,
my cultural comrades were not employed. I was left to
fend for myself in a job-seeking world in which all
others seemed hostile, and determined to prevent my
success in obtaining a job. I came to Watts in the early
1930s. When I told the foreman at Long Beach Naval
Shipyard that I was a machinist, he looked at me in total
disbelief, asked me to operate three of his more difficult
machines, and then told me not to let the sun go down
on me in Long Beach. I then took the Red Car back to
Los Angeles City Hall and applied for a job as a janitor.
See Wayne Robert Davidson, An Analysis o f the Problems o f Fifty
Migrant Boys Who Were Known to the Los Angeles Police Department in
1944 (Master’s thesis. University of Southern Califomia, 1947).
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108
I retired from my job as a custodial supervisor of the
City of Los Angeles five years ago.^
Prostitution and other vice activities were also glaring problems on
the Eastside. At one count, there were forty-six brothels in the two major
Black neighborhoods, Central Avenue and W est Jefferson.®^ Local
businessmen could not get any satisfactory response from city officials
nor from the police department when they requested that something be
done. One police officer said of prostitution;
It’s a business that flourishes in the Negro district. I
know the pay-off men. I know the go-betweens, but
what can I do when it's sanctioned by city politicians?
Besides, the Negro women deal strictly with the white
trash that comes into the district looking for that sort of
thing.®^
The vice that flourished in the Eastside is what would compel the LAPD to
have an overwhelming presence in that part of town. A strong police
presence was approved of by the majority of the electorate, ignorant
though they were of the police practices that flourished in that
atmosphere.
According to Bond, the type of leadership present in Black
communities in Los Angeles in the 1930s was disparate and not focused.
Leaders arose for each voice, activity, and philosophy, rather than
^ Collins, “Black Los Angeles,” 48-49.
^ Ervin, The Participation o f the Negro, 76.
^ Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” 136-37.
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109
presenting a unified voice for the community. “Negro leadership tends
toward numerous small leaders, each with his own public and each in
most instances with his own axe to grind,” Bond contends.®® This
leadership issue was perhaps the biggest cleavage between old settlers
and new migrants.®® Old timers resented the competition and threats to
their status that the newcomers introduced. They also may have busied
themselves with identifying which of the newcomers were worthy of joining
their ranks rather than focusing on unifying the entire community by
incorporating all newcomers.®^
Demographic and political pressures shaped the relationship of
Black Angelenos with the police department and with city hall in the first
four decades of the twentieth century. The Second World W ar would
bring about even more dramatic change to the city and the reform agenda
but it also highlighted the fact that the racial and ethnic history of
Califomia differs from the conventional Black-White dialectic in some
respects. There is no doubt that the prejudicial and discriminatory
practices that Anglos in Califomia inflicted upon African Americans was
®®lbid., 141, 142.
® ® Ibid., 152.
^ Ibid., 160. For a sim ilar discussion on the tensions between old settlers
and new migrants and issues of leadership in the segregated black
community see Alan Spear, Black Chicago: The Making o f a Ghetto,
1890-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
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110
due to this dialectic— an inextricable element of the nation’s social code.
But in Califomia, and in Los Angeles in particular, there were two
significant groups of “others” who, in the words of De Graaf, “competed
[with Blacks] to be the targets of white hostility and repression.”® ® These
groups were Asian, almost exclusively Chinese and Japanese, and
Mexican.®® And their history of antagonistic relations with the white
majority as well as instances where they have been pitted against one
another goes far back in Los Angeles history. For example, in 1971,
eighteen Chinese men were killed in a “wholesale massacre” by a
vigilante mob which numbered 1,000.” ’ In 1888, African American
workers were recruited essentially as scab laborers by the Cotton
Growers Manufacturing Association to help the growers play their hand
against the demands of Chinese and Japanese agricultural workers.^^
And again. Black workers were pitted against Mexican workers, when in
1903, Southern Pacific Railroad recruited Black workers from the South to
come and break the strike of Mexican railroad workers.^
® ® De Graaf, “The City of Black Angels,” 332.
® ® Laurence I. Hewes, “Race Relations on the West Coast,” The Nation,
September 21, 1946, reprint, American Council of Race Relations, Ford
Collection.
Bowron, “Notes on the LAPD,” 4-5, Bowron Collection.
Collins, “Black Los Angeles,” 5.
^ De Graaf, “The City of Black Angels,” 333.
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111
So a legacy of antagonism, and pitting one group against another
was already in play when the first and second waves of Black migrants
arrived in Los Angeles. They benefited from the endurance and struggles
of their minority brethren against the legacy of hate, political animosity,
and economic exploitation imposed upon them by the white majority. But
as World W ar II began to transform Los Angeles, it was the whites’
handling of Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans that illuminated
the complexities of the dynamics of race and ethnicity just mentioned as
Los Angeles becomes a city transformed by war, by political reform, by a
growing population, and by racial tensions boiling over into conflict.
These wartime factors coupled with white political responses to racialized
anxieties of the prewar years shaped the paradigm which became quite
evident when the third wave of Black migrants appeared in Los Angeles
during the war.
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112
Part Two: W artime Transformations
Chapter 3
'The Playground That W ent to War"^
All of you folks who have never been to Califomia will get the
impression that it's a carefree, golden spot— bound all around with
blue-tiled swimming pools, great movie lots, glamorous stars,
famous restaurants, and glittering sights. These things are true, in
a measure. In peacetime, this section of our great southwest is a
tourists' paradise. It's a sunny playground where work is done
"manana," and the majority of the population has a wonderful time
golfing, and swimming and loafing.
But Califom ia, like the rest of the nation, has gone to w a r.. . .
(Kate Smith, April 1944)
The onset of the European W ar in 1939 impacted the industrial
economy and ultim ately transformed isolationist sentiment into patriotic
fervor in the United States. Benefiting from “cash and carry” orders for
war materiel, the heavily boostered Los Angeles became the fourth
largest city in the United States by 1940. Copious amounts of federal
dollars in the form o f defense contracts, housing assistance, and for
military deployment poured into Los Angeles. This infusion dramatically
^ This chapter title is taken from a 1944 "Farewell from Los Angeles" radio
broadcast by entertainer Kate Smith. The message was part of an
advertising campaign to promote Los Angeles tourism by the private, non
profit All-Year Club; John Anson Ford Collection, Special Collections,
Huntington Library, San Marino, Califomia. Hereinafter cited as Ford
Collection. Ford was a Los Angeles County supervisor for the Third
Supervisorial District (Hollywood, W ilshire, Westlake, Downtown and the
Eastside) from 1934 to 1958.
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113
expanded the emerging shipbuilding and aviation industries bringing jobs
and job seekers to Los Angeles in droves— forever changing the city in
significant ways. Overcrowded, unsanitary housing accommodations,
increased juvenile delinquency, more intimate relationships between local
government and the military, and between city hall and federal agencies
were some of the tangential results of the war.^
Most important for this study, preexisting racial antagonisms based
on what the Califomia Council for Civic Unity labeled “a heritage of...
prejudice and bigotry, racial discrimination and segregation" woven into
California’s pattern of living were also exacerbated by this unparalleled
growth.^ In Los Angeles, as the early 1940s unfolded, there was a
palpable anti-Japanese hysteria compounded by war and film industry
propaganda, an uneasy state of Anglo-Mexican relations, and a
hypersensitivity in some quarters to the burgeoning southern Negro
"invasion." Los Angeles County Supervisor John Anson Ford
^ Much of the contextual material in this chapter regarding the economic
expansion during the war is drawn from the following secondary sources;
Gerald Nash, The American W est Transformed: The Impact o f the
Second World IVar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Arthur
Verge, “The Impact of the Second W orld W ar on Los Angeles, 1939-
1945” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern Califomia, 1988); and
Geoffrey Perrett, Days o f Sadness, Years o f Triumph: The American
People f 939-f 945 (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc..
1973).
^ Califomia Council for Civic Unity, “Why do we need the CCCUT, Ford
Collection.
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114
characterized this time period in Los Angeles as “the explosive years.”
The accompanying racial sentiments, he said, were crystallized in
newspaper headlines such as; “ Japanese Treachery,' T he Mexican
Menace,’ and Negro Inferiority’.”^ In his book. Prisoners Without Trial,
Roger Daniels calls this “customary” discrim ination-a racism so
embedded in American culture that it is simply an American trait and not
one that any particular individual would recognize as anything else.^ The
social, political, economic, and military revert>erations of W orld W ar It
were a heavy tax on the city.
An additional element of instability was a service draft to which no
one was immune. The police department was forced to attend to its
public duties, while at the same time, operating with less manpower
because the armed services draft depleted its strength. Moreover, the
war certainly distracted Fletcher Bowron from his original agenda. He
became not just a big-city mayor, but the mayor of a big city forging close
ties to the federal government and coping with a host of unanticipated
problems.
When Fletcher Bowron became mayor in September 1938, Los
Angeles was still relatively close to the idyllic, demographic perfection
^ John Anson Ford, Thirty Explosive Years in Los Angeles County
(San Marino, CA: Huntington Library Publications, 1961), 129.
Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World
War I! (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 4.
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115
envisioned by the early Progressive reformers and civic boosters such as
Charles Dwight W illard and Reverend Robert Shuler. In effect, Los
Angeles was a city composed of people who mostly looked like the
reformers— native-born, Midwestern, Anglo, and Protestant.® This
particular group had been fifty-six percent of the population in 1906. The
1940 census showed that Los Angeles had a population of 1,504,277. Of
this number, 97,847 were tabulated as nonwhite. In other words, official
records show that the number of Asians, Negroes, and Indians in Los
Angeles in 1940 was only about six and one-half percent of the total city
population. This proportion had been fairly constant since the 1890
census when the population of Los Angeles was just 50,395. While
Mexican Americans were included in the totals of the white population up
until the 1940 census, specifically counted in the foreign-born category
(as according to definition, they are not a distinct racial group)-they
represented about ten percent of the population. Therefore, Los Angeles
in 1940, had a population which had t)een at least eighty-five percent
white or greater since the 1890 census. And most of those white Los
Angeles residents were bom in the United S ta te s/ The coming economic
® Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: Califomia Through the Progressive
Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 238.
^ 1940 U. S. Census as cited in Keith Collins, “Black Los Angeles: The
Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950" (Ph.D. dissertation. University of
Califomia, Los Angeles, 1980), 7, 13; Verge, “Second W orld War," 100.
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116
and demographic transformation would quickly change the focus of the
good government agenda.
1 . “We must o f course rem em tier that these are riot norma/ times.
The exigent circumstances of war gave Los Angeles a new identity-
-it was now a military-industrial town. Due to war-inspired growth in
defense industries such as aviation and shipbuilding, the City of Angels
developed a close and dependent relationship with the federal
government.^ For example, the W ar Manpower Commission provided
federal assistance with the early manpower shortage by helping fuel
immigration to the city which in turn fueled a housing crisis for which the
city again turned to the federal government fo r aid. The Office of W ar
Information (OWI), established in 1942, created a special division just for
motion pictures. According to the historian Gerald Nash, the OWI
encouraged Hollywood producers to “include explicit discussions of war
themes, avoid blatant stereotypes of the enemy, and provide affirmation
of democratic values."’® And, although President Franklin Roosevelt
authorized the military to remove Japanese Americans from the West
Coast, the cities bore the brunt of the psychic and social costs. The
® Mayor Fletcher Bowron in a radio address, June 19, 1941, Bowron
Collection.
® Nash, American West Transformed, 25.
Ibid., 182-83.
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117
impact of the war on Los Angeles was enough to indelibly alter the
"landscape" of the city.
The port of Los Angeles had been built in 1900. In addition to the
growing commercial and fishing traffic, by 1919, thirty-two ships of the
Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy established their bases in the Los
Angeles and Long Beach ports. Los Angeles became the home base for
two battleships, one cruiser, and six destroyers. During the 1920s, port
traffic included oil and petroleum products going out, passenger traffic
both arriving and departing, and lumber being brought in to support the
building boom. Along with its oil and manufacturing industries, Los
Angeles had become a navy town of sorts as well.'^ When the Japanese
bombed the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the
reverberations were particularly strong in the Los Angeles region.
Just prior to the beginning of World War II, workers at factories in
Los Angeles were making and packaging glass, rubber tires, furniture,
clothing, food products, automobiles, and movies, yet agriculture
remained the primary labor activity. Los Angeles’ proximity to the Pacific
markets, the network of rail lines, and the port at San Pedro all attracted
Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s
(New York; Oxford University Press, 1990), 90-92.
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118
manufacturers to Los Angeles. Nevertheless, despite all of this output,
only 5.4 percent of workers were employed in manufacturing in 1939.’^
Most of the aviation activity in Los Angeles was commercial prior to
1939. Aircraft and shipbuilding were two industries that did not fully
develop until after the war had begun. The early military orders for aircraft
came from the British and the French. Lockheed was the first aircraft
company to receive a substantial order when in June 1938, Great Britain
ordered 200 war planes.^^ By the close of the war, Nash says, the names
of some airplane manufacturers had become household words. That first
order for Lockheed in 1938 grew to $7,093,837 in federal orders. Hughes
Aircraft, Northrop, North American Aviation, and Douglas Aviation became
Known for their fighter planes— and put a new face— that of a vital defense
manufacturing center— onto Los Angeles.’^
Although shipbuilding was concentrated more in the Bay Area of
Northern California, shipbuilding at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard also
enhanced the regional economy of Los Angeles. And with shipbuilding
came the need for steelyards. Henry Kaiser, who had established the
California Shipbuilding Company at Terminal Island, was a well-
connected industrialist who secured the support and concurrence of
Verge, “Second W orld W ar,” 5-6.
’^Ibid., 8.
Nash, American West Transformed, 26.
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119
President Franklin Roosevelt that a west coast steel manufacturing
operation was essential for defense production. In 1942, the New Deal
agency, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, loaned Kaiser $150
million to build a steel plant in Fontana— about 30 miles east of Los
Angeles.^® According to the historian W illiam Chafe, Kaiser Steel was
producing thirty percent o f the total national output in defense building by
the following year.’® W ith Kaiser Steel, there were now three major
military defense industries in Southern California; steel, aviation, and
shipbuilding. They were supported by the preexisting oil industry and
these industries in turn spawned a number of subcontractors and small
business suppliers such as airplane parts, electrical equipment, plastics,
and machine tools. All of these businesses needed labor. And thus, the
population boom occurred. The population of Los Angeles County rose
from 2,785,643 in 1940 to an estimated 3,317,407 in 1943. Los Angeles
itself grew from 1,504,277 in 1940 to an estimated 1,764,720 in 1943.
Over the entire decade, the county population increased by forty-nine
percent while the city grew thirty-one percent to 1,970,358 in 1950.’^
Ibid.. 26-27.
’® W illiam Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 8.
Growth in Los Angeles with Com parions, Research Department, Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 1952; Population in Los Angeles County,
Bowron Collection. See Table 1, ch. 2.
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120
The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce kept records of industrial
development and expansion, new jobs, and additional jobs throughout
Los Angeles County during the war. According to these records, from
1939 to 1945 there came into existence 1,047 new industries which
created 37,536 new jobs. Existing industries, many of which expanded
during these same years, provided an additional 127,836 jobs. By
1945, California had emerged as one of the top ten states in industrial
jobs. Average yearly incomes increased from $2,031 to $3,469 in Los
Angeles.’®
Job creation in the war industries was continual once it got
underway. Production was in such high gear that by late 1942 labor
shortages were high, turnover was high, in some cases 100 percent, and
the accelerated population growth strained the city's infrastructure. The
labor shortage in 1943 was estimated to be close to 200,000 in shipyard
and aircraft industries. California Senator Sheridan Downey considered
the shortage to be a crucial impediment to California's wartime
production.^ Yet, despite the shortages, Los Angeles was already having
problems meeting the housing and transportation needs of the migrants
who were arriving daily. And despite the manpower shortages, local
Statistical Record o f Los Angeles County Industrial Development, Los
Angeles Chamt)er of Commerce, 1945, Ford Collection.
’® Chafe, Unfinished Journey, 9.
^ Nash, American W est Transformed, 42.
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121
private employers and even the United States Employment Service
(USES) refused to end their discriminatory employment practices. At the
height of defense industry job growth, 19.4 percent of the unemployed
registered with USES in Los Angeles County were Negro.^’ The USES
had separate offices for white and Negro Job seekers. And regardless of
qualifications, USES agents overwhelmingly sent Black men to menial,
custodial, and unskilled jobs.“ To illustrate the extent to which
discrimination persisted, the president of North American Aviation
Company, in an oft-quoted statement, said, “Regardless of their training
as aircraft workers we will not employ Negroes .... It is against company
policy.””
On April 4, 1943, Mayor Bowron wrote a letter to Senator Downey,
who chaired the Senate Subcommittee of M ilitary Affairs (also known as
the Downey Committee), and highlighted the impact of defense industry
growth and military mobilization in Los Angeles. Bowron cited inadequate
mass transportation, decentralized business and industry, a
disproportionate share of government contracts, and a population growing
at a rate of about 6,000 per month as troublesome issues wrought by the
Research and Statistics Report 281 (June 6,1942), United States
Employment Service, Ford Collection.
” Laurence De Graaf, “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930-1950”
^h .D . dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1962), 146.
Nash, American West Transformed, 89; Verge, “Second World War,”
72; De Graaf, “Negro Migration,” 117. See also Chapter 2 above.
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122
war. These problems were “largely due to the constant demand for more
workers in the war industries, and the moving here of families of men in
the armed forces.” He continued,
whereas the municipal expense has been greatly
increased, the municipal income has been actually
decreased so that the City of Los Angeles has been
placed in a most disadvantageous position. W ar
production for the benefit of the entire nation has meant
to us a great local burden.^^
In just a few years, Bowron's administrative focus had been forcibly
shifted from local corruption to bearing the burden of a national war effort.
In August 1943 he held a housing conference in his office at city hall
inviting among others, representatives from the Federal Housing
Administration, the National Housing Agency, and the W ar Manpower
Commission. One of the questions Bowron presented to the War
Manpower Commission representative was whether or not migration to
Los Angeles could or should be discouraged.^
As mayor, Bowron was concerned about the wartime disruption of
the daily lives of Los Angeles residents. The war, it seemed, was
affecting every aspect of their lives and altering the character of the city in
which they lived. Los Angeles residents were susceptible to the
Fletcher Bowron to Downey Committee, April 27, 1943, Bowron
Collection.
Transcript of war housing conference, August 10, 1943, Bowron
Collection, 11.
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123
propaganda they were being bombarded with on all fronts. anti-Hitler,
anti-fascist, anti-Communist polemics on one hand, and anti-Japanese
fuel on the other. A 1941 document distributed by the Committee on
Church and Community Cooperation entitled “Immediate Economic
Musts,” decreed the following; “Every individual American, regardless of
personal attitudes, should at once adjust the economic aspects of his
whole life to All-Out-Aid to Britain for the purpose of defeating Hitler." A
1944 memo from Harley Andre, chairman of the Executive Committee,
Security of W ar Information, proclaimed Los Angeles to be the “Number
One Jap Listening Post.” The memo was an entreaty to Los Angeles
business, military, government, and civic leaders:
Accept responsibility for educating our people on what
can and what must not be mentioned about Los Angeles
production activities and military movements. . . . It is to
the selfish as well as patriotic interest of every Los
Angeles citizen to back this attack against our unseen
but ever present enemies.^
Beginning in 1940, forty percent of all Los Angeles County workers
were employed in the war industry.Los Angeles' involvement in the war
was total. According to the tourism-promoting All Year Club,
“Playgrounds" such as the racetrack at Hollywood Park were now used to
^ Harley Andre memorandum. May 1, 1944; “Immediate Economic
Musts,” Committee on Church and Community Cooperation, November 1,
1941, Ford Collection. The CCC was an LA county sponsored interfaith
group which operated from 1937 to 1949.
Verge, “Second W orld War,” 7.
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124
breed horses for the army. California wineries were now being used to
produce industrial alcohol. The refuge of Santa Catalina Island was
turned over to the Maritime Commission and many of the city's beaches
were turned into navy training grounds. The symbolic oranges and
lemons that lured tourists to Southern California, grown in groves and
orchards throughout the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys, were
used to supplement the diets of the armed forces. Citizens were
encouraged to plant "victory gardens " in order to supply their own fruit
and vegetables so they might help free up the produce of large-scale
farmers for provisions for the troops.^ Their lives were disrupted by air
raid warning drills. Families witnessed husbands, fathers, sons iDeing
sent off to war— many of whom had followed their soldiers to Los Angeles
from the East, South, or Midvwst. The Office of War information was
effective in encouraging residents to ration everything from scrap metal to
kitchen fat. Hollywood celebrities helped sell war bonds. At night Los
Angeles residents tended to family duties in darkness while the city was
under blackout. Los Angeles, it seemed, was exploding at the seams with
the advent of soldiers and their families, eager job seekers, new
government agencies, and the most massive influx of Negroes the city
had ever experienced. Among the largely young migrants to Los Angeles
"Playground That W ent to War," Ford Collection.
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125
were many women. Other migrants added to the ethnic diversity of Los
Angeles that had heretofore been largely absent. European émigrés from
the Slavic nations and from Russia, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, Greece,
and Italy were among the migrants, as were American Indians, Mexicans,
and Asians. Culturally, with contributions to local art, music, motion
pictures and literary fields, the new migrants greatly enriched life in Los
Angeles but the old-line reformers found it harder and harder to maintain
that idealized WASP image of peaceful, fun, restful Los Angeles. Self-
reliance, homogeneity, and individualism seemed to be rapidly
disappearing in the face of dependence on local government to meet
employment, health, and housing needs, collective sacrifice of all for the
greater good, and an increasingly heterogeneous population.”
2. Impact o f War on Law Enforcement in Los Angeles
One agency intimately involved in the new complexities of home
front life in the early 1940s was the Los Angeles Police Departm ent.
Called upon to keep the peace amidst the confluence of factors which
mitigated against a calm homefront, the LAPP peacekeepers were also
displaced, threatened, and disoriented by the war.
” Nash, American West Transformed, ch. 10, “Cultural Life in the West:
Hollywood in W artime.”
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126
Chiefs of police in the LAPD had long complained that the
department was undermanned, especially relative to the vast area of the
city (rather than compact densities of large, eastern cities that were the
department's counterparts).” As the department began losing its officers
to the draft. Mayor Bowron recognized the negative impact this law
enforcement drain could have on a city in flux. In April 1942, Bowron
wrote a letter to the Defense Department requesting a draft reprieve for
the LAPD's sworn officers.^’ Although overall crime rates dropped during
the war, juvenile delinquency rates increased— a growth of thirty-five
percent from 1941 to 1942 and another forty-nine percent above 1942
rates in 1943.” At the same time, the number of sworn personnel
declined from 2,410 in the 1938/1939 fiscal year to a low of 2,088 in
1943, a twelve percent decrease in police officers from 1941. Bowron
implored the Downey Committee to help correct the imbalance in police
personnel in Los Angeles— again citing the significant burden the city was
bearing in the national defense effort. “Since the declaration of war, the
Police Department had been called upon by almost every federal agency
operating in this area, in addition to the Army and the Navy,” Bowron
” Report to Board of Police Commissioners from Chief Lyle Pendegast,
1921-22; from Chief R. Lee Heath, 1924-1925; Chief James Davis, 1925-
1926, 1926-1927, 1936-1937, 1937-1938; Chief Roy Steckel, 1929-1930,
in LAPD Annual Report.
Fletcher Bowron to James Sheppard, Director, Ninth Civilian Defense
Region, San Francisco, April 22, 1942, Bowron Collection.
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127
stated, “and at the same time, the personnel has been seriously affected
by the induction of policemen into the armed forces."^ He reported that
473 members of the department had entered the armed services and
reiterated his intense dissatisfaction with the loss of police department
personnel to the draft;
We feel that those who made the decision to take away
trained and experienced policemen from this vital
defense and war production area did not have a proper
understanding of relative values of manpower. Trained
and experienced policemen are much more valuable
than soldiers who must be stationed in this area
continuously fo r defense against enemy attack.^
Bowron also communicated his concerns and frustration to California
Governor Earl Warren. “I have exhausted my patience in trying to
accomplish anything through the State Director of Selective Service,” he
wrote in his m issive.^ Los Angeles County Supervisor John Anson Ford
supported Bowron’s position in this matter. He, too, urged the governor to
use his influence to encourage Washington to investigate the detrimental
impact of the draft on law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County.*
^ LAPD Annual Refjort, 1942, 1943, 1944.
* Fletcher Bowron to Downey Committee, April 27, 1943, Bowron
Collection.
^ Ibid.
* Fletcher Bowron to Governor Earl Warren, May 18, 1943, Bowron
Collection.
* John Anson Ford telegram to Governor Earl Warren, 1944, Ford
Collection.
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128
By 1945, the number of officers returned to prewar levels, but the
2,354 sworn officers were still disproportionately low, as the population
had increased by approximately fifteen percent during that same time
period. In 1946, when the number of sworn personnel had risen to 3,013,
Police Chief 0. 8. Horrall reported that the LAPD was still undermanned
in comparison with the five largest U S. cities.^^ Bowron's concerns
about the loss of police department personnel had been pragmatic.
Social chaos was evident— strangers and strange activities could be found
throughout Los Angeles. Disorder, flux, and too many people were a ripe
mixture for combustion.
Bowron's aggressive pursuit of “special consideration” for the
exclusion of experienced LAPD officers from the draft illuminates one
aspect of the paradigm— the relationship between politics and police. The
war, by necessity, encouraged the mayor to take a public stance in
support of what he soon came to describe as the much needed, greatly
effective, hard working, yet overburdened police department. This is a
different picture of the police department than the one that was heaped
with scorn and ridicule from the outside and plagued with cronyism and
fratemalism on the inside. After all, the latter characterization of the
LAPD was one of the underlying reasons that Judge Fletcher Bowron was
LAPD Annual Report, 1946.
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129
drafted as a mayoral candidate In the recall election of 1938. Yet he had
to sing a new tune atx)ut the qualities of the LAPD In wartime.
Interestingly, despite the yearly entreaties for more manpower, It
appears that LAPD chiefs were content to let the mayor speak publicly on
this issue. The autonomy, so ardently supported and so politically
sensitive in later years, was not visibly asserted, nor was the mayor’s
influence called to question while he fruitlessly attempted to gain a
reprieve from military service for LAPD officers.
The draft, however, was only one of the contemporaneous Impacts
of the war on the city police department. The long-term effects on this
cadre of officers who were sent off to fight in 'The W ar Against Fascism"
contributed to the emerging ideological underpinning for the new
professionalism orientation of the LAPD. Police officers who had left the
city as officers without a great deal of confidence in their roles, came back
militarized, strengthened in their convictions that might Is right, that
outspoken labor activists and others who challenged the prevailing social
structure were Reds, and that democracy Is the key to sovereignty.^ This
attitude not only permeated the LAPD, but the minds and hearts of many
Americans.
^ Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century o f War in
the City o f Dreams (New York; Pocket Books, 1994), 67, 108-9.
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130
3. Combustion on the Home Front
Population growth, economic transformation, w ar these conditions
forced the mayor to govern Los Angeles while essentially in “crisis mode.”
Putting out fires rather than establishing and strengthening the good
government agenda t>ecame the focus of Fletcher Bowron's mayoralty as
the war progressed into the 1940s. The challenges of the wartime
transformations were persistent and overlapping— putting Bowron's
administration and the character of Los Angeles itself through a grueling
test. Central among the new issues and problems were those relating to
race.
A. Japanese Americans: Earning Their Rights as Citizens
Regarding racial tensions throughout the United States during
W orld W ar II, the social historian Geoffrey Perrett writes, “the country
teetered on the verge of hysteria from the moment the war began. In
factories, in schools, in cities large and small, racial clashes broke out
more readily than at any time in recent memory.”” Los Angeles was no
exception. The years 1942 and 1943 were particularly troublesome. On
February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066
authorizing the military to exclude the presence or restrict the movement
39
Perrett, Days o f Sadness, Years o f Triumph, 149.
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131
of certain persons from designated military areas.'*® Thereafter, the
military established the entire Pacific coast region as a prohibited military
area and the inner coastal region as a restricted zone. Next came
congressional legislation which made it a federal crime to refuse to leave
a military area if ordered to do so, and finally, the military began to issue
Civilian Exclusion Orders which called for “all persons of Japanese
ancestry, both alien and non-alien” to be evacuated from the designated
military areas on the basis of military necessity. Under the orders of John
DeWitt, the commanding general of the Western Defense Command,
approximately 120,000 residents in the Pacific coastal region—about one-
third of whom were from the greater Los Angeles area— were ordered to
leave their homes. *'
Public hearings and opinion polls showed that upwards of seventy-
five percent of Californians approved of either or both the relocation and
internment of Japanese American citizens.*^ Indeed, even a
representative of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce had contacted
the provost marshal general after the Japanese had attacked Pearl
Executive Order No. 9066, as cited in Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial,
129.
Frank Murphy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, from
dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States, 319 U. S. 624 (1944);
Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, 51-54.
Nash, American West Transformed, 149.
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132
Harbor urging that “all Japanese [in Los Angeles] should be locked u p .^
Perhaps the most vociferous local support for the internment of Isei
(immigrant/alien population) and Nisei (second generation, American-
born) Japanese came from Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron.
Regarding evacuation, he made the following statement to the Senate
Military Affairs Committee:
I feel that all Japanese should be kept away from the
combat zone of the coastal area. There is too great
opportunity for securing and sending military information,
assisting possible serial bombing and sabotaging this
vital war industrial section. However, I agree that the
Japanese should be put to work rather than kept in
relocation centers or concentration camps at great
expense. Most of them could be used as farm laborers
and particularly as truck gardeners. . . . I believe the big
majority of Japanese are loyal but feel there is no known
method of looking into an Oriental mind and determining
which ones would not act for the Mikado if the
opportunity presented itself. . . . I would recommend that
all be required to work and earn their sustenance, but
that all be carefully watched. This would be
comparatively easy because of their distinct appearance,
but please keep them away from Los Angeles for the
duration.**
The act of removing Japanese Americans from Los Angeles
severely tested the veneer of racial equality and peaceful coexistence
that the city projected to the world. Albeit a small proportion of the city's
population, the Japanese Isei and Nisei— who were sixty-three percent of
Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, 31.
** Fletcher Bowron statement, April 22, 1943, Bowron Collection.
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133
all people of Japanese ancestry in 1940— had established roots,
organizational and commercial ties, and despite a legacy of segregation
and discrimination, had generated feelings of goodwill in many parts of
the city. Seventy-nine percent of the Isei generation was self-employed,
primarily in agriculture, as produce farmers or in small wholesale or retail
businesses.^ Active Japanese community organizations in Los Angeles
included the Japanese American Citizens League, Nippon California
Farmers Association, and the Japanese Students Christian Association.
Even the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, extending the hand of
interracial cooperation, had established Asia House whose purpose was
"to create a friendly contact with our own Oriental people and visitors and
through such social contact to prevent those misunderstandings that
usually result in racial differences."^
The Japanese American Citizens League, primarily a Nisei
organization, was active in Los Angeles sponsoring cultural festivals,
recognizing positive efforts of interracial cooperation, and providing
political education and participation programs for Japanese Americans.
One of the organization's chief aims had been "the Americanization of the
Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, 16-17; Ronald Takaki, Strangers From
a Different Shore: A History o f Asian Americans (New York: Penguin
Books. 1989), 214.
Asia House was established 1936; see Ford Collection, Box 74, in
reference to this and other Japanese American or Asian interest
organizations active in Los Afigeles in the years before World W ar II.
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134
second generation of citizens of Japanese extraction . .. . Many youth
of the Nisei generation, in a classic clash with their immigrant parents and
because of their determination to be accepted as Americans, worked hard
to prove themselves and reconcile their duality in the United States. They
were diligent in their school work, distanced themselves from immigrant
parents and cultural traditions, tried to break out of the employment ghetto
they were restricted to, and asserted their birth rights to enjoy the fruits of
their American citizenship. Yet still, in 1940, one in five members of the
Nisei generation worked in a Japanese-owned produce stand.^
The surface peaceful coexistence between Japanese Americans
and Anglo Americans began to disintegrate in 1939. On June 25, the Los
Angeles Committee for Non Participation in Japanese Aggression was
formed with the intent to join the national movement to prevent further
shipments of war materiel from the United States to Japan. In 1940, the
committee's campaign had “reached” more than 50,000 Southern
Californians.^ It was not long before many Japanese Americans in Los
Angeles felt as if they must pass a vague sort of loyalty litmus test. They
were placed on the defensive— forced to justify and prove that they were
not enemy subversives.
'’^Japanese American Citizens League convention committee to John Anson
Ford, September 1, 1938, Ford Collection.
Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore, 218-20.
John Anson Ford notes, October 24, 1940, Ford Collection.
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135
Once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,
the Japanese American Citizens League, as an organization representing
40,000 Southern Californians of Japanese ancestry, released a loyalty
pledge to the United States.®® County Supervisor John Anson Ford
anticipated the probability of a full-scale degeneration of public decorum
and hurriedly presented a resolution to the full board of supervisors that
sanity and fairness prevail, especially in the public schools where, the
resolution stated, "children are often among the first ignorantly to display
hysterical intolerance" and where tension had already begun to cause
some disruptions.®^
Nonetheless, the voice of reason was soon drowned out by
Executive Order 9066 and the process of its implementation. Aside from
the moral issues it should have raised, the mechanics of carrying out this
order placed a huge strain on the city's political as well as economic
resources. In January 1942, just a few weeks prior to the order, the Los
Angeles County Civil Service Commission announced the following;
® ° The pledge read; "We are all Americans pledged to the defense of the
United States. Any disloyal act or vwjrd by any Japanese or American citizen
of Japanese descent harms the United States. The military Espionage Act of
1918 provides that any ^ord or act detrimental to the United States is duly
punishable. Any act or word, therefore, prejudicial to the United States
committed by any Japanese must be reported by us to the F.B.I. or other law
enforcement authority. Any menace to the security of this country must be
thoroughly and completely wiped out, " December 7,1941, Ford Collection.
® ^ John Anson Ford resolution presented to board of supervisors, December
9,1941, Ford Collection.
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136
in view o f the tensity of relations now existing between
the peoples of the United States and of Japan, it is
believed to be to the best interests of both the County
and such employees that their temporary separation from
the County service for duration, be encouraged by
means of requested leaves of absence on their part"^^
As the crisis with Japan loomed larger, both Los Angeles county and city
officials recognized that they would bear significant costs, both monetary
and psychic, caused by the removal of people of Japanese ancestry from
the region. A flurry of correspondence was initiated between Los Angeles
and Washington concerning the cost burden. Who should provide
financial support to wives and children of interned males? W hat about
the decreased agricultural production due to loss of Japanese farmers
who farmed about seventy percent of producing farm land in the county?^
Ultimately, however, concerns about the effects of the Japanese
evacuation devolved chiefly to concerns about the economic impact of
their departure on the region. In March 1943, Harry Kingman of the
University YMCA at University of California at Berkeley wrote an article
entitled, "America's New Crop of Tumbleweeds," which warned "One of
our most valuable racial minorities, composed in large part of capable,
law-abiding, hard-working, self-respecting and loyal Americans, is in the
“ Clifford Amsden, Secretary, Los Angeles County Civil Service Commission,
January 28,1942, Ford Collection.
“ John Anson Ford to Eleanor Roosevelt and U. S. Attorney General,
January 29,1942; Ford to Works Progress Administration; County Chief
Administrative Officer to Ford, March 2, 1942, Ford Collection.
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137
process of being warped into another dependent and costly ward of the
governm ent"^ The proof of this sentiment W3uld be in full evidence at
the close of the war and upon the return of evacuees to Los Angeles
County. W hereas prior to the war, there had t>een a total of only twenty-
five Japanese clients on county relief, the caseload had risen to 4,000
after the war.®®
The forced removal of Isei and Nisei Japanese from their homes
contributed to racial groups’ feeling unsafe and politically vulnerable
because of their identity, or, as in the case of Mexicans Americans, made
to feel wrong for maintaining their cultural identity. For example, Mayor
Bowron stated uncategorically in April 1943, "We do not want the Japs
back in Los Angeles during the war and even after victory is won and
Pearl Harbor and the murder of captured aviators has been avenged, we
should avoid a concentration of Japanese population in this area."®® Even
without such bold statements or the encouragement of flagrant headlines
such as "Government to Urge Japs to move East" as seen in the Los
Angeles Times on January 11,1945, the public no doubt absorted some
^ Harry Kingman, “America’s New Crop of Tumbleweeds” (publication
unknown), March 19, 1943, Ford Collection.
® ® See statement by county supervisor Leonard Roach, January 22, 1946,
Ford Collection.
® ® Fletcher Bowxxi telegram to A. B. CharxJIer, of subcommittee of the
Senate Military Affairs Committee, April 2 2 .1 9 ^ , Bowron Collection.
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138
of the more subtle anti-Japanese cues that were prevalent during those
turbulent years as well.
At the time that the return of the internees to Los Angeles was
imminent, Mayor Bowron had not shifted his position. Although he had
tempered his previously stated opinions somewhat, in a lengthy letter to
W illiam H. McReynolds, administrative assistant to President Roosevelt,
Bowron proffered several reasons why he thought it would be a good idea
to keep the war relocation centers open. The consequences of the return
of the Japanese in large numbers, Bowron suggested, would exaceitate
the already deplorable housing shortage in Los Angeles. Returning
evacuees would be competing with returning veterans, war workers, and
especially with the burgeoning Negro population for homes. Bowron
apparently did not see the paradox in his attempts to forestall the formerly
interned Japanese Americans' return to their own homes. He wrote,
"many war workers now living in houses owned by Japanese would be
evicted."^ Nor did Bowron recognize his own acceptance of the
"inevitable" existence of racial discrimination when he cited the fact that
the returning Japanese "would not be accepted as employees in local war
plants" as a reason for keeping them in such relocation centers as those
^ Fletcher Bowron to W illiam H. McReynolds, administrative assistant to
President Roosevelt, Washington D. C , January 26, 1945 (emphasis
added), Bowron Collection.
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139
at Gila, Arizona and Poston and Manzanar In California. Furthermore,
Bowron suggested that the returning Japanese could create a riot by
attempting to reclaim their homes.
. . . the section of the city (known locally as Little Tokyo)
where most of the Japanese formerly lived, now
embraces almost exclusively a colored population for
wtiom other housing in this immediate area simply
cannot be provided. Knowing the temper o f the people, I
fear an adverse effect upon morale in this important war
production area, disturbances, and possible race riots.^
W hile recognizing one problem, Bowron dismissed another. The
returning Japanese should not return to their homes for fear of displacing
Negroes whose last ditch efforts to resolve the housing shortage, caused
in part by housing restrictions, had sent them into abandoned homes and
storefronts in Little Tokyo. By setting up a sensational consequence like
"disturbances and possible riots," Bowron effectively shifted attention
away from his racialized fear of people of Japanese ancestry and the
housing crisis affecting Black migrants, and set the burden for its
resolution on two victimized groups which he pitted in opposition to one
another. The real problem here was the race restrictions, which kept
African Americans and Japanese Americans confined to, or away from,
certain areas in the city.
“ Ibid. (emphasis added).
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140
Ever the politician, however, Bowron's concern over any
anticipated "trouble" on the part of the city's African Americans was
actually a smokescreen for his response to the anti-Japanese sentiment
arising from other quarters in the city. He warned staffers in the W ar
Relocation Authority that they had misjudged public opinion regarding the
return of the evacuees. "This was only natural," Bowron wrote,
those entertaining a deep-seated prejudice and
resentment are not demonstrative and vocal. But on
every hand, citizens with whom I come in contact tell me
privately how they feel. I have received a re p o rt. . . that
a secret anti-Japanese organization has been formed for
the purpose of discouraging future concentration of
Japanese population in California . . . by resorting to
illegal methods such as employed by the vigilantes of a
half century or more a g o .*
Through his public proclamations and official protestations, Bowron, it
seemed, was merely representing the concerns of his constituents.
In spite of his unambiguous sentiments, Mayor Bowron spoke at a
post V-J Day testimonial banquet for Japanese American veterans. He
praised the record of Nisei soldiers on the battlefront and congratulated
them for their patriotism. This speech apparently set many community
members at ease, especially those who had previously been
apprehensive about the returning internees. But the words which Bowron
used to officially close this reprehensible chapter in the city's and county's
* Ibid.
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141
history was the vacuous platitude that " You [Nisei citizens] are again
citizens of our city .... You have earned the right to share the future of
our great and growing city."®
Planted directly by Fletcher Bowron were additional elements of
the paradigm for race and politics in Los Angeles which began with the
city’s involvement and reaction to the evacuation, internment, and
subsequent return of first and second generation Japanese. W hile no
major disturbance erupted as the United States government carried out
the removal of Japanese aliens and Japanese American residents, there
were other more dangerous results; the suspension of civil rights,
unfounded accusations, and the application of “guilt by association.”
Initially after Pearl Harbor, most Isei were considered treasonous
subversives and were subject to being raided in their homes by the FBI.
During this period, there were sporadic episodes o f violence, including
arson at homes and/or businesses of Japanese residents and increased
and flagrant use of derogatory epithets in the media. And the mayor of
Los Angeles, in concurrence with military propaganda, suggested that
Japanese residents were untrustworthy.®^ “Yellow peril" and “Japanese a
® ° Remarks by Fletcher Bowron at testimonial banquet for Japanese
American veterans, November 3,1946, Bowron Collection.
Daniels, Prisoners W ithout Trial, 32, 43.
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142
Menace to American Women” are just two examples of the media’s
vilification of Japanese Americans.^
The city’s experience with the Japanese brought overt racism into
the public arena and justified it in the name of wartime exigency; that
alone added to the paradigm as would the city’s wartime experience with
Mexican Americans.
B. Chicano Youth: "More Sinned Against than Sinning'^^
Yet, there are real distinctions between the
characteristic problems here [in the W est] and those of
the East, South and Midwest. For example, in addition to
problems of Negro-white relations and of anti-Semitism,
which are found throughout the country, there are on the
Pacific Coast very specific issues affecting Japanese,
Chinese, Armenians, Filipinos, native Indians, and
Mexicans.®^
According to Fletcher Bowron, second generation Japanese
Americans veterans had "earned" their rights as American citizens only
after having served in the U. S. military while many of their family and
friends had been deprived of such rights as due process, unreasonable
search and seizure, and freedom of association when they were interned
“ Ibid., 10, 27, 30; Ford, Thirty Explosive Years, 130.
“ Report o f Special Committee on the Problems o f Mexican Youth, Los
Angeles County Grand Jury, 1942, as quoted in Verge, “Second W orld
W ar,” 105, also found in Bowron Collection.
“ Laurence Hewes, Jr., “Race Relations on the W est Coast,” American
Council on Race Relations, reprinted in western supplement of The
Nation, 21 September 1946, Ford Collection.
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143
during the war. How paradoxical, then, that Bowron proclaimed that
second generation Mexican American youth were indeed Americans first
when it came time to put out diplomatic fires in the wake of the June 1943
Zoot Suit Riot. According to local political reasoning, Los Angeles-area
residents of Japanese ancestry had been considered potentially disloyal,
subversive, and warranted classification as enemy aliens— regardless of
American birth. On the other hand, that same rationale did not work when
the United States was trying to sustain its Good Neighbor Policy with
Mexico in the 1940s. As it became necessary to fend off international
concerns regarding the way the United States treated Mexican
immigrants, it was expedient to assert that the poorly treated youth of
Mexican descent in Los Angeles were indeed Americans. In a letter to
Elmer Davis, Office of W ar Information, Bowron wrote, "We have been
trying . . . striving to make those of Mexican blood in this community
realize that they are Americans, rather than Mexicans."®®
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Spanish-speaking
Americans constituted the largest minority in the West. According to the
1940 census, slightly less than two-thirds of all Spanish-speaking
“ Fletcher Bowron to Elmer Davis, Office of W ar Information, Washington D.
C., June 8, 1943, BowA"on Collection; regarding Good Neighbor Policy, see
Verge, “Second World War,” 107; and Report o f the Special Committee on
Problems o f Mexican Youth, Final Report of the Los Angeles County Grand
Jury (County of Los Angeles, 1942), 43, Bowron Collection.
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144
residents of California lived in Los Angeles.* Yet their American
birthrights obviously could not correct and/or compensate for the
decidedly un-American experiences of many of Los Angeles' Mexican
American residents. Historian George Sanchez, in Becoming Mexican
American, quotes a young man who expressed this sentiment; “Ever
since I can remember I've been pushed around and called names
because I’m a Mexican. I was bom in this country. . . . I want to be
treated like everybody else.”^ Many Mexican Americans faced
discrimination in housing, excluded by the same deed restrictions that
shut out Negroes from home ownership and/or tenantship in certain
areas.* They were segregated into twenty-eight separate schools in Los
Angeles County to such an extreme, writes Verge, that "school districts
drew boundary lines down the center of streets without including
dwellings on either side to connect settlements of Hispanics into
segregated school d istricts."* Those Los /Angeles residents o f "Mexican
Blood" who needed to "realize" that they were /Vnericans faced
* The number of Spanish-speaking residents was 354,432 in California and
219,000 in Los A ngles, Nash, American West Transformed, 107-108. The
Black population in the city at the time was 63,774 and the Japanese
population, captured within the census category of "other nonwhite," was
34,073.
^ George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and
Identity in Chicano Los Angeles. 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 253.
* Verge, “Second World W ar,” 58, 60-61.
* Ibid., 108; Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, 258-59.
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145
employment discrimination at almost every turn. Except for unskilled jobs,
over which they had to scuffle for employment with the city's Black
residents, Mexican Americans were widely refused employment
opportunities in Los Angeles. The institution of the Fair Employment
Practices Commission in 1941, combined with the increasing manpower
shortage in Los Angeles opened up jobs which had previously been
closed to them. Nevertheless, when employed, Mexican American
workers often faced segregated work environments and wage scales
different from those o f Anglo American em ployees.^
Gerald Nash argues that the Los Angeles Police Department and
the Los Angeles press played significant roles in fanning the flames of
racial heat during W orld W ar II. Sometime in 1942, a group of Mexican
American youth migrated to Los Angeles from El Paso, Texas. They had
been delivered an ultimatum by the El Paso police chief to leave the city or
t>e arrested. These youth, engaged in the local drug culture and with a
distinctive speech style adapted from the Mexican underworld, were known
as Pachucos. Historian Mauricio Mazon, defines a Pachuco as “a Mexican
bom in the United States; alien to both cultures; fluent in neither Spanish nor
English . .. the argot of lumpen elements-an ideal subject for ethnocentric
Nash, American West Transformed, 121-22; Sanchez, Becoming
Mexican American, 249-50; Report o f the Spedai Committee on Problems
o f Mexican Youth, 42, Bowron Collection.
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146
apologies or chauvinistic attacks."^^ interestingly, historian Douglas
Monroy also writes about a group o f Texans who migrated to Los
Angeles— bringing a particular racial predisposition with them -over 100
years earlier. “All too many Texans had learned the art of taking care of
unwanted Mexicans beginning in 1836,” Monroy contends, “Now they
brought those skills to Los Angeles.”^ The majority of lynchings in Los
Angeles in the 1850s were of Mexicans. This public ritual was performed
as a warning to Mexicans not to “transgress” the boundaries established
by the dominant Anglo class. Ultimately, Monroy contends, “This process
served to criminalize all of /a gente Mexicana."^ Perhaps it also served
as a basis for future ethnic conflicts as well.
In Los Angeles, young Mexican American men adopted the zoot suit
as their "uniform" of choice. Often made of brightly colored fabric, the zoot
suit consisted of a long coat and baggy pants, which tapered down to narrow
cuffs. It was worn with a pancake hat and thick-soled shoes. According to
Stuart Cosgrove’s cultural critique.
The zoot-suit was more than the drape-shape of 1940s
fashion, more than a colourful stage-prop hanging from the
shoulders of Cab Calloway, it was, in the most direct and
obvious way, an emblem of ethnicity and a way of
Mauricio Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots: The Psychology o f Symbolic
Annihilation (Austin; University of Texas Press, 1984), 5.
^ Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Makirjg o f Mexican
Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990), 209.
^ Ibid., 208-209.
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147
negotiating an identity. The zoot-suit was a refusal; a
subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the manners
of subservience.^^
The police department, Nash contends, due to nervousness about
Pachucos, "tended to view perfectly innocent Mexican Americans on the
streets as potential criminals" and arrested these youth for loitering,
gambling, or "suspicion of possible illegal activities.”^ A writer for the
California Eagle noted this propensity of the LAPD to arrest and jail
Mexicans indiscriminately on “suspicion of this or that.” Noted John
Kinloch, “Police squads enter night spots, clear out all the Mexicans, but
don’t touch white or Negro customers. Rank discrimination!”^
Nash, and other scholars as well, purport that Los Angeles
newspapers also fomented anti-Mexican prejudice particularly attributing
the rise in juvenile delinquency rates solely to Mexican American youth.^
The Los Angeles Times which had not displayed any restraint in inflaming
the racial aspects of the Japanese attack on Pearl harbor displayed that
same tendency well into 1942 and 1943 as it began to report that juvenile
delinquency among Mexican American youth was the new menace on the
Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot-suit and Style W arfare,” History Workshop
Journal 18(1984), 78.
75
Nash, American West Transformed, 111-12; Verge, “Second World War,”
103.
John Kinloch, “Mexicans Face Police Terror Round-Ups; Vile Press
Slurs,” California Eagle, November 5, 1942.
^ Nash, American West Transformed, 112,114-15.
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148
domestic front. “The Zoot Suit Menace," the “enemy within,” and “wolf-
packs" of Mexican youth were just some of the terms published in relation
to Mexican American youth in Los Angeles.^" Despite the local press'
contentions, Los Angeles County probation statistics cited in the 1942
annual grand jury report showed "that there had been no increase of
admissions to Juvenile Hall of youths of Mexican extraction
Furthermore, the Los Angeles County grand jury reported that “The
increase in delinquency since the war is not a local but a national
phenomenon .... (There is a] greater degree of anxiety or nervous tension in
war time [over] the insecurity and danger of their [the youth's] relatives and
themselves ....”“ Despite the grand jury’s work, the inevitable equation-
young, male, Mexican American = Zoot Suit = Pachuco = gang member
engaged in criminal activity-had become pervasive in Los Angeles by
1942.®’
The California Eagle did not subscribe to the same theories as
newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Herald Examiner. In
Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, 29; Sanchez, Becoming Mexican
American, 267.
^ Probation statistics as presented in preamble to report entitled
"Delinquency of Youths of Mexican E)draction in Los Angeles" presented to
Los Angeles County Grand Jury, October 1942, Ford Collection.
® ° The aforementioned section on Delinquency of Youths of Mexican
Extraction in Los Angeles in the 1942 Grand Jury Report was released to the
public on May 13,1943, Ford Collection.
® ’ Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots, 61, 62.
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149
fact, the Eagle criticized those newspapers in a rather caustic article in
November 1942 by declaring that there was a “Hearst-Chandler
conspiracy” to foment a phony crime wave amongst “Negro kids in
Harlem, Negro kids in Detroit and Mexican kids in Los Angeles." The
article reported that juvenile delinquency had actually decreased in Los
Angeles (decreased in offenses such as vagrancy, theft, and sex offenses
from 1939 to 1942, but increased in homicide, rape, and assault during
those same years) and blasted the major newspapers for their sensational
coverage;
W hite and Negro Angelenos in the last several weeks
suddenly began to read of Mexican baby gangsters.
(Nothing about decripid [sic] housing.) They were
regaled with tales of gang war. (Nothing about a lack of
defense training for Mexicans.) They saw lurid
photographs of fifteen year old girls in the toils of the
law. (Nothing about the Mexican soldiers who, with
Negro and white comrades, wrote pages of glory on
Bataan and Corrigedor.)“
One other significant sociological factor necessary to understand
the experiences of Mexican American youth in war-time Los Angeles is
the consideration of intergenerational conflicts similar to that of the
Japanese Nisei. Parents bom in one culture and nation and children in
another, compounded with the prejudices both generations faced in the
United States, presented many opportunities for confusion about roles
^ Kinloch, “Mexicans Face Police Terror Round-ups."
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150
and status. Unfortunately, sometimes this confusion was manifested in
anti-social ways. Yet, this is a process of Americanization which almost
all immigrant groups in the United States have undergone.”
Nevertheless, official passivity in light of increasing tensions had
become the operant standard during the war. Therefore the opportunity to
question and learn from past and present conflicts was soon lost. The
Bowron administration's opportunity to work to prevent future conflicts
was not properly attended to. Denial became the rule, proactive action,
the exception. The Sleepy Lagoon and Zoot Suit Riots exhibit this
contention in some detail.
In August 1942, Los Angeles police officers, in what one historian
claims to be an “exaggerated response,” rounded up and arrested more
than 300 Mexican American youth as suspects In the beating death of
Jose Diaz at the Sleepy Lagoon Bar. An “ordinary” murder of an
“ordinary” Mexican youth might not have garnered such a forceful
response at any other time. But in light of the still sensitive and prominent
Issue of Japanese interment, this latest domestic crisis, in the midst of the
war crisis, in a city undergoing fundamental physical, economic, and
demographic changes, weakened the pressure points in Los Angeles.
” Report o f the Speaal Committee on Problems o f Mexican Youth,
41-42, Bowron Collection; Cosgrove, “The Zoot-Suit as Style W arfare,”
79.
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151
Jose Diaz died in the hospital a few hours after the police found his
unconscious body. His death touched a nerve. The police officers knew
there had been a gang fight at the Sleepy Lagoon the previous night and
were ready to exact some sort of vengeance for the Diaz murder. Despite
the Inability of the police department to produce a murder weapon, and
without eyewitness testimony, they went on a raid which netted the arrests
of the 300 youth. Twenty-three of those arrested were gang members,
and twenty-two of them were subsequently charged and taken to trial
where seventeen were convicted of murder in January 1943.*^
Historians Sanchez and Mazon contend that Mexican Americans
replaced Japanese Americans as the new suspected disloyals or “the
enemy within.” Sanchez argues that, “However benign their activities
during the W orld W ar II era, Chicano youth were increasingly viewed as a
threat to the stability of the Anglo American population.”® ® Shortly after
the police roundups, the grand jury convened a hearing and established a
special committee on the problems of Mexican youth. The final report of
the committee included testimony by LAPD Chief C. B. Horrall, Los
Angeles County Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz, representatives from United
States Office of W ar Information (OWI), the W ar Manpower Commission
^ Nash, American West Transformed, 115-18; Verge, “Second World
War," 102-104.
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, 267; see also Mazon, The Zoot
Suit Riots, 19.
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152
(WMC), the Mexican Consulate, and from the inveterate chronicler of Los
Angeles life, w riter Carey M cW illiam s.^ Despite Mayor Bowron's
protestations to the contrary, the young second generation Mexican
American defendants in the murder case and in subsequent volatile
Incidents in Los Angeles were more commonly referred to in official
documents and in the press as: “Mexican Hoodlums," "Mexican Youth,"
"young people of Mexican ancestry" or "extraction," but never simply as
Americans, or even as Mexican Americans.®^ The murder, police round
ups, and final charges brought against twenty-two young Mexican
Americans became national and international news.
According to one observer, three clearly delineated "camps"
formed around the Sleepy Lagoon case, exposing greater disparities of
opinion surrounding race and politics than had previously been exposed
in the city. AI Waxman, a columnist for the Eastside Journal termed those
groups: the execution-seekers— "the boys were murderers"; the liberals—
"there was no pro of; and, "a third element, irate citizens— not Mexicans—
of standing in the community. . . . They contended that these Mexican
Report o f the Spedai Committee on Problems of Mexican Youth, 41-59,
Bowron Collection.
^ Ibid.; Verge, “Second World War,” 100-106; Sanchez, Becoming Mexican
American, 266.
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153
youths were being tried when in reality society should be sitting in the
courtroom as a defendant.'*®®
The case became more than just a case for municipally-handled (or
mishandled) crisis management. The Office of W ar Information (OWI)
became involved as the incident became a potentially problematic
situation for the State Department as inaccurate reports of the Sleepy
Lagoon Murder and police round-ups were dispatched to other countries.
The grand jury reported that “Headlines appeared in at least one
newspaper in Buenos Aires, stating that 25,000 young people of Mexican
ancestry had been placed in concentration camps in Southern
California.”® ® Indeed, the Office of W ar Information arranged conferences
with newspaper publishers, city and county authorities, and interested
citizens with a plan to "radically change” the editorial policy of major Los
Angeles newspapers by eliminating the sensationalized
misrepresentations of Los Angeles' Mexican American youth.®® After
these meetings, the grand jury reported, both the Los Angeles Times and
the Evening Herald and Express had been convinced by the OWI of the
“harmful effects” of some of their coverage and published positive articles
® ® A 1 S. Waxman, "Justice?" Eastside Joumal, January 20,1943, Ford
Collection.
® ® Report o f Special Committee on Problems o f Mexican Youth, 43, Bowron
Collection.
® ° Ibid.
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154
regarding Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times
made good by covering the Southern California Youth Conference with a
brief article, headlined, 'Trade Schools Advocated for Mexican Youths"
(although Nash contends that this effort was too little, too late). Despite
the grand jury report’s recitation of pre-existing problems of "bad housing,
segregation . . . low income, lack of opportunity, " the report did not
disparage the city fathers for lack of progress in those areas— but more for
the public prominence to which this case was raised.^^
Despite efforts to scapegoat and keep the process quiet, fairer
minds would not hush up. The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was
formed in the wake of the convictions of seventeen of the twenty-two
defendants. This committee worked to raise money to fund an appeal for
the convicted youth. The committee's sentiment was that the original
convictions were based more on "anti-Mexican prejudice than on fact."
One member of the committee, John Bright, went so fa r as to characterize
the verdict as "a blow at national unity for the war e ffo rt. . . " ^
To its credit, although for explicitly ulterior motives, the Southern
California Council for Inter American Affairs exhibited some insight into
Los Angeles Times May 10, 1943; Nash, American West Transformed,
115.
“ Unattributed rxjte, January 14,1943, Ford Collection. Convictions resulted
in three first-degree murder verdicts, nine convictions for second degree
murder, and five convictions on lesser charges; Verge, Impact o f the Second
World War, 104; Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots, 24.
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155
the effects and after-effects of the situation that had generally eluded
some of the more conservative residents of Los Angeles. The Council
called on other like-minded groups to establish an assertive offense to
take away some of the power that the "radical left"— as they referred to the
Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee and others who had rallied in defense
of the accused youth— had monopolized in cases like this. Thus, falling
into the previously described "third element" category— "irate citizens, not
Mexicans, of standing in the community”-Raym ond McKelvey of the
Southern California Council on Inter American Affairs, sent a letter to
W illiam C. Mathes of the Los Angeles Bar Association. McKelvey first
suggested that the international implications of the case would gamer
some sort of recognition for the group, some of whose members have
been “deeply disturbed” by the repercussions of the Sleepy Lagoon case.
He proposed that.
It would seem a stroke of far-sighted statesmanship
locally, if some committee of outstanding members of the
Bar Association could be constituted to look into this
case. Perhaps on investigation this committee would
see fit to file a brief on appeal as a friend of the court.
The widest publicity should be given to the work of such
a Bar Association committee. It should be composed of
distinguished men who command the respect of the
community as having no special political or economic
axe to grind. The establishment of such a committee
would do much to correct the impression now being
fostered among the Mexican colony that only left-wingers
are concerned with their problems, and that when they
need assistance, advice, and counsel, they should look
to the various radical groups who thrive on discontent.
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156
Such local racial tension would be alleviated if our Bar
were undertaking an inquiry to find out whether, as is
alleged, the case was in fact handled in a way prejudicial
to the defendants, and whether it can honestly be said
that racial bias showed itself in the prosecution of the
case, and in the severity of the sentence.”
Although not guided by the most altruistic of motives, it is clear that some
members of Los Angeles elite establishment understood that racial/ethnic
conflicts had to be addressed and arbitrated rather than antagonistically
managed or simply ignored. The language of M cK elve/s letter, however,
reveals the belief that somehow those people who stand up for the rights
of others are “radical” and by implication, dangerous. He writes,
the radicals have a splendid chance to dramatize
themselves and build their prestige and potential
opportunities for leadership among our Mexican-
Americans. We can only guess the consequences of
this for the community in the years ahead. . . . This is
bad for Los Angeles, bad for California, bad for our
country's relationships with Latin America and bad for
the war effort.”^
Ultimately, the District Court of Appeals agreed with the "third element."
In October 1944, the verdicts in the original superior court case were
reversed based on lack of evidence and prejudicial conduct of the trial
judge.”
” Raymond G. McKelvey, Southern California Council on Inter American
Affairs to William C. Mathes, Los Angeles Bar Association, Octot>er 28,1943,
Ford Collection.
^ Ibid. (emphasis added).
” Nash, American West Transformed, 114; Sanchez, Becoming Mexican
American, 266; Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots, 24.
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157
With the onset of 1943, the racial tension in Los Angeles went from
bad to worse. Scarcely had the year begun before the verdicts in the
Sleepy Lagoon case came in. The verdicts and resultant "aftermath" had
the city reeling in finger pointing, blame, and diplomatic disputes. W hile
the war raged on in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, life on the
homefront became more complicated as racial tension escalated in
several major U. S. cities as more and more job seekers pressed into
overcrowded industrial centers. The city leadership's prognostications on
race relations had been correct. Tensions were mounting. These
predictions had been easy to make. It was the foresight and fortitude
necessary to forestall an actual cataclysm of race conflict that would be
difficult to attain. More difficult still would be the ability to diffuse such an
event once it was set in motion. The argument could be made that Los
Angeles was more than prepared for the eventuality that would become
known as the Zoot Suit Riot in June 1943. This seven day riot in which
many zoot suit clad youth were stripped of their clothes, shorn of their
hair, and beaten by U. 8. servicemen surprised most observers for its
duration as well as its intensity, although no one should have been too
surprised at its occurrence, given the rising level of public antipathy
toward Mexican American males. The multi-layered reasons for this
serious clash affected Los Angeles for months afterward.
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158
On many levels, the path toward the rioting in June 1943 had been
a long time coming. The path the city took during the war escalated and
enhanced the probability that such race rioting would occur. It started
with the anti-Japanese propaganda campaign undertaken after Pearl
Harbor. That campaign made it easier for many Americans to accept the
forced relocation of their neighbors of Japanese ancestry— sixty-two
percent of whom were fellow citizens. No sooner had the city turned its
attention away from that situation than had the press begun yet another
anti-ethnic propaganda campaign— this time waged against juvenile, male
Mexican Americans. By the time of the trial and conviction of the youth
charged in the Sleepy Lagoon case, battle lines had been clearly drawn in
the city. The expectation of major strife within the city was palpable, but
downplayed at the same time.
In the spring of 1943, zoot suit-clad Pachucos and white m ilitary
servicemen became engaged in a series of frequent skirmishes
maneuvered in a tit-for-tat fashion with the original basis for conflict
having gotten murkier as time went by. W ar-time cloth rationing had
essentially made the manufacture of zoot suits illegal. In March 1942 the
War Production Board had instituted a twenty-six percent cut back in the
use of fabric during war-time, yet the continual wearing of the draped suits
by Mexican and Black youth was viewed by some city residents as an act
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159
of defiance. In June 1943, the Los Angeles city council declared the zoot
suit a “public nuisance" and attempted to ban their being worn within city
limits.®®
One theory about the bad blood between the two "uniformed"
groups— servicemen and Mexican American youth— was that Pachucos did
not like the attention paid by military servicemen to the local girls.
Another suggestion was that the Pachuco youth had a visceral reaction to
the uniforms of the servicemen. The United States’ military uniforms were
symbolic of all that was wrong with Anglo-dominated and racially-
oppressive America from their perspectives as disenchanted youth o f an
oppressed group. Yet another interpretation was simply anomie— juvenile
restlessness compounded by family dislocation and instability in time of
war.®^ Supervisor Ford cited racial friction, economic inferiority, and the
increasingly hostile attempts to blame all local juvenile crime problems on
Mexican youth as possible explanations for the Zoot Suit Riot.®® Ford
also believed that tensions were exacerbated by a statement made by
Lieutenant Edward Duran Ayers of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs
® ® Cosgrove, “The Zoot-suit as Style W arfare,“ 80; Mazon, The Zoot Suit
Riots, 75.
® ^ Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots, 64; Ford, Thirty Explosive Years, 135;
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, 267; Cosgrove, “The Zoot Suit and
Style Warfare,” 79-80.
® ° John Anson Ford to Nelson Rockefeller, Office of the Coordinator of
InterAmerican Affairs, June 9,1943, Ford Collection; Ford, Thirty Explosive
Years, 135.
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160
Department who said that there are “biological differences” regarding
Mexican American youth which must be considered in addition to
socioeconomic factors. Speaking metaphorically, Ayers suggested that
“although a wild cat and a domestic cat are of the same family, they have
certain biological characteristics so different that while one may be
domesticated the other would have to be caged to be kept in captivity.”^
Ayers' Social Darwinist views were not well received by many Mexican
Americans in Los Angeles.
There is an additional element that can be woven through all this.
Despite the harsh reality of segregation and discrimination in their lives,
as a group, Mexican Americans had an enlistment rate above the national
average.Perhaps some Pachucos could not reconcile their nether
cultural existence with the fact of their older brothers, fathers, and uncles
going off to fight a war in defense o f a country that allowed and implicitly
condoned their disparate treatment. Nash suggests that "M ilitary service
and urbanization tended to break down traditional values and lifestyles,
and accelerated social and cultural integration into American society. At
the same time Spanish-speaking Americans became more conscious of
99
Lieutenant Edward Duran Ayers, Statistical Report, May 1943, Bowron
Collection; Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots, 2^-2A.
Nash, American West Transformed, 111.
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161
their own identity and of such discrimination to which they were
subjected."’® ’
W hatever the core reasons, the unresolved problem began to
manifest itself in verbal aggression and physical jostling by Pachucos
against servicemen in places as disparate as a dance hall in the Venice
area on the far western edge of the city, to the Red Car electric train
which ran south from downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach, to the
armory at Chavez Ravine on the northern periphery of downtown, and into
the quaint bungalows of segregated East Los Angeles.
The population of servicemen in Los Angeles was quite noticeable.
Like the Pachucos, soldiers were known to "hang out" in various parts of
town. Also, like the Pachucos, sometimes subtle forms of discrimination
exacerbated their nocturnal activities. In this case, servicemen on
furlough had reputations that preceded them. Local hoteliers did not like
to rent them rooms due to bad past experiences with servicemen on leave
who generally had no compunction, it seemed, about damaging hotel
rooms. Thus, they became known for hanging out on city streets at all
hours of the night. Their gathering spots were such places as the
downtown bus depot and all night theaters and hotel lobbies. Groups of
servicemen could also be found along a stretch of Main Street between
Ibid., 126.
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162
4th and 9th Streets, on a section of Broadway from 5th to 7th Streets, at
Pershing Square (a city park across from the posh Biltmore Hotel), and on
Hollywood Boulevard/” W herever there were servicemen, it seemed,
there were also Pachucos-hanging out, just like them. The evidence
suggests that the military had its own share of problems controlling its
youthful group of soldiers, who it seemed reverted to irresponsible civilian
adolescent behavior while off duty on the streets of Los Angeles.^”
So, although in the aftermath of the Zoot Suit Riot the newspapers
showed a pro-military bias, the servicemen had not necessarily enjoyed
stellar reputations in the city. This too may help account for some of the
problems of accountability stemming from the "control" (or lack thereof)
during the rioting itself. The LAPD, with a long-standing cooperative
relationship with the military police, had essentially abjured control in this
matter. Because the military police and shore patrol were responsible for
military personnel, the LAPD with limited authority over m ilitary personnel
was ostensibly off the hook. It did not help that in the case of the conflicts
between the two groups, one group was a uniformed representative of the
United States military, while the other was a uniformed representative of,
in some minds, the criminal element— one with even less status due to
national origin. Police Chief 0. B. Horrall downplayed the dramatization
102
103
Letters to John Anson Ford, Box 65, January 1943, Ford Collection.
Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots, 72-74, 85.
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163
of the week-long free-for-all noting that, “Quite a few boys had their
clothes tom off, but the crowds weren’t particularly hard to handle. And
the feeling in general among them was one of fun and sport rather than
malice.”’" Indeed, the riots were apparently so insignificant that they did
not even merit a mention in the 1943 Annual Report o f the Police
Department. In the police chiefs annual letter to the board of police
commissioners which leads off the report, Horrall wrote, “Probably the
most acute problem facing the L. A. P. D. is that concerning juvenile
delinquency. . .. This department has bent every effort to reduce the
delinquency in our area.”’® ®
Accountability was further complicated by a naval commander's
interpretation of the tumult as being a civilian matter, "irrespective of what
may have been the original course of these disorders," he w ro te .T h e
military police were noticeably absent during the rioting, even though
service personnel were clearly the aggressors. Mazon contends that
had the military police been quicker in their response to the outbreaks
they would have had to bring charges for disorderly conduct, disobeying
direct orders, inciting a riot, being AWOL, and maytje even mutiny against
“hundreds and perhaps thousands of servicemen." Not only would the
C. B. Horrall, quoted in Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots, 80-81.
LAPD Annual Report, 1943, 4.
Memo from Rear Admiral David Bigley, June 9,1943, quoted in Nash,
American West Transformed, 118.
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164
military suffer serious public relations damage, but, Mazon suggests,
“This would have been an enormous propaganda victory for the Axis.”’°^
Finally, the LAPD did take control and achieve some semblance of order
to end the rioting on June 10.’° ®
Politics and race, two elements of the wartime paradigm are further
embedded with Fletcher Bowron's efforts to diffuse the appetite of the
media monster which arrived in town in the wake of the riot. His three
pronged approach was to; 1 ) disavow/distance the city and its
administration from the peculiarities of the incident; 2) assert a zero
tolerance for the lawlessness of the least powerful group involved in the
incident; and 3) castigate all those who suggested bias, maltreatment,
and one-sided social control practices as rabble-rousers, or worse. In just
one public statement, Bowron effectively implemented this approach at
damage control:
[These Mexican gang members] are Los Angeles
youth, and the problem is purely a local one; but, while
our problem is local to Los Angeles there is nothing
peculiar or unique about it. Similar disturbances have
been reported in Arizona . . . West Texas ....
We are going to see that members of the Armed
Forces are not attacked ....
Mazon, The Zoot Suit Riots, 73.
’° ® See Fletcher Bowron memorandum to LAPD Chief C. B. Horrall, July 19,
1943; Fletcher Bowron to Brigadier General B. W. Simpson, U. S. Army
Commanding Ordinance Training Center, Camp Santa Anita, Arcadia, CA,
July 23, 1943, Bowron Collection; Verge, “Second World War,” 107; Nash,
American West Transformed, 117-19.
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165
At the same time, I want to assure the people of Los
Angeles that there will be no sidestepping and the
situation will be vigorously handled. There are too many
citizens in this community, some of them good
intentioned and a few whose intentions I question, who
raise a hue and cry of racial discrimination or prejudice
against a minority group every time the Los Angeles
police make arrests of members of gangs or groups
working in unison. They all look alike to us, regardless
of color and the length of their coats. The law is going to
be enforced and the peace kept in Los Angeles and,
under existing circumstances, this requires two-fisted
action and it cannot be done with powder puffs or slaps
on the wrists. If young men of Mexican parentage or if
colored boys are involved it is regrettable, but no one
has immunity and whoever are the disturbers are going
to be sternly dealt with, regardless of the protests of the
sentimentalists and those who seemingly want to throw
so much protection around the disturbing element in the
community that the good citizens cannot receive proper
protection and the good name of the City of Los Angeles
may suffer in the eyes of the rest of the country.’* ®
In a communication with Nelson Rockefeller at the Office of Inter
American Affairs, Supervisor Ford had explained that the news treatment
was, In most cases, "definitely slanted in favor of the servicemen."” * ’
Bowron's management of the crisis appears to have operated under the
same bias. He had already determined that there was too much concern
for the Mexican American youth involved. He held the notion that
because there are "good" Mexicans in Los Angeles, then the Zoot Suit riot
should not have been construed as an indication of racial/ethnic/cultural
’* ® Fletcher Bowron statement. June 9,1943, Bowron Collection.
John Anson Ford to Nelson Rockefeller, June 9, 1943, Ford Collection.
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166
conflicts in Los Angeles. Yet, while insisting to the Office of W ar
Information that Los Angeles was the jurisdiction responsible for this
"problem," Bowron did not accept the blame within his own administration
nor within the police department. In fact, Bowron went to great lengths to
instruct Police Chief C. B Horrall on how to write a "stronger and more
effective" letter for submission to the U. S. State Departm ent’ " 'The
responsibility for local conditions is our own," Bowron wrote to Elmer
Davis in Washington,
[we] feel that we know much more about people and
conditions here than one who comes from Washington.
. . . This Is In no sense a racial problem and would have
no possible International implications if the busybodles
and a few organizations composed of radicals had not
made it so by rushing to the defense of the young
hoodlums when they were arrested.’ "
The biggest problem, one that was reinforced with each day that
Bowron remained In office, was his many attempts to justify his Inaction.
One patently dangerous justification for official passivity was Bowron's
implication that the issue of Mexican gangs had basically been Ignored
because they had only been harming each other. In fact, Bowron
conceded that it took a group of law-abiding Mexican citizens to appeal
directly to the chief of police In order to get equitable police protection
’ ’ ’ Fletcher Bowxxi to C. B. Horrall, July 19,1943, Bowon Collection.
’ ’^ Fletcher Bowon to Elmer Davis, Office of W ar Information, Washington D.
0., June 9, 1943, Bowron Collection.
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167
from Mexican youth who were preying on them in their neighborhoods.’ ^ ^
By distancing him self from the problem of Mexican juvenile crime, by
insisting it was "Brown on Brown," by suggesting that there was no racial
motive for police crackdowns, since the request for police to do something
about it came from within the Mexican American community, Bowron did
not realize he was actually underscoring the very real, systemic racial
biases in operation.
These 1943 events had a decidedly white and brown c a s t-
revealing simmering ethnic tensions between Anglo American and
Mexican American Angelenos. These ethnic tensions were compounded
by nativist sentiments as well, but paradoxically Zoot Suiters were almost
by definition second or third generation Mexican American youth. And
yet, in the summer of 1943, the infamous mass influx of Negro migrants
largely from the South, displaced the paramount concern regarding the
“Mexican problem” and utterly discombobulated what was left of the
notion of a racially harmonious Los Angeles.
With its responses to “the yellow peril” and “the Mexican Menace”
during World W ar II, the Bowron Administration set the tone for Los
Angeles' future race relations. By extension, Bowron could be viewed as
Fletcher Bowen to Philip Bonsai, chief. Division of American Republics,
U. S. State Department, Washington, D. C.. August 3, 1943, Bowron
Collection.
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168
leading by example. In particular, his spin on race relations and race
conflict was similarly practiced without quarrel by the police department
that had to physically arbitrate these social and political dynamics. W hile
such racial perspectives may have been socially conventional during this
particular time period, when viev^ng how the mayor and the police
department worked closely together throughout this period of racial and
ethnic conflict, one might consider the coincident development of a
policing paradigm so closely allied with the political leadership of Los
Angeles as an especially interesting development given the recently
attained (1937) full autonomy o f the LAPD.
The experiences, both sim ilar and disparate, of Japanese
Americans and Mexican Americans in the context of city politics are
instructive as a basis for understanding how the police department
practices with respect to African Americans became standardized. The
dynamics established during the war between Anglos and Mexicans and
Anglos and Japanese (and Anglos and the proportionately smaller Black
community in pre-war Los Angeles) could be viewed as a dress rehearsal
for post-war municipal and police department relations with African
Americans. A certain style of rhetoric, reactions, political impassivity,
inaction, and disrespect for the conditions and stated grievances of Los
Angeles' minority population groups coupled with the use of police and
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169
media to manipulate public sentiment became embedded into the city
culture.
The watershed events of these years were guided by the hand of
Mayor Fletcher Bowron, a reform mayor whose mission was to oust all the
remaining vestiges of political corruption (both hidden and evident).
Bowron's crusade also had a subtext of a progressive moral reform
mandate. To a certain extent, he was elected to maintain the status quo:
to boot out the political interlopers and return city hall and city residents to
the appearance of Los Angeles being a "lily-white" or "chemically pure"
city. Although these terms ostensibly refer to the absence of corruption,
they could also be viewed as a metaphor for the ideal of a homogenous
population in Los Angeles. After all, if this was not the case in the actual
makeup of the city's population, it could indeed be the case as far as the
culture or "tone" of the city was concerned.
Layered on top of the Japanese American and Mexican American
wartime experience, of course, was the explosive growth in the African
American population. Aside from getting larger, the burgeoning African
American immigrant neighborhoods were also demographically different
from those areas where the "old-settlers" resided. The differences within
the Black ranks contributed to confusion on the part of longtime
establishment understandings of how "these people" should be dealt with.
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170
The rapid growth in the African American population (as well as the city
population as a whole) brought many infrastructure problems to the fore.
Racism and nearsighted municipal remedies, of course, compounded
these problems. Yet the fundamental truth was that this newly enlarged
Black population was in Los Angeles to stay.
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171
Chapter 4
The Influx and the Impact; The Third Wave of Black Migration
With reference to race, it was suggested that the... Negroes .. .
would provide an easy field for communist infiltration. The
question here was how the major group of Americans could help
the other racial groups to attain sound and patriotic citizenship.
(Minutes of meeting of Town Hall Group, 1941)
The W orld War II migration to Los Angeles of large numbers of
African Americans was not only significant in the lives of the migrants and
their families, but was also significant to the city itself. Primarily, it
revealed the ugly fissures of racial prejudice— fissures which had long
been effectively subordinated within Los Angeles civic culture. When the
swelling numbers of black migrants crested in May and June 1943, the
hidden effects of discrimination and segregation and all of its insidious
aspects could no longer be ignored.
At the onset of the 20th century, Los Angeles prided itself on its
White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) leadership and, some would
argue, heritage. The latter however, is only mythical given the actual
history of the city. Los Angeles was founded as a pueblo in 1781 on the
proclamation of the Spanish governor. A group of forty-four settlers from
Mexico, described as eleven families, two of whom were Negroes and six
of whom were at least half African, were the initial residents. Only two of
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172
the original settlers were classified as Caucasian, the rest were either
indigenous or mestizo (Spanish/Indian). As a matter of fact, the last
Mexican governor of California, Pio Pico, was himself of African descent/
Nevertheless, with the advent of statehood in 1850 and the not so soon
thereafter onset of its packaging and selling to the rest of the nation in the
name of boosterism, Los Angeles would come to be more identified with
its WASP residents than with its Spanish/Indian/African heritage.
Since the development of city boosting in the late 19th century,
middle and upper class Anglo, Protestant males ran Los Angeles in
convulsive waves of legitimacy and illegal self-interest well into the
1930s. W ith the advent o f Fletcher Bowron to the mayoralty in 1938, the
Progressives’ municipal reform efforts reached a fruitful end in his
penultimate WASP leadership. All the while, contends Robert Fogelson,
the small minority of “others” (about fifteen percent Asian American,
Mexican American, and African American) led lives constricted by the
power and prejudices of the majority— but were basically ignored.^ Those
who spearheaded the reform movement necessarily believed that their
^ J. Max Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles" (Ph.D. dissertation. University
of Southern California, 1936), 2-4; B. Gordon Wheeler, The History o f
African Americans in the Golden State (New York: Hippocrene Books,
1993), 30-35; Octavia Butler, “The Story of the Negro In Los Angeles
County,” Federal W riter's Project, Works Progress Administration, 1936,
reprint (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1970), 3.
^ Robert Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles 1850-1930
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 198.
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173
values, culture, and beliefs were the standards of citizenship by which all
should be judged. Mayor Fletcher Bowron further embedded the city's
political and social commitment to WASP privilege as he steered the city
through the wartime racial conflicts involving whites, Japanese
Americans, and Mexican Americans.
But the entrenched standards of privilege and the primacy of Los
Angeles white ruling elite as the ultimate arbiters of the social order were
most glaringly illustrated by the administrative methods used to address
the great increase of the Black population during W orld W ar II. That
growth, often referred to as an “influx,” and the consequent political
concerns regarding housing, employment, health, and tangentially-
although neither adequately nor proactively addressed— the prospects for
better race relations became concomitant elements of the good
government reform agenda, affecting even the relationship between city
hall and the police department. As the third wave o f Black migrants
began in 1942, Bowron, his deputies, city department managers, and
even some federal agencies implemented measures to control the growth
of, and curb the activism within, the Black community as they formalized a
new paradigm for governing the intersection of race, politics, and police
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174
The Black exodus to Los Angeles in the early to mid-nineteen
forties was radically different from the phases o f migration which had
preceded it. According to Lawrence De Graaf, while previous migration
shifts (Great Migration, Depression) had subsumed the Black population
gain within the overall increase in the number of Los Angeles residents,
the third wave— beginning in 1942— was six times greater than in any
previous decade. These "conspicuous migrants" came to represent one
in ten newcomers to California during the 1940s. In Los Angeles County,
Black residents were overwhelmingly concentrated within the Los Angeles
city limits.^ Overall, it was a "migration of hope." Unlike their migrant
predecessors, African Americans who migrated west in the 1940s were
drawn specifically to Los Angeles for job opportunities and better wages
rather than having been compelled to migrate in order to escape the
exigencies of life in the South.^
African Americans had not sought work in Los Angeles defense
industries in significant numbers in the early years of defense build-up.
Rather, they were inclined to believe that employment discrimination was
no less prevalent in the W est than in the South. Their assumptions were
^ By 1950, seventy-eight percent of all Black Los Angeles County
residents lived in Los Angeles proper Keith Collins, “Black Los Angeles:
The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of
California, Los Angeles, 1980), 18-19.
* Lawrence De Graaf, “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930-1950”
(Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1962), 142.
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175
well-founded. Although World W ar II jump-started the economy after
years of economic depression, from 1940-1942 the primary beneficiaries
of defense industrial job creation were unemployed white men.^ Through
the early nineteen forties, industries operating in the Los Angeles area
had demonstrated a reluctance to hire Black workers. In 1941, for
example, the president of North American Aviation company in El
Segundo declared that company policy prohibited the employment of
Negroes. Another company posted signs that employment applications
from Negroes would not be accepted. Yet another company, capitulating
to the 1941 Presidential Executive Order 8802 which called for removing
discriminatory barriers in companies with federal defense contracts, did
hire ten Black workers as janitors. It stipulated, however, that they must
be "coal black and over fifty."®
Black women fared even worse than Black men in gaining
industrial employment. Virtually locked into the employment sector as
domestics, Black women could not get the United States Employment
Service (USES) to view them any differently. One USES official publicly
^ Ibid.. 102, 106-107.
® Gerald Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact o f the
Second World War (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1985) 89;
James Fisher, “A History of the Political and Social Development of the
Black Community in California, 1850-1950” (Ph.D. dissertation. University
of California, Los Angeles, 1971), 245; De Graaf, “Negro Migration,” 117.
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176
stated that Black women were not interested in defense jobs and that they
were more suitable as domestics and co o ks/
Labor unions also played a role in discrimination against Black
workers. "One of the most vicious industrial setbacks Negro workers
have endured." the editors of the California Eagle noted in mid-1940, "is
the discriminatory labor union [by which] thousands of qualified, expert
black workers in building and engineering trades were ruthlessly excluded
from the right to practice their skills."^ Illustrative of this notion was the
custom of the American Federation of Labor's International Brotherhood
of Boilermakers to keep Black workers out of lucrative jobs in the
shipyards by not accepting them as full members of the union. Instead,
the Boilermakers created a separate "auxiliary" union for Black workers
and only 100 of 8500 shipyard workers were Black in 1 9 4 1 Union
hostility to integrated workplaces also contributed to employers'
reluctance to hire Black workers. In January 1943. white workers at the
Los Angeles Railway Company went on strike after the transit company
had agreed (through FEPC mediation) to place Black train operators on
^ E. Frederick Anderson. “The Development of Leadership and
Organization Building in the Black Community of Los Angeles From 1900
Through W orld W ar 1 1 ” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern
California. 1976). 88; De Graaf. “Negro Migration.” 120; California Eagle,
July 13. 1942.
® California Eagle, August 22. 1940.
® De Graaf. “Negro Migration.” 117-18.
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177
the lines that ran along Central Avenue and to promote other Black
employees from janitorial to mechanic positions. Following form, the
transit company responded to the striking white workers by reversing its
previous position and demoting the recently promoted Black workers back
to their original jobs.’®
Finally, employment training was another component in the
discriminatory treatment of the Black labor force in the Los Angeles area
during the war. Some aircraft and oil companies would not hire a person
without industrial training, yet at the same time, prospective Black
employees were not accepted into industrial training programs without a
letter verifying future employment. Another problem with the training
programs was accessibility. The Board of Education had employment and
training centers for women in two predominantly white suburbs of Los
Angeles; Inglewood and Glendale. It took a storm of protest, fomented by
an organization called the Negro Victory Committee, to have centers
established at two schools. Manual Arts High and Jefferson High, in
segregated areas where African Americans resided."
Alonzo Smith, "Blacks and the Los Angeles Municipal Transit System,
1941-1945," Urbanism Past and Present 6 (W inter/Spring 1981):
25-31, 28; Anderson, “The Development of Leadership,” 97.
" De Graaf, “Negro Migration,” 117-18, 120; Anderson, “The
Development o f Leadership,” 92-93.
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178
Many of these typical discriminatory barriers to employment were
eliminated well into the U. S. involvement in the war— and mostly due to
necessity as the labor shortage became increasingly acute. After
President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25,
1941, Black southerners eager to flee racial repression and attracted by
higher wages and their perceived assurance of nondiscriminatory
treatment in employment, began their exodus to Los Angeles in earnest.
It is not clear whether employers were motivated to hire black workers
due to the executive order alone. The labor shortage remained constant
for two reasons; 1 ) job creation was on an upward trend, and 2) the
available labor pool shrank as the number of local workers joining the
armed services went up. In 1942, aircraft plants lost 20,000 workers
through the draft and voluntary enlistment. W hite women and Mexican
American workers, groups previously excluded, were welcomed into the
industrial labor force— yet there was still a labor shortage. And
consequently, and coincidentally with Executive Order 8802, some of the
most impenetrable barriers to Black workers were dropped.
From that point on, the number of Black persons migrating to Los
Angeles far outstripped that of other groups seeking new work and new
lives in the city. W hile aggregate growth in the Black population had
12
Collins, “Black Los Angeles,” 20-21.
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179
increased over the years, so had the total city population, thus
maintaining the proportionate number o f Black residents at the same
levels— between two and one-half percent to four percent of all Los
Angeles residents. W ith the explosive growth in the number of Black
residents in Los Angeles beginning in 1942, this relatively small
proportion would double. By many accounts, the late spring and summer
of 1943 marked the most significant period in the growth of the Black
population of Los Angeles. An assistant to Los Angeles County
Supervisor John Anson Ford documented some figures regarding what
came to be referred to over and over again as th e influx of Negroes" into
Los Angeles. Similarly, at Bowron's behest, headcounts of arriving Black
migrants were taken at the train and bus terminals: 7,945 colored people
were reported to have arrived by train at Union Station in May and June.
Another 3,000 were counted as having arrived by bus. When the
estimated number of newcomers who arrived by car and by foot were
added, the total came to approximately 12,000— an unprecedented
increase in the number of migrants to the city in such a short period.
Arthur Miley to John Anson Ford, July 8, 1943, Ford Collection; De
Graaf, “Negro Migration,” 187; Collins, “Black Los Angeles,” 18-19;
Transcript of meeting on war housing for Negroes, August 10, 1943,
Bowron Collection; “Is the Negro Population Growing?” March 16, 1944,
Bowron Collection; Orville Caldwell, executive deputy to Mayor Bowron to
Ed V. Izac, Chairman, House Naval Affairs Committee Investigating
Congested Areas, November 10, 1943, Bowron Collection. For
references to the “influx” or other such superlative statements, see Arthur
(continued on next page)
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180
The Black population of Los Angeles grew from 63,774 In 1940 to
171,209 in 1950-a 168 percent. By 1950, Los Angeles had a Black
residential population representing 8.7 percent of the total number of
residents in the city (up from four percent in 1940).’^
W hile the jobs beckoned, the housing market did not. As with
discrimination in employment. Black Angelenos also faced a lengthy and
unyielding history of prejudice in matters of housing. In 1902, when the
first Black homeowner moved south of 7th Street to 33rd Street and
Hooper Avenue, he, along with six friends, had to take up arms against a
mob of angry white residents. In recalling this incident, one long-time
Black resident said that this particular event represented "the first open
conflict between the races."’®
Housing deed restrictions and block covenants had been prevalent
in Los Angeles since the early 1920s. Restrictions were written into real
Miley to John Anson Ford, August 10, 1943, Ford Collection; Eastside
Chamber of Commerce to John Anson Ford, April 9, 1945, Ford
Collection (note; Ford and his staff suspected that the Eastside Chamber
consisted of no more than a few disgruntled and prejudiced white men
the president and vice president of the organization); J. M. W hitley to
John Anson Ford, October 22, 1946, Ford Collection; Fletcher Bowron,
“Remarks on Eight Years in Office,” September 23, 1946, Bowron
Collection; Fletcher Bowron press statement, July 31, 1943, Bowron
Collection.
De Graaf, “Negro Migration," 221 ; Population Statistics o f Los Angeles
County, March 1944, Bowron Collection; Fisher, “The Political
Development of the Black Community,” 240; U.S. Census as cited in
Collins, “Black Los Angeles," 41.
Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” 35.
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181
estate deeds limiting ownership and occupation of residences often only
to white Christians. Block or neighborhood covenants operated a little
differently. First seen in Los Angeles in 1922, block restrictions were
developed by a group called the Anti-African Housing Association. In
reaction to the continued movement south and east of the Black enclave
of the W est Jefferson District, the association crafted compacts forbidding
the sale of any homes between Vermont Avenue (east) and Budlong
Avenue (west); and Adams (north) and Vernon Boulevards (south) "to
people other than the Caucasian race."'^ White owners could be fined if
they broke the pact, but if Negro buyers purchased and/or resided in
houses in restricted blocks, they could be evicted and even sued. These
discriminatory real estate practices resulted in the confinement of Black
Los Angeles residents into an area encompassing less than fifteen
percent of the city.^^
"Negro encroachment" increasingly alarmed white residents. By
1931, Black families had moved even further south along Central Avenue
to 55th Place. "On several occasions," writes J. McFarlane Ervin, "police
were called upon to settle controversies and neighborhood
Bessie Aveme McClenahan, The Changing Urban Neighborhood: From
Neighborhood to Nigh-Dweller: A Sociological Study (Los Angeles;
University of Southern California Semicentennial Publications, 1929),
90-91.
Miley to Ford, July 8, 1943, Ford Collection.
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182
infringements."’® In 1936, Henry and Ana Laws purchased a home on
92nd Street in the Watts area which had a deed restriction against Negro
occupancy. The Laws family did not move into the home until five years
later at which point they were arrested and jailed for violating the
restriction. A superior court judge ordered that they must vacate their
home because race restrictions were written into the deed by the
mortgage holder, the Bank of Italy. The judge ruled that residential
restrictions such as this were not in violation of the constitution. He
contended that such private agreements by white homeowners do not fall
outside of “equal protection" because Black property owners could enact
the same sort of restrictions if they desired.’® W ith the help of Charlotte
Bass, publisher of the California Eagie, the Reverend Clayton Russell of
the People's Independent Church, and also with the backing of First
African Methodist Episcopal (First A.M.E.) and Second Baptist churches,
the Laws family pursued this case to the California Supreme Court. The
Laws’ supporters appealed by letter to Los Angeles County Supervisor
John Anson Ford for his aid in this case, “This respected Negro family
was jailed for the offense of living in their own home which is located in
one of the areas in Los Angeles where non-Caucasians are forbidden to
’® Ervin, “The Participation of the Negro,” 73.
’® California Eagle, August 27, 1942.
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183
live by a private compact of individual property owners.” “ in 1946, the
California Supreme Court upheld the legality of block restrictions on the
basis that private individuals and not the state enacted these compacts. It
was not until May 1948 that the U. 8. Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v.
Kraemer (a combination of cases from the states of Missouri and
Michigan) that the practice of enforcing restrictive covenants was unlawful
as it was a denial of equal protection of the laws as determined by the
14th amendment. In the opinion delivered by Chief Justice Vinson, the
Supreme Court declared that
It cannot be doubted that among the civil rights intended
to be protected from discriminatory state action by the
Fourteenth Amendment are the rights to acquire, enjoy,
own and dispose of property. Equality in the enjoyment
of property rights was regarded by the framers of that
Amendment as an essential pre-condition to the
realization of other basic civil rights and liberties which
the Amendment was intended to guarantee.^^
^ Catholic Interracial Council of Los Angeles to John Anson Ford,
January 15, 1946, Ford Collection; Los Angeles Times, May 5, 1948,
August 22, 1982; Nash, The American West Transformed, 94; California
Eagle. September 5, 1946.
The U. S. Supreme Court had previously banned any state or municipal
ordinances which barred a person from owning or occupying property
anywhere based on race or color. Block restrictions were used to
circumvent this supreme court ruling and had been upheld in other states,
including Missouri and Michigan. Upon appeal, these cases were
overturned as the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for a
State Court to back such an agreement reasoning that while there is no
law restricting individuals from making restrictive agreements there is no
due process for enforcing them -as they are unlawful. Los Angeles
Times, May 5, 1948; Shelley V. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).
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184
Those African Americans who participated in this latest wave of
migration, then, arrived in a city which already had a bleak and restrictive
record in the area of housing. Made worse by the magnitude of the war
time population growth, the housing shortage became emblematic of the
problems with race relations in Los Angeles. In a perverse bit of
rationalization, if Japanese American residents had not been ordered out
of town by Presidential Executive Order in 1942, then the area known as
Little Tokyo would not have been available to serve as the reserve
housing resource for the new Black arrivals as it did beginning in the
summer of 1943. Although it had remained essentially deserted for about
a year, Little Tokyo, largely commercial with a lot of rooming houses and
hotels, absorbed many Black migrants who had no other housing
alternatives. Only ten percent of the structures in Little Tokyo were single
fam ily homes. As new arrivals tjegan to take up residence in the
neighborhood bounded by Aliso Street (north). Sixth Street (south), Los
Angeles Street (west) and Alameda Street (east), severe problems arose
pertaining to poor sanitation making it evident to health officials that it
would be unsuitable to permanently house concentrated numbers of
people there.^
^ Report of Dr. George Uhl, Health Officer, Department of Health, City of
Los Angeles, to Fletcher Bowron, Septemtjer 15, 1943, Bowron
Collection.
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185
The late June 1943 occupation of Little Tokyo by Black families
and single job seekers provided the first indication for city leadership of
the potential ramifications of the seemingly unabated Black immigration.
A group called the Leadership Roundtable (membership included the
prominent African American business and community leaders of the day)
convened a meeting on July 8 to discuss their concerns about "the influx
of population into the Little Tokyo area, particularly colored people, of
\Miom there are some 200 in there at the present tim e."^ Mayor Bowron,
too, was concerned about the changes underway in Little Tokyo. In
acknowledgment of the few housing alternatives available to Black
migrants, he expressed dissatisfaction with the inadvertently forced
settlement of Little Tokyo. In response to the growing overcrowded
housing conditions, Bowron announced that he would hold a formal
meeting on housing problems the following month.
Reports that have reached me indicate a very serious,
even appalling, situation with respect to crowded local
housing affecting certain racial groups, particularly
Negroes.
The right of colored men and women to work in
defense plants on the basis of equality with white
workmen .... [has] brought an influx of Negroes from
the southern states to Southern California and the
immigration is still continuing in such numbers that the
problem of housing colored families in this area has
been a most difficult one, particularly so since there are
practically no vacancies for the families of white
workmen.
^ Miley to Ford, July 8, 1943, Ford Collection.
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186
With no proper living quarters available, many colored
families have crowded into the section formerly occupied
by Japanese, known as Little Tokio [sic], simply because
there is no other place for them to go. Here they are
crowded together and living under insanitary conditions—
conditions that are deplorable in a modem American
city.^^
These same concerns had been raised at least six months earlier
by the NAACP, the National Negro Congress, the Negro Victory
Committee, and the leading Black newspapers, California Eagle and The
Sentinel. These organizations held a mass meeting at F A. M. E. in
December 1942 to discuss “outrageous conditions," race restrictions, and
employment discrim ination.^
Dr. George Uhl, the health officer for the city of Los Angeles, was
particularly interested in addressing the ramifications for public health due
to Black residential settlement in Little Tokyo. In preparation for a report
to Mayor Bowron, the health department conducted a survey (funded by
the John and Dora Haynes Foundation) in the late summer of 1943 of
newly arrived Little Tokyo residents. The survey revealed instances
where up to thirty to forty people were sharing one toilet and one bath.
It determined that ventilation was poor in most of the existing housing
stock, that many people were living in commercial buildings not intended
Fletcher Bowron statement regarding crowded housing conditions, July
31, 1943, Bowron Collection.
^ California Eagle, December 11, 1942.
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187
for residential usage, and that 55.7 percent of persons were living in
overcrowded conditions. Inspectors noted defective and inadequate
plumbing, rat and vermin infestation, lack of adequate garbage facilities,
and "many other violations of state and city sanitation and housing laws
and ordinances." Perhaps the most discouraging revelation of the survey
was that "Most all [Little Tokyo residents] have the financial capacity to
afford to move, but are up against a severe housing shortage which is
quite general in Los Angeles, but is particularly severe in areas available
to these minority groups.'*^ This statement was supported by comments
by the residents themselves. One respondent said, “I was bom in the
country and I did better than this. Things were cleaner. I can't get used
to eating in these dirty restaurants.” Another said, “I wish I could move
out of here and find a new place to live. I've been trying since I came, but
I can't.Along with these testimonies, Uhl’s report warned that the
spread of communicable and infectious diseases like tuberculosis,
smallpox, and syphilis could result from the overcrowding and residential
usage of spaces not intended fo r that purpose.^
Uhl report, Bowron Collection.
Ibid.
Uhl’s report is reminiscent of a sim ilar concern regarding an epidemic of
the pneumonic plague in October and November 1924 with thirty-two
confirmed deaths. The outbreak had been isolated to the "Mexican
district." The city's efforts at eradicating the epidemic included extensive
demolition, disinfection, and rubbish removal— all in efforts to rid the city of
plague-carrying rodents; Sioux Harvey, "California State Board of Health
(continued on next page)
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188
Despite the harsh realities o f the unhealthy and unjustifiable living
conditions they faced, the Black residents of Little Tokyo did their best to
make it home. W ithin months, signs had sprung up throughout the area
reading, "This is Bronzeville. W atch us Grow." A Bronzeville Chamber of
Commerce was established. And a social service agency called Pilgrim
House opened with its declared purpose being to address "the serious
problems that were developing rapidly in the Little Tokyo district following
the inrush of the great Negro immigration from the South into the area
formerly occupied by the Japanese." By 1947, the number of Black
residents in the area had climbed to between 10,000 and 15,000, far
surpassing the original number of Japanese Americans who had resided
there prior to the w ar.^
The settlement of Little Tokyo, however, was just a release valve
which could only relieve a fraction of the overall pressure on the city's
infrastructure— while paradoxically creating additional infrastructure
problems as well. Health officer Uhl noted ironically that while urging that
health, sanitation, and zoning laws be strictly observed in efforts to
Versus the Pneumonic Plague: How the City of Los Angeles Responded
to the Pneumonic Plague Epidemic, October 1924-June 1925,”
unpublished research paper (University of Southern California, 1993.)
^ Miley to Ford, July 8, 1943; "Chamber Set Up by Negro Group in Little
Tokyo," Eastside Journal, November 3, 1943; notes dated September 1,
1943 and October 18, 1947 regarding Pilgrim House; Ford to State Board
of Equalization, September 14, 1944, all in Ford Collection.
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189
protect the residents' endangered health, aggressive statute enforcement
would actually turn those same people out of their homes (however
substandard) and onto the street.
The city leadership's concern about the wartime increase in the
migration of African American individuals and families to Los Angeles
seemed to be centered on the infrastructure and service delivery
ramifications of this growth. But there were evident concerns about the
impact on the social order as well. Mayor Bowron and other city leaders
became increasingly distressed as the Black population continued to grow
as the decade progressed. This deepening distaste for the burgeoning
Black population did not bode well for the ties that had been established
between white establishment leaders and those Black community leaders
known to them. Bowron had long had the favorable support of the Los
Angeles Black elite. In June 1934, George Beavers (one of the founders
of Golden State Mutual Life insurance Company) as president of the
California Co-operative Improvement Association, entreated Fletcher
Bowron, when he was still a superior court judge, to help equalize
depression-era work opportunities for colored people in Los Angeles.*
The following month, the Colored Non-Partisan League of Los Angeles
City and County endorsed Bowron's candidacy for a new judgeship noting
30
George Beavers to Judge Fletcher Bowron, June 23, 1934, Bowron
Collection.
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190
that “The citizenry of this city and county is indeed fortunate to have one
of your ability and training to live in the midst of passion and tumult and to
show an unselfish devotion to the ideals and principles of the law "^^
Bowron responded in kind, “I have known you for a long time, Mr.
Sanders and it was indeed pleasing to receive your nice letter.”^
In January 1939, just months after becoming mayor, Bowron
received a request from the local chapter of the Association fo r the Study
of Negro Life and History (an organization founded by historian Carter G
Woodson in 1916) to declare the week of February 5, 1939 as Negro
history week in Los Angeles. W hile Bowron skillfully evaded making such
a public declaration, he did promptly reply to the members of the
association thanking them for their “communication” and enclosing a
statement which asserted, “The Negro has helped and is helping to build
our country.”^ Additionally, Black supporters depicted Bowron as a friend
of the Negro and supported him in his first reelection campaign in 1941.
One piece of campaign literature was entitled, “How Mayor Bowron
Helped the Negro People.” Another touted that.
W. H. Sanders to Judge Fletcher Bowron, July 24, 1934, Bowron
Collection.
^ Fletcher Bowron to W. H. Sanders, September 9, 1934, Bowron
Collection.
^ Negro History Study Club of Los Angeles to Mayor Fletcher Bowron,
January 23, 1939; Fletcher Bowron to Negro History Study Club of Los
Angeles, January 30, 1939, Bowron Collection.
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191
More Negroes have been integrated In City Civil Service.
Negroes have been hired as Policemen. Negroes have
been hired as Firemen. Neoroes have been integrated
into the housing projects. Negroes have been
integrated in Civil Service W hite Collar and
Professional jobs. Negro home owners have
increased.^
Bowron's support in the Black community was strong and
seemingly one of mutual respect as the 1940s began— this despite the
obstacles of discrimination and segregation. Bowron was a keynote
speaker at a dinner banquet in honor of Charlotte Bass sponsored by the
Civil Liberties Division of Hiawatha Temple (an Elks organization) in Los
Angeles. Over 400 people were in attendance at the March 27, 1941
dinner when Bowron made his remarks about Bass' dedication to the
community. He said, “The most difficult and worthwhile structure to build
in any community is a fine reputation. Your presence [the audience] here
tonight attests to the fact that Mrs. Bass has built w e ll."^
The high-profile, activist editor and publisher of the Eagle,
Charlotte Bass had been running the paper since she married the
publisher Joseph Bass in 1912. The Eagle chronicled the growth and
"goings on" of the black community from the vantage point of its offices
directly in the heart of the Central Avenue business district. W hile
^ Committee to Reelect Bowron, campaign flyers, 1941, Bowron
Collection.
“ California Eagle, April 4, 1941.
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192
mainstream individuals considered the paper to be a radical/protest
weekly because of its no-holds barred editorials and articles which
directly addressed race relations and the subordinate status of Black
residents of Los Angeles, their perception of the Eagle could also have
been based on Bass' own individual activism and outspokenness, such as
her membership in the Forum, the Victory Committee, and the NAACP. In
1916, Bass was serving on the local election board when she noticed that
a tab on the right-hand comer of municipal ballots bore the following
instruction; "Tear off if the voter is a Negro " Bass rallied Black election
board members to do no such thing and those discriminatory tabs were
not used on Los Angeles ballots th e re a fte r* In 1931, prominently
displayed on the Eagle’s front page was an article reporting that the
Wickersham Commission (The President's Commission on Law
Enforcement and Observance) found that urban police forces often
engaged in illegal practices-especially the brutal "third degree " of
criminal suspects and sometimes of witnesses.^ And in 1941 not only did
Bass cover the rampage of white students at Fremont High School in
south Los Angeles as they protested the enrollment of black students by
burning effigies and waving placards announcing their displeasure, but
she went to the campus herself to talk to the students and engage them in
* Los Angeles Times, February 22,1993.
Califbmia Eagle, October 3,1931. See above Chapter 2.
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193
constructive dialogue about the situation.^ Clearly, Charlotta Bass and
the newspaper she published were at the forefront of social activism in
Los Angeles' Black community.
Bowron’s first reelection was trumpeted in the headlines of the
California Eagle the month after he spoke at Bass’ testimonial dinner. In
an article about the election results, Charlotta Bass acknowledged that
Bowron could t>e criticized for obviously courting Black voters and for his
disturbing support of a Ku Klux Klan rally the previous year.”
Nevertheless, Bass continued, Bowron was supported on the Eastside
because, "the people of the Eastside are sick and tired of being singled
out as the vice kings’ of the entire city, who are wearied with exposes and
scandals, who are above everything through tolerating the incipient
growth of vice in a community which must mold the social character of
their children."^ On July 16, 1942, Mayor Bowron officially welcomed
delegates to Los Angeles at the opening convocation of the 33rd annual
NAACP convention. In October, he issued a statement, written expressly
for the California Eagle but delivered to all the local press, in support of
the Geyser-Pepper anti-poll tax bill.^^ In November 1942, Charlotta Bass
” Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles, 1850-1950
(Los Angeles: California Afro-American Museum Foundation, 1988), 39;
Califomia Eagle, February 20, March 6, 1941 ; see below fh. 70.
” See below fn. 67.
^ California Eagle, May 8, 1941.
Ibid., July 16, October 8, November 12, 1942.
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194
wrote another supportive editorial about Mayor Bowron stating, "The
Honorable Fletcher Bowron has given the city an administration of which
we may be justifiably proud
In time, this friendly, cooperative relationship would change, mostly
on the part of Bowron and other members of the white leadership
community who would come together to lament the changes in the
makeup of the Black community. This would put the "old settler" leaders
in the untenable position of being caught between the proverbial rock and
hard place as alarm ist responses to the growing Black residential
population escalated, particularly with regard to the acute housing
shortage. By war's end, the complexity o f the "Negro Problem" would
forever change the status that the prewar Black community had held in
Los Angeles. Even before the third wave of Black migration had begun in
earnest, some members of elite white social circles began to express their
concern about the changing nature of the small, appeasable black
residential population as questions of "suitability” began to arise. At a
meeting of the Town Hall Group, Dr. W illsie Martin, pastor of the W ilshire
Methodist Church declared that "Among the problems facing the county,
[is] the Negro problem.'" He continued, "these Negroes are highly race
conscious, in contrast to such leaders of their race as Booker T.
Ibid., November 15, 1942.
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195
Washington who had felt that Negroes should establish their place in the
world by forgetting their color and winning respect on their own merits as
men."^
In April 1943, Bowron reported to the U. S. Senate Subcommittee
of Military Affairs (the Downey Committee) that an "estimated 25,000 to
30,000 Negroes have moved into the Los Angeles area during the past
two years, most of them within the last ten months. The migration from
out of state," he stated, "is continuing at the rate of from 350 to 500
families a week."** At summer's end, Bowron estimated the number of
Negro residents to be 100,000, suggesting it might reach 150,000 by the
end of the war.*®
^ Minutes of Town Hall Group, July 1, 1941, Ford Collection.
** Fletcher Bowron prepared statement for Chairman Downey and
members of U. S. Senate Subcommittee of M ilitary Affairs Committee,
April 27, 1943; Uhl Report; O rville Caldwell, executive deputy to Mayor
Bowron, prepared statement to Chairman Ed V. Izac and members of the
House Subcommittee of Naval Affairs Committee Investigating Congested
Areas, November 10, 1943, Bowron Collection.
Bowron to Surgeon General Dr. Thomas Parran, October 13,1943,
Bowron Collection. Bowron may have based his numbers on figures
provided to him by Floyd Covington, president of the Los Angeles Urban
League who had been called on to report the Negro migration figures at a
meeting in the mayor's office on August 10, 1943. Covington stated;
'Three years [after the 1940 Census], as near as estimates can be made,
and with the aid o f studies made with the assistance of the Haynes
Foundation, we find that the number [of Black Los Angeles residents] has
greatly increased. The last figure was more than 87,000 and some
estimates show 91,000, and it is continuing to increase. By the end of the
year it may reach 150,000 in the city itself," W ar housing meeting, Bowron
Collection.
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To resolve the housing shortage, it seems as if an immediate,
short-term solution would have been for Bowron to take the lead in calling
for the eradication of housing restrictions which forced an already
overcrowded Black community into tighter and tighter quarters. Floyd
Covington, president of the Los Angeles Urban League put the
overcrowding in perspective when he related that 91,000 people were
currently residing in the same area that had housed only 40,000 persons
in 1930.^ Any opening up of the restricted housing stock to Negroes
would have allowed time for Los Angeles housing and health departments
to develop plans to accommodate the migrants as the inflow tapered off to
between 3,000 and 3,500 per month through the remainder of 1943 and
into the next year. Nevertheless, Bowron's approach to resolving the
housing shortage was simple. He attempted to absolve local government
of responsibility while calling upon federal agencies for help. In addition,
he raised the specter of potential race rioting and thus placed
responsibility for averting such rioting on Black residents themselves.
Bowron contended that federal agencies should shoulder
responsibility (especially financial) for the Black influx in three particular
areas. The National Housing Association (NHA) and the Federal Housing
Association (FHA) should continue to build federally supported public war
^ W ar housing meeting, Bowron Collection.
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197
housing and open it to Negro occupancy. Second, he was concerned that
the health issues arising from overcrowding should be addressed by the
U.S. Surgeon General. And third, Bowron suggested that the W ar
Manpower Commission (WMC) should review its recruitment strategies in
the South.
In testimony before the Downey Committee, Bowron acknowledged
that "private industry . . . has not been interested in providing housing for
colored fam ilies." Moreover, he argued, because the migration of
Negroes was caused by the demand for war workers, then, "it is believed
that this is a Federal and not a local problem." He continued, "Most
[public housing] developments have already run over the quotas for
Negro families based on the racial pattern surrounding the developments
.... Something must be done for these Negro families." That something,
according to Bowron was fo r the committee to approve the construction of
new housing for Black residents at federal expense/^ Between 1940 and
1945, only 2,840 Black households acquired housing in Los Angeles
Housing Authority projects. Another 5,000 Black migrants moved into
former commercial establishments in Little Tokyo. The NHA built 51,012
units throughout Los Angeles County between 1940 and 1945 and
approximately 1,100 of these were open for Negro and other non-
Statement to Downey Committee, Bowron Collection.
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198
Caucasian occupancy/^ On the sorry state of public housing available to
Black home-seekers, the Los Angeles Sentinel reminded its readers that
"race restriction covenants [are] placed on the land [on which public
housing sits] with the consent of the Federal Housing Administration."
According to the Sentinel, “less than 1000 war housing units were actually
open to use and occupancy by Negroes."^
Although Bowron had the foresight to assume that Washington
would indeed suggest that he call on the private sector to do its part to
help alleviate the housing shortage, he did not engage individual property
owners in discussions regarding this situation. The local Communist
Party addressed Bowron's silence on housing segregation by issuing a
statement entitled, "Los Angeles Needs More Housing for W ar Workers,
Without Discrimination." The statement, in part, proposed that:
The Mayor and City Council shall take steps to combat
and curb practices which limit full utilization of facilities
by war workers in need of housing, or which tend to
create segregated and slum areas, or which unduly tax
city transportation and other facilities due to failure of
industrial communities in the environs failing to make
adequate provision for housing of their war workers.^
^ George Gleason, "Housing for Negroes in Los Angeles County," July 9,
1945, Ford Collection.
Los Angeles Sentinel, February 1, 1945.
“ "Los Angeles Needs More Housing for W ar Workers, W ithout
Discrimination," Los Angeles County Committee of the Communist Party,
August 10, 1943, Bowron Collection.
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199
The Party also called on elected officials to "oppose the adoption of
'restrictive covenants' by groups of property owners directed to the
exclusion of renters or purchasers of property because of race, color or
creed. Although Bowron had not suggested such proactive measures
himself, he would most certainly have been reluctant to entertain such
notions now that a group such as the Communist Party had made such an
appeal. The idea of easing racial residential restrictions appeared to be
unfathomable to Bowron himself, made more so by the conviction with
which groups on the radical left supported the idea. In a September 1946
letter to the editor of Reason magazine Bowron expressed his aversion to
the efforts of the left leaning group. Mobilization for Democracy, to
dismantle housing restrictions:
[Los Angeles] is a proving ground and we have a mixture
of people here that represents, as nearly as in any other
urban area, a cross section of America. During the war
our colored population increased from approximately
62,000 to, as nearly as can be estimated, approximately
250,000. Most of these Negroes came from Louisiana,
Arkansas, Eastern Texas, Mississippi and other states
where they have been held down for generations. Here
they have been not only treated as equals but have been
embraced by so-called leaders of a radical element who,
under the pretext of elimination of racial prejudice, are
glorifying these Negroes and turning their heads,
attempting to break down deed restrictions or restrictive
covenants so that Negroes may live in all residential
sections of the city, all of which is bad enough, but, in
addition, they are frightening Negroes with the Ku Klux
Klan bogey and making communists of them .... I
Ibid.
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200
believe there is much material here In Los Angeles for an
article that would convey timely warning to the American
people of what is going on in our country in the name of
democracy.^
Bowron handed responsibility for taking care of the social costs of
the "great increase of our colored population [in] Los Angeles" to the
United States Surgeon General. Citing statistics that sixty-six percent of
current black residents had lived in the city for less than one year, and
alarmed by the recent spread of venereal disease, Bowron, in a 1943
letter to Surgeon General Thomas Parran, contended "that an emergency
situation exists as a direct result of wartime conditions, for which the City
of Los Angeles should not be held primarily responsible."^ With that he
requested federal assistance to cope with the health problems (recorded
and substantiated by the Los Angeles Health Department) arising from
the population increase which Los Angeles had recently undergone.
At the Mayor's August 10,1943 “Meeting on W ar Housing for
Negroes" were representatives from the Los Angeles Housing Authority
and Health Departments, representatives from the Federal Housing
Authority, National Housing Authority, the War Manpower Commission,
and local representatives of labor and social service agencies. Among
“ Fletcher Bowron to De W itt Wallace, Reason, September 13, 1946,
Bowron Collection.
“ Fletcher Bowron to Thomas Parran, October 13, 1943, Bowron
Collection.
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201
the topics discussed was what role the W ar Manpower Commission
should play in helping Los Angeles resolve the housing shortage.
Bowron suggested that the Commission "analyze the situation . . . [to] see
whether those people can be encouraged or discouraged” from migrating
to Los Angeles. "Until we actually have more facilities,” he concluded, ”
we should discourage the immigration." Dr. Uhl of the Health Department
concurred:
We feel that so far as the health of the people in this
area— in the city of Los Angeles, the county and also the
southern part of the state— is concerned, there just is no
room for additional persons unless some facilities are
provided to take care of them and we feel that the further
immigration of people into this area should be
discouraged.**
These statements were a direct appeal to the WMC Commissioner
McCandless at the meeting, but he was not swayed by the remonstrations
of Bowron and Uhl. "Los Angeles was classed as a critical labor shortage
area," he replied. "Labor must come from areas where there is still an
available supply. That area happened to be the South Central part of the
United States. I have no reason for believing that there will be any
specific change in that migration." Furthermore, McCandless indicated
that the WMC's position was that most o f the Negro migration to Los
Angeles was voluntary and initiated through word of mouth, not through
** W ar housing meeting, Bowron Collection.
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202
employer recruitment. Due to this, he concluded, "There is relatively little
the W ar Manpower Commission can do to stop it."^
The W ar Manpower Commission would not and could not accept
responsibility for halting the labor-seeking migration of Black southerners
to Los Angeles. Yet the idea of somehow suspending this migration
stayed on the mind o f Bowron and his staff. On November 10, 1943,
Orville Caldwell, executive deputy to Mayor Bowron, testified in Los
Angeles before the House Naval Affairs Subcommittee Investigating
Congested Areas. "W ar production for the benefit of the entire nation has
meant to us a great local burden," Caldwell said in his opening statement.
The remarks that followed echoed earlier expressions of the desire to halt
the migration of African Americans to Los Angeles. In this instance, the
oft-stated private comments became public and subsequently inflamed
many city residents. Caldwell initially tempered his comments with the
caveat that the forthcoming remarks should be considered "in an
unbiased and sincere manner and from a non-racial aspect." He
described the growth of the Black population since 1940, outlined the
manpower shortage and supply, explained the stress on infrastructure
and services like education, transportation, and recreation facilities, and
delineated the particularities of the hardscrabble lives of Black residents
“ Ibid.
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203
in the Little Tokyo area. Finally, Caldwell pleaded with the committee; "If
in-migration is not stopped until such time as these people can be
properly absorbed into the community, dire results w ill ensue."®®
Mayor Bowron immediately felt the impact of his deputy's well
publicized statement (which was not dissimilar from his own previous
statements). The Los Angeles Sentinel reported on the hearings and
Caldwell's sensational comments in its weekly edition.®^ A group called
the Citizen's Emergency Committee wrote a letter to Bowron expressing
its concern about Caldwell's remarks. Members of the committee
included Lou Rosser of the Communist Party, Reverend J. Raymond
Henderson of 2nd Baptist Church, Harold Prince of the YWCA on East
28th Street, Norman Houston of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance
Company, Benjamin Bowie of the American Legion Post on South Central
Avenue, and John Hargrove of the Dining Car Cooks and Waiters Union.
Bowron responded to the committee with the assurance that Caldwell
“had no intention to differentiate Ijetween colored and white immigrants. " ® ®
Bowron, who had repeatedly demonstrated a myopic insensitivity in the
complex matters of race relations, essentially chastised the committee for
® ® Orville Caldwell statement to House Naval Affairs Committee,
November 10,1943, Bowron Collection.
^ Los Angeles Sentinel, November 18, 1943.
® ® Orville Caldwell to Fletcher Bowron, November 29, 1943; Bowron to
each of the twenty-one members of the Citizens Emergency Committee,
November 30, 1943, Bowron Collection.
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204
overreacting: "If we are to have an Inter-racial problem in Los Angeles,"
he wrote, "it will be because of misunderstanding due to over-emphasis
on the problem."
I feel we should have less emphasis on minority groups
and more emphasis on Americanism, the meaning and
purpose of Democracy, the carrying into practical effect
of the principles of the Bill of Rights. There should be
less fanning the flames. There should be more
tolerance. There should be less division of our
citizenship into groups. “
But it wasn’t “the colored” who created divisiveness throughout the
enactment of housing restrictions. Nor did they practice employment
discrimination. Who ordered the racially biased internment of Japanese
Americans? And who "fanned the flames" of ethnic prejudice in the
figurative pogrom that was the Sleepy Lagoon Case? Nevertheless,
irrespective of larger ramifications of their action, on December 3, 1943,
members of the House Naval Affairs Subcommittee recommended that
the War Manpower Commission limit the number of Black laborers
recruited to Los Angeles.®®
This recommendation did not reduce Black in-migration nor the
vehement community responses to the sizable increase in the Black
population in ensuing years. Los Angeles County Supervisor John Anson
Ford received a number of letters from constituents demanding that some
Bowron to Citizens Emergency Committee, Bowron Collection.
® ° Collins, “Black Los Angeles,” 26.
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205
effort be made to stop the Black population influx and dispersal
throughout Los Angeles. Typical comments included;
Let's keep them out of the Valley.
Why not keep them segregated in the part of the city
around W est Adams and Jefferson?
The alarming way the Negro population out here has
increased in recent years constitutes a major blight on
this part of the country. . . . Everything possible should
be done to keep any more Negroes from coming west.
[We] proposed to discourage this indiscriminate travel to
our area by contacting the leaders of the various
southern states through magazines, booklets,
newspapers, church journals and personal contacts,
emphasizing the qualifications necessary to immediate
assimilation.®’
In clear contrast to Bowron's inability to recognize the harsh reality
of white racial prejudice. Ford did not let such sentiments go by
unheeded. W hen one of his constituents, who was also a neighbor,
requested that Ford sign a petition to exclude non-Caucasians from their
neighborhood, he wrote the following in response:
Admitting that this race situation is a complex problem, I
cannot believe that condemning all people as being
unworthy to be our neighbors because they are not
Caucasians, is the way to solve the problem. It takes me
right back to Hitler and his terrible, insane crusade to
make the Aryan race the master race. It seems many
who seek to exclude non-Caucasians, secretly would like
to do the same to all Jews as well.
® ’ Eastside Chamber of Commerce to John Anson Ford, April 9, 1945;
Mrs. Marquete Herrick to Ford, August 14, 1946; J. M. W hitley to Ford,
October 22, 1946, Ford Collection.
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206
There is one additional factor in my own situation. As
a public official I am equally a servant of all citizens
without discrimination as to race, color or creed.
Accordingly, I do not feel that a proposal such as yours
is one in which I could join.
It is always true, I guess, that it is easier to apply our
principles to some remote, far-away situation than at
home. But we are in a war for principles that are not
abstract and they have to be applicable at home if we
are really going to win this war and win the peace.“
Fletcher Bowron was clearly a product of his times, but Ford gives
evidence that it was not impossible for a white male in an elective office in
the 1940s to display true leadership in the concepts of racial fairness and
equity without the blinders of white supremacy.
Bowron and others believed that the large influx of Negroes held
the potential fo r race rioting in Los Angeles. In August 1943, Supervisor
Ford wrote a letter to Califomia Attorney General Robert Kenny, asking if
he knew about or had been present at a recent "unpublicized conference"
held by local law enforcement agencies where strategies to quell potential
racial disturbances had apparently been discussed. Ford's sources told
him "that they feel Los Angeles is 'building up' to a bad race riot
situation." Yet again, in contrast to Fletcher Bowron, Ford’s understanding
of the nuanced complexity of racialized politics was also apparent in this
inquiry. He continued, “I do not know whether you were present at such a
gathering or not, but I certainly hope you were for your counsel would not
“ John Anson Ford to Noel Edwards, May 10, 1944, Ford Collection.
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207
only be wise and discerning but it would help to ameliorate the heedless
undertone of race prejudice and intolerance which so often is manifest in
gatherings of this kind.” “ Although Supervisor Ford's concern about the
potential for race rioting was strong enough to contact the state attorney
general, it was tempered with the knowledge that exaggerated hyperbole
might circumvent any meaningful discussion on the subject.
At Bowron's August 10 war housing meeting, the topic of race
rioting was the first item to be discussed. It is interesting to note that
although the Zoot Suit Riot had occurred in Los Angeles just a few
months earlier, it was not consciously used as a basis for fueling the race
rioting scare that was currently being raised. Instead, Bowron utilized
"the very disgraceful incidents in Detroit" to arouse the attention of those
present at the meeting. "W e are determined that what happened in
Detroit will not happen in Los Angeles. We propose to do everything, to
do what we can not only to prevent a race riot but also the cause for a
race riot."^ To that end, Bowron introduced his already enacted plan to
“ John Anson Ford to California Attorney General, Robert Kenny, August
1943, Ford Collection.
^ War housing meeting, Bowron Collection. In April and May 1943,
whites rioted in Detroit when the Federal Housing Authority established
that the newly built Sojourner Truth Homes public housing project would
be integrated. On June 20, 1943, whites again rioted when the first Black
family moved into the housing project. President Roosevelt had to
intercede after the Michigan governor hesitated to declare martial law.
Thirty hours of rioting left twenty-five African Americans and nine whites
dead before 6,000 soldiers quelled the disturbances.
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prevent race rioting in Los Angeles: he had selected a committee whose
members are "entirely of the colored race" to meet together with him and
selected representatives of police, housing, and transportation agencies
to work out the problems coincident with the increase in the local Negro
population.^ Bowron's advisory committee had as its members some of
the most prominent members of Los Angeles' Black community: Floyd
Covington, the aforementioned president of the Los Angeles Urban
League, Norman Houston, one of the founders of Golden State Mutual
Life Insurance Company, Thomas Griffith, president of the Los Angeles
branch o f the NAACP, Municipal Court Judge Edward Jefferson (the first
black judge in the state, appointed by Governor Culbert Olson in October
1941 ), and Jim Doherty, the state vice president of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO). Covington, Griffith, and Houston were
present at the August 10th meeting. Speaking for the group, Norman
Houston told the assembled participants that the advisory committee had
already made progress in meetings with the LARD, the Navy Shore Patrol,
and the M ilitary Police. These law enforcement agencies had offered
their assurances "that if an incident happens it will merely be an incident
and not a racial incident," Houston reported. In particular, he said, "we
W ar housing meeting, Bowron Collection; Bowron statement on
crowded housing conditions, Bowron Collection.
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209
believe that the Los Angeles Police Department w ill treat [any incident]
as such without regard to race."®®
Bowron's preoccupation with race rioting was perhaps an
acknowledgment of the preexisting friction between Black and white Los
Angeles residents. But undoubtedly the clam or to prevent race rioting
before it even happened was itself what contributed to the increasingly
heightened tensions. Prior to the third wave of migration and the
pervasive uncertainty of what that Negro influx meant, racial conflicts had
not been accorded the same sensational anticipation. In 1940, for
example, Bowron had defended the Ku Klux Klan's right to parade
through downtown, while downplaying the reactions of those who
remonstrated against it.® ^ In April 1940, a small band of Kluxers marched
through downtown Los Angeles without a parade permit. This incident
raised a number of concerns. The California Eagle ran a banner headline
on April 4 entitled, “Hooded Klan Marches Through Downtown Los
Angeles,” and the article noted that the police department, “fail[ed] to halt
the parade of Kluxers.”® ® The Eagle suggested the LAPD implicitly
condoned the march by not prohibiting it. The mayor, too, was implied to
be in agreement with the Klan for not stepping in to prevent the march
® ® W ar housing meeting, Bowron Collection.
^ Bowron statement regarding the Ku Klux Klan march through downtown
Los Angeles, May 6, 1940, Bowron Collection.
® ® Califomia Eagle, April 4, 1940.
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210
even though he was out of town on the day it had occurred. The silence
on the part of law enforcement and the Bowron administration, rather than
the small march itself was what so incensed some residents of Los
Angeles. When Bowron did finally speak out about the Klan march, he
first spoke of civil liberties and freedom and then the law. Diplomatically,
Bowron responded to his critics by saying;
I believe that I have proved, or at least tried to prove, by
word and deed that I yield to no man in the desire to
guard and preserve the civil liberties and constitutional
rights of all our people, regardless of race, or color, or
creed. These liberties and these rights are the
very essence of democracy and should be revered as
sacred things in our America. They belong to all
American citizens regardless of whether we may or may
not agree with the objects and purposes of those
Individuals or groups of individuals who seek to exercise
the freedom of speech, an action guaranteed by the Bill
of Rights.®
Although Bowron closed his prepared statement by saying, “We must
endeavor to prevent by all proper means the sowing of the seeds of racial
prejudice, class hatred, minority oppression, religious bigotry and mob
violence in Los Angeles,” some people still believed that an outright
denunciation of the Ku Klux Klan by the mayor was necessary. An
organization called the Labor’s Non-Partisan League of Southern
Califomia asked the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to
® Bowron statement. May 6,1940, Bowron Collection.
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211
“demand that Mayor Fletcher Bowron issue a public statement castigating
the Ku Klux Klan.“^
Perhaps the escalation of later war-time racial tensions as well as
the equivocating and contradictory nature of Bowron's responses began
v/ith the KKK incident; it seems to be evidence of the hardening of the
paradigm. Prior to the U S. entrance into the war, prior to the influx of the
third wave, and despite his continued support by old settlers, Bowron's
reluctance to denounce admittedly lawful Ku Klux Klan activity symbolizes
the discord in race relations in Los Angeles and informs some of the later
municipal reactions to the influx. Increasingly, when Bowron was called
upon to respond to discomfiting racially charged incidents, the dissonance
between his rhetoric of social equality and legal fairness and the reality of
social inequity and injustice became more and more evident.
In contrast to his strong statement about preventing racial violence
after the Klan march in 1940, Bowron remained publicly silent the
following February about the rampage of white students at Fremont High
School following the enrollment of six Black students there. Bowron's
silence in light of placard-waving students announcing "W e want no
niggers at this school " and the burning of Black students in effigy was
Labor's Non Partisan League of Los Angeles County resolution
presented to Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, May 22, 1940,
Ford Collection.
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212
another disturbing symbol of the administration’s inability to confront
racial tension in Los Angeles/^ In each of these instances, Bowron had
not publicly introduced any notion that these behaviors were wrong much
less that the potential for large scale race rioting was at hand. Nor did
Bowron speak out in October 1943 when the Los Angeles City Council
conceded to the pressures of an organization of white homeowners in
Watts to change the "non-restricted" status of a 465-unit city housing
project.^ Bowron still did not relate white reactionary activities with the
possibility of racial conflict.
But Bowron did forcefully respond to charges o f racism and
prejudice levied by "leftist" groups. In 1946, before the grand jury,
Bowron testified in response to claims about a Klan “reign of terror" by
making counter claims of communist-inspired tactics on the part of the
complainants. Speaking of the group known as the Mobilization for
Democracy, Bowron stated.
Every incident that has been reported [by MFD] has
been carefully investigated by the Los Angeles Police
Department and no evidence has been secured
sufficient to justify an arrest. Therefore all persons who
make positive statements such as were made over the
air [on radio station KLAC] last Monday evening should
Black Angelenos, 39 There was no record found in the Bowron
collection regarding any official response, speech, or statement about this
incident. See below.
^ De Graaf, “Negro M igration,” 215; Califomia Eagle, October 28, 1943.
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213
be placed under oath and examined as to the nature of
their inform ation.^
He further suggested, using information provided by LAPD reports, that
“this is a communist-inspired group, that its main objective is to stir up the
local population, particularly Negroes and Jews, and cause . . . distrust of
established g o v e rn m e n t.T h e s e examples illustrate Mayor Fletcher
Bowron’s standards for acceptable racial behavior, gn'evances and
protests. He would side with the belief that “communist-inspired” agitation
was at the root of most group grievances. He would accept and therefore
implicitly allow the police department to collect intelligence on groups
deemed to be subversive. He was more concerned about mitigating the
impact of protest rather than addressing the issues which were the basis
for protest.^
^ Fletcher Bowron testimony before Los Angeles County grand jury,
September 13,1946, Bowron Collection.
Ibid.
^ Over the years, Bowron had made many references to protesters, critics
of the systemic racism, labor organizers, and others in such dismissive
terms as “banner wavers,” “agitators,” “disturbers,” as well as communists.
Regarding criticisms of the LAPD handling of the Zoot Suit Riot in June
1943, Bowron said in a statement on June 9, 1943, “whoever are the
disturbers are going to be sternly dealt with, regardless of the protests of
the sentimentalists and those who seemingly want to throw so much
protection around the disturbing element in the community that the good
citizens cannot receive proper protection.” In a September 1945 V-J Day
address at the Philharmonic Auditorium, Bowron said, “Recently some
sinister outside influences have come into our state, trying to destroy our
unity, to stir up race bigotry and religious hatreds A few deluded
Californians have been beguiled into giving aid and comfort to these
enemies of American ideals.” In his September 23, 1946 remarks on
(continued on next page)
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214
On the other hand, Bowron anxiously engaged the police in efforts
to resolve racial problems arising from the incessant Negro migration. He
wrote a letter to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox describing the racial
problems in Los Angeles as a basis for his request to have LAPD officers
serving in the military be relieved of duty. They were needed at home, he
argued, where they would be much more useful to help circumvent racial
disturbances on the homefront. Naming one officer in particular, Bowron
wrote the following:
I have been informed by the Chief of Police that it is
extremely important and necessary that he have the
services of a police sergeant who is now on military
leave to the Navy, W arrants Boatswain, Guy Rudolph.
For years Sergeant Rudolph as been extremely
valuable because of his intimate knowledge of racial
problems in the metropolitan area of Los Angeles,
particularly Orientals and Negroes. His ability as an
eight years in office, Bowron said the following: “Here we have the
banner wavers and the placard carriers and those who get together
supposedly in the name of democracy.” In a speech given at an
“Americanization Rally” at Jefferson High School in November 1946,
Bowron said, “There has been too much going on, not only here but in
every section of the country, in accordance with a definite communistic
pattern . . . generally the objective is to bring about as much confusion
and uncertainty as possible, . . . to demonstrate against law and order, to
inject into the minds of people prejudice, suspicion, bitterness.” In March
1950 remarks at the annual meeting of Fire and Police Protective
Leagues, Bowron declared, “. . . I want to distinguish between criticism [of
the police department] coming from good citizens and those of the other
kind.” To the graduating class at the police academy in August 1950,
Bowron appealed, “I understand that each and every one of you is an ex-
serviceman. . . . We must maintain law and order, we must demonstrate
that the democratic form of government is far superior to that based on
false ideologies of another nation— I refer of course to communism.” All in
Bowron Collection. See below Chapter 6.
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215
investigator and his sources of information are such that
he is badly needed to help us properly handle our racial
situation.
This city, with its many important war industries can ill
afford to have production disrupted by any disturbances
and we are striving by every means to prevent such
disturbances. . . . You may be assured that any
information we obtain regarding the racial situation in
Los Angeles w ill be made available to the Navy at all
times. The Navy therefore will not lose the benefit of the
service of Sergeant Rudolph if you permit him to return
to police work.
The idea that the situation involving Negro migration was
construed as "alarming" and necessitated police attention while incidents
throughout the city involving white racial antagonism did not even gam er
a public statement is worrisome. The incipient reactions of Los Angeles
city leaders to the growth of the Black population appeared to be rooted in
issues of administrative practicality. As the flow of Black migrants into
Los Angeles ostensibly remained high and constant, the alarmist
characterizations of the influx suggested another, deeper concern. Many
public officials utilized such superlatives as "alarming," "dire," and
"unendurable." in reference to the impact of migration on the city's
infrastructure. Or was the sentiment in fact an intrinsic reaction to the
mere presence of greater numbers of Negroes? In a manner not
comparable to the attention paid to any other group of newcomers during
Fletcher Bowron to Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, September 24,
1943, Bowron Collection.
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216
the Bowron administration, meeting after meeting and memo after memo
not only chronicled the number of Negroes arriving in Los Angeles but
also detailed exactly where they came from and where they settled in Los
Angeles. "How many of war Negroes came from rural deep south— what
state especially?" was the question written on a note card belonging to
County Supervisor John Anson Ford. That the vast majority came from
the South, especially Texas and Louisiana, was of particular note. W hile
the public spin was that the migrants were unsophisticated Negroes of
rural, agricultural southern origins, most came from larger southern cities
like Dallas, Little Rock, and New O rleans.^
The "types" of Negroes involved in this third wave of migration
were literally changing the character of Los Angeles' Black community
and causing heightened concern in political circles. Immediately prior to
his warning to the Naval Affairs Subcommittee of "dire results" should
Negro migration be allowed to continue, Orville Caldwell, executive
^ Undated, unattributed note card written sometime in 1945, Ford
Collection; Uhl report, September 15, 1943; “The Problem of Violence;
Observations on Race Conflict in Los Angeles” (Los Angeles: The
American Council on Race Relations, 1946), 7-8; Bowron, “Remarks on
Eight Years in Office,” September 23, 1946; Orville Caldwell to House
Naval Affairs Committee Investigating Congested Areas, November 10,
1943; Bowron statement, March 6, 1945; Los Angeles County Grand Jury,
Report of the Special Committee on Racial Problems, 1943; Bowron
statement, July 31, 1943; George Gleason, “Housing for Negroes in LA
County, “ July 9, 1945; all in Bowron Collection.
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217
assistant to Mayor Bowron, said, according to the Califomia Eagle, "'these
southern Negroes are a serious problem. They don't get along with the
Negroes who were bom and reared here, nor with the white residents
Perhaps establishment leaders were also reacting in response to the
sentiments of their constituents, friends, neighbors. Many Los Angeles
residents, it seemed, were apprehensive about the emergence of a large
Black residential population in the city and their subsequent active efforts
to dismantle the barriers caused by segregation, prejudice, and
discrim ination.^
It was not enough for Bowron and others to call on their
preordained Black leaders when it came time to work through solutions to
the impact of the growth of the Black community in the city. Many Black
residents, old settlers and newcomers alike, felt that not enough was
being done, not enough voices were being heard, and the desperate
conditions remained so. As the war ended and defense plants slowed
Although this statement was not found in the text of the prepared
statement to House Naval Affairs Subcommittee in the Bowron collection,
it has been cited in several sources; Collins, “Black Los Angeles,” 26, De
Graaf, “Negro Migration,” 198, Anderson, “Development of Leadership,”
44, Los Angeles Sentinel, November 18, 1943, Los Angeles Times,
December 3,1943, and Califomia Eagle, December 11, 1943.
Constituent letters to John Anson Ford, see above fn. 60; W. F.
Hoffman to John Anson Ford, June 23, 1948, regarding their feelings
about Negro migration, lifting housing restrictions; and letter from Ford to
Noel Edwards regarding a petition for restrictive covenants. May 10,
1944, Ford Collection.
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218
down production, black laborers were generally the first to lose their jobs.
In 1949, when the Negro population stood somewhere near 171,000,
there was approximately twenty-five percent unemployment among
them.“ The war housing situation had overwhelmingly routed black
fam ilies into public housing in a swath of residential districts stretching
from downtown to Watts. By war's end, according to Keith Collins, the
"maturation" of the Black Los Angeles ghetto was complete.®’
Going into the war. Black activists, spearheaded by Forum Club
and People's Independent Church leadership, addressed and attempted
to correct the wrongs of employment discrimination and housing
segregation, and also encouraged the continued patriotism of Black
Americans. Patriotic rallies during the war were organized by the Negro
Victory Committee, which had been created in 1941 to fight employment
discrimination and to secure jobs for Negroes in defense industries. The
committee, an outgrowth of the activist outreach practices of the People’s
Independent Church, represented a unified front across preexisting
organizations and wasted no time in seeking fairness and equity for Black
workers. E. Frederick Anderson described the Negro Victory Committee
as engaging in "direct aggressive social action on behalf of the Black
Emergency jobs conference meeting minutes. Reverend Clayton D.
Russell, People's Independent Church of Christ, August 16, 1949, Ford
Collection.
Collins, "Black Los Angeles,” 64.
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219
Community.” The committee, which was ardently supported by Charlotta
Bass and the Eagle newspaper and Reverend Clayton Russell, had a
“results oriented agenda that took up where the Forum Club’s
deliberative, process-oriented debates about issues left off.”^ In April
1942, Russell delivered an address entitled, “America, This is Our Stand.”
Another rally, held on September 17, 1942, was sponsored by the Council
on African Affairs and featured a headline concert by Paul Robeson— the
Black entertainer who unequivocally spoke out against the segregation
and mistreatment of Negro soldiers and the evils of Jim Crow laws. The
agenda of that “monster mass meeting” were three points of action: 1 )
open a second front; 2) a call for freedom of colonized peoples in India
and Africa; and 3) full equality for Negroes in the United States.”
Attacking employment discrimination was a constant battle for
African American activists in Los Angeles as well. The Citizens' Defense
Committee criticized the Los Angeles Unified School District’s continued
refusal to place Black teachers and principals in schools with majority
Black student enrollments.” In August 1942, the Victory Committee
” Anderson, “The Development of Leadership,” 83.
” Open letter to “Friends” from Charlotta Bass, S P. Johnson, Clarence
Muse, Rev. Clayton Russell, Rev. J. Raymond Henderson and the
Committee of 100, September 1942, Bowron Collection.
” Price Cobbs, MD, President, Citizen’s Defense Committee to Vierling
Kersey, Superintendent, LAUSD Board of Education, July 29,1942, Ford
Collection.
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220
stormed the board of education to demand job training centers in Black
neighborhoods; it also challenged the discriminatory practices of the Los
Angeles Railway Company through the Fair Employment Practices
Committee. The California Eagle exposed discriminatory practices among
some of the local labor unions, and in November 1943, a group of
protesters picketed a city council meeting with demands that the city take
action against anti-Negro property restrictions.®®
Although Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 had ostensibly opened
up defense work opportunities, and although the Fair Employment
Practices Committee was established to ensure the presidential directive
was observed, many Black migrants to Los Angeles were still
disenchanted with their reordered lives. They may have escaped the
more suffocating effects of southem-style Jim Crow racial stratification,
but Los Angeles had its own version of societal separatism. Black
workers were still primarily relegated to janitorial and other menial
positions, more exposed to hazardous conditions on the job,
disproportionately assigned to night shifts which became really
problematic when reliance on public transportation was a factor, and
rarely given authority over white employees— regardless of skills and
“ Anderson, “Development of Leadership,” 92-93, 97-98; Smith. “Blacks
and the Los Angeles Municipal Transit System,” 28; California Eagle,
November 4, 1943.
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221
experience. When the war ended and defense industry production
decreased, the labor market contraction affected Black workers most
severely. All the while, Black migration continued— stimulated mostly
based on personal contacts and the continued perception that the quality
of life in Los Angeles was indeed better than it was elsewhere.”
As part of his thesis research, Keith Collins interviewed a number
of Watts residents in the late 1970s, many of whom had arrived in Los
Angeles during the war years. W ith regard to expectation versus reality
of life in Los Angeles, one respondent said, “things hadn’t changed for
me, whether before the war, during the war or after the war. I was busted,
broke and Black.” Another recalled, “W e came to Watts in 1942 by car
from Texas. The adjustment was hard on us . .. our whole lives changed
when we moved to the city; after a while, we didn't seem to be as close
somehow. We didn't seem to have time to talk.” As for employment, the
two summary experiences of working in a discriminatory environment
were first, the exasperated comment by one man, “It was a job getting a
job, it was a job keeping a job, it was a job getting to the job; and I felt like
the White man didn't want me to work so he could label me lazy.” The
Anderson, “Development of Leadership,” 84,88; Collins, “Black Los
Angeles,” 22-25; Fisher, “Political and Social Development," 250-51; De
Graaf, “Negro Migration," 194-95.
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222
second take on the toll of the every day work experience on a race-weary
Black man was;
My fam ily was more important than a political fight or a
fight to keep my job. I went in every day [to the shipyard]
and just did my job. I didn't need another fight because I
already had enough. Also, if I had fought back, I would
not have been given a good recommendation when I
tried to get another job. The man had me going and
coming. There was shit to deal with on the job and shit
to deal with on the streets while looking for a job; so I
tried just to keep my head above the stink.^
Although their work lives were bleak, social outlets did abound.
Central Avenue was the site of a bustling night life, enjoyed by white and
Black residents alike. The "Avenue" was filled with jazz clubs,
speakeasies, and illicit activities of choice. Reminisced jazz drummer
Roy Porter of the late-war and postwar heyday of the Central Avenue
music scene:
There were all sorts of joints that had good music
.... On Central Avenue at W ashington Boulevard the
Clark Hotel had a small bar that featured jazz music. Up
at 22nd there was the Lincoln Theater. Across the street
was the Jungle Room, down the way on 33rd was Jack's
Basket Room. At Santa Barbara was the Elks Auditorium.
Then, a little further south at 42nd was the Down Beat
Club and directly across the street was the Last Word. A
few doors down was the Club Alabam and the Dunbar
Hotel, where all of the heavies o f the black entertainment
world stayed when they came through town.®®
Collins. “Black Los Angeles,” 51-53, 63.
® ® Roy Porter with David Keller, There and Back (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
University Press, 1991), 60.
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223
By day, Central Avenue was the hub of Black commercial and
professional enterprise with offices of the Black press, banks, insurance
companies, markets, real estate brokers, doctors, dentists, and lawyers
headquartered there. Black families enjoyed picnics on the segregated
section of beach at Santa Monica known as “the Inkwell,” and weekend
excursions to Lake Elsinore and Val Verde were other common
recreational pursuits.^ The society pages of the Eagle were filled weekly
with the activities o f Los Angeles’ Black elite; debutante balis,
engagement and marriage announcements, charity functions, concerts,
musicals, and sporting events. Advertisements for Black-owned
businesses and churches are valuable indicators of a thriving and
commercially successful Black community despite the barriers imposed by
residential segregation, discriminatory employment practices, and political
exclusion.
Sometime during the early forties, the focus of Black activism
turned to include an attempt to address not just the applied results of
racism, but racism itself. Because the most recent Black arrivals were
Val Verde was a resort area in the northeastern-most comer of Los
Angeles County developed by Black real estate developer, Harry
Waterman. Waterman had been prevented from building homes on land
he purchased in Palos Verdes and thus looked elsewhere to develop
weekend escapes for the Black middle class; Pamela Douglas, “Progress
Presses in on Black Village,” Herald Examiner, August 22, 1978.
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224
struggling just to keep and maintain jobs, the fight to address the insidious
racism continued to rest with the old settlers. The racial combustion which
had erupted in the early 1940s, evidenced by Japanese removal, the Zoot
Suit Riot, and indiscriminate treatment of Mexican American youth, was
even more palpable with the advent of the third wave of Black migration.
Predictions of race riots by the city fathers, though provocatively uttered,
were not entirely unfounded.
In Los Angeles, reactionary approaches to the rapid growth of the
Black population contributed to the development of a modified
relationship between the city and its black residents. By the close of the
decade, more than one-half of the Black residents in Los Angeles had
been there less than ten years. For the duration of their experiences in
the city, they had been regarded as problematic by the city's
establishment leaders. They had been forced into overcrowded and
substandard housing and told not to cause any problems. The police had
been prepped to regard them as potential trouble. They had been
recruited for jobs and then sum.marily dismissed in order to make way for
returning servicemen. They were aware that even the suggestion had
been made to prevent them from ever coming to Los Angeles in the first
place. They were played against the long-time established residents,
especially those that had achieved some measure of middle-class
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225
success. And they were essentially told that the sole basis of their
complaints was that they had been unduly influenced by communist-
inspired agitators— not that they had any truly tangible grievances. The
establishment of the tripartite relationship was now complete.
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226
Part Three: Confluence
Chapter 5
Mayor Bowron and His Chiefs of Police
Los Angeles has suffered long enough fnxn cop hating.’ Our
police force should have popular support in its war against the
underworld, against organized crime, and against the large number
who make law violating a business.
(Fletcher Bowron, 1950)
Before moving to a discussion of the convergence o f the three
elements of the paradigm, we need to understand the relationship
between the mayor and the police department, particularly with the police
chiefs and the police commission. The interesting aspect of this thesis is
that while all elements are necessarily interrelated, the pairing of each of
the individual components— politics and police, politics and race, race and
police-have evolved separately albeit while concurrently developing into
one complex, tripartite paradigm for social control in Los Angeles.
Simultaneously with the reforms in the LAPD and in city hall, Ixjt in
stark contrast to the hyper-vigilant attention paid to the growth of the Black
population in Los Angeles during the late war years, Mayor Fletcher
Bowron’s solidification of his tight grip over the leadership of the police
department went largely unnoticed, or at least unremarked. His hand in the
Implementation of the 1937 reforms of the police department was evident.
From his relationship with the chiefs who served under him, to his
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227
appointments and dictates to the board of police commissioners, to his
ever-vigilant guard against the incipient creep of corruption, Bowron
played a prominent role in police department affairs throughout his
mayoral administration.
First, the mayor established a strong relationship between himself
and his hand-picked police chief, Clemence 8. (C. B.) Horrall who served
from 1941 to 1949. It was a supportive and mutually beneficial working
relationship.^ Second, the mayor publicly presented strong and
unequivocal support of the police department.^ This was in stark contrast
to previous years where reform mayors, by virtue of their reform intent,
were at odds with the police department, and when, prior to Bowron’s
' For example; Fletcher Bowron to Los Angeles city council, “.. .
repeated baseless criticism of the Chief of Police, one of the most honest,
honorable and efficient law enforcement officers of any city in the entire
country,” March 6, 1946; Bowron statement to the press, “I will back up
and support Chief Horrall and the Los Angeles Police Department to the
limit,” March 11, 1949, all in Bowron Collection.
^ For example: Fletcher Bowron to attendees at meeting about police
brutality, “We have many fine officers,” “It is not the police department, it
is individual policemen. I have great faith in this police department,”
October 8, 1948; Bowron address to 59th annual conference of
International Association of Chiefs of Police, “During my service as the
executive officer of this city we have . . . the kind of law enforcement that I
am, and I feel most other citizens are, generally proud of,” “We in Los
Angeles-always modest in our claims— feel that we have a good police
department, deserving of the respect and confidence and support of all
good citizens, and one rightfully earning the enmity of bad citizens,”
September 22, 1952, Bowron Collection.
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228
administration, vocalized support of the department was enough to arouse
suspicion about one's own extralegal proclivities. The third dynamic
solidifying the partnership between the mayor and the police chief was
that despite the earned autonomy which the LAPD achieved through a
series of amendments to the city charter in 1925, 1934, 1936, and 1937,
Mayor Bowron still managed to play a role in the administration and policy
decisions of the police department. In addition to his close working
relationship with the chief, Bowron's appointees to the police commission
ensured that his influence on the LAPD would be complete. He also
attempted to exert some influence over the city council in police
department matters as well.^ Fourth, with the help of the pro-democracy
propaganda and the rhetoric of anti-communism resounding during and
after World W ar II, the brand of "anti-patriotic" was placed upon anyone
who agitated against, was in opposition to, or who condemned the Los
Angeles power structure, including the police department. Bowron made
several public statements labeling such protesters as "rabble-rousers,"
^ For example: Fletcher Bowron to Los Angeles city council regarding the
establishment of a new, non-civil service administrative position in the
police department, July 18, 1945; Bowron to city council regarding his
opposition to a payroll deduction for police union dues, “A labor union of
peace officers is repugnant to the very principles of democracy," March 6,
1946, Bowron to board of police commissioners recommending that they
instruct Chief Horrall to extend invitation to a police consultant to come to
Los Angeles to conduct a traffic survey for the department, November 14,
1946, state of city address calling for 500 additional police officers,
January 2, 1947, all in Bowron Collection.
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229
"disturbers," and "communist-influenced agitators." His rhetoric
introduced a standard that held little regard for those who complained
about questionable LAPD practices.'* That increasingly those raising
such concerns were Black merely compounded the issue. Bowron’s
perspective that critics of the police department could be dismissed as
agitators not worthy of a hearing is also in stark contrast to earlier years
when criticism o f the department was common, frequent, and in a sense,
even considered to be virtuous.
* Fletcher Bowron to attendees at meeting on police brutality, “Any matter
of brutality doesn't follow a system or a policy," “I think that what we
should do is not concern ourselves with general condemnation of the
police department,” “We have had too much general complaining against
the police department," October 8, 1948; Bowron to graduating class at
the police academy, “We must maintain law and order, we must
demonstrate that the democratic form of government is far superior to that
based on false ideologies of another nation. I refer of course to
communism,” August 31, 1960; Bowron remarks at annual meeting of Fire
and Police Protective Leagues, “. .. it has tjeen somewhat surprising, but
true, how many intelligent citizens condemn the police department,
criticize the administration, speak ill of the city as a whole, for what a
single man in uniform may have done... . And again, I want to distinguish
between criticism coming from good citizens and those of the other kind,"
August 31, 1950; Bowron address to 59th Annual Conference of
International Association of Chiefs of Police, “. . . strict law enforcement is
not always popular, and any misdeed or lack of judgment of an individual
police officer immediately results in charges against an entire police
department that anything critical or derogatory of the police makes good
news, and that, unfortunately, most people are prone to believe, or at
least want to believe the worst about the police," September 22. 1952, all
in Bowron Collection.
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230
Shortly after assuming office, Bowron fired over one hundred city
commissioners including the entire membership of the police, civil service,
and pension commissions and replaced them with “honest and
unimpeachable men.” When Chief James Davis resigned amidst scandal
on November 11, 1938, Bowron’s newly installed police commission
destroyed all the existing promotional lists and declared that new exams
must be taken. The department was clearly in flux. In early March,
proclaiming him self a “lone w o lf in city hall, Bowron assured city
residents of his support for the acting chief of police, David Davidson.^ At
the same time, the five police commissioners tackled their task to clean
up the police department by requesting the retirement of twenty-three
high ranking police officers. Among the retirees were Deputy Chief Roy
Steckel (a former chief of police from 1929 to 1933), Chief of Detectives
Joe Taylor, Assistant Chief George Allen, eleven captains and nine
lieutenants.® In the following six months, another forty-five high-ranking
police officers resigned as well.^ The initial resignations had been drawn
from a list of forty-two officers. Interestingly, future chief W illiam Parker, a
lieutenant at that time, was included on the list of proposed retirees.
According to Henry Bodkin, who was one of Bowron’s newly appointed
® Los Angeles Times, March 1, 2, 1939.
® Ibid.. March 4, 1939.
^ LAPD Book, 82.
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231
police commissioners, "The view of other commissioners [of Parker] was
that he must be crooked because he was so close to Oavis.”^
The first new chief of police to serve in Fletcher Bowron's first
mayoral administration was Arthur Hohmann who was installed on June
24, 1939. He was promoted from lieutenant to chief-an astonishing jump
in rank-on the strength of an outstanding performance on the civil service
exam. Commissioner Bodkin recalled that Bowron had favored the
selection of another candidate. Captain Ross McDonald, who was the
third choice of the top three candidates selected by the police
commission.^ Nevertheless, Bowron issued a statement in support of the
police commission’s selection of Hohmann (whom Bowron admittedly had
no real knowledge of until Hohmann scored ninety-eight percent on the
civil service promotional exam). The statement said, in part;
In the selection of Lieutenant Hohmann, I believe Los
Angeles will have a real chief of police. He is a member
of no clique within the department. He is honest and
conscientious, and has never even been suspected of
being identified with gambling interests, or under the
influence of any individual, group or syndicate interested
in securing special privilege or protection in any form.^°
® Henry G. Bodkin, oral recollection, December 11,1968, transcript, Bowron
Collection. Bodkin was a police commissioner from 1938 to 1941. Fletcher
Bowron, "A Mayor Looks at his Job," April 1,1946, Bowron Collection.
® Bodkin transcript, Bowron Collection; see below Chapter 6.
Fletcher Bowron statement. June 23,1939, Bowon Collection; Los
Angeles Times June 23-25,1939.
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232
Bowron’s support of Hohmann is indicative of an unswerving
commitment to eliminate corruption. Perhaps, though, this determination
was a failing on Bowron's part. It seems that the only way he could view
the department was in relationship to its inextricable past association with
the group of self-interested players engaged in unlawful activities. It is
interesting to note that Bowron supported Hohmann wholly on his
independence, but made no comment about the incumbent chiefs
leadership, management, or vision. W ith his glowing respect for
Hohmann's independence, Bowron also promised not to interfere with
police administration and policy. Chief Hohmann “will be urged to
discharge his duties as Chief of Police as nearly as possible entirely free
from political influences. No appointments will be dictated and no
transfers urged," Bowron said.”
Bowron's pronouncement is puzzling. One month before
Hohmann's installation, Bowron had made a public statement indicating
his frustration with the 1936 city charter amendment which had given the
police department “the exclusive right to wash its own dirty linen.” He
lamented “the limited powers of the Mayor under the city charter.”’^
Although Bowron's influence on internal discipline was circumscribed, his
lamentation about the limited powers of the mayor and declaration of
” Fletcher B ow w i statement, June 23,1939, Bowon Collection.
Fletcher Bowron statement, May 12, 1939, Bowron Collection.
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233
influence-free leadership were supported neither by his ardent advocacy
of the department, nor by his directives to police chiefs, nor by efforts to
dictate policy to his appointed police commissioners. Bowron was very
much a hands-on mayor whose influence on the police department
administration and personnel and policy decisions was considerable.
Nevertheless, despite his expressed concerns about his inability to
intercede in the internal discipline of the LAPD, Bowron would use this
same justification in later years to decline to respond to claims of
malpractice and brutality.
Bowron’s endorsement of Chief Hohmann at his installation in 1939
became subdued over the next two years as Bowron, whose purported
mission as mayor was to clean up and elevate the stature of the police
department, was uncharacteristically silent about the LAPD. Then, in
June 1941, Arthur Hohmann resigned and Bowron again became a
publicly staunch supporter of the department. Hohmann's resignation
was viewed publicly, in part, as a reaction to the recent deaths of his
mother and son— in two separate incidents on the same day— and in part to
his unwillingness to deploy LAPD officers to disperse a union-led strike
against North American Aviation.’^ Away from the public eye, however.
Los Angeles Times, June 5-7, 1941 ; LAPD Book, 83; Fletcher Bowron
notes, January 1967, Bowron Collection; see Joe Domanick To Protect
and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century o f War in the City o f Dreams (New
York: Pocket Books, 1994), 64-68, re: LAPD, unions, and labor strikes.
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234
Hohmann's resignation and subsequent demotion to deputy chief was
really a brokered deal between Hohmann, Mayor Bowron, and the police
com m ission/” * Both the mayor and the police commissioners were
concerned about the low morale in the police department— the force had
never actually accepted Hohmann’s promotion from lieutenant to chief.
Recalling that time, Bowron said, “I fought and argued with the members
of the Police Commission that, once Hohmann had received a permanent
appointment [after probationary period was up] as Chief o f Police that the
men would get in line.”’® Yet upon the realization that Hohmann had not
gained the following of the rank and file, Bowron asked for, and received,
Hohmann's resignation.’®
W ith the immediate appointment of C. B. Horrall as Hohmann's
successor, Bowron not only found an ally in reform, but— despite charter
reform which freed the police department from external influence— a true
partner in establishing and carrying out the law enforcement needs of the
city. It was an appointment that proved to be "a very wise decision and
the big turning point in the development of the LAPD," said Bowron in
later years. And true to form, Bowron lauded Horrall's service as chief for
cleaning up "every vestige of corruption within the department. " ’^
’* Bodkin transcript, Bowron Collection.
’® Fletcher Bowron notes, January 1967, Bowron Collection.
’® Ibid.
Ibid.
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235
Bowron's relationship with Chief Horrall was purely symbiotic. In
stark contrast to the 1992 revelation that Mayor Tom Bradley and Chief
Daryl Gates had not spoken to each other during the year after the
Rodney King Beating (this was revealed in the wake of the April/May riot
that year and the clamor for Chief Gates to resign), it is evident that in the
eight years that C B. Horrall was the chief of police in Los Angeles, not
only did he and the mayor maintain constant communication, but the
mayor often directed the chief to perform certain tasks.’® For instance,
during U. S. Department of State investigations into the diplomatic
ramifications of the 1943 Zoot Suit Riot, Bowron suggested that Chief
Horrall write a more convincing letter than the one he had already drafted
(and submitted for Bowron to review) to the State Department regarding
the LAPD's treatment of Mexican American youth in Los Angeles.
I do not want to be too critical, but I believe that your
report relative to the recent Zoot Suit disturbance could
be made much stronger and more effective.. . . I would
like to say, in effect, to the State Department that I have
requested a full and complete report from the Police
Department, that such a report has been carefully and
deliberately prepared, that it shows that no Mexican
citizen was arrested by the Police Department, that, so
far as the Police Department can determine, no Mexican
citizen was set upon by sailors, soldiers or civilians . ..
that instructions had been given to all police officers that
racial discrimination would not be tolerated and that any
Understanding the Riots: Los Angeles Before and A fter the Rodney
King Case, Staff of the Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles; Los Angeles
Times, 1992), 37; Daryl Gates with Diane K. Shah, Chief: My Life in the
LAPD (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 432.
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236
action of the police officer in any arrests should be
without reference to race, color or creed.’®
In correspondence, public statements, and internal documents.
Mayor Bowron made many references to detailed discussions he held
with or about the police chief on subjects ranging from juvenile
delinquency, the importance of a law enforcement orientation toward that
of crime prevention rather than arrest statistics, the manpower shortage
within the department, the Zoot Suit Riot, Japanese internment, the
burgeoning Negro problem, and the continuing allegations of vice and
graft. W hile this may simply be the mark of good, strong municipal
stewardship, it may also strengthen the argument that Bowron was not as
constrained in police-city hall relations as he implied. Bowron, the mayor,
directed the tenured police chief in ways both large and small, directly as
well as indirectly through the city council and police commission. And the
politically astute, politically independent police chief complied. When the
mayor repeatedly touted the honest and efficient administration of the
LAPD, in which the mayor took "great personal pride," what ambitious,
twenty-year veteran of the department would not gladly yield to the
Fletcher Bowron to Chief C. B. Horrall, July 19,1943; and subsequent
letter to Philip Bonsai, State Department in \Miich he refers to the Horrall
letter, August 3, 1943, Bowron Collection.
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237
popular mayor?“ It Is not the type o f influence Bowron exerted on the
chief which is at issue; after all it does not appear to be corrupt. Rather
the issue is any mayoral influence on a department that is ostensibly free
of external political control. By 1992, only six chiefs of police had served
since Horrall’s tenure and only an additional two since then. The two who
have come to symbolize the department since 1950, W illiam Parker
(1950-1965) and Daryl Gates (1978-1992) did not warmly receive or invite
any sort of political influence, nor did these chiefs offer the appearance of
Fletcher Bowron to subcommittee on m ilitary affairs regarding “direct
and indirect effects of the war in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area," April
27, 1943; Bowron statement regarding Zoot Suit Riot, June 9, 1943;
Bowron to District Attorney Fred Houser, July 29, 1943; Bowron to Chief
Horrall regarding plans for postwar police department buildup, October
11, 1943; Bowron statement at dedication of Boys Club, December 17,
1944; Bowron to Rear Admiral W. R. Freidell, U. S. Navy regarding Naval
Shore Patrol charges of “protection rackets" in the LAPD, January 24,
1945; Bowron to W illiam McReynolds, administrative assistant to the
President, regarding the return of the interned Japanese Americans,
January 26, 1945; Bowron to Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior
regarding the return of the interned Japanese Americans, February 9,
1945; Bowron to city council urging that they not recognize a police union,
March 6, 1946; Bowron to board of police commissioners recommending
that they instruct Chief Horrall to extend an invitation to a police
consultant to come conduct a traffic survey of the department, November
14, 1946, state of city address calling for 500 additional police officers,
January 2, 1947; Bowron to Judge Charles Fricke regarding pending trial
regarding graft within the LAPD, December 1, 1948; Bowron press
statement in support of Chief Horrall, March 11, 1949; Bowron press
statement regarding allegations of corruption in the police department,
June 21, 1949; Bowron statement regarding Horrall’s retirement, June 28,
1949, Bowron statement regarding replacement of Chief Horrall, June 30,
1949, all in Bowron Collection; Robert Wilcox, Law Enforcement (Los
Angeles: The Haynes Foundation, 1952), Bowron Collection.
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238
being anything but influence-free, in any capacity. And because of the
police department’s charter-sanctioned autonomy, mayors since Bowron
(Norris Poulson, Sam Yorty, Tom Bradley), have followed the example he
created of vociferous public support, but did not enjoy the same behind
the scenes influence as well. The current mayor of Los Angeles, Richard
Riordan (since 1993) may be more Bowron-like in this regard.^’
C. B. Horrall had been chief of the police department less than six
months when Bowron successfully deflected the specter of another
In the wake of the Independent Report on the Los Angeles Police
Department (1991) and the April-May 1992 Los Angeles Riot, Los
Angeles voters approved a major police reform measure in June 1992.
By a two to one margin, the measure, known as Charter Amendment F,
limited the police chief to two five-year terms. Applicants for the position
would be screened by the city personnel department which would submit
names of six qualified candidates to the police commission. The police
commission in turn would submit a ranked list of three names to the
mayor, who then has the authority to appoint the chief, with the approval
of the city council. Appointment to a second five-year term would be
determined by the police commission. Other reforms in Measure F
included a maximum of two five-year terms for all members of the police
commission, and the creation of an executive director fo r the board.
According to the Los Angeles Times of June 5, 1992, an argument
against the measure was that “it would make the Police Department and
its chief the puppets of City Hall politicians: transform the chief from a
professional manager to a political appointee who could be effectively
silenced or removed for political reasons; [and] demoralize officers and
erode the quality of law enforcement.” And thus, just as charter mandated
police reforms, or changed circumstances, preceded Fletcher Bowron’s
mayoral administration and impacted the nature of the relationship
between city hall and the police department, so did the same occur for
Richard Riordon’s mayoralty which he assumed in 1993, and for Chief
W illie Williams, an outsider former police commissioner of the
Philadelphia Police Department, who was appointed under the 1992
measure but failed to receive an appointment to a second term in 1997.
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239
damaging grand Jury Investigation into the department. A grand Jury
reputedly antagonistic to reform brought charges against the LAPD chief
for allowing the use of illegal wiretapping equipment.^ Bowron himself
had hired an investigator named W allace Jamie to sort through ongoing
claims about the continued involvement of LAPD officers in protected
gambling and prostitution syndicates in Los Angeles. Jamie was paid
from the secret service' fund of the LAPD, a fund appropriated in the
department's annual budget and administered by the chief of police.
Bowron was also suspicious of a staff member who he assumed was a
“spy” planted by his antagonists. Not long after he first came into office,
Bowron said, "some of those most interested in [the 1938] election merely
wanted to help put the old gang out in order to get in on the gravy."^ One
method employed to uncover information was through the use of
electronic equipment. In defense against the implications of his own as
well as Horrall's participation in the illicit wiretapping, Bowron rhetorically
asked, "Just why has there been so much concern about the precious
legal rights of those who have been investigated? It is because," he
answered, "there are those who are interested in protecting their precious
hides ''^'* The charges against Horrall were ultimately dismissed when the
“ LAPD Book, 84.
“ Fletcher Bowron, "A Mayor Looks at his Job," Bowon Collection.
Fletcher Bowron statement February 21,1942, Bowon Collection.
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240
trial judge ruled that the penal code permitted dictaphone use by police
officers.^®
Bowron also supported Horrall's leadership when it came to
addressing the LAPD’s manpower needs at the height of the war. Police
officers were being conscripted into service at a time when the city
evidently needed a full strength police department. Bowron wrote letters
to the Secretary of the Navy, to the Director of the Ninth Civilian Defense
Region in San Francisco, and to California Governor Culbert Olson, all in
efforts to support the Los Angeles police chief and to prevent the attrition
that was weakening the LAPD.“ From the viewpoint of the LAPD itself,
the lack of qualified applicants to fill the war-induced shortage of sworn
personnel could be directly correlated to the increase in reported cases of
police brutality because “it became necessary for the department to hire
individuals with less than acceptable credentials” during that time.^^ This
shortage and hurried attempts to rectify it would come to haunt the police
department in ways that it would never fully acknowledge.
Neither Bowron’s good government crusade nor his unwavering
support of the LAPD could stop the continued allegations that the police
LAPD Book, 84.
^ Fletcher Bowon to James Sheppard, Commanding Officer 9th Civilian
Defense Region, April 22, 1942; Bowron to Skip Knox, Secretary of the Navy,
September 24,1943; Bowron to Governor Culbert Olson, 1944, all in Bowron
Collection; see above Chapter 3.
LAPD Book, 85.
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241
department was still allowing illegal vice activities to go unpunished in Los
Angeles. But in contrast to his stance when he was a superior court judge
and even when he first ran for office, as mayor Bowron adopted a position
which rejected a lot of criticism of the police department as being based
on ulterior motives. The crusader for good and corruption-free
government was now clearly on the defensive. The finality of his 180
degree turn was evident when he fired off an antagonistic letter in July
1943 to District Attorney Fred Houser regarding the prosecutor’s inquiries
into allegations of police protection of prostitution and gambling in Los
Angeles. In the letter, Bowron suggested that Houser was “not sincerely
interested in correcting vice conditions here, or elsewhere within the
county.” Instead, “[you] are launching an attack that has long been
expected on your part against the LAPD, which, under the present Chief
of Police, has been waging a vigorous and unrelenting war against vice
and corruption." Chief Horrall, the mayor claimed, was the target of a
character assassination attempt by a member of “the so-called syndicate.”
Bowron would later describe the syndicate as a group of “commercialized
gambling enterprises” that exercised influence in local affairs through
appointed and elected city officials, who in turn especially influenced the
police department with a “system of protection” in order to allow these
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242
illegal activities to continue.^® In further defending the police department
against the ever present dangers of the syndicate, he blamed the
lingering remnants of corruption on the loss of police officers to the
military, the influx of population, and the “hundreds of millions of dollars of
payrolls of defense workers” as additional elements which contributed to
the difficulty of entirely cleaning up the city.” W ith the credibility of his
good government crusade challenged, Bowron circled the wagons and
questioned the motivations of the critics rather than respond to the validity
of the critics’ charges.
As Bowron’s relationship with police chief C. B. Horrall solidified, his
insistence that the police commission be a strong supporter of the police
department intensified as well. In all of the years of efforts to resolve the
problems in the police department, one of thie major impediments had been
the police commission. The make-up and the number of commissioners had
been the target of city charter amendment many times. Through civil service
reform, the mayor first became an ex-officio member of the five-member
police commission. The year the size of the board was reduced from five to
three, the mayor became a full-fledged member who appointed the other two
members of the commission. Ultimately, the mayor was removed from the
Fletcher Bowron to Rear Admiral W. R. Freidell, January 24,1945;
Bowron statement, March 11, 1949, all in Bowron Collection.
” Fletcher Bowron to District Attorney Fred Houser, July 29, 1943,
Bowron Collection.
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243
board as it returned to five members. Included in this latest charter reform
was the introduction of staggered terms for dty commissioners so that no
one mayor could have undue influence over the commission.^ Throughout
the tumultuous years of reform, the police commission had either rubber-
stampted the police chiefs initiatives or the mayor’s initiatives, but had never
seemingly been independent enough to break the grip of the syndicate and
rackets.
In his mayoral campaign of 1938 Bowron had pledged to change all
that. Nevertheless, he still had a private investigator, paid for with the chief of
police’s slush fund, and he, like many mayors before him, wanted his police
commission to be an affirming rather than a discerning body-and for the
most part it was. Commissioner Bodkin, who served just one fiscal year
(1938/1939), said,
Fletcher Bowron kept in touch with the commission, but did
not seek to impose his views on the Commission. He
appointed men to the Commission v»iiom he trusted, and
depended upon their judgment. At no time did he order or
direct me to do anything, and I am sure that is true as to the
other commissioners.^’
Yet Bodkin’s testimonial is contradicted by v\^at Bowron considered to be a
challenge to his good government agenda in Spring 1946. The incident,
which is described below, illustrates the degree to \A^ich he did indeed
“ Charter of the City of Los Angeles (1902), amended 1911, Los Angeles,
1948; see above chapter 1.
Bodkin transcript, Bowron Collection.
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244
attempt to influence the work of the police commission. In a politically
unpopular action, Bowron attempted to remove the well respected and long-
serving police commissioner, Van Griffith (son of the land baron. Colonel
Griffith J. Griffith, who in 1896 bequeathed 3,015 acres—approximately five
square miles— of land to the city as “a place of recreation and rest for the
masses”). Griffith was one of Bowron’s first group of five appointees to the
police commission in 1938, and the only member of that group still serving in
the 1945/1946 fiscal year. His zeal as a crusader for police reform had not
faded, but apparently t)egan to cause some consternation for Mayor Bowron
and the other appointed police commissioners.
In April 1946, Bowron received a letter of resignation from police
commissioner E. M. Martin who had joined the commission in 1940:
I have resigned from the Police Commission solely
because of my mature conviction that the outpourings of
radicalism I have had to resist at almost all the recent
meetings of the Board have been inspired and
encouraged by commissioner G riffith’s antagonistic
attitude toward and by his support of pressure groups
whose activities, in my opinion, are detrimental to the
public w elfare.^
Rumors soon surfaced and the Los Angeles Times published speculation
that Bowron had asked for Griffith's resignation.” Griffith refused to
resign, prompting Bowron to inform him by letter that he would seek
” E. N. Martin to Fletcher Bowron, April 3, 1946; Los Angeles Times, May
2, 1946.
33
Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1946.
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245
approval from the city council to remove him from the police commission.
In the letter, Bowron cited board member complaints that Griffith is
“unable to work harmoniously” with them. Bowron also indicated his
dissatisfaction with Griffith’s efforts to prevent the building of a veteran's
emergency housing project in Griffith Park as a reason for his lack of
confidence in Griffith. But mostly Bowron simply did not approve of
Griffith's continuous relentless efforts to clean up vice in a manner which
suggested he had little confidence in the police department. Bowron said
that Griffith was “unnecessarily stirring things up, magnifying little things
out of all proportion to their importance, in an effort to ‘get something on'
police officers.”^ Bowron, who had lauded Griffith's persistence at one
time, indicated that his own policy toward the police department was not
different than it was in 1938:
I feel however, that I must have members of the Police
Commission under my administration in more complete
harmony with my policy of constructive support of the
Chief of Police and the elimination of suspicion and
criticism, either expressed or implied, and evidenced in
such a way as to undermine confidence in officials and
employees of the department without good cause.^
Bowron was clearly straddling a fence here. Griffith had a reputation for
being a vigorous crusader against crime, yet he was being removed
because he was too tireless in his efforts. Therefore, Bowron had to
^ Fletcher Bowron to Van Griffith, May 8, 1946, Bowron Collection.
^ Ibid.
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246
praise G riffith’s record and pledge the continuation of his own policy to go
after purveyors of vice and those who attempt to bribe or otherwise
corrupt police department pe rsonnel*
Griffith, however, felt that part of Bo>MDn’s decision to seek his
resignation had to do with Griffith’s objection to Bowon’s recommendation to
create the position of first deputy police chief, which was to be a non-civil
service appointment by the police chief. Bowron had urged the city council to
heed the request of Chief Horrall and the consenting police commission to
approve this new position which would help alleviate the vwrkload of an
“overworked and overburdened” department manager. In justifying the civil
service exemption for the post, Bowron said, “I feel [the chief] should be given
a free hand in the selection of this officer, who must possess peculiar
qualifications, many of which cannot be determined by any possible civil
service examination. Van Griffith informed the city council that he had
objected to the creation of the new position on the grounds that it would place
high level authority in the hands of someone who had not earned a high-level
civil service ranking.*
* Bodkin transcript, Bowron Collection; Fletcher Bowron to Los Angeles
dty council. May 8,1946, Bowron Collection.
38
Fletcher Bowron to Los Angeles city council, July 18,1945.
Van G riffith to Los Angeles city council, May 22, 1946, Bowron
Collection.
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247
The city council itself did not know what to make of the charges
against Griffith. One council member said, “I don’t think [G riffith] should
be removed simply because one or more of the other commissioners do
not like him or want to serve with him.”* Another said, “I must say I have
never encountered greater political stench and hypocrisy than is here
today. . .. [G riffith] stood up against corruption ever since the inception
of this reform government and there was been pressure to get rid of him.
They have finally succeeded.”^
G riffith’s perspective on Bowron’s change of heart was this:
Mayor Bowron has stood behind my every move, for
over seven years, to improve the administration of the
Police Department. That is, he did so until immediately
after his last re-election. A change came over him then.
. . . He has recently taken positions on police
department matters which, in my opinion are opposed to
public interest.
G riffith’s case is indicative of Bowron’s transition from an adversary to a
supporter of the police department. He had no clear justification for
G riffith’s removal other than Griffith’s lack of “team work”— a commissioner
considered a demoralizing busybody by his fellow police commissioners
* Minutes of Los Angeles city council discussion regarding Bowron’s
request to remove Van Griffith from the police commission. May 9, 1946,
Bowron Collection.
Los Angeles city council majority report against the removal of Van
Griffith, May 22, 1946, Bowron Collection.
Van Griffith to Los Angeles city council, minutes of council discussion to
consider the removal of Van Griffith, May 9, 1946, Bowron Collection.
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248
and a minority of city council members. Some supporters, however,
considered Griffith’s tenacious oversight as the perfect antidote to the
remaining members of the police commission. “Many Trusted Van
G riffith,” was the title of a May 9 editorial in the Hollywood Citizen-News:
The mayor may be absolutely right in believing that
the Chief of Police is entitled to full confidence. But we
can’t see why either the mayor or the other
commissioners should be disturbed if one of five
commissioners is always alert to complaints or
intimations of anything wrong in a great Police
Department even under a great Chief of Police.^
It appears that Bowron anticipated neither the public’s nor the city
council’s reaction to his request to remove Van Griffith from the board.
Although he justified his actions by invoking both the Los Angeles City
Charter and an appellate court ruling supporting the powers of the mayor
to remove his appointees, Bowron also defended his position in a radio
address on station KFI on May 16, 1946."*^
After the city council majority decided not to oblige Bowron’s
request to remove Griffith, in a complete turnaround, on May 27, Bowron
rescinded his request to remove Griffith altogether. In correspondence
with the city council, Bowron wrote;
Hollywood Citizen-News, May 9, 1946, Bowron Collection.
The appellate court ruled that the mayor need have no “definite
charges” to remove an appointee and has a right to have appointees be in
sympathy with the policies of his administration. Fletcher Bowron to Los
Angeles city council. May 8, 1946; excerpted statements of radio
broadcast. May 16, 1946, Bowron Collection.
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249
I take this action neither because I have changed my
mind with reference to the reasons that prompted my
action or the sufficiency thereof nor because of any
scurrilous and untruthful statements that have been
made or because I fear the outcome of my action. On
the contrary, I make this request for exactly the
same reason that prompted my original action of
removing Commissioner Griffith, namely, in the interests
of the city, considering primarily the effect upon the
Police Department.**
Bowron conceded that he had essentially been forced by public opinion
and political pressure to back away from the removal of the popular police
commissioner. He also stated that this issue had become so clouded in
controversy that even if Griffith were to be removed, Bowron would be
forever tainted by it.*®
In July, however, in a continuing effort to get rid of Van Griffith,
Bowron asked the entire police board to resign. They all submitted
resignations except for Griffith who wanted to make sure the resignations
would actually go into effect rather than be held “in escrow” by the
mayor.*® Finally, in August, four new appointees were named to the
police commission. Bowron asked police commissioner E. N. Martin (the
first to tender a resignation in the Van Griffith debacle) to stay on in order
** Fletcher Bowron to Los Angeles city council, May 27, 1946.
* ® Ibid.
* ® It was not uncommon to ask for resignation letters. The intent was not
to actually replace all board members, but perhaps a specific person or
two; see Bodkin transcripts, Bowron Collection.
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250
to acclimate the newly appointed police commissioners/^ In the following
year’s annual report for the police department, the names of five new
police commissioners appeared/"
Bowron had squandered a tremendous amount of political capital
on the Griffith debacle which pressed on for four months. He proved he
could when needed, hunker down and outlast a political battle until it
came out the way he intended. It proved the disdain he had for critics, but
acknowledged his reliance on public approval. And finally it proved
Bowron’s intransigence on police issues— once he staked a position on his
administration’s policy, while he might give in to pressure in the interim,
he refused to be coerced into any position antithetical to his own.
Perhaps Van G riffith’s dogged pursuit of police department
malfeasance would have helped Bowron prepare for the inevitable end of
his relationship with Chief Horrall.^ When charges of corruption flared up
again in late 1948, Bowron, however, maintained his steadfast support of
the chief and of the police department. After years of vigorously voicing
his belief in the incorruptibility of the chief, his support— at last— was not
Fletcher Bowron notes, July 22, August 6, 1946, Bowron Collection.
LAPD Annual Reports, 1946, 1947.
After the incident with Commissioner Griffith, Bowron would continue to
be on the defensive regarding police commission appointments. In
September 1947, Bowron faced intense scrutiny regarding the resignation
of Police Commissioner Charles Matthews; Fletcher Bowron statement,
September 27, 1949, Bowron Collection.
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251
quite enough. The grand jury was again considering bringing charges
against certain police officers for bribery. Bowron, the form er superior
court judge, sent a letter to the presiding judge of the grand jury
reiterating his "confidence in Chief of Police C. B. Horrall." Bowron
mentioned that he and the chief had discussed the need to conduct a full
investigation in preparation for a hearing before the grand jury and then
somewhat presumptuously suggested, “I would like to have Chief Horrall
have a talk with you, or if your prefer to take the matter up with anyone
else in the police department, I will see that such officer is assigned to the
investigation.”® ® Later that month, the Hollywood Vice Squad became
notorious as news of “Bloody Christmas”— the infamous drunken rampage
of holiday-reveling police officers— became front page news. Reports
circulated that a gang of police officers mercilessly beat a group of
prisoners housed in the station house ja il on Christmas eve. Three
officers involved in “Bloody Christmas” were arrested in June 1949— all
the while insisting that they were framed.®’
In the meantime, the grand jury continued to investigate allegations
of corruption in the department. In June 1949, it alleged that one vice
sergeant “protected” a known madam, Brenda Allen, and her high-priced
“ Fletcher Bowron to Judge Charles Fricke, December 1,1948, Bowron
Collection.
® ’ Los Angeles Times, June 24-27, 1949.
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252
call girl service in Hollywood. Chief Horrall's testimony was inconsistent
with that of a captain who had sworn that Horrall had been apprised of the
sergeant's illegal activities. Bowron was even subpoenaed due to the
grand jury's expressed frustration with the police department’s reluctance
to help the investigation. Bowron, who called the charges “bad for
publicity,” said he knew nothing about the case and did not blame Chief
Horrall for not informing him about the case. Bowron told the grand jury,
that, as mayor, he “does not try to run the department.”^ On June 27,
Bowron declared that he had no intention of replacing the police chief.
Nevertheless, Horrall resigned the following day citing poor health.”
Characteristically ignoring the controversy, Mayor Bowron praised the
chiefs performance over the length of his tenure and even helped ease
the disgrace surrounding Chief Horrall’s resignation by revealing' that the
chief had made overtures about retiring at least two years earlier. Bowron
declared that he had "urged [Horrall] to continue in service."” And
despite the reared ugly head of scandal, trial, resignations, and
newspaper headlines, Bowron trumpeted the strength of the department
and vowed to move on:
” Ibid., June 23, 24, 1949.
” Ibid., June 28. 29. 1949
Fletcher Bowon statement, June 28, 1949, Bowron Collection; Domanick,
To Protect and to Serve, 96; Los AngeAes Times, June 27,1949.
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253
Because of recent events, it should be stated that the
police commission and the mayor are unanimous in the
confident belief that Los Angeles has an excellent police
department. . . . Throughout the state and the country
Los Angeles must not be pointed to as a graft-ridden city
but a city where law and order prevails and where law is
enforced without fear or favor.
Despite the tumult of the war, the removal and return of Japanese
Americans, the hysteria of the Zoot Suit Riot, and the provocative
reactions to the growth of the Black population, the primary administrative
assessment of the LAPD continued to be based upon the department’s
involvement, or lack thereof, in the furtherance of gambling and
prostitution protection rackets and other vice activities in Los Angeles.
Therefore, in homage to the tradition of the reform mandate of the good
government types that brought him into office, Bowron’s favored chief had
to go. He continued to tout the greatness of the department, however,
and measured that greatness in the context of its disassociation with
graft. The following sentiments in a 1946 article best reflect how Mayor
Bowron measured the performance of the department;
Los Angeles is a big city, it is not chemically pure, it is
not prudish or goody-goody, and can never be made so
by any city administration, but if anyone is paying
protection money, making contributions, thinking he is
buying immunity from law enforcement, he is just wasting
his money, because the Los Angeles Police Department,
now entirely reorganized, under a most able Chief of
Police— C. B. Horrall, a university graduate and W orld
W ar I veteran, who came up step by step through the
“ Fletcher Bowron statement, June 30,1949, B o^on Collection.
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254
ranks— is now honestly as well as efficiently
administered, which is a matter o f tremendous
satisfaction and great personal pride to me as Mayor of
the city.“
In order to continue to benefit from the gains made in improving the
department’s image under Chief Horrall’s leadership and to stifle the
criticism in the wake of the latest grand jury charges, upon Horrall’s
resignation in June 1949, Bowron suggested that Los Angeles would be
best served by a temporary chief who was an outsider. W ith such a
replacement, the mayor and police commission could take the time they
needed to choose a permanent chief who would tend to the department
and the city’s law enforcement needs most effectively. And upon the
selection of Chief William Worton, a retired marine, Bowron again made
one of his frequent and effusive appraisals of the police departm ent.^
The mayor’s consistent praise for the police department served a few
purposes. He made clear that he would defend the department against all
critics and by the very nature of the praise lavished upon the department,
it was also clear that anyone who spoke out against such an exemplary
police force would be viewed with outright skepticism. City hall and the
“ Bowron, “A Mayor Looks at his Job,” Bowron Collection.
^ Fletcher Bowron statement, June 30, 1949: “It should be stated that the
Police Commission and the mayor are unanimous in the confident belief
that Los Angeles has an excellent police department, that man for man
and, in its work, case for case, it compares favorably with any police
department of any of the largest cities of America,” Bowron Collection.
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255
police chief by 1949 had come together in a partnership, not mandated by
city charter. As a matter of fact, this sort of relationship had been
construed as problematic by previous generations of charter reformers.
Nevertheless, dunng the bulk of Bowron’s tenure this symbiotic
relationship worked to establish a paradigm of a solid front— the no-longer
corrupt police department joining forces as partners rather than
adversaries with the no-longer corrupt municipal administration in
establishing law and order in Los Angeles.
Bowron was not without his critics. Throughout the nineteen-
forties, as his defense of the police department grew ever more vocal in
the face of the allegations of scandals which continued to plague the
LAPD under Chief Horrall's leadership, those who questioned Bowron's
leadership became more vocal as well. The mayor’s critics began to depict
him as a man who brooked no criticism against him or his effort to carry out
his agenda. The August 1943 issue of Hollywood Life, for example, argued
that;
The new mayor immediately set about to gain control of
the entire city set-up; it was not long until he had disrupted
just about every branch and every board within the city
government He promulgated the theory that any city official
who did not see eye-to-eye and bite tooth-to-tooth with him,
was untrustworthy and an enemy of what Bowron
designated as ‘Decent Government’® ®
“ “The Little Man Who Isn’t There: A Bit of Local Political History of Fact
Not Fiction,” Hollywood Life, August, 1943, Ford Collection.
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256
In an editorial in the Independent Review, William Anderson wrote that
Bowron had a tendency to declare anyone >Mio opposed him or his ideas as
“an enemy of good government,” or as “evil-minded,” and/or “self-seeking.”® ®
Even Clifford Clinton, Bowron’s most ardent supporter in the 1938 recall
campaign, grew dissatisfied with Bowron-to the point of running against him
in the 1945 election. Clinton was quoted in an article in the Christian Science
Monitor regarding his disenchantment with the mayor “We helped elect the
mayor on the principle that this city could be the grandest place in the world if
corruption were ousted,“ said Clinton. “Mayor Bowron has ousted graft He
is an honest official. But he has stopped there.”® ®
Bowron’s 1949 reelection campaign was also contested, Bowron
suggested, by the syndicate itself. In a March 11,1949 statement to the
press, Bowron said, “I was told long loefore the present campaign started that
if I ran for reelection I either had to consent to the appointment of a new
Police Commission and the elimination of Chief of Police Horrall, or hundreds
of thousands of dollars would be poured into a campaign against me.”® ^ And
although Bowron did prevail in his third reelection contest, his detractors
remained persistent. By September, talk of a recall surfaced. Critics of the
Bowron administration seemed to focus on continued corruption in the police
Independent Review, February 17, 1944, Ford Collection.
® ° “Bowron Backer Enters Contest as Bowron Rival,” Christian Science
Monitor," January 6, 1945, in Bowron Collection.
Fletcher Bowron press statement, March 11, 1949, Bowron Collection.
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257
department and failed promises to “acknowledge leaders in various
geographical and racial gro up s/^ Additionally, the venerable Time
magazine published a subdued critique of the mayor of Los Angeles; “Mayor
Bowron, a slow and cautious man, had guided-but seldom led— the city
through its most phenomenal decade of growth and development
In his own defense, remarking on eight years in office in September
1946, Bowron simply said, “I did not set out to be a continuous crusader.
After things were cleaned up as satisfactorily as they could be, I interested
myself in more constructive things, in better administration, in improving
conditions.”^ B o^on did not see any problems in the police department
once he had “cleaned up” the graft. He did not recognize complaints about
malpractice and brutality because they came largely from people who were
enemies of good government, those v\4io had been unduly influenced by
“ Notes of recall of Mayor Bowron meeting, September 27, 1949; Park La
Brea Reporter. January 25, 1950; Clifford Clinton, The Clock Strikes
Twelve; Rupert Hughes, draft speech charging Bowron with racial
antagonism, March 26, 1941; undated League for Religious tolerance
statements regarding Bowron’s “antagonism against Jews and Negroes,”
all in Bowron Collection.
“ “Bowron’s Boom Town,” Time, 11 October 1948, 27.
^ Fletcher Bowron, “Remarks on Eight Years in O lfice,” September 23,
1946, Bowron Collection.
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258
communist-inspired "disturbers."^ And finally, Bowron saw no reason to
question the police department because he, unlike previous mayors, had a
good, clean, working relationship with the chief of police. Perhaps because
of the sensitivities surrounding the ever present issues of race and dass,
perhaps because of the war, perhaps because "law enforcement" is
conventionally unremarkable unless associated with scandal, during the
1340s Bowron and the LAPD, despite scattered critidsms, established the
precedent for police and dty hall relations that would last through the end of
the century and that would have profound impad on hardening the paradigm
for policing in Los Angeles. Now that police and dty hall relations has been
established, the incorporation of the "radal element" was all that was
necessary to complete the paradigm.
Bowron’s antipathy to Communists was evident in other areas as well.
In 1948 he approved a dty ordinance requiring all dty employees to take an
oath against communism; “although it may not be unlawful to be a member of
the Communist Party, Communists are not desirable, " Fletcher Bowron to
Los Angeles city council, November 1, 1948; Los Angeles Information
Office notice regarding implementation of Loyalty oath requirement,
December 1, 1948; Bowron statement compelling no one to take the oath,
but suggesting that they resign if they refuse to do so, December 6, 1948,
all in Bowron Collection.
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259
Chapter 6
"Be Vigorous But not Brutal”; Race, Politics, and Police in Los Angeles
Policemen should not be expected to deal with the criminal
element with kid gloves. I feel they should be encouraged to be
vigorous but not brutal.
(Fletcher Bowron, 1943)
Have decades of efforts to reform corruption in the LAPD had the
unintended consequences of embedding in its culture a custom of police
malpractice manifested by covert brutality and denigrating discourtesy
directed toward the city's Black residents in the city's Black
neighborhoods? The template or foundation for this question established
in the previous chapters connects three separate but interrelated
elements: 1 ) the achievement of long sought reforms of both the LAPD in
1937 and the mayor's office in 1938; 2) the economic and demographic
transitions Los Angeles underwent as a result of World W ar II, including
racial ized anxieties which were negatively directed toward Japanese
Americans and Mexican American youth; and, 3) the political and social
reactions to the large number of African American migrants who came
primarily from the South during the war. During the 1940s the
intersections of politics and police and race and politics converged into a
tripartite relationship of race, politics, and police which became
normalized in a paradigm concerning the politics of policing and social
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260
control in Los Angeles. In 1937, the LAPD achieved autonomy after close
to four decades of reform. And early on the influential Merchants and
Manufacturers Association made sure the force understood that one of its
primary functions was social control— especially of labor radicals and
organizers— through the early decades of the century. True to the
Progressive reform agenda, the only real problems to try to root out of the
police department were those of corruption, vice, and graft. And,
therefore, in as much as police malpractice against African Americans
(and others— be they labor radicals, long-haired rebels, criminals,
communists, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, or any other
antagonist to the status quo) occurs, it could be studiously ignored by
both political and police department leadership and the mainstream press,
with suggestions that complainants were in effect agitants (and therefore
in need of social control) rather than credible victims of indefensible
police activities.
The Los Angeles Police Department has been both vigorous and
brutal in its efforts to “keep the peace” in Los Angeles. Like many urt>an
police departments in their formative stages, the LAPD recruited officers
more for their brute strength than for any other reason. Homer Broome, who
tjecame the first Black division commander of the LAPD in 1969, writes that
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261
Los Angeles in the late 1800s was a time W ie n preserving the peace and
protecting life and property was a job requiring real physical strength In
his description of the type of officers the Progressives dealt with in their
efforts to reform the Los Angeles Police Department Joseph G. Woods
wrote, “Political loyalty, a rude tongue, and a ready fist seemed sufficient
qualifications for police work.”^ After all, urban police departments in the
United States were formed beginning in the mid-19th century to quell growing
social disorder as immigrants spilled into the nation's cities, as the free black
population grew, and as the “dangerous dasses'-the social undesirables;
the poor, homeless, beggars, thieves, roving gangs, and orphans-became
paramount threats to the desired social order. ^ This depiction is echoed in
To Protect and to Serve, as Joe Domanick describes prototypical LAPD
^ Homer Broome, Jr., LAPD's Black History, f 886-f 976 (Norwalk, CA:
Stockton Trade Press, 1978), 49-50. The first black police officer, Robert
W illiam Stewart, hired in 1886 was 6’4” and weighed 240 pounds.
^ Joseph Gerald Woods, “The Progressives and the Police: Urban Reform
and the Professionalization of the Los Angeles Police” (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), 18. Other implicit sanctions
of violence included the ability of officers to use coercive force for social
control. Sidney Marring in Policing a Class Sodety: The Experience o f
American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1983), writes, “This capacity to employ violence if other social
control mechanisms fails is more important than the actual violence
because it is fully understood by all as a component of the state’s
power,” 8. See also Egon Bittner, The Functions o f Police in Modem
Society: A Review o f Background Factors, Current Practices and Possible
Role Models (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975).
^ Richard Wade. The Urban Frontier Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. 1959), 87-90, 287-88, and Chapter 7: “Riots and the
(continued on next page)
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262
officers of the early 20th century as ‘thuggish enforcers of the rich man’s laws
who’d been selected for their job." One former police officer's description of
an ideal policeman was, "a burly t\M>fisted knuckle-buster who could flatten a
violator with one blow."^ Brute strength, in the absence of other defined
qualifications, in the pre-civil service police department, seemed to be a
positive attribute for employment.
At the height of the LAPD’s war against illegal gambling, its rancor
against the mob, criminal syndicates, and tvw-bit hustlers was well known.
“Cossacking,” verbal and physical violence against citizens, was a common
complaint. “Anyone who antagonized a policeman or was beaten for it had
Restoration of Public Order;” Erik Monkkonen, Police in Urban America
1860-1920 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1981), 22, 42;
Eric Monkkonen, “From Cop History to Social History: The Significance of
the Police in American History,” Journal o f Social History 15 (Summer
1982):75-91; James Richardson, Urban Police in the United States (Port
Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 33; Sam Bass Warner, The
Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods o f its Growth (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 96-97, re: “Dick Baux’s police”;
Eugene J. Watts, “Police Responses to Crime and Disorder in 20th
Century Los Angeles,” Joumal o f American History 70 (September 1983):
340-58; Frank Donner, Protectors o f Privilege: Red Squads and Police
Repression in Urban America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1990), 2; Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston 1822-
f 885 (New York: Athenaeum, 1971), 6, 24-26, 35; Samuel W alker, “The
Urban Police in American History: A Review of the Literature,” in Paul
Cromwell and George Keefer, eds., Police-Community Relations,
Selected Readings, 2nd ed. (New York: W est Publishing, 1978); John
Mayer, “Notes Toward a Working Definition of Social Control in Historical
Analysis,” in Stanley Cohen and Andrew Scull, eds. Sodal Control and
the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 17-38.
Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century o f W ar in
the City o f Dreams (New York, Pocket Books, 1994), 34.
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263
himself to blame,” reports Woods. “Many complaints of police brutality were
filed with the notation: officer was within his rights."® Practices common
within the LAPD, as well as in police departments nationwide, including the
third degree and the use of implements such as brass knuckles, blackjacks,
rubber hoses filled with sand, ankle pistols, and other devices used to elicit
confessions or “cooperation” were documented in independent investigations
like the Wickersham Commission findings published in 1931. ® Not only were
such practices as those listed in the Wickersham Commission’s final report
fairly common, but they were not necessarily hidden from the public either.
Woods contends that these police department methods for handling criminal
suspects were not only tolerated but implicitly condoned-as long as the
“elimination of graft and the suppression of vice” continued unabated. The
LAPP'S “vigorous and brutal” responses to labor and political radicals was
implicitly encouraged by “commercial leaders' reactionary policy toward
transients, labor unionists and civil libertarians, and their violent opposition to
I.W.W. [International Workers of the World], Communist Party and Socialist
® Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 243-46.
® National Commission on Law Enforcement and Observance, known as
the Wickersham Commission after George Wickersham, President
Herbert Hoover’s appointee to head the commission. Initially put together
to report on the progress of prohibition, the Wickersham Commission
extended its investigation to include, according to Skolnick and Fyfe, “the
whole structure of our federal System of Jurisprudence”; Jerome Skolnick
and James Fyfe, Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use o f Force
(New York: The Free Press, 1993) 45, 43-61; Domanick, To Protect and
to Serve, 65. See above Chapter Two and Chapter Four.
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264
organizers.”^ Nevertheless, regardless of the LAPD’s reputation for
cossacking and txutality, a 1931 Los Angeles County Grand Jury found,
despite strong evidence to the contrary, that criticism of the LAPD in this
regard was “unjust and unmerited.” Citing the report of the 1931 Grand Jury
Committee on Public Safety, Woods describes fifty separate incidents of
ruptured kidneys, broken bones, clubbings, kickings, and shootings by LAPD
officers.^ There was widespread txutality in law enforcement in Los Angeles
in the early 20th century.
The Progressive reform efforts begun at the turn of the century to
eradicate the corrosive effects of illegal and flourishing protection rackets and
influence peddling had come close to fruition by the 1950s txjt they never
really addressed the issue of brutality. Ignored amidst all the political energy
directed toward reform, the mayor’s desire to clean up the department, and
the police department’s own steps toward militarization and
professionalization was the vigorous policing style that had accompanied the
vice wars. This aggressive or proactive style was a part of the culture of ttie
LAPD and it remained intact® There was not, either simultaneously with the
anti-vice crusade or afterward, a decades-long effort to end the cossacking
that had accompanied that corruption in those quarters wfiere vice had
^ Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 7, 287.
® Ibid., 291.
® Ibid., 259.
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265
flourished. And therefore, in Los Angeles, once the Progressive efforts to
curb the rackets had been declared victorious there persisted a police
corruption of another kind— the malpractice of police misconduct-the gray
area which resulted from the LAPD’s well-established orientation toward what
Domanick describes as "strong-arm policing and rigid enforcement of the
law.^°
This vigorous style was overwhelmingly present in the vice districts,
where two-bit hustlers and penny ante thieves could easily enough be
“encouraged” to provide police officers with desired information necessary to
make arrests. Roy Porter, a drummer Wio played the circuit of jazz clubs on
Central Avenue in the 40s, recalled that the police "really didn't have to worry
about how many guns or knives were around because there were plenty of
Uncle Tom snitches who kept the police informed of anything and everything
that went down in the neighbortiood.”” Although many of the patrons and
vice purveyors of the red light district lived elsewhere, the denizens of the
district were the segregated old settlers and recently arrived Black migrants.
Police malpractice or institutional malpractice can be described as
a whole series of behaviors that, although not explicitly illegal like
participating In protection rackets, indicate an abuse or misuse of police
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 49.
” Roy Porter with David Keller, There and Back (Baton Rouge; Louisiana
State University Press, 1991 ), 67.
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266
officers' duties or powers while enforcing the law /^ For example, the
Wickersham Commission's 1931 revelations about the common usage of
the "third degree"— aggressively intimidating witnesses or suspects into
submission— illuminated a type of police malpractice. Malpractice in the
form of behaviors range from the persistent, hostile denigration of people
by acts of simple discourtesy, to making an arrest in order to cover up
some type of misconduct such as civil rights violations, to questionable
uses of force like "street justice" or curbside beatings, all the way to
"sustainable" deaths in custody. This range of misconduct came to be
increasingly oppressive during the late 1930s— as the reforms of city hall
and the police department began to take hold.^^ In isolation, police
malpractice can be viewed as an at)erration, but a constant number of
aberrations is indicative of a problem.
A selection of incidents taken from the pages of the California
Eagle illustrates the range o f reported police misconduct. If a small
number of cases reached the pages of the local press, then there are
most likely a considerably greater number of sim ilar events which only the
officers and victims involved knew of. In two separate incidents
(occurring within one year o f each other in 1938 and 1939), two
Armando Morales, "An Analysis of Police-Minority Community Relations,”
(Master's thesis. University of Southern California, 1981 ), 28.
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police," 410-11.
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267
seventeen-year-old Black boys were killed by LAPD Newton Division
officers. Both of the boys were engaged in criminal activity but the Eagle
argued that they nevertheless posed no threat to the responding police
officers— they were both shot in the back.’^ In the summer of 1939, a mob
of white youth beat a Black cleaning room attendant at Griffith Park in a
vicious attack. It was the attendant, Geraldine Taylor, however, who was
arrested by LAPD officers for disturbing the peace. She died a couple of
months later from complications resulting from the beating.’®
On September 4, 1939, a robbery suspect was shot and killed by a
pair of Los Angeles police officers. The California Eagle sardonically
suggested that the officers involved would be “absolved of blame” at the
coroners’ inquest. On September 14, 1939, the Eagle announced the
successful outcome of a lawsuit filed against the LAPD; two Black men
were awarded damages for assault and battery in a suit against an LAPD
detective. That same day, the Eagle reported on an incident involving a
young Black man, Lewis Tippen and two LAPD officers. Tippen claimed to
have been picked up by the officers, thrown into a squad car, driven to a
remote location and beaten, and then shoved out of the car. He would
later receive a $350,000 judgment for his charge of assault and battery.’®
14
Califomia Eagle, March 22, 1938, April 6, 1939.
’® Ibid., July 3, November 16,1939.
’® Ibid., September 7. 14, November 19, 1939, May 16, 1940.
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268
A committee of local leaders headed by the president of the Los
Angeles chapter of the NAACP attended a July 1940 police commission
meeting to protest a recent incidence of police brutality. They expressed
their concerns about what they considered to be the overzealous police
response to reports of a “racial disturbance" at the Rossmore Hotel.
Although two Black women were the alleged victims of a white attacker,
the police responded to the call by “invading the Rossmore lobby,” as the
California Eagle reported, and beating up several Black railroad
employees, porters, and waiters.’^
On July 24, a Pasadena pastor lodged a complaint against the
LAPD. The Eagle described the incident as a case of “extreme
discourtesy and incivility.” The pastor was responding to a friend's call to
come to the Lincoln Heights police station to help him pay a traffic fine.
The friend, who had w illingly gone to the station to pay the fine, was
instead transferred to the city jail. The pastor was treated with
indifference and groped and shoved as he attempted to seek information
about the whereabouts of his friend.’®
In a most disturbing incident of indifference, a number o f LAPD
officers were alleged to have refused to help a Black woman who was the
victim of a hit and run accident. According to eyewitnesses, although the
Ibid., July 25, 1940.
’® Ibid.
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269
woman was bleeding profusely, officers in two separate police cars
arrived at the scene and judged “the woman not hurt seriously enough to
warrant immediate hospital attention, and drove away.”'^
Race riots in the late summer of 1940 at the Santa Monica pier
resulted in yet more denunciations of police brutality. Although the police
department in question was the Santa Monica PD, many beachgoers in
the vicinity were residents of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles chapter of
the NAACP requested that the Los Angeles County grand jury investigate
a series of skirmishes at the pier which the police were called to quell.
The grand jury refused the NAACP’s request to investigate, stating the
incidents were “purely a police matter.”^ The November 1940 death of a
man, from complications from a bullet wound inflicted in a spring
altercation with an LAPD officer, resulted in the rare charge of murder
against Officer Thomas Cobbs.
These and other incidents supported Black Los Angeles residents’
contentions that circumstances surrounding the arrests and/or simple
interaction between themselves and the LAPD was often unnecessarily
denigrating, sometimes unnecessarily brutal, and occasionally,
unnecessarily deadly. Bowron and his first two chiefs (Interim Chief David
'®lbid., August 2, 1940.
“ Ibid., September 10, 1940.
Ibid., November 7, 1940.
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270
Davidson, November 1938 to June 1939 and Chief Arthur Hohmann, June
1939 to June 1941), despite the problems with their leadership, diligently
attacked the stubborn remnants of the once predominant problems of
racketeering, bribery, and graft activities in the police department. Yet the
behavioral problems associated with those illegal activities continued to
plague some segments of the Los Angeles community. Police
malpractice was much more difficult to recognize and root out, but no less
damaging to the department and actually, more damaging to the people
upon which it was inflicted.
When African Americans began to arrive in Los Angeles in large
numbers during the first year of the United States' involvement in the war
their immediate concerns were housing and employment. Leadership
among Black residents and their representation at the municipal level on
these and a host of other issues was largely left to those who were long
time residents, but who were no doubt catalyzed into a new wave of
activism spurred on by the acute needs of the wartime migrants. Historian
Richard Dalfiume has labeled the years 1939 to 1945 as 'The Forgotten
Years of the Negro R e v o lu tio n .D a lfiu m e contends that a heightened
“ Richard Dalfiume, "The Forgotten Years' of the Negro Revolution," Journal
of American History 55 (June 1968): 90-106; see also Geoffrey Perrett, Days
of Sadness, Years o f Triumph: The American People, f 939-f 945 (New York:
Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, Inc., 1973), ch. 11, “Negroes, Blacks and
Persons of Color,” for his similar thesis on the emergence of the modem civil
rights movement
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271
race consciousness— growing out of the Marcus Garvey Movement and
the Harlem Renaissance— as well as the lessons learned from World W ar
I, evolved into a new urgency for a group of people who finally
acknowledged that fairness in a racially polarized society was not just
going to “happen.* Therefore, during the Second W orld War, while faced
with the burden of fighting a "white man's war, " African Americans not
only accepted that burden but turned it into a campaign for their inclusion
in the United States' democratic process. The resulting Double V
Campaign represented a fight for democracy at home and abroad. With
increased militancy and with mass action efforts such as A. Philip
Randolph's March on Washington Movement (a nation-wide effort that
called upon African Americans to mobilize in a fight for desegregation of
the armed forces and in defense industry employment), African Americans
collectively brought together their cynicism, hope, and race
consciousness in protest against discriminatory treatment and
exclusionary segregation.”
During the war, while Black activists continued to make legitimate
demands for fair housing and nondiscriminatory employment, they also
turned to other long standing issues that had become increasingly
significant in their daily lives; open racial conflict and police malpractice.
23
Dalfiume, “Forgotten Years,” 90-93.
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272
And, in Los Angeles, these two issues eventually merged into one major
concern as the city fathers increasingly used the police department to
restore order as the number of volatile racial conflicts began to rise.
Even the California Department of Justice acknowledged that the police
are “always in the middle of any racial dispute.”^^ W ith the use of law
enforcement to maintain social order, a new complexity was injected into
an already problematic situation— the cossacking, it seemed, was
becoming more prevalent— even for law-abiding citizens. Community
members convened meetings at local churches and community centers
and also requested audiences with Mayor Fletcher Bowron to discuss the
problems. Bowron, however, steadfastly refused to ally himself with his
Black constituents on this issue.
Although the transformation of Los Angeles and the shaping of the
paradigm was already underway before the arrival of the third wave of
African American migrants, this influx was the trigger which shifted
political attention away from looking at the LAPD with an eye toward
reforming it to an unyielding, defensive support of the department.
Davis McEntire, Police Training Bulletin: A Guide to Race Relations for
Police Officers (Sacramento; Department of Justice, State of California,
1946), 7, 26.
California Eagle, May 27, June 3, September 16, 1943, October 7,
1948; Fletcher Bowron to Thomas Griffith, December 5, 1945, Bowron
Collection; meeting in mayor's office, transcript, October 8, 1948, Bowron
Collection.
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273
Behaviors that were long-established practices continued unabated and
ignored now that corruption in the LAPD was finally being replaced by
professionalization. There are four primary explanations for the
continuation of those intractable, deeply embedded behaviors throughout
years of reform, and their ultimate equation with the policing of Black
people in Los Angeles.
First, the continued existence of unofficial and unlawful police
practices can be laid in the department's "unprofessional" past and rooted
in its corrupt ties to organized crime and illegal vice activities. Most of the
graft and racketeering scandals which plagued the department throughout
the depression years were centered primarily on vice establishments
which were inordinately located in the Central Avenue district. It has not
been historically uncommon to find the intentional municipal steering of
the sale of forbidden pleasures to neighborhoods densely populated with
Black residents. As the historian Roger Lane writes in his provocative
analysis, The Roots o f Violence in Black Philadelphia, “One reason [that
red-light districts were found in black neighborhoods] was political, while
police and magistrates were not usually thought capable of eliminating
vices, they could at least set bounds to it.”^ This process seems to have
Roger Lane, The Roots o f Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860 to 1900
(Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1986), 122; Allan Spear, Black
Chicago: The Making o f the Negro Ghetto, 1690-1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1967), 25; Fogelson, Big City Police, 39.
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274
been operative in Los Angeles as well, until Fletcher Bowron stepped in
with a 1938 campaign pledge to clear up vice once and for all.
The price Black residents paid for criminal vice in their
neighborhoods was high. W hile the Central Avenue area boasted of
business and professional offices, renowned jazz clubs, grocery and
furniture stores, churches, theaters, rooming houses, and real estate
offices, there were also betting parlors, brothels, saloons and bars, street-
walking prostitutes, and drug addicts. Public drunkenness was one
reminder to Eastside residents that their neighborhoods were different
than others and being under constant police surveillance was another.
Persistent exposure to crime and vice may have normalized those
activities for young and old, while employment discrimination and housing
segregation essentially held them captive in these neighborhoods.
Crime and high crime rates stigmatized residents in the vice
districts as being criminal themselves. From 1940 to 1950 Newton Street
station, part of the LAPD Central Division and in the heart of the Central
Avenue district, continually reported the greatest number of murders and
felonious assaults of all LAPD stations. Annual reports indicate that 23.3
percent of murders were in Newton in 1940, 19.4 percent in 1941, 28.9
percent in 1942, 23 percent in 1943, 16 percent in 1944 and 18 percent in
1945. The Newton Division served a residential population of about five
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275
percent of the total city population. Overall, the arrest rate for Black
adults on sexual offense charges remained constant from 1939 to 1945 at
about twenty-nine percent of the total number of persons arrested for this
crime city-wide. There was, however, a noted increase in Black arrestees
for public drunkenness, from 4 percent in 1939 to 10 percent in 1945, for
disorderly conduct a three fold increase in the arrests of Black adults,
from 6 percent in 1939 to 19 percent in 1945; vagrancy arrests more than
doubled from 11 percent to 27 percent in those same years, and arrests
of Black adults for gambling and other municipal violations just about
tripled from 23 percent to 63 percent— most of these increases outstripped
the reported growth of about 168 percent in the Black population over the
same period of time.^^
Some of the effects of concentrated vice in the densely-settled
Black districts of the Eastside were paradoxical. W hile there was no
doubt a heavy police presence, some suggested that the police were not
present to stop crime, but were actually on the Eastside in order to harass
Black people, or to contribute to the crime themselves (as in the
documented cases of “protection”). Roy Porter wrote that one could not
walk down Central Avenue between 42nd Street and Vernon Avenue
without bumping into “soldiers, pimps, gangsters, hustlers, whores, movie
LAPD Annual Reports, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945.
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276
stars, musicians, politicians, groupies, fans, and of course, cops.”^ ®
Those cops. Porter contends, were not looking for criminals, but were
looking to harass “Black pimps that had white whores or any black men
with white women.”^ Chester Himes has a similar contention in the book.
If He Hollers, Let Him Go. Himes writes about a Black man being the
object of two police officers’ roadside interrogation due to the
protagonist’s presence with a white woman;
Two motorcycle cops pulled up and flagged us down.
They rolled to a stop in front of us, stormed back on foot
cursing.
“All right,” one said, pulling out his book. “Start
lying.”
. . . The cop leaned over to see me better. “A coon,”
he said. Then he looked at Alice again. “Both coons,”
Then on second thought he asked her, “Are you white?”
“She’s a coon, too,” I answered for her.^
And the real-life version of this scenario sometimes ended up as front
page news as with the September 1948 California Eagle article entitled,
“Negro and W hite Girl in Car Rile Police and Land in Jail.”® ’
Porter and Kelly, There and Back, 61.
Ibid., 66.
Chester Himes, If He Hollers, Let Him Go (New York: Doubleday, Doran
and Company, 1945), 75.
California Eagle, September 2, 1948.
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277
In late summer, 1940, the California Eagle noted the infectious
problems of the flourishing illegal trades on the quality of life on Central
Avenue;
Central Avenue after midnight as well as before, is
becoming a problem of first importance. W hat was once
picturesque is now vulgar; what was once carefree is
now plain vandalism. Profanity and acts of wanton
lawlessness are rife among the black boulevard nightly;
police protection is at a-minimum; and indications point
toward a problem growing more steadily serious.^
Joe Domanick writes, the “crowds, noise, filth, disorder, diversity,
rebellion, anarchy” of the vice districts called for the police to maintain
social order. Yet the reality of this law and order orientation in the
Eastside was that arrests were more often made of basically hard-working
people who happened to be caught on the few occasions they gambled or
purchased the services of a prostitute rather than the high level operators
that the anti-crime/anti-vice civic leaders intended.”
The impact of the police presence in the Black residential districts
where criminal vice also flourished had a ripple effect: the threat of
arrest, the fear of brutal “back-room” interrogations would eventually
harden into a sort of wearied antagonism when it came to the way Black
Angelenos viewed the police officers who patrolled their neighborhoods.
” Ibid., August 22, 1940.
” Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 47, 52; Woods, “The Progressives
and the Police,” 84.
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Observers in September 1939 witnessed a Black man being assaulted in
his own home on East 17th street by a LAPD vice officer. The police
officer, who proffered no identification according to the victim, forcibly
entered the residence on the premise that he was looking for a prostitute.
The homeowner, Clifton Lester, wielding a baseball bat in self-defense,
was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. On November 19, the
Eagle reported that police officers had broken into the East 53rd Street
home of the owner of a Central Avenue pool hall. They claimed to be
seeking proof of liquor law violations. The homeowner, Roy Howard, filed
a suit against the department charging malicious mischief and willful
destruction of property."
Oftentimes, local Black women, innocently shopping, or going to or
from work were caught up in the ongoing morals crusade which had been
launched by progressive reformers in the early part of the century.
November and December 1940 were active months for the acquittals of a
number of Black women who had been arrested by Newton Street vice
officers on “morals charges.” One woman was accused of operating a
house of ill-repute and of being a “dissolute person.” Two others were
charged with being willful residents in a house of ill repute. In this case,
the arresting officers, who had “crashed” a party at the East 42nd Place
" California Eagle, September 14, November 19, 1939.
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279
home, had recorded on the arrest report that they had been offered sex
for pay. In two similar cases, while the judge not only acquitted the
women that patrol officers had arrested for “proposing a rendezvous with
officers,” he also charged the arresting officers with perjury. There was
yet another case with sim ilar circumstances in January 1941 and again in
May where Black women accused LAPD officers of not only false arrest
but of also being treated less than professionally in the process.^
A January 1941 Eagle article reported on the recent police raids of
‘vice dens' in the Negro and Japanese districts. In a prescient preemptive
statement, the district attorney asserted “that other districts in more
exclusive sections of the city need not think they were immune from
similar blitz raids in the future.”^ The Reverend Clayton Russell of
People’s Independent Church wrote a commentary regarding the
denigration of the Central Avenue district through the numerous press
accounts of the vice raids in that area. Russell wrote, “it is unfair to any
community to play up daily the same raid that netted the arrest of men
with whom law enforcement representatives had bargained and who had
been induced by officials to open certain activities in violation of the
law.”^^ This raid was good public relations for the police department and,
35
Ibid., November 7, 14,21, December 17, 1940, January 30, May 22,
1941.
“ Ibid., January 9, 1941.
Ibid.
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of course, for Bowron as well. But these raids only proved a phyrric
victory in the vice wars. A concurrent grand jury investigation into the
bribery charges o f three Central Avenue men shifted its focus from the
defendants to deputy police chief Ross McDonald when the defendants
revealed that McDonald had solicited payoffs from them in order to allow
them to run a few gambling clubs and brothels in the district.^
In July 1941, a Black female resident of East 55th Street filed
brutality charges against two Newton Division vice officers. She claimed
that she had been beaten “unmercifully about the face and head" in a May
14 confrontation with the officers.® The California Eagle reported on
February 2, 1942 that LAPD officers treated a male arrestee with disdain.
Upon his release after his arrest for gambling, the man, while attempting
to reclaim his belongings, alleged that the two arresting officers had
stolen the money he had in his possession while he was booked. They
denied it.'”
® Ibid., March 27, 1941.
® Ibid., July 17, 1941.
” Ibid., February 3, 1942.
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Of LAPD vice squad officers, Joseph Woods wrote:
The most nefarious policemen led details of the vice,
vagrancy, radical and intelligence squads, setting an
example and maintaining a tradition of brutal,
unconstitutional and dishonest law enforcement. They
typified the new definition of policeman, an official who
breaks ten laws while enforcing one.'*’
The demise of the syndicate, the rooting out of graft within the
department, the reforms, and the granting of political independence did
not end these behaviors, this policing style. But the victims of it were no
longer just the “deserving criminals” who plied illegal pleasures in the
Central Avenue district.
A second element necessary for understanding the continuation of
the police behaviors evident in the confluence of race, politics and police
Is tied to the first. Strong, aggressive policing must be employed in the
efforts to eradicate crime, vice, the syndicate and its protection rackets. If
the locus of control in the vice district lies first with the syndicate then with
the vice officers on its payroll, then the quality and quantity of vice arrests
would also have to be questioned. The vice kings are not going to have
themselves arrested, but they are going to make sure that arrests are
made, “strong” law enforcement is practiced, and their police department
confederates are sufficiently protected from external pressure. Some of
the most “forceful” law enforcement happened to have been practiced in
Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 259.
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282
the prewar years when the Red Squad was most powerful. Under the
direction of Chief James Davis, who served two separate terms, first from
1926 to 1929 and again from 1933 to 1938, the Red Squad and the LAPD
practiced rigid, rigorous, no-holds-barred policing in Los Angeles.
According to Domanick, the LAPD under Davis' leadership, became an
“efficient, well-regulated police department that stood for absolute law and
order”— at least for petty offenses and in areas where the syndicate was
not in control.*^
Even when James Davis was a patrol officer, he had conducted
random “stop and searches” of loosely defined criminal “suspects.” In his
zeal, Davis recollected, he neither hesitated to kick down doors, nor to
“knock [someone] on his ass” if they talked back, nor to fabricate a
context for which to make an arrest.^ Later, as police chief, Davis would
pioneer the dragnet technique— cordoning off sections of the city so that
officers could stop and search motorists in order to make arrests of
suspicious characters. He introduced the use of hotsheets— lists of
license numbers of stolen vehicles or of suspects, formed an elite gun
squad, and warned his officers that any one of them who showed “the
least mercy to a criminal” would be reprimanded.** Under Davis'
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 47-49.
^ Ibid., 44.
** LAPOBook, 68.
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283
direction, the number of arrests for vagrancy skyrocketed. ^ In effect, as
chief, he instituted the aggressive, law and order crime fighting operation
that he had practiced while a patrol officer. As Davis noted in the
1926/1927 departmental annual report, “In a determined attempt to
prevent as many crimes as possible, a policy of bringing in suspicious
characters has been carried on for some time.”" * ® Davis’ most notorious
tactic may have been his unilateral decision to prevent dust bowl migrants
from entering California in 1935. He sent 136 officers to the Califomia-
Nevada, Califomia-Oregon, and Califomia-Arizona borders with
instructions to turn back non-California residents. W hile this LAPD
“border patrol" lasted only two months, Davis continued to do the same
thing within Los Angeles County through 1937.^
It was not Davis’ support and encouragement of strong-arm
policing that led to his first ouster (or his second), but rather more
revelations of organized protection occurring within his ranks. While
citizens and newspaper columnists in Los Angeles spoke out against
graft, there was little mainstream public discussion about the questionable
manner in which arrests were made. This element of the paradigm left a
^ Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 245; Lawrence De Graaf,
“Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930-1950” (Ph.D. dissertation.
University of California, Los Angeles, 1962), 84.
LAPD Annual Report, 1926/1927.
De Graaf, “Negro Migration,” 84; Domanick, To Protect and to Serve,
60-63.
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284
lasting impression, as this is a significant component of the public’s
response to news of police incidents which are often declared aberrations
by the police department.
The Merchants and Manufacturers Association favored Davis’
policing strategies. Some law enforcement observers contend that the
role of police is to protect businesses and power elites from the union-
organized working class and the miscreant masses.^ Therefore, the third
explanation for the continued existence of seemingly uncontrolled police
malpractice might also lie in the department’s tradition o f elitism. In To
Protect and to Serve, Joe Domanick described the im plicit bargain
between city officials and leading corporatists with the enactment of laws
in 1909 which curtailed union organizing, and according to Domanick,
eliminated free speech in Los Angeles. Domanick reports that additional
"anti-union and anti-radical laws” including antipicketing ordinances and
criminalizing a failure to salute the flag were promoted by the downtown
business elites. Of course, the enforcement of these statutes would f c > e
the responsibility of the LAPD— the complicit keepers of the desired social
order. The labor conflict which instigated the bombing of the Los Angeles
Times in 1910 placed the department "unequivocally, passionately and
^ For additional information on this topic see Marring, Policing in a Class
Society: and Isidore Silver, ed.. The Crime Control Establishment (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1974); also see above Chapter 1.
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285
irrevocably in the business of spying, surveillance, and repression,”
Domanick writes.'*®
Bowron’s own recollection of the conflicts between labor and the
Merchants and Manufacturers Association reveals the expected role of
the LAPD. "The Los Angeles Police Department maintained a ‘Red
Squad’,” Bowron recalled, “the principle function of which was strike
breaking until after a change in city administration by the recall of
September, 1938.”“ Frank Donner also supports Bowron’s contention in
the book Protectors o f Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in
Urban A m e ric a .Donner argues that the Los Angeles Chamber of
Commerce and the Merchants and Manufacturers Association helped
fund the strike breaking activities of the Red Squad.“
Other elements of elitism relate to the Progressive movement in
general. Many Los Angeles municipal ordinances had to do with the
legislation of a moral code imposed upon the populace and enforced at
the behest of privileged WASPs by the police department.®® And
ideological warfare, often correlated to union-busting and strike-breaking.
Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 38-39; Woods, “The Progressives
and the Police,” 7, 245.
“ Fletcher Bowron notes, April 13, 1965, Bowron Collection.
Frank Donner, Protectors o f Privilege: Red Squads and Police
Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), 62.
Ibid., 59-60.
“ Domanick, To Protect and To Serve, 32-33.
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286
but also Independent of those activities as well, was often supported and
promoted by business leaders. Donner writes,
Not as a casual or optional matter, but as official routine,
the [Red Squad] broke up every demonstration of
organized communists and sim ilar groups, raided
communist halls every two weeks, confiscated literature,
broke up Depression-related protest gatherings, and
flexed its muscles on all occasions.^
Finally, a fourth explanation suggests that racial and ethnic
prejudices inherent in American culture were pivotal determinants of the
continuation of the LAPD’s cossacking behaviors that were directed at
Black residents.
“I went ahead to Central, turned south to Slauson,
doing a slow twenty-five, observing all the traffic rules,
stopping at the boulevard stops, putting out my hand
when I turned. At Slauson I turned toward Soto,
stopped at Soto for the red light.
“A police cruiser pulled up beside me. The cop on the
outside gave me a casual glance, saw that I was a
Negro, and came to attention. He leaned out the window
and said, Pull over to the curb, boy '
“. . . I knew then that they didn’t know I was wanted;
they’d just stopped me because I was a black boy in a
big car in a white neighborhood.”® ®
There is a present day colloquial expression, “Driving W hile
Black,” which encapsulates the experience that many Black motorists
have of being stopped by police officers for no reason other than their
skin color. Ironically, although this term has only been in broad usage in
^ Donner, Protectors o f Privilege, 60.
® ® Chester Himes, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 238-39.
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287
the 1990s, it has already been Illustrated here with examples drawn from
the 1940s.“ Yet there is an even earlier parallel for this contemporary
experience. In the antebellum years Black people in some areas, whether
free or enslaved, had to carry papers just in case the slave patrollers, also
known as “patty-rollers,” demanded that they state their business for
moving about freely on roads, especially after state-imposed curfews.®^
According to African American culture scholar Patricia Turner, the
pattyrollers were "a random band of poor white marauders” responsible
for monitoring slave traffic on the roads.* From slave patrols to policing,
some historians suggest that the control of Black bodies was a paramount
concern for newly established nineteenth century urban police forces.
* A common expression among those who have been stopped for Driving
W hile Black, the mainstream press has also paid attention to this
phenomenon. For example, see Tracey Maclin, “Can a Traffic Offense be
D. W. B. (Driving W hile Black)?” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1997;
“DWB: Driving W hile Black,” Time 15 June 1998, 35; Edward Boyer, “A
New Drive for Justice,” Los Angeles Times November 13, 1998; Elizabeth
Mehren, “Judge Cites Man’s Record of Driving W hile Black," Eases his
Sentence,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1998; Phil Pitchford,
“Traffic Stops: Is Race a Factor?” Riverside Press-Enterprise, March 7,
1999; Brent Staples, “Police Stops— Black Paranoia" Makes Sense,”
Riverside Press-Enterprise, May 5, 1999.
^ John Hope Franklin, and Albert Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A
History of African Americans, 7th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1994), 83;
William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and F^racdce: Its
Distinctive Features Shown by its Statues, Judicial Decisions, and Illustrative
Facts, orig. pub. American Anti-Slavery Society, 1853 (New York: Johnson
Reprint Corporation, 1968).
* Patricia Turner, I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African
American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 39.
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288
For example, in The Urban Frontier, Richard Wade contends that 'Towns
legislated very early to set up some police arrangement, but only those
with large slave populations maintained men on the street with any
degree of regularity."* In antebellum northern cities whites' fear of being
“overtaken” by Negroes easily slipped into hostility, and that hostility often
spilled over into violence.’ * Racial unrest and riots were not an
uncommon occurrence. And, although those early municipal police
departments were not without their own problems of disorganization and
lawlessness, it became their responsibility to impose order, or to control,
the growing free Black population.®’
One 20th century facet of this problem is illustrated by
departmental concerns about having Black and white officers in superior
and subordinate roles respectively. According to the California Eagle,
Chief Arthur Hohmann, in a January 1941 appearance before the 7th
District Civic League (city council district which encompasses the Central
Avenue district), “virtually admitted [his] inability to discipline white
policemen who balk at working under Negro superior officers.”® ^
* Wade, The Urt>an Frontier 88. Wade also discusses the municipal
police in cities of Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky. He contends that
the purpose of these new public departments "was less the security of the
inhabitants and their property than the control of slaves, and instructions
to captains and men on the beat continually emphasized that function."
® ° Ibid., 225.
® ’ Ibid., 287-89.
^ California Eagle, January 23, 1941. By creating an all Black command
(continued on next page)
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289
Hohmann implied a sort of empathy for those of his police officers who
were used to operating under rigid racial caste systems. He intoned that
LAPD officers were “coming ‘from all over the country" [and] objected to
working with Negroes.” The participants at the meeting criticized
Hohmann’s lack of leadership and violation of police department
discipline policies by creating a “Black command” in the Newton D ivision-
putting two Black lieutenants solely in charge of other Black officers on
one watch command— rather than take the steps to support and recognize
the Negro superior officers.®^
(Black lieutenants overseeing Black patrol officers on the midnight watch)
rather than allow the department's first Black lieutenants to supervise
white officers, the chief was essentially conceding to the prospective
Insubordination of white officers. See below.
^ Ibid. Chief Hohmann's stance nonetheless was not unlike that of his
predecessors, nor out of accordance with the views of the board of police
commissioners. Earlier, in 1923, although four Black men had passed the
promotional sergeant’s exam, then Chief James Davis had made it clear
that their promotions would never come to pass. Apparently, under
explicit directives from the police commission, Davis had said the LAPD
“administration would not support promotion of Negroes to administrative
positions on the force,” California Eagle, Novemljer 29, 1940. The four
Black officers who were placed on the promotional list were Jesse
Kimbrough, Homer Garrott, Charles Broady, and R. F. Green.
Kimbrough, who joined the force in 1916, ultimately advanced to a
detective lieutenant in Newton Division in 1925; Charles Broady joined
the force in 1914, was promoted to sergeant and served as acting
detective lieutenant at Newton Division in the 1930s; Homer Garrott
joined the department in 1913 and became acting detective captain in
Newton Division in 1936; and R. F. Green became a sergeant in the
juvenile unit at Newton Station in the early 1940s; Homer Broome, LAPD’s
Black History, 1886-1976 (Norwalk: CA: Stockton Trade Press, 1978),
27-28, 151.
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290
One other aspect of racist practices within the department was the
relegation of most Black officers to assignments in three of fifteen
divisions, racially separated patrol cars, and until 1955 only two Black
officers had been promoted to uniformed supervisors (sergeants
supervising the work of patrol officers in the field).®^ A mayor's committee
in March 1947 also substantiated the “well-known feeling that there is
racial discrimination practiced in the police department, and that Negroes
are not given a square deal' in their work, and that their abilities are not
recognized by appointment and rank.”® ® The committee also reported that
the Los Angeles Police Department had 3,193 sworn officers, 111 of
whom were Negroes and none who held a rank higher than lieutenant.
When the committee requested the total number of men in each rank on
the police force, the total length of time each Negro on the police force
had been in his present rank, and the total length of time each Negro
served in each rank since they joined the force, the police department
refused to oblige, saying the material was confidential. The committee
concluded that complaints of racial discrimination within the police
department were well founded.®® It also suggested that the LAPD
recognize how racial caste may impact their individual police officers and
^ Broome, LAPD’s Black History, 94-95.
® ® Report of the Special Committee on the Crime Situation, August 11,
1947, Bowron Collection.
® ® Ibid.
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291
that it should consistently train and retrain officers to help them become
aware of how their prejudices “make impossible the efficient and impartial
performance of the duties of his office.”® ^ There was no formal response
to this report from either Bowron or Horrall.
Why is it important to acknowledge the LAPD in a racialized
context? Simple, the legacy of the pattyrollers, the inherent suspicion of
the unregulated movement of Black people, and the belief that there is a
societally sanctioned white authority over black people— are all part of this
nation's complex social code and continues to be played out at all levels,
but perhaps most intensely in the criminal justice and law enforcement
functions of the country.
These four explanations for the consistency of incidents of police
malpractice reveal the complexity of the paradigm for policing Black
Angelenos. W hile the conjunction o f politics and police is filtered through
an examination of the relationships cultivated between the mayor, the
police commission, and the police department itself through the chief; an
understanding of intersection of race and police comes from reviewing the
corruption which accompanied concentrated vice activities, the legacy of
Chief James Davis’ systematic “tough policing” stance, the role of
business elites and reformers in determining the function of the police
Ibid.
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292
department, and the indelible nature of racism both within and outside of
the Los Angeles Police Department. These patterns were already
established by the time the Black migrants of the second and third waves
arrived in Los Angeles. Yet the migrants of the second wave increasingly
felt the sting of the continued cossacking even as the war against vice
ebbed. W hile Bowron and his chiefs waged war on the protection
rackets, the syndicate, and vice activity in Los Angeles, the residue of the
sort of police practices which accompanied the corrupt years did not raise
much concern. The elite had sanctioned brutality against union radicals
and the good government mayor had not pledged to crusade against
police malpractice. The Third Wave of Black migrants— that massive,
multitudinous, much-maligned group of Black southerners— and
successive generations were the groups who withstood both the
normalization of these police behaviors and the administrative and
mainstream public indifference to their application.
The arrival of the Third Wave catalyzed Black Angelenos into even
more activism and agitation against systemic racism: employment
discrimination, housing segregation, low wages, poor education.
Therefore, the Black population of Los Angeles, a smaller, more cohesive
community before the war (although clearly class stratified), came to be
viewed by establishment white civic and political leaders, as well as some
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293
residents, as a rabble-rousing mass of race-conscious unpatriotic
residents. There were more of them and a more potent m ix-southern
Negroes and southern whites bringing southern prejudices to a town
where the chauvinism of WASP elites set the standard for social
intercourse. Prior to the arrival of the Third Wave, the size of the Black
community could be regarded as either invisible (mainstream press rarely
covered the Black districts except in instances o f sensational crime or
social events) or visible (to trot out hand-picked leaders), but once the
massive influx came, the Black population was too difficult to ignore.
They became a social problem, social problems t>ecame social control
issues, and social control issues were the province of the LAPD. W ith the
LAPD's autonomy and sole responsibility for meting out punishment to its
officers who did not carry out police policy and strategy according to the
department’s standards, the city’s political leadership t^egged off on
oversight, saying its hands were tied by the city charter. Mayor Bowron
essentially said, I may not like it (Section 202 of city charter) but there is
nothing I can do.“ The postwar paradigm represents the cementing of
official political non-responsiveness to Black residents' concerns about
the unofficial misbehaviors of police officers.
Bowron statement. May 12, 1939, Bowron Collection.
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294
Among Black residents, another disturbing trend in the shifting
focus on law enforcement in the good government years was how the
politics of civic and police reform affected their support of the Newton
Street police station. The majority of the c it/s residents may have
agreed with Bowron's assessment that the LAPD was now to be rallied
around and fully supported. And many may have gauged Bowron's
leadership and measured the police department's performance by the
diminishing scandals gracing the pages o f the Los Angeles Times. But
residents of the Eastside, and the publishers and staff of the California
Eagle in particular, assessed the police department's stature and overall
performance with different criteria.
While Arthur Hohmann headed the LAPD from 1939 to 1941 the
picture painted by the California Eagle was that not all Los Angeles
citizens were yet convinced that the police department had transcended
public criticism. The LAPD's surmounting of its recent scandals was not
of paramount concern to the editors of the paper. The Eagle had a long-
established practice of covering local and national crime and law
enforcement issues as they pertained to its African American readership,
but it gave particular attention to Newton Street S tation-a new LAPD
division which opened on the Eastside in 1922. Not hesitant to publish
articles critical of the LAPD, the paper noted arrests, editorialized about
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295
the nature of police-community interaction, expounded on the political
nature of law enforcement In Los Angeles, and unflinchingly printed
articles alleging brutality or discourtesy and details of such incidents. The
paper also followed up on previously covered incidents, informing readers
of the adjudication of cases that went to court, and taking the moral high
ground against criminal behavior of Black residents. In addition, the
Eagle seemed intent about revealing the continuing political
gamesmanship that was ongoing within the LAPD and specifically at
Newton Street station.*
Another element of Eagle coverage was the regular trumpeting of
Black "firsts" achieved in all aspects of the social and professional lives of
Black Angelenos. There was an undeniable pride in the gains in the Los
Angeles Police Department. The paper announced the hiring of individual
officers as they joined the force. The paper also reported the promotions
of Black police officers as they became the first Black motorcycle officer,
detective, police woman, detective lieutenant, detective captain, sergeant,
and the like. A 1934 article lauded colored officers in the LAPD as highly
* The Eagle reported about instances of police misconduct in other
American cities as well. It documented incidents from as far away as
Baltimore— reporting for example, on the acquittal and reinstatement to
duty of two Baltimore police officers charged with murdering two Black
youth, and as nearby as Santa Monica, where it was reported that a
Santa Monica police officer had slain a young Black man, Cafifbmia Eagle,
October 11, March 23, 1939.
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296
creditable, with enviable records; 'The citizens at large as well as the
colored citizens should feel proud of the great record that these officers
are making on the metropolitan police force of this city
The Eagle's advocacy of the gains made by individual black police
officers did not preclude it from publishing penetrating analyses of the
police department in which they served or from reporting on the evident
distractions of racial bias which African American LAPD officers endured.
In 1940, the LAPD was divided into twelve geographic divisions (there are
eighteen today). The Newton Station, when it first opened at the comer of
Newton Street and Central Avenue, was located in the heart of the Negro
district. Its officers were responsible for the geographical area stretching
from 6th Street fifty blocks south to Slauson Avenue, and was bordered
on the west by Avalon Boulevard and San Pedro Street and on the east
by the Los Angeles River and Alameda Street. The eastern and western
boundaries flanked Central Avenue by a couple of blocks in either
direction. The Newton Division covered 5.7 square miles and served a
population o f approximately 75,000 residents when Bowron came into
office in 1938 and slightly more than 92,000 people at the close of the
war.^’ And it was the LAPD division to which most Black officers were
relegated. This practice of segregation within the LAPD was unstated but
"Colored Officers Credit to the City, " California Eagle, November 28,1934.
LAPD Annual Report, 1938, 1946.
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297
understood. In 1937, only thirty-four of the 2,386 (1.4 percent) sworn
personnel of the LAPD were Black. Twenty-four of the Black officers
were assigned to Newton Street which had a total of eighty-three police
officers.^ In other words, seventy percent of all of the LAPD’s Black
police officers worked out of one station house where approximately one
in three was Black. The Black residents of the Eastside came to feel a
bond with the Black officers of Newton Division and a certain "ownership"
of the station house itself. Nevertheless, the community's support of
Newton Division began to falter in the early years of the Bowron
administration.
The swift personnel changes made in the first months of the
Bowron administration were no doubt of great political import for Mayor
Bowron as well as for the LAPD. At the street level, the many
resignations of high-ranking officers reverberated in other ways. The
outpost, segregated Newton Station, despite its built-in bias, had served
an important function for the Black community. Rumblings about changes
in Newton surfaced in the Eagle in the spring of 1939, shortly after the
Bowron administration's initial purge of the headquarters brass. In her
weekly column, Bowron supporter Charlotte Bass quoted a comment
W aiter Gordon, a popular Eastside resident, had made at a recent
^ Ibid., 1936/1937; Broome, LAPD’s Black History, 53-56.
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298
NAACP meeting. He said, “I have been watching closely the trend of civic
affairs . . . interested primarily in the promised house cleaning. In all my
goings, I have yet to hear one suggestion that \AOuld t)enefit Negroes
Bass’ assessment was that all the gains regarding the advancements of
Black police officers— seven of the twenty-four Black officers at Newton
station had made it to the rank of sergeant or at>ove— previously reported
in the Eagle's pages looked like they might be usurped with the new
administration.
In articles and commentary, the Eagle ruminated on the losses
taking place at Newton Station and the "manner in which Negroes have
been almost totally ignored since the advent of civic reform."^^ Bass
particularly lamented the retirement of twenty-six year LAPD veteran
Homer Garrott who had risen from foot patrol to detective lieutenant to
acting captain of detectives and head of the Juvenile Bureau at Newton.
Garrott, however, did not survive the Bowron police commission’s purge.
He was not only passed over for promotion to captain at Newton Station,
but was instead demoted back to patrol— "his original status of beat-
pounder* during the wee hours of the mom
73
California Eagle, April 6, 1939.
Ibid., May 18,1939; see June 8,1939, February 1,15, 22,1940 for
additional editorials about Newton Street station,.
Ibid., May 18, 1939.
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299
in another 1939 article, the Eagle's dissatisfaction with the
"machinations" at Newton Station grew stronger. The article inferred that
the police administration was intentionally deranking some of Newton’s
senior Black officers in order to force their retirement, in addition to the
segregationist, forced assignments of Black officers to Newton, it was also
becoming apparent that opportunities for Black officers in the LAPD were
diminishing:
It has long been a recognized taboo in Los Angeles
official circles that Negroes must not be allowed to work
in the central, downtown offices of the police department.
However, under past administrations, colored citizens
slowly gained much needed employment recognition at
the local Newton St. Station. But today, we find that even
this has been snatched away. Young progressive
Negroes who formerly held responsible positions at the
station have been removed to the inglorious task of
"beat-pounding!”
Dissatisfaction with Newton Street Station on the
Eastside grows by leaps and bounds— and rightly so.^^
The culminating insult to Eastsiders’ affinity for the Newton Street
station was the promotion/demotion debacle of police officers Roscoe
Washington and Earl Broady. In November 1940, Washington, a fifteen-
year veteran, was promoted from acting detective lieutenant to lieutenant
In the Newton Division. At the same time Broady, an eleven-year veteran,
was also promoted— from acting sergeant in the Crime Prevention Division
Ibid., June 8,1939; see also Domanick, To Protect and to Serve. 139,167;
Broome, LAPD's Black History, 97.
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300
at police headquarters to a lieutenant at Newton Division— along with
Washington. They were both assigned to one watch command— a newly
established all black, overnight watch. According to Homer Broome, this
watch was created in order "to prevent Washington and Broady from
commanding white personnel."^ The folly of this assignment was soon
apparent, Broome contends-two lieutenants commanding one watch was
redundant at t>est. W hile Washington maintained his position, Broady
was demoted to sergeant six months later. Two days before his
probationary period was up— he learned of the demotion from the
newspaper. W hile Broome implies the demotion was inherently based on
race, the Eagle reported that Broady was the only Negro of twelve officers
demoted by the new chief of police, C. B. Horrall. The LAPD implied that
Broady and another demoted lieutenant were guilty of either “assorted
delinquencies or infractions of the rules.”^ Nevertheless, the Eagle
lamented the demotion of Broady, repeating claims that he was known as
one of the “bright boys” of the police force. Broady stayed with the force
and in 1943, along with sergeant A. J. Johnson, he became a field
supervisor— yet another first in the LAPD. Black sergeants previously had
^ Broome, LAPD's Black History, 98; see above, fn. # 62, # 63.
California Eagle, June 19, 1941.
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301
never had direct supervisory responsibilities in the field. Broady never
did make lieutenant again in his career.^
Bowron's highly touted, hand-picked selection of C. B Horrall to
replace the outgoing Hohmann did not counteract the police department's
steadily eroding reputation with black residents. As a matter of fact, it
seemed as if tensions between them and the police grew in concert with
the solidification of the mayor's support of the LAPD and partnership with
the new police chief. For the most part, however, Horrall’s honeymoon
period coincided with the ongoing European war. News of police
malpractice receded from the newspapers as the seeming inevitability of
the United States’ entrance into the war took over the headlines. The
Eagle’s pages became peppered with news of the war and one story, the
refusal of the m ilitary to enlist Black volunteers, became a rallying cry.
On December 11, 1941, the Eagle reported that one young Black man,
eager to volunteer after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was told,
“There is no provision for the recruiting of Negro soldiers and we will not
know of any until word arrives from W ashington.”* The irony of the U. S.
fight against Nazism did not escape many African Americans. As 1942
unfolded, there were a number of perceptive articles regarding the
Broome, LAPD’s Black History, 98; California Eagle, November 28, 1940,
June 19, 1941.
* California Eagle, December 11,1941.
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302
inherent contradictions of the U. S. engaging in a war to fight for freedom
for peoples in other parts of the world while African Americans could not
vote, served in segregated military units, faced the threat of extra-legal
violence every day, and lived in a society so infected with racial hatred
that even the American Red Cross kept segregated blood banks.
Regarding the blood banks, the Eagle reported that Representative
Rankin of Mississippi feared that “crackpots, communists, and parlor
pinks were trying to get the American Red Cross to take the race labels
off the blood bank, and thus ‘mongrelize the nation’. .. . They seem to
have some crackpot alien doctors advising them that it makes no
difference what race blood comes from.”“
But for Black Angelenos 1943 emerged as the calamitous year as a
growing Black population and a nervous white leadership fed into a string
of incidents which further made Black Angelenos question the LAPD's
motto of protecting and serving the public. On January 11, 1943 (just one
day before the mass arrests of 24 Mexican American youth in the Sleepy
Lagoon murder case). Mayor Bowron broke a long-held silence on the
subject of police brutality. Regarding a sensationalized jail-house treating,
resulting in the death of a prisoner in police custody, Bowron first
Ibid., October 2, December 18, 1941, January 8, 15, June 1, 18, July 9,
1942.
Ibid., July 2, 1942.
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303
appealed for fair-mindedness. His tactical assurance that there would be
“no white-washing, no soft-pedaling” in this case was effectively neutered
by a now familiar pattern of going on just a couple of sentences too long.
In his concluding statement about the incident, eerily prescient of Daryl
Gates’ remark that the 1991 beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers was
an aberration, Bowron stated with both absolution and blame:
I am not so naive as to feel that such a thing as police
brutality has not occurred in the past and it is only
natural to believe that there are isolated instances at the
present time. The entire police department must not be
brought into disrepute. Policemen should not be
expected to deal with the criminal element with kid
gloves. I feel they should be encouraged to be vigorous
but not brutal.^
On January 15, a Black male patron of the Orpheum Theater was
held down and beaten from behind by two LAPD officers. The man,
whose jaw was broken in the altercation, was ordered to appear in court
on charges of disorderly conduct.®^ A banner headline in the Eagle in
March read: “13-year old Boy Killed by Cops’ Bullet Through Eye.” The
teenager’s family sought a grand jury investigation into the shooting which
police officers contended occurred as they fired into the car as the joy
riding youth sped away.®®
® ® Fletcher Bowron statement, January 11,1943, Bowron Collection.
^ California Eagle, February 10, 1943.
® ^ Ibid., March 10, 1943.
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304
On May 23, 1943, less than two weeks prior to the Zoot Suit Riot,
the Eagle reported, “Police Slaying Incites Near Riot on East 52 PI.”
Attorney and NAACP president Thomas Griffith said, “There is no excuse
for a police officer to shoot an unarmed man four times when that man is
not even guilty of a felony.”* Defense worker Lenza Smith was shot by a
police officer who claimed that the unarmed man had threatened him.
Smith died the following afternoon. Three eyewitnesses were arrested on
charges of “inciting to riot.” One of them was harassed and beaten in the
face by an officer at the Newton Street station jail. The NAACP and
People’s Independent Church, in solidarity with CIO labor union activists,
called for an emergency mass meeting on Sunday, May 30.®^ Reverend
Clayton Russell of People's Church likened the city to a tinderbox;
We understand clearly that there is on foot in Los
Angeles a deliberate effort to goad the Negro people into
rioting and bloodshed. . . . W e are aware of the sinister
scheme behind the daily slurs against Negroes,
Mexicans and other m inorities in the metropolitan press
of Los Angeles. . . . We are not baffled by the reaction
of Los Angeles realty robbers, who restrict us into a
congested, over-crowded, rat-infested comer of this
magnificent city. It is their design to drive us into
bloodshed. .. . With our staunch friends in the labor
movement, our Mexican neighbors, with all fair-minded,
patriotic Americans, we call upon the constituted
authorities of Los Angeles and of the nation to protect us
against the rapacious brutality of the police force on the
Eastside.*
*lb id .. May 27, 1943.
Ibid., May 27, June 3, 10, July 1, 1943.
* Ibid., May 27, 1943.
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305
in early June 1943, the infamous Zoot Suit Riot occurred. June
was also the month when 12,000 black migrants arrived in Los Angeles
by car, foot, train, and bus— causing near panic at city hall. In the summer
of 1943, criticism of the LAPD was not confined to the pages of the Black-
owned press. A columnist in the Independent Rev/ew wrote that LAPD
officers were "too often with brutish instincts, and frequently obsessed
with the possession of a little brief authority" and imbued with the
insolence of office . . . .’”® ® Another young Black male, an eighteen-year-
old, was shot in the back by a LAPD officer in August.*’ The LAPD was
called to de-escalate a number of skirmishes between white and Black
residents throughout the latter part of 1943. On September 15, a brawl
was reported to have occurred between a group of white and Black men
at 5th and San Pedro Streets. The next day, two policemen investigating
a "racial disturbance” at North Broadway and College Street critically
wounded a Black man who had allegedly threatened the officer with a
knife.®’
On October 10, the owner of the Paramount Cafe, a Central
Avenue establishment, refused to serve some patrons what they had
W. H. Anderson, “Random Ramblings,” Independent Review, August
26, 1943, in Bowron Collection.
® ° California Eagle, August 26, 1943.
Gerald Nash, The American West Transformed: The Impact o f the
Second World IVar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 76.
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306
requested. When a melee ensued, the LAPD responded with “swift police
action.” A few days later, there was a small race hot at a dance hall on
West Jefferson Boulevard when three white soldiers became involved in a
fist fight with some Black patrons. The fight extended out of the dance
hall, into the streets, and onto passing street cars where a number of
Black participants reportedly robbed white passengers. A large
contingent of LAPD officers were called in, resulting in forty-two arrests.^
Also in October, a Baptist minister, attempting to get into an ambulance
with his wife who had been injured while exiting a streetcar, was verbally
abused by a Black officer who reportedly said, among other things, “You
preachers can run the church, but you can’t run the town.” That same
month, a deputy marshal serving eviction papers to a Black Los Angeles
resident was “somehow forced to shoot” the man. The LAPD was called
in to “quell the disturbance.”^
In light of these incidents in the fall of 1943 and a number of racial
skirmishes in Little Tokyo and on downtown streetcars, maybe it was time,
suggested Charlotte Bass, that Fletcher Bowron expand his four member
“race unity” committee to include members who were not Black. Bass led
” Ibid.
93
94
California Eagle, October 14, 1943.
Nash, The American West Transformed, 95.
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307
a delegation to Mayor Bowron's office demanding, among other things,
more public mass meetings to promote interracial unity. W aiter White,
the national executive secretary of the NAACP addressed a crowd of
more than 1,000 at Second Baptist Church on the race issue and the
Eagle ran editorials assessing the “somber and dangerous” connection
between the resurgence of KKK organizing and continued “Anti-Mexican,
Anti-Negro incitement of the Hearst Press.”* Then, the following month.
Deputy Mayor Orville Caldwell suggested that Black migration to Los
Angeles be halted. In that tense racial climate, it is no wonder that his
statements were considered to be so incendiary.
These instances clearly established a pattern and raised a red flag,
and yet, there was no empathetic and emphatic response to constituents'
concerns about police malpractice. Nor was there any official
acknowledgment that some LAPD officers were indiscnminately
employing certain sanctioned misbehaviors in Black communities in Los
Angeles. As late as December 1945 when Thomas Griffith of the NAACP
invited the mayor to a meeting to discuss police brutality, Bowron
responded with surprise, “to learn that there have been widespread
complaints of discourtesy and brutality on the part of the Los Angeles
* Ibid., 96; California Eagle, October 7, 14, 21, 1943.
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308
police.”^ W hat was a surprise for the mayor was not a surprise to any
resident of the Black districts of Los Angeles or to any regular reader of
the Cafifornia Eagle.
In June, 1946, Charlotte Bass brought one of those nagging acts of
malpractice, this one personal, directly to the attention of the mayor.
Bass and two companions had apparently been stopped by police officers
on some dubious pretext and were first ordered out of the car and
subsequently taken to a police station in order to determine whether or
not the car they were in (Bass' car) had been stolen. Bowron was
nonplused in response to Bass’ indignation at the way she and her
companions were treated. He would not acknowledge the pattern evident
in all the "allegations" of brutality and discourtesy that had graced the
pages of the Eagle or with those instances which had been particularly
brought to his attention. Since three major meetings about police brutality
had been called since Bowron had been in office, one in July 1940 and
one in the spring of 1943, and another in December 1945, it is clear he
knew of the brutality being visited upon Black Angelenos. Bowron would
not concede that Black residents in Los Angeles lived daily with a virulent
form of racism which complicated every single interaction they had with
Fletcher Bowron to Thomas Griffith, December 5, 1945, Bowron
Collection.
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309
white Americans, and perhaps especially and increasingly with white
police officers. Bowron's myopia was apparent in his response to Bass,
The officer involved gives assurance that he would
have acted in precisely the same manner regardless of
who was in the car, and there was no different treatment
in this case because of the fact that the occupants
happened to be members of a minority group. I take it
from your letter that the only thing that might have been
considered offensive and/or insulting was [the police
officer's] direction to the two men to ‘Get out of the car*
and the determination if they or either one them was
armed (‘frisked’ as you call it). If there was anything else
done or said that indicated a different treatment or
attitude than that accorded any other person under the
same or similar circumstances, I would like to hear from
you further.^
In all probability, based on Bowron's refusal to acknowledge and
address the weight of these concerns, he did not send a memo to the
police chief, nor is there any evidence of independent investigations.
Later that year, in his 1946 remarks on his two previous terms, however,
Bowron admitted that discourteous police officers did contribute to a
negative perception of the police department. “I wish some of them
[LAPD officers] were more courteous,” Bowron said. “I receive reports
from time to time from indignant citizens, and I am free to admit that there
is considerable room for improvement in this regard.”* Why had Bowron
not conveyed this sentiment to Charlotte Bass? Yet he did not actually
97
98
Fletcher Bowron to Charlotte Bass, July 1, 1946, Bowron Collection.
Fletcher Bowron, “Remarks on Eight Years in Office,” September 23,
1946, Bowron Collection.
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310
even consider such contemporary forms of discourtesy a valid criticism of
the police department. After all, it was not as bad as it used to be when
the “old ‘copper’ . . . felt that it was part of his job to be insulting to
everyone with whom he came in contact.”*
The problem of the race conflict in general and prejudiced police
officers in particular contributed to the development of two widely
distributed documents in 1946. Changing demographics in
neighborhoods in East Los Angeles, Watts, and the West Jefferson
district exacerbated racial tensions which ultimately resulted in the police
department having to play the role of peacekeepers. Yet those same
officers could not always be counted on to respond to such situations
objectively, given their own prejudices. The American Council on Race
Relations published and sold copies of “The Problem of Violence;
Observations on Race Conflict in Los Angeles” for twenty-five cents each.
The American Council on Race Relations also cooperated with the
California Department of Justice in the development of its publication, “A
Guide to Race Relations for Police Officers.”’*
In early January 1947, the Civil Rights Congress, a group of local
activists including representatives of such diverse organizations as labor
* Ibid.
’* Lloyd Fisher, “The Problem of Violence: Observations on Race Conflict
in Los Angeles” (Los Angeles: The American Council on Race Relations,
1946); McEntire, Police Training Bulletin.
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311
(with the California state representative of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations present), the NAACP, members of the clergy, and Charlotta
Bass, representing the Califomia Eagle, called on the police commission
to probe three particular cases of brutality, one of which was an in-
custody death under suspicious circumstances. The LAPD board of rights
absolved the officers involved of any blame, but the affidavit the Congress
forwarded to the police commission on behalf of the widow of the dead
man suggests that the hearing was neither impartial nor based on the
evidence.The Los Angeles County Conference on Human Relations
was also created that month. The county supervisors wanted this group
to address the tensions which were growing out of the return of Japanese
American fam ilies to their homes and the increase in the Negro
population.
Despite the unceasing complaints against police officers' field
practices and recognition by individuals and organizations that the racial
crisis was indeed real, Bowron continued to be feign ignorance of the
apparent distress of many of his constituents. Indeed, the mayor’s own
Special Committee on Crime, convened on April 17, 1947, was bothered
by the “great disparity” between community insistence that incivility and
California Eagle, January 9, 1947.
Testimony o f George Thomas, January 25, 1960, State of Califomia,
Civil Rights Commission hearings, Los Angeles, 56.
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312
gross brutality were a major problem and “administrative
pronouncements” that there was no such problem /”^ Bowron made such
a pronouncement in his rejoinder to a letter requesting that he address
the department’s “Gestapo-like tactics”. In his officious response to the
constituent’s letter, Bowron declared, “I am not aware that 'totalitarian
techniques of a Stalin or Hitler’ have been used in the city of Los Angeles
by the Los Angeles Police Department." He continued, “I have received
no previous complaining of ‘Gestapo action’ of our police department.
. .. Your letter is the first information that has reached me that anyone
has been ‘manhandled and mistreated’.”’" W ith such an obvious
obfuscation of the issue, the new paradigm was clearly evident at this
point.
Bowron’s no longer believable ignorance of the prevalence of
police brutality bordered on duplicity. This became apparent during an
October 1948 meeting with members of the Civil Rights Congress.’® ®
They had asked the mayor to convene this meeting in order to discuss
with him the recent case of yet another man, Herman Bums, who had died
from a beating he received while in police custody. Bums was taken into
Report of the Special Committee on the Crime Situation, August 11,
1947, Bowron Collection.
Fletcher Bowron to Keith Kanaga, December 5, 1947, Bowron
Collection.
Meeting in mayor’s office, transcript, October 8, 1948, Bowron
Collection.
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313
custody after a “routine traffic stop” at the comer of 45th Street and San
Pedro Avenue. To the mayor, Charlotta Bass implored,
We are here this aftemoon because we want to believe
that if the issue is put to you in plain English so that you
understand how we feel about [police brutality] you are
going to do something about it. Act speedily, act quickly,
before something happens.
The CIO representative called for action to correct what the group felt to
be provable
crimes against the citizens . .. brutality against workers
on the picket lines, discourtesy that is reported time and
time again. . . . We have a long history of that.... We
have appealed to Assistant Chief Reed in attempts to
alleviate the condition and we were . . . just plain kissed
o ff.’ °'^
Five more speakers recounted to Bowron their own personal experiences
of discourteous or brutal treatment by Los Angeles police officers. They
also shared stories with Bowron that others had shared with them. One
speaker said, “I drive under the [speed limit] because I am always afraid
that I’ll offend some officer.”’** In essence, they appealed to the mayor to
respond to his constituents' concerns regarding the police department
which was supposed to protect them, rather than terrorize them.
Once the speakers had their say, Bowron expressed his
disappointment that the meeting had degenerated into “a general
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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314
condemnation of the police department" rather than a meeting to ask the
mayor about his plans for addressing the Bums case. He continued to
fault the speakers for engaging in "general talk" with no specific facts. His
support of the department then went into overdrive: “The police
department is accused of this or that,” Bowron contended, “it is not the
police department, it Is individual policemen. And I have great faith in the
police department." Bowron did not offer any encouraging or sympathetic
words to the small group assembled in this office on that day. He
indicated that he would not intercede into the Bums case in any way until
the grand jury had made a decision and he was clearly not solicitous
about the other issues and accusations presented to him by the
representatives of the Civil Rights Congress. He dismissed the meeting
with cavalier reproachments about their general complaints.
Nevertheless, when Charlotta Bass suggested that the NAACP would
conduct its own investigation into Bum’s death to bring forth the facts
Bowron wanted to hear, he countered with the exasperated question,
“What right has any group of citizens to make definite findings?" He then
paradoxically concluded, “You have a right to make your own
investigation but I couldn't accept the findings," callously exposing his
own tacit approval of the brutal policies and actions of the LAPD.^°® One
Ibid.
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315
can only imagine the expressions of utter frustration nowon everyone’s
faces as the mayor told them he needed facts, but would not accept any
facts that they might bring forth. Although the following were not the last
words uttered at the meeting, they represent the plaintive expression that
consistently would be heard over the next forty years;
We are not angry at the Police Department as such; we
are not angry at the mayor of this city; we are angry
because certain crimes have been committed against
people of this city. We ask you to conduct an
investigation free of politics. We urge that Fletcher
Bowron, Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, know what is
going on.” °
Throughout the nineteen-forties, Bowron worked closely with chief
0. B. Horrall, to steer the city through the war. Together they presided
over a city being transformed through economic and industrial
development, demographic changes, war-time anxiety, Japanese-
American internment, race riots, housing shortages and health crises.
This transformation occurred while Los Angeles was recovering from a
period when unaccountability, racketeering, payola, and self-interest were
the dominant themes concerning reformers of city hall and the police
department. The years 1941-1949 marked the first time (and the longest
period of time up until that point) that one mayor and one police chief held
Ibid.
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316
office and worked together in efforts to sustain good government reform in
Los Angeles. Their actions set the standard for what would become the
acceptable, "the clean way," fo r a Los Angeles police chief and mayor to
work together to serve the law enforcement needs of the city. They
established some precedents: despite the achieved political autonomy of
the police department, the mayor could continue to influence the
department, outside of the public eye— through his appointments to the
police commission; and, periodically the mayor could express
unequivocal, unconditional support for the department while at the same
time regret his inability to have more of a say in the every day operations
of the department by invoking the city charter. The mayor essentially was
free to pick and choose the policing issues he wanted to contend with and
the manner in which he would do so. And the results of long-ignored
social issues— pent-up frustration, hostility, community organizing,
picketing, racial animus— became social control law enforcement issues
devoid of public policy.” ’ Therefore, that Mayor Fletcher Bowron did not
(either publicly or privately) take on the issues of police malpractice and
See Cyril D. Robinson, “The Mayor and the Police— the Political Role of
the Police in Society," in George Mosse, ed.. Police Forces in History
(Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1975) for an insightful analysis of
how political independence for the police department was key to the
ability of municipal administrations to decide which police issues they
wanted to address, among other things, giving them freedom to accept
praise for the good, while distancing themselves from the bad.
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317
brutality but instead placed them squarely in the hands of the police
department to deal with as it saw fit was a significant political inaction. By
carefully retreating from the matter, the mayor established a standard that
police malpractice was not an issue of public policy nor a matter of public
concern— a damning legacy for the LAPD, for the victims of police
malpractice, and for the city of Los Angeles.
The fact is that cases of discourtesy or brutality were a constant
thread throughout the Bowron Administration, not merely isolated
instances. In a speech to the August 1950 graduates of the police
academy, Bowron refers to citizens’ complaints against the police
department:
It has been somewhat surprising, but true, how many
intelligent citizens condemn the police department,
criticize the administration, speak ill of the city as a
whole for what a single man in uniform may have done.
In most instances it is his manner or his statements
rather than his acts, that provokes the citizens to ire.
Merely by reason of brusqueness or discourtesy on the
part of one man, your department has a critic, an enemy,
who goes about talking to others, sowing the seeds of
animosity towards many thousands of conscientious,
hardworking, faithful and good employees of a fine
department.’’^
While this might be read as a warning to the cadets not to become that
“one man,” with this statement, Bowron essentially sealed the new
Fletcher Bowron speech, August 31, 1950, Bowron Collection. See
above Chapter Five.
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318
paradigm of policing; a tacit recognition of a problem placed in an “us
versus them” fram ework-city hall now stood firmly and irrevocably behind
the thin blue line with the police department. The “aberration” or “one bad
apple” justification was thus approved. Citizen complaints against the
police department thereafter would face rigid scrutiny in order to be ruled
justified. Earlier that month, the police commission had just selected
William Parker to be chief of police guaranteeing the development of
LARD polices and practices within the paradigm of race, politics, and
police until at least the close of the 20th century.
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319
Epilogue: The Paradigm Perfected
Police behaviors— discourteous, denigrating, repressive, vio le nt-
police behaviors directed at a particular group of people, who were
overwhelmingly concentrated in particular residential districts have been
operant in the city of Los Angeles for most of the second half of this
century. Credit for this style of policing is often laid at the hands of
W illiam Parker, the police chief who came to personify the LAPD in the
postwar period. Chief Parker, however, only finessed a paradigm that
had been established during the years he rose through the ranks of the
police department. “In later years, Chief W illiam Parker was given credit
for cleaning up the Police Department,” Fletcher Bowron recalled. “The
fact was he did not do so. He was a good police officer, but he inherited a
good, well-organized, and efficient police force. The real work of cleaning
up the department was during the years that C. 8. Horrall was Chief of
Police.”^ Inheriting a department already well immersed in notions of
social control, during the 1930s, Chief James Davis secured the LAPD’s
reputation for aggressive policing. In the 1940s, C. B. Horrall attempted
to elevate the department's reputation by establishing, at last, a united
front with city hall. The Progressives’ decades-long effort to defeat the
protection rackets had at least resolved the political problems of the vice
’ Bowron recollection, January 1967, Bowron Collection.
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320
districts and returned good government to city hall in 1938. No one
however, could prevent the war, the racial combustion, or the third wave
of black migration.
W illiam Parker honed his skills as a police officer during this
critical era. He joined the LAPD in 1927 after having received a law
degree the previous year. In the mid-to late thirties, along with his
promotion to lieutenant, he became the protégé of Chief James Davis.
Parker, as Davis' adjutant, was instrumental in rewriting Section 202 of
the city charter which resulted in the 1934 and 1936 amendments giving
the LAPD control over its internal discipline and which, in 1937, extended
the same civil service protection of a “substantial property right” to the
police chief that the rest of the police force held. As lieutenant, Parker
instructed the police academy reform class of 1940. Not long thereafter,
with a promotion to captain, W illiam Parker headed the Internal Affairs
Division, whose power he had earlier written into the city charter. In sum,
Parker had, to an extent, engineered the structure of the department he
was appointed to head in 1950.^
^ LAPD Book, 80, 88; Joseph Gerald Woods, “The Progressives and the
Police; Urban Reform and the Professionalization of the Los Angeles
Police” (Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1973),
509; Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD's Century o f War
in the City o f Dreams (New York: Pocket Books, 1994), 85, 90, 92-95, 99,
118; Henry Bodkin oral recollection, transcript, 1968, Bowron Collection.
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321
Parker also benefited from the standard of accountability and
responsibility to the political leadership set by Fletcher Bowron. As
mayor, Bowron had worked closely with the police chief, clarified that his
position was to support the department, and fostered the notion that
neither criticism nor outside scrutiny of the department would be tolerated.
Parker had been with the police department long enough to understand
that the majority of city residents did indeed support the LAPD. He would,
like Bowron, count on this public perception of the department in order to
convince that same majority that the complaints of brutality and
malpractice brought against the police were not only unfounded, but that
those who levied the charges were actually attempting to subvert law and
order in Los Angeles. Bowron's rhetoric and reactions during the 1940s
solidified the police department's continued assumption of this stance.
The cloak of autonomy protected the LAPD and the mayor from having
the responsibility to respond to such charges.
Joe Domanick suggests that Parker "took James Davis' stop-and-
search and dragnet techniques, and Bob Shuler's and Harry Chandler’s
conception of a culturally limp, politically obedient city, a n d fu tit all
together, and gave it a name, proactive policing."^ In fact, once Parker
became chief, he took the policing paradigm created by Bowwon,
^ Domanick, To Protect and To Serve, 110.
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322
combined it with m ilitaristic professionalism and embedded the newly
forged independence of the Los Angeles Police Department into a highly
supported, although accountable only to itself, urban police department.
Parker's high expectations for the police department were apparent in his
swearing in statement when he declared that the LAPD would become
“the most respected police force in the U S.”^
Bowron had not supported Parker's promotion to chief in 1950.
Moreover, this appointment was hotly contested; Parker, the captain in
charge of the Internal Affairs Division, scored higher on the written exam,
but lower on the oral interview than chief of detectives Thad Brown.
Bowron preferred Brown but it was up to the police commission to select
any of the top three candidates and they ultimately chose Parker.® The
relationship between Parker and Bowron was thus cool from the
beginning, but Parker nonetheless enjoyed a fine honeymoon and
embarked on his program to reassert the LAPD's reputation, not just in
" Chief W illie W illiams and Sergeant Larry Domagalski, “The LAPD and
Community Policing (A Historic Perspective),' draft document (Evaluation
and Administration Section, Office of Operations, Los Angeles Police
Department, Los Angetes>, January t999.
® LAPD Book, 88; Domanick, To Protect and to Serve, 101-102; Henry G.
Bodkin, oral recollection, December 11, 1968, transcript, Bowron
Collection.
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323
Los Angeles, but nationwide as he proselytized atx)ut police
professionalism throughout the country during the 1950s.®
Bowron ran in his fourth reelection campaign in 1953. Five police
chiefs sat at the helm of the LAPD during his four administrations.^ When
he first assumed the mayoralty, Bowron’s reform agenda had essentially
pushed James Davis from the ch ie fs position in November 1938 yet
Bowron’s mayoralty would not survive the agenda of the new police chief
appointed in 1950. Parker became the first police chief in Los Angeles
history to survive a change in mayoral administration.® In an assertion of
his and the LAPD’s independence from Bowron and the mayor's office,
Parker supported candidate Norris Poulson in the 1953 mayoral
campaign which had become a referendum on the “creeping socialism” in
the city’s public housing projects and on the housing authority director,
Frank W ilkinson. Parker was a conservative in an unabashedly right-
wing department. His proclivity towards police intelligence gathering
® Domanick, to Protect and to Serve, 106-107; Frank Donner, Protectors
o f Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America
( Berkeley and- Los Angeles: University o f Califam ia Press, 1990% ,25t.
^ Bowron was elected to the mayor’s office in the 1938 recall against
Frank Snyder. He was reelected in 1941, 1945, and 1949. The 1953
contest was his fourth attempt at reelection. The five are James Davis,
Arthur Hohmann, C. B. HoraH, WrHiam Worton, and W illiam Parker.
® Jack Webb, The Badge ( Englewood Cliffs. NJ; Prentice-Hall), 1958.
Not only did W illiam Parker succeed Bowron’s mayoralty, he also stayed
in office beyond the two-term tenure (1953-1961) of Mayor Norris
Poulson, and died in 1966 while still serving as chief of police during the
second term of Mayor Sam Yorty.
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324
(tending toward extralegal practices) placed him on par with the nation’s
foremost law enforcement officer, J Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau
of Investigation. Three days before the 1953 mayoral election, Chief
Parker testified at a state legislative hearing that Fletcher Bowron had
previously tom up the dossiers that Parker had collected on W ilkinson
and that Bowron would not admit that, despite the information in the
dossiers, Frank Wilkinson was a “subversive.” Parker also stated that
Bowron would not fire W ilkinson based on the material contained in the
dossier.^ W hile there are other elements involved, Parker was clearly a
factor in the election and Bowron’s fifteen-year tenure as mayor ended
shortly after Parker’s fifteen-year tenure as police chief began.
Parker’s evident antagonism toward Bowron was no different from
earlier adversarial relationships between the mayor and the chief of
police. In previous years, however, the relationships were that way
because the two were clashing over issues of reform. The problems
between Parker and Bowron were different. W hile they both desired to
have a clean, professional police department in Los Angeles, they
clashed with each other ideologically and they each were concerned
about the power and privileges of their respective offices. In 1953, Parker
asserted a power associated with his position that would not have been
* Domanick, To Protect and To Serve, 159-60; Donner, Protectors o f
Privilege, 248-49.
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325
possible without the transformation in city politics and race relations and
police department internal affairs that had come before. In January 1960,
both Mayor Poulson and Chief Parker testified in Los Angeles at the
hearings of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. As the first
witness, Mayor Poulson said, “I think you will find that Los Angeles has an
excellent record in the treatment of minority groups and in the lack of
intergroup tension or friction.” In his testimony, Chief Parker stated,
“There is no segregation or integration problem in this community, in my
opinion, and I have been here since 1922.” But clearly closer to the mark
was the testimony of Black civic leader George Beavers, Jr.,
Our police department has a splendid written policy on
human relations, but in actual practice the policy is not
implemented. In training, officers are taught equality to
all citizens and equal enforcement of the law. However,
when they receive their work assignments, they observe
racial discrimination as follows; 1 ) an unwritten rule
against Negro and Caucasian officers working together;
2) waste of manpower, rather than mix the races; and
3) no Negro officers assigned to certain divisions. These
discriminatory practices have the effect of discouraging
Caucasian officers from having respect for their fellow
Negro officers, tend to lower the morale, and limit the
experience of the latter group. Many times, this attitude
of disrespect is reflected in the work of white officers in
the Negro communities. This in turn, results in
discourtesies, unnecessary unrest, and brutality.
U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Los Angeles Hearings, January 25,
26, 1960 (Washington D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office), 4, 25-26,
325.
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3 26
For that policing paradigm Beavers could have credited the Progressive
reform legacy, Fletcher Bowron, and the turbulent years of W orld W ar II.
The die had been cast.
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 327
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345
Modell, John. “The Japanese of Los Angeles; A Study in Growth and
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346
Williams, Dorothy Slade. “Ecology of Negro Communities in Los Angeles
County: 1940-1959." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern
California, 1961.
Woods, Joseph Gerald. “The Progressives and the Police: Urban Reform
and the Professionalization of the Los Angeles Police. Ph.D.
dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1973.
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A multidimensional approach to political information seeking and political participation

Asset Metadata

Creator Woods, Kristi Joy (author)

Core Title Be vigorous but not brutal: race, politics, and police in Los Angeles, 1937-1945

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program United States History

Degree Conferral Date 1999-12

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Black studies,history, United States,OAI-PMH Harvest,political science, general,sociology, criminology and penology

Language English

Advisor [illegible] (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-571994

Unique identifier UC11354398

Identifier 9987591.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-571994 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 9987591.pdf

Dmrecord 571994

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Woods, Kristi Joy

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA