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"It's important to remember what started it": conserving sites and stories of racial violence in Los Angeles, 1943-1992

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"It's important to remember what started it": conserving sites and stories of racial violence in Los Angeles, 1943-1992

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Content “It’s important to remember what started it”:
Conserving Sites and Stories of Racial Violence in Los Angeles, 1943-1992
By
Jackson Loop
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF HERITAGE CONSERVATION /
MASTER OF PLANNING
MAY 2020
Copyright 2020 Jackson Loop
i
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the members of my committee, Trudi Sandmeier, Dr. Alison Hirsch, and
Luis Hoyos, who patiently guided this project into what it is now. To my cohort at USC: it has been a true
honor to learn with and from you all, one that I hope continues well beyond graduation. To my mom,
dad, and brother: love and respect, always. I owe you three much more than I can ever give back.
We can do much better than we currently are at giving both credit and resources to the people
who keep things going. To the real heroes of research and universities: cleaning staffs and maintenance
workers; interns scanning theses and articles around the country for me to read without leaving my
desk; librarians and archivists who preserve and organize what we know; and organizations like the
Southern California Library, keeping those interested in revolution informed—I thank you all deeply and
as much as anyone I have listed above. Academics are truly nothing without your work. If you are
reading this and able to donate to an organization that helps you learn, please consider doing so.

ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................................... i
List of Tables ................................................................................................................................................ iii
List of Figures ............................................................................................................................................... iv
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1
Chapter One: Heritage, Difficult History, and Social Change ...................................................................... 4
Literature Review: Deconstructing Heritage and its Uses ............................................................... 5
Alternative Approaches: Grassroots Heritage and Social Change ................................................. 11
Leveraging Difficult History ............................................................................................................ 13
Chapter Two: The Zoot Suit Riots .............................................................................................................. 16
Causes and Context: Dissonance from the Outset ........................................................................ 17
Selected Sites ................................................................................................................................. 31
Recognizing Alternative Approaches ............................................................................................. 41
Chapter Three: The Black Panther Party in Los Angeles ........................................................................... 46
Contextualizing the Black Panthers ............................................................................................... 47
The Southern California Chapter and the “Undeclared War” on the Black Panther Party ........... 53
Selected Sites ................................................................................................................................. 67
Recognizing Alternative Approaches ............................................................................................. 74
Chapter Four: The 1992 Uprising ............................................................................................................... 84
Causes and Context ........................................................................................................................ 89
Selected Sites ................................................................................................................................. 99
Recognizing Alternative Approaches ........................................................................................... 109
Chapter Five: Analysis and Recommendations ....................................................................................... 115
Case Studies in Facing Difficult History ........................................................................................ 124
Recommendations ....................................................................................................................... 130
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 133
Bibliography.............................................................................................................................................. 135

iii
List of Tables
Table 5.1 Compiled Selected Sites ............................................................................................................ 117
Table 5.2 Alternative Heritage Approaches .............................................................................................. 122

iv
List of Figures
Figure 2.1 Man in Zoot Suit .................................................................................................................. 21
Figure 2.2 Illustration of Man in Zoot Suit ........................................................................................... 21
Figure 2.3 Mass Oath Taking, Sleepy Lagoon Trials ............................................................................. 25
Figure 2.4 Mass Arraignment, Sleepy Lagoon Trials ............................................................................ 26
Figure 2.5 Prisoners Released from Hall of Justice .............................................................................. 27
Figure 2.6 Map of Zoot Suit Riots Selected Sites ................................................................................. 31
Figure 2.7 Herald Examiner Building .................................................................................................... 32
Figure 2.8 Navy Armory Building ......................................................................................................... 34
Figure 2.9 Hall of Justice ...................................................................................................................... 37
Figure 2.10 Lincoln Heights Jail .............................................................................................................. 39
Figure 2.11 The Great Wall of Los Angeles, Zoot Suit Riot Panel .......................................................... 43
Figure 3.1 Black Panthers Surrendering After FBI/LAPD Raid .............................................................. 59
Figure 3.2 Damaged Headquarters at 4115 Central Avenue Following FBI/LAPD Raid ....................... 60
Figure 3.3 Protestors at City Hall ......................................................................................................... 61
Figure 3.4 Crowd of Protestors on Spring Street ................................................................................. 62
Figure 3.5 Protestors Headed to Hall of Justice ................................................................................... 63
Figure 3.6 Map of Black Panther Party Selected Sites ......................................................................... 67
Figure 3.7 Southern California Chapter Headquarters ........................................................................ 68
Figure 3.8 Campbell Hall, UCLA ............................................................................................................ 70
Figure 3.9 Carter-Huggins Memorial.................................................................................................... 71
Figure 3.10 Wilshire Federal Building .................................................................................................... 72
Figure 3.11 “Our Mighty Contribution” Mural ....................................................................................... 78
Figure 3.12 “To Protect and Serve” Mural ............................................................................................ 80
Figure 4.1 Protestors at Parker Center ................................................................................................ 86
Figure 4.2 Building Burned During Uprising ......................................................................................... 87
Figure 4.3 National Guard Soldiers Outside Grocery Store ................................................................. 88
Figure 4.4 Empire Liquor Store ............................................................................................................ 94
Figure 4.5 Map of 1992 Uprising Selected Sites .................................................................................. 99
Figure 4.6 Numero Uno, Former Empire Liquor Store ........................................................................ 100
Figure 4.7 Site of Rodney King Beating ............................................................................................... 102
Figure 4.8 Parker Center ..................................................................................................................... 104
v
Figure 4.9 Florence and Normandie ................................................................................................... 106
Figure 4.10 Lots Made Empty Through Arson at Vermont and Manchester ........................................ 108
Figure 5.1 Map of Historic-Cultural Monuments and Selected Sites .................................................. 116
Figure 5.2 National Memorial to Peace and Justice ........................................................................... 126
Figure 5.3 Topography of Terror Museum.......................................................................................... 128

vi
Abstract
1

Like every megacity, Los Angeles has histories of both triumph and shame. But these pasts are
not told equally. Lurking beneath empty lots, nondescript intersections, and even this city’s most stately
landmarks are stories of strife and oppression, largely invisible. This thesis inspects three moments of
racial conflict in Los Angeles: the Zoot Suit Riots (1943), the repression of the Southern California
Chapter of the Black Panther Party (1969), and the 1992 Uprising. Analyzing sites associated with these
events makes clear that conventional, government-based tools for preserving the past are poorly
designed to handle painful history, producing stories that are avoidant or reductive.
This past is told more fully, however, from the grassroots. Through community organizing,
performances, digital catalogues, alternative tours, vigils, and art, people are grappling with these
memories in real time. But the current legal approaches to preservation—which privilege tangible
buildings over intangible actions—are not equipped to recognize this work. This thesis argues that
calling attention to these practices could help heritage conservation break away from the role it has
played in upholding the narratives of society’s most powerful groups, both intentionally and
unintentionally.

1
The title quote is from Denise Harlins, aunt of Latasha Harlins, the fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by a Korean
shopkeeper in South Central Los Angeles in 1991. Her story and its relationship with the 1992 Uprising are
discussed in Chapter Four. Matt Hamilton and Angel Jennings, “At the Corner of Florence and Normandie, Marking
Causes of L.A. Riots: ‘It’s Important to Remember What Started It,’” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2017.
1
Introduction
This thesis starts from a simple assumption: there is no such thing as objective history, and thus,
no such thing as an objective heritage. The past and its interpretation are inherently political. We owe it
to ourselves to be forward about our biases and recognize that even our most mainstream historical
narratives are slanted. This thesis seeks to chip away at some of these stale stories by bringing difficult,
suppressed histories to the foreground.
The project begins by defining heritage and providing a brief literature review for deconstructing
this concept. Three case studies of racial strife in Los Angeles are then discussed: the Zoot Suit Riots
(1943), the repression of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party (1969), and the
1992 Uprising. One chapter is dedicated to each, generally following the same format: a discussion of
the events and their context, an analysis of significant sites, and an inspection of some alternative,
grassroots engagements with these pasts. By comparing mainstream heritage engagement with some
alternative approaches, it becomes clear that governments are woefully underequipped to tell these
stories. Designed to protect grand pieces of monumental architecture, both local and national
preservation policy fail to give these marginalized events the voice they need. Complex and painful pasts
confound tools like landmark designation, particularly when significant sites have already been
destroyed. While this issue is slowly improving, the narratives associated with these case studies still
remain underrepresented and at risk.
Their memory does persist, however, outside the purview of the government. The alternative
approaches analyzed here reveal that through things like political organizing, commemorative
gatherings, and the creation of public art, people continue to shape and maintain these pasts.
Independent of historic sites and professional preservationists, these social practices are particularly
adept at maintaining collective memory in the face of erasure. But these actions go unrecognized by
mainstream heritage approaches, which continue to privilege buildings over these forms of intangible
heritage. An analysis chapter discussing what role the government should play in protecting and
catalyzing these practices follows the three case studies. Bridging this gap could help heritage play a
more robust role in spurring social change.

Terminology and Identity
In the effort to shed light on these sites, identity is paramount, particularly because the
dynamics that caused much of this strife are alive and well. The sites discussed here mean something
2
different to every race and class. Gender is also no doubt a factor. As a white, cisgendered, heterosexual
man, it is important that I discuss how I plan to handle these stories of oppression.
Racial terminology changes rapidly and is best selected by the groups being discussed, to which I
do not belong. I am providing some background on my decisions here for clarity in advance: I use the
term “Mexican American” during my discussion of the Zoot Suit Riots even though many of those
discussed were not naturalized citizens. I believe this phrase implies that these people belonged in Los
Angeles, considering the land of Southern California was once theirs and that they maintained well
established communities there. I avoided the term “Mexican” because it implies foreignness and was
used by the press during this time as a means to otherize. Pachuco/a was also used during the events,
often to imply gang affiliation. Chicano/a/x was not yet in use, and I was uncomfortable with applying
retroactively, particularly as a white person. I also decided against Latino/a/x because, while useful as an
umbrella term, its inclusivity would downplay the fact that it was Mexican Americans in particular that
were targeted by sailors during the riot. In Chapters Three and Four, when discussing the Black Panther
Party and the 1992 Uprising, Latinx becomes useful for capturing the diverse group of Central and
Southern Americans involved.
While the Black Panther movement started as an African-American one, as Marxists, their
ultimate aspiration was international revolution. With this in mind, I use the term Black throughout this
project because it signifies unity between people of Black ancestry as a transnational group. I also
capitalize Black—another contentious decision—because capitalization is afforded to most other
nationalities, races, and cultures. If Black is uncapitalized in a quote, it was written as such originally.
Lastly, I use the phrase “of color” when the intersections between non-white people are important to
note. Otherwise, I try to remain as specific as possible.
Heritage conservation is a broader term than historic preservation, which handles buildings as
well as social practices. When I do use “historic preservation,” it describes heritage approaches focused
on architecture. To avoid repetition I sometimes use the word “preservation” as an umbrella term for all
heritage engagement, including both the preservation of buildings and less tangible forms of heritage. I
define these concepts and elaborate on this distinction in the first chapter.

Research Methodology
This thesis relies mostly on books, journal articles, and newspapers, as well as some government
documents like landmark designations, commission reports, and policy memos. Occasionally, I use some
ephemeral materials and alternative publications accessed through the Southern California Library, an
3
archive in South Los Angeles that collects material on social resistance. I unfortunately did not have the
capacity to support this research with oral history interviews. This project provides only a survey of
alternative heritage engagements, all of which deserve their own in-depth study. Further research on
these approaches would benefit from direct engagement with residents and activists, and the use of
more non-institutional source material.
I hope the angle I took makes clear I do not aim to speak for anyone other than myself. I also
sincerely hope that I have avoided voyeurism and the fetishization of violence, poverty, or the lived
experience of people of color. But that is not for me to decide. This is the push and pull of academic
work interested in social change. The idea that one day a researcher of color may tear this thesis to
shreds excites me. In the meantime, one less research project on a white aristocrat’s estate is a step in
the right direction.

4
Chapter One: Heritage, Difficult History, and Social Change

“…it’s not possible to be objective, and it’s not desirable if it were possible.”
— Howard Zinn
2

"To vilify heritage as biased is thus futile: bias is the main point of heritage."
— David Lowenthal
3

There are as many heritages as there are people. I say this not to avoid defining heritage, but to
highlight its vulnerability. This chapter argues that heritage plays a vital role in narrative building—
heritage sites and stories are essential to how we understand ourselves, each other, and the spaces we
occupy.
Because I discuss heritage here in the abstract, some examples used are distant from Los
Angeles. However, by defining heritage and breaking down some of its main frameworks and
approaches, I develop the lens with which I inspect the case studies of this project. I begin by providing
some different perspectives on what heritage is, followed by a literature review for background
knowledge on its use as either a tool of exclusion or social change.

Defining Heritage
Heritage has only been formally studied since the 1980s.
4
Since then, many authors have tried
to define the phenomenon and what it does to and for people. Because it rests between disciplines—
history, geography, anthropology, etc.—putting boundaries around this field in a way that is inclusive or
universal is difficult.
The most useful definition of heritage for this project is simply the selective use of the past for
present and future gain. Prominent heritage scholar J.E. Tunbridge elaborates: “The present selects an
inheritance from an imagined past for current use and decides what should be passed on to an imagined
future.”
5
The goal is to maintain a relationship with the past that suits present needs and helps secure
an understanding of self for future generations. Within this broad of a context, heritage can take many

2
Howard Zinn, Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian, (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1993), 11.
3
David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, (New York: Free Press,
1996), 122.
4
John Carman and Marie Louis Stig Sørensen, “Heritage Studies: An Outline,” in Heritage Studies: Methods and
Approaches, ed. John Carman, and Marie Louis Stig Sørensen (London: Routledge, 2009), 11–28.
5
J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict
(Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), 6.
5
forms, ranging from architectural relics to less tangible traditions like dance, music, or food. Oftentimes,
these significant pieces of a culture have a spatial component—a business, a city block, a region, or a
nation. In each of these contexts and combinations, people receive knowledge about their pasts that
helps build identity. In the words of David Lowenthal, one of the founding thinkers of heritage studies,
“To know what we were confirms what we are.”
6

Heritage plays a critical role in representing identities and holding space for their performance.
In their anthology on heritage and identity, editors Marta Anico and Elsa Peralta argue that “Through
heritage, people not only experience community; they simultaneously legitimize and consent to the
agendas of its builders and caretakers.”
7
This fact brings heritage from kitsch to something far more
significant. It also makes clear that to cut someone off from an important aspect of their past can inflict
great harm. This is explored in the following section.

Literature Review: Deconstructing Heritage and its Uses
Societies have always grappled with how best to remember and pass on history. This thesis is
one small piece that builds off of centuries of work on this topic. Tracing the roots of this effort would
require diving into theories of famous thinkers—Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin,
etc. But such an approach lies outside the scope of this project and would only bog its prose down with
a background not necessary for understanding its argument.
It is mandatory, however, to highlight some prominent scholars of heritage studies and urban
planning to criticize how these fields handle the painful history of these case studies. These namely
include David Lowenthal, Laurajane Smith, and Dolores Hayden. In The Past is a Foreign Country and
Possessed by the Past, Lowenthal formalized heritage studies, calling attention to its complexity and
problematic independence from the field of history. Years later, Smith deconstructed this concept
further in her book Uses of Heritage, criticizing how powerful people use heritage in a self-aggrandizing
way, suppressing many marginalized perspectives in the process. Lastly, through The Power of Place
Hayden permanently changed how history and urban planning interact. She beautifully articulated the
important role these fields play in creating a sense of belonging and empowerment in neighborhoods
and demanded that more work be done to enshrine underrepresented narratives in all communities.

6
David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 197.
7
Marta Anico and Elsa Peralta, eds., “Introduction,” in Heritage and Identity: Engagement and Demission in the
Contemporary World (London: Routledge, 2009), 1.
6
The remainder of this chapter pulls from these works and others to highlight the shortcomings of
mainstream heritage approaches and the role difficult history could play in improving them.

History, Heritage, and Power
There has been an outgrowth of interest in heritage conservation since the Second World War.
Many nations and cities throughout the world now have bureaucratized the protection of historic sites.
Entire industries have developed to answer questions regarding best practice for preserving aged
buildings. But, as the prolific geographer David Harvey points out in his article on the history of heritage,
these recent changes are built on foundations that run deep in human society.
Harvey traces the use of the past for present gain throughout history, with the practice typically
being associated with empires or influential institutions like the Catholic Church. The takeaway point of
his broad summary is that heritage is a “discursive construction with material consequences” that has
always been “interwoven with power dynamics.”
8
For both this project and any other that engages with
heritage, these two points are critical: a) heritage is a social construct, and b) it is controlled by powerful
people. The formalization of heritage management after the Second World War left these facts
unchanged.
Many have argued that in the post-war era, heritage became associated with the decline of
highly visible twentieth century imperialism. As countries in Western Europe lost their stature globally,
aristocratic classes became nostalgic for their days of grandeur. These groups, in the words of
geographer Dennis Hardy, valued “a pastiche version of history, articulated in everyday products ranging
from wallpaper designs to best-selling historical novels…”
9
States also became involved in this nostalgia.
The United Kingdom, for example, allocated new funds to its aristocratic country homes, and opened
them to visitors.
10
This gave post-war engagement with heritage a conservative character from the
onset. This was noted by Lowenthal, who criticized the concept’s role in nation building, its
commodification through the growth of globalization and tourism, and the role the wealthy play in
protecting their own narratives of grandeur while downplaying the damage their class did during their
centuries of oppressive power. He summarizes: “Heritage normally goes with privilege: elites usually
own it, control access to it, and ordain its public image.”
11

8
David Harvey, “The History of Heritage,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian
Graham and Peter Howard (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 19.
9
Dennis Hardy, “Historical Geography and Heritage Studies,” Area 20, no. 4 (1988): 334.
10
Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006), 115-127.
11
Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, 90.
7
The problem, however, is worse than one of elites and their self-image. Those that affect
heritage influence not only how we remember, but what. By preventing the preservation of certain sites
and stories, those with power can “suppress the identity of minority or less powerful groups.”
12
This
process can take many forms, from a passive lack of funding, to more malicious acts like the intentional
destruction of significant sites during wartime.
13

In nations throughout the world this sanitation gives the hegemonic culture “a more long-
standing or deeply historically rooted sense of belonging,” according to Jo Littler.
14
Conversely, these
mainstay histories usually exclude indigenous populations, enslaved people, and immigrants. For
decades, interpretive panels at Thomas Jefferson’s stately home of Monticello ignored the work of
enslaved Black people by claiming that meals simply “were served” and furniture “was built.”
15
In his
analysis of immigration and heritage in The Netherlands, Keld Buciek argues that the legacies of
“cultivators, workers, [and] ethnic groups” are “overlaid by . . . national narratives . . . to such a degree
that the legacy of 'the stranger' is more or less invisible."
16
Through heritage, the powerful can erase the
less powerful. This not only eliminates pieces from the story, but invalidates marginalized people in the
present.
This is particularly troubling because heritage is often seen as uncontentious and fixed. Certain
perspectives become deeply entrenched and challenging to criticize. Visitors to controversial sites may
even dismiss alternative interpretations as fake or taken out of context. In the anthology Slavery and
Public History, an article reported that a visitor stormed off a tour of Monticello when presented with
information about the Jefferson’s relationship with his enslaved “concubine,” Sally Hemings, asking
“We’re not going to fight the Civil War again, are we?”
17
And, when the National Park Service began

12
Sara McDowell, “Heritage, Memory and Identity,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity,
ed. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 45.
13
For more information on the relationship between memory, heritage, and war, see: Robert Bevan, The
Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).
14
Jo Littler, “Heritage and ‘Race,’” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian Graham
and Peter Howard (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 94.
15
Lois E. Horton, “Avoiding History: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Uncomfortable Public Conversation
on Slavery,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, ed. James Oliver Horton and Lois
E. Horton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 138.
16
Keld Buciek and Kristine Juul, “‘We Are Here, Yet We Are Not Here’: The Heritage of Excluded Groups,” in The
Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2008), 121.
17
I use concubine here for lack of a better term. I believe it implies a lack of consent, or sexual subservience.
Horton, “Avoiding History: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Uncomfortable Public Conversation on
Slavery,” 141.
8
pushing content related to slavery at Civil War battlegrounds in the 1990s, visitors submitted comments
like the following:
I do not believe the battlefield parks should become laboratories for sociological or ‘cultural’
discussion and education. Issues of political, cultural, or ideological interest should be left to
school classrooms…

It is not one of the functions of NPS [the National Park Service] to change history so that it is
politically correct. When we do that, we ape the Soviet government of the 1930s through the
1960s.
18

The problematic phrase “change history” is at the crux of this entire project, because it shows how
effective fixed approaches to heritage conservation are. Through exclusion, powerful interests
consistently leverage heritage to their advantage, and eventually their narrative becomes seen as fact,
rather than a single piece of a larger discourse. This makes turning the machine of heritage slow and
often uncomfortable.
Berthold Molden elaborates on this process in his article on the relationship between hegemony
and memory, writing that “The past as we know it from history is depicted as the only possible one
because this serves to justify the present order…”
19
Heritage sites play a critical role in this. The issue is
that, as Lowenthal showed in Possessed by the Past, these places are actually quite fraught:
It [heritage] is a jumbled, malleable amalgam ever reshaped by this or that partisan interest.
Flying in the face of known fact, it is opaque or perverse to those who do not share its faith.
Those who do share it, though, find heritage far more serviceable than the stubborn and
unpredictable past revealed by history.
20

Heritage is associated with institutions of stability—museums, historic houses, etc.—that feed us some
of our most treasured, “serviceable” narratives. But despite their appearance, the heritage consumed at
these places is dominated by subjectivity and exclusion.

The Flaws of Heritage Policy: Expertise and Exclusion
Power imbalances plague not only historic sites, but governments. Laurajane Smith unpacked
the role exclusion plays in heritage policy in her book, Uses of Heritage. Smith inspects fundamental

18
Dwight T. Pitcaithley, “‘A Cosmic Threat’: The National Park Service Addresses the Causes of the American Civil
War,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory, ed. James Oliver Horton and Lois E.
Horton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 175.
19
Berthold Molden, “Resistant Pasts versus Mnemonic Hegemony: On the Power Relations of Collective Memory,”
Memory Studies 9, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 125–42, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698015596014., 127.
20
Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, 147.
9
ideas about who designs the heritage management systems of the West, including its most prominent
face, UNESCO, which continually assigns Western ideals of monumentality and historical significance to
sites that could be assessed by different criteria.
21
Additionally, she criticizes the role that expertise
plays in the field, arguing that cumbersome state designation processes often exclude communities with
less political or intellectual capital.
22

The issue of historic “integrity” is a perfect example of how current heritage approaches
automatically dismiss many significant sites. The seven aspects of integrity used by the National Park
Service and emulated in many local historic preservation ordinances assess ideas like workmanship,
material, and association with history to vet a building’s ability to impart its connection with the past.
The problem is that not every community has the resources needed to maintain its historic sites in such
specific ways.
23
Private actors and governments frequently demolish buildings deemed lacking in
integrity even if they hold social significance in a community. Highway construction in post-war America
embodied this trend, in which transportation planners razed communities of color across the country in
the name of “progress.”
24
Smith does a good job of demonstrating that in contexts like these,
government preservation methods fail to protect many marginalized sites and the sense of place they
produce. This leaves certain stories and their potential for memory work completely unrecognized, or
worse, erased.
These problems affect both how sites are preserved and who preserves them. The United
States’ Secretary of the Interior requires that professional preservationists hold advanced degrees.
25

Conservationists consult with materials scientists, structural engineers, and professional architects to
maintain aged buildings. Designating a site as a landmark on any government register—often a
necessary step for obtaining tax breaks or preventing demolition—requires hours of research and the
navigation of unwieldy bureaucracies.
26
Thus, while heritage is vulnerable to manipulation and bias, the
amount of intellectual and political labor needed to preserve sites of significance should not be
ignored—it is a very real barrier to entry that can exclude many people and the places they cherish. The
end result is clear: professional standards that started as a well-intended measure to hold heritage to

21
UNESCO stands for United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Smith, 106-114.
22
Ibid., 107.
23
Max Page, Why Preservation Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 47-50.
24
Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014).
25
National Park Service, “Qualifications,” accessed July 14, 2019, https://www.nps.gov/history/local-
law/gis/html/quals.html.
26
Page, 47.
10
the more rigorous standards of professional history can divorce less privileged people from pasts they
deem theirs.
These systems allow heritage experts to assign narratives to groups, rather than hold space for
communities to organically produce their own relationship with the past. As noted by Smith, this
happens frequently to indigenous populations as part of a broader systemic pattern of erasure.
27
This
leaves little room for discourse in which heritage owners could work through and reformulate their
pasts—a process essential to collective memory, particularly in cases where history is painful. Once a
site is designated on a register, for example, its associated narrative is essentially frozen and stowed
somewhere out of direct view of the public. Statements on a building’s “character defining features” are
then used to maintain a particular moment in time, as opposed to letting the space continue to have a
symbiotic relationship with the people that find it significant.
28

This reliance on experts and professionals is especially troubling because heritage is much larger
than the management of buildings—this concept impacts people’s everyday lives and is an important
component of identity. Wallpaper, postage stamps, television shows, historical fiction novels—the list of
media that impart the past is endless. Raphael Samuel explored these pieces of what he calls “unofficial
knowledge” in his book, Theatres of Memory, arguing that the practices that surround them are an
essential aspect of socialization, and can be quite intellectually valid. But such ephemeral engagements
with the past are often ignored by professionals in heritage and history alike.
This process tends to push out not only questionable sources or unsubstantiated claims about
history, but also legitimate forms of underrepresented heritage. By generally relying on scholarly
sources as opposed to ephemera from small actors like oral histories and alternative publications,
heritage policies can block marginalized groups from legitimizing their pasts.
29
Additional questions
about how this dynamic interacts with political situations arise: What if the knowledge deemed
“unofficial” is not that of amateur collectors at flea markets, but of people associated with social
movements that the police made explicit efforts to crush? Does that make these stories and sites
unworthy of designation by default? If the process of designation in these cases does begin, might a
government sanitize narratives before they reach public record, or even deny the designation outright

27
Smith, 280-281.
28
Page, 33-40.
29
As mentioned in the introduction, this is a shortcoming in this thesis as well. In the final chapter I make
suggestions for further research and elaborate on the role participation and non-institutional sources should play
in future analyses of grassroots heritage. But for this project I mostly focus on acknowledging that these
approaches exist and how they are pushed to the margins of heritage management.
11
on political grounds? Moreover, is a designation from the government meaningful for sites associated
with events of anti-state violence or oppressive action from the police or military? I list these questions
here not only because they will be useful for inspecting later case studies, but to highlight how blunt the
tools of heritage conservation are. Ultimately, expertise in heritage can propagate a dangerous idea:
that politicians and government-backed experts, rather than communities associated with sites, should
have the final say on what is worthy of preservation efforts and incentives.
To clarify, this project is extremely critical of official designation while still recognizing its
usefulness. The case studies that follow are organized to call attention to how limiting designation can
be—both in terms of who the process involves, and how landmarks are framed and enshrined. While
this policy approach can be adjusted, it becomes clear in later chapters that entirely new tools are also
needed. Chapter Five offers recommendations, but, for now, it is most important to note that
exclusionary policies and the expertise they demand preserve only a small piece of the past: in 2010, the
National Park Service reported that just eight percent of the 86,000 listings on the National Register for
Historic Places were designations associated with women or people of color.
30
These same tools also
struggle to recognize difficult history. The result is a selective memory that avoids important stories of
oppression and discord.

Alternative Approaches: Grassroots Heritage and Social Change
In his book, How Societies Remember, Paul Connerton argues that the “struggle of citizens
against state-power is the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting.”
31
Fear of future unrest,
the delegitimization of a certain group, or denial of responsibility—there are many motives behind why
a government might turn a blind eye to a painful past. But there are alternative approaches that
maintain underrepresented narratives despite this avoidance.
32
By conducting memory work from the
grassroots, the alternative heritage engagements analyzed in later chapters circumnavigate the
problems of expertise and exclusion. In these contexts, heritage can help in fights for social and spatial
justice. If Lowenthal’s words are true, and heritage is “ever reshaped” by multiple partisan interests,

30
Stephanie Meeks, “A More Perfect Union: Towards a More Inclusive History, and a Preservation Movement That
Looks Like America,” National Trust for Historic Preservation, March 30, 2015, https://savingplaces.org/press-
center/media-resources/a-more-perfect-union-towards-a-more-inclusive-history-and-a-preservation-movement-
that-looks-like-america.
31
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15.
32
Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, 93.
12
calling attention to these methods could help move heritage away from its role in maintaining the status
quo.

“Heritage from Below” and Intangible Heritage
In each of these case studies, activists and everyday people conduct a form of “heritage from
below,” to borrow a phrase from heritage scholar Iain Robertson. Rather than relying on professional
experts or bureaucrats, people can preserve their own memory, a process which “offer[s] an alternative
construction of the past,” as a means to “celebrate and memorialize from within the lives and thoughts
of those otherwise hidden from history.”
33
Taking control of their own heritage allows marginalized
groups to maintain important narratives that are too politically charged or shameful for governments to
endorse.
34

Aside from their political baggage, another significant barrier to recognition for these
approaches is the issue of tangibility. Preservation policy throughout the United States is designed to
recognize and protect tangible heritage—namely, sites and buildings—over forms of intangible heritage,
like oral traditions, performances, etc. The grassroots approaches discussed here—which include
gatherings, public art, and digital heritage—are largely intangible. This means that even if the political
will did exist to recognize their work, there are no legal mechanisms with which to do so.
Although the United States’ approach to intangible heritage is particularly lacking, most of the
Western world has long privileged grand monuments over these practices. Heritage scholars and
policymakers alike are struggling with this issue in real time and debating what role governments should
play in safeguarding intangible heritage, if any.
35
Chapter Five’s analysis unpacks some of the politics
behind this dynamic. For now, it is only important to note the contrast between tangible and intangible
heritage, and how this binary interacts with power and preservation in the case studies discussed later.

Heritage and Dissonance
Another important concept for this thesis is dissonance. J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth first
coined the term “dissonant heritage” in 1997. The central argument of their book by the same name is

33
Iain Robertson, “Heritage from Below: Class, Social Protest, and Resistance,” in The Ashgate Research
Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 147.
34
More information on this form of “counter-heritage” and its interaction with the state can be found here:
Andrew Herscher, “Counter-Heritage and Violence,” Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History,
Theory, and Criticism 3, no. 2 (2006): 25.
35
See: Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa, eds., Safeguarding Intangible Heritage (London: Routledge, 2019).
13
that the past must be recognized as a resource in conflict.
36
Essentially, places and events mean
different things to different people. Friction can come along racial, political, economic, linguistic, or
religious lines. Recognizing and embracing these divisions is a critical first step for moving heritage from
a place of nostalgia and comfort to one of social action. Tunbridge and Ashworth argue that this process
is particularly important at sites of difficult history, where memory “can so dominate the heritage of
individuals or social and political groups, as to have profound effects upon their self-conscious
identity…”
37
When heritage is particularly divisive, like in the case studies inspected here, its
interpretation is both challenging and influential.
The following chapters make clear that government approaches to heritage conservation are
poorly equipped to handle disagreement, adding yet another motive for avoidance of these difficult
pasts. Landmark designations are often reductive and static, leaving little room for new interpretations
of sites. Additionally, on-site commemorations and interpretive materials struggle to capture the
different nuances and contexts to historic events. Each of the following three chapters shows how
complex and racially charged these narratives are. Capturing their intricacies is difficult, even in a
document as large as this thesis. This challenge leads to representations at historic sites that are
woefully incomplete, or even boosterish. Freed from constraining bureaucracies and political feasibility,
the intangible practices analyzed in later chapters confront this problem head on by embracing multiple
perspectives to tell richer, more discursive stories.

Leveraging Difficult History
The stories analyzed here are painful.
38
The goal is not to celebrate oppression, subjugation, or
violence, but to show that the fight for liberation is a continuous one. Powerful people benefit from
separating those interested in justice from the history of previous struggle. Drawing connections
between events of oppression and resistance demonstrates that progress is not linear, nor is it
guaranteed. When heritage is used to keep these connections alive and accessible, it becomes an
essential component in the fight for social change.
The goal is to become comfortable with discomfort. Michael Landzelius elaborates on the role
heritage should play in social healing: “the aim should surely be to achieve an unsettling experience, in
which immediate closure is forestalled and which would encourage us to engage in the creative act of

36
Tunbridge and Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage.
37
Ibid., 94.
38
An anthology that inspired parts of this thesis can be found here: William Logan and Keir Reeves, eds., Places of
Pain and Shame: Dealing with “Difficult Heritage” (London: Routledge, 2009).
14
thinking the social differently…”
39
Thus, through sites of pain and contention, people can inspect how
society works and the role injustice plays within it. In the words of Max Page, “We cannot heal, once and
for all, injuries of the past,” but it is the “duty of historic preservation to lead our fellow citizens to
historic buildings and landscapes that represent our very worst histories, or capture our most
fundamental disagreements and . . . hold us there with creativity and compassion, and make us think
again about who we are.”
40
It is the heritage of shameful pasts that can inspire this introspection.
There are many who want the uncomfortable histories explored here to fade. This is
unfortunately not possible, nor is it actually happening. This past is being preserved, but not in a way
that calls attention to the victims of these events. Dominant narratives glorify the perpetrators of
violence inspected in these case studies, namely the police and military. In Los Angeles, residents can
visit several museums dedicated to these institutions.
41
While the language at these interpretive sites
does not explicitly glorify oppression, the victims of their violence continue to struggle for recognition.
Political recognition may not feed or shelter people, but alternative heritage projects like this
thesis can have quite tangible effects on communities. The act of repatriating indigenous burial remains
in settler colonial nations, for instance, is a heritage-based action that lends political legitimacy to a
people historically ignored by their colonizers. This step, Laurajane Smith argues, can “aid the material
processes and strategies needed to remedy injustices.”
42
Organizing around a collective identity can
offer groups more direct control over their representation and even give footing to other social
movements.
In the community of Gårda, Sweden, years of bad social policy tarnished the image of a
neighborhood, painting it as derelict and crime-ridden. Local policymakers slated large swaths of the
neighborhood for demolition. Feras Hammami and Evren Uzer note that this tactic of defamation
followed by violent removal is common: “The stigmatisation of a place or territory has always been a
mechanism for creating social spaces with dark histories or narratives and to thereby enable new urban
development and displacements.”
43
Resistance groups in Gårda began curating an alternative narrative
for their community with slogans such as “have a coffee in Gårda” and “upgrade Gårda,” asking people

39
Michael Landzelius, “Commemorative Dis(Re)Membering: Erasing Heritage, Spatializing Disinheritance,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 2 (April 2003): 212, https://doi.org/10.1068/d286t.
40
Max Page, “Why We Need Bad Places,” Forum Journal 29, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 32-33.
41
Los Angeles Police Museum, American Military Museum, etc.
42
Smith, 296.
43
Feras Hammami and Evren Uzer, “Heritage and Resistance: Irregularities, Temporalities and Cumulative Impact,”
International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 5 (2018): 454.
15
to engage with the neighborhood in ways not depicted in the media.
44
Hammami and Uzer argue that
this process of self-reflection and display helped residents better understand how their neighborhood
related to “broader socio-political and historical contexts,” and created a greater “capacity to contest,
resist, and suggest.”
45
Ultimately, the government canceled the widespread demolitions, instead
preserving the neighborhood as a heritage site.
46
In today’s urban moment of housing crises, rising
rents, and rampant gentrification, the work in Gårda, in which a community managed its own
representation, could be useful elsewhere.
People have a right to shape their city and the heritage projected onto it.
47
By enshrining social
history into public landscapes, communities can create their own theatres of memory and belonging, as
opposed to simply accepting the dominant narrative. No one argued this as effectively as Dolores
Hayden in her seminal work, The Power of Place: “Creating public history within the urban landscape can
use the forms of the cultural landscape itself, as well as words and images, to harness the power of
places to connect the present and the past.” She recognized the role public history could play in calling
attention to marginalized groups, giving people “places to spend time that connect them to the possible
meanings of city life as a social bond.”
48

For Hayden, the aim is to hold space for everyone and welcome the friction that this process
entails. In this framework, challenging history is not ignored, but “recorded, pondered, and perhaps
debated.”
49
She continues: “Any historic place, once protected and interpreted, potentially has the
power to serve as a lookout for future generations who are trying to plan the future, having come to
terms with the past.”
50
The stories inspected here have the potential to do this work, but are currently
being held back. Historian Ranajit Guha concisely summarizes what lifting this barrier requires: “If the
small voice of history gets a hearing at all in some revised account […] it will do so only by interrupting
the telling in the dominant version, breaking up its storyline and making a mess of its plot.”
51
The
following chapters make just such a mess.

44
Ibid., 454.
45
Ibid., 459.
46
Ibid., 451.
47
Henri Lefebvre’s famed concept, “The Right to the City,” is detailed here: Henri Lefebvre, The Production of
Space, Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden Mass: Blackwell, 1974).
48
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, Mass: The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 1995), 246-247.
49
Ibid., 247.
50
Ibid., 247.
51
Ranajit Guha, “The Small Voice of History,” in Subaltern Studies IX: Writings on South Asian History and Society,
ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12.
16
Chapter Two: The Zoot Suit Riots
For nearly a week in June of 1943, white sailors attacked young Mexican American men in the
streets of Los Angeles. Sailors stripped their oversized zoot suits—a symbol of their refusal to assimilate
into white, wartime society—from their bodies, sometimes burning them. Well over one hundred
people were injured, and the police arrested just as many Mexican Americans, most of them victims
rather than perpetrators of violence.
Both contemporary source material and accounts created by researchers since recognize that
racial tension was running high in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Social changes brought on by the wartime
economy, visiting sailors on leave, the murder of a young Mexican American man, issues with juvenile
delinquency, and racial discrimination—different parties with varying motivations have come up with a
long list of causes for the Zoot Suit Riots. This chapter maintains that race was the main motive behind
the violence and analyzes historic sites associated with this painful history through such a lens.
This chapter demonstrates how this polarizing past has been reduced to something politically
palatable, largely absent from Los Angeles’ built environment. Mainstream heritage approaches have
glossed over sites associated with the Zoot Suit Riots by designating them for unrelated reasons or
allowing for their demolition. However, less tangible heritage practices from the grassroots keep this
past alive despite this avoidance.

The Riots
Violence began in earnest on June 3. There is still much debate about its beginnings. Carey
McWilliams, contemporary journalist and leftist advocate, argues that the riots began when the Alpine
Club, a group of young Mexican American men, met with police officers to discuss issues in their
community, namely how to preserve peace in their neighborhood. Afterwards, police officers dropped
the boys off, and they were assaulted by members of the military.
52
Other sources cite the origins as a
scuffle between sailors and Mexican American men in Chinatown over the verbal and sexual harassment
of a Mexican American woman.
53
Ultimately, the exact moment of the riot’s origins are not important
for this thesis. In the words of historian Mauricio Mazón: "It is a sad commentary, indeed, on the status
of American historiography, when the most important domestic upheaval of military personnel in the
history of World War II is reduced to the lame equation of ‘who started it first,’ and the even weaker

52
Carey McWilliams, “The Zoot-Suit Riots,” The New Republic, June 21, 1943, 818.
53
Melissa A. Esmacher, “The Riotous Home Front: Contested Racial Spaces in World War II Los Angeles, Detroit,
and Harlem” (Ph.D., University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2013), 93-94.
17
summation of moral culpability."
54
The finger pointing that exists in much of the scholarship on this topic
is a red herring that sidesteps the true issues at hand, which are race and the power dynamics between
the state, the military, and the governed.
The violence was mostly one sided. For five days, throngs of sailors moved throughout the
neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, downtown, and South Los Angeles with makeshift weapons, beating
and disrobing Black and Mexican American men wearing zoot suits, some as young as twelve years old.
55

They raided theatres and stopped streetcars in search of their victims, bloodying them and removing
their clothes in the street.
56
In one instance, a group of white sailors entered homes in East Los Angeles
to inflict damage.
57
To add insult to injury, one oppressive arm of the state aided the other when the
police arrested ninety-four Mexican Americans compared to only twenty servicemen.
58
Taxi cabs gave
free rides to sailors on their way to join the fracas.
59
Fighting also broke out in San Diego and San
Bernardino.
60
The violence did not end until the Navy begrudgingly forced sailors to remain on base.
61

Most of the mainstream press across the country heralded the sailors for their actions.

Causes and Context: Dissonance from the Outset
Migration, Race, and Discrimination
Even though most of the contemporary coverage of the riots avoided the topic of race
altogether, researchers have since made clear that this issue was central to the unrest. The economic
demands of America’s war machine caused widespread movement of goods and people both
domestically and internationally, exacerbating existing racial tensions in cities across the country. As
land annexed from Mexico in the nineteenth century, Southern California maintained a fraught, racially
charged past. Mexicans and Mexican Americans had played a centuries-long role in this narrative. The
bracero program, which brought large numbers of guest laborers to Southern California during World
War II to sustain the economy while many American men were abroad, was just one chapter of this

54
Mauricio Mazón, “Social Upheaval in World War II: ‘Zoot-Suiters’ and Servicemen in Los Angeles, 1943” (Ph.D.,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1976), 83.
55
Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 327.
56
Roger A. Bruns, Zoot Suit Riots (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2014), 46-48.
57
Edward Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles
Police Department, 1900-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 141.
58
Douglas Henry Daniels, “Los Angeles Zoot: Race ‘Riot,’ the Pachuco, and Black Music Culture,” The Journal of
African American History 87 (Winter 2002), 100.
59
Bruns, 46-48.
60
Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot-Suit and Style Warfare,” History Workshop 18 (1984): 81-83.
61
“City, Navy Clamp Lid on Zoot Suit Warfare,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1943.
18
story.
62
Despite the inextricable link between this culture and the region, these arrivals heightened
white xenophobic fears in Los Angeles, which affected both migrants and second-generation Mexican
Americans alike.
An article from historian Eduardo Obregón Pagán argues that the unequal distribution of the
city’s resources and the social costs of its expansion in the interwar era were directly related to the
outbreak of violence in June of 1943. The placement of a Naval Armory through eminent domain in the
Chavez Ravine, an historically Mexican American community, was one manifestation of such
discrimination.
63
This construction forced Mexican Americans to share space with sailors who moved
through their neighborhoods on their way downtown sometimes in numbers exceeding 50,000 per
weekend, an influx large enough to frustrate any community, racial tension aside.
64
This particular
development embodied the social anxiety produced by the war: it forced sailors from all over the
country to share space with local residents who were frustrated with the government and its treatment
of their neighborhoods. Small scuffles along racial lines became increasingly common between sailors
and residents.
65

Despite this obvious tension, the reliance of the American domestic wartime economy on
Mexican labor created pressure to minimize the role race played in the Zoot Suit Riots. As argued in a
dissertation from the University of Texas at Austin, the local dominant narrative “disregarded race as a
factor in the uprising and blamed minority communities for the violence, in order to align with the
federal government’s goal of maintaining an industrial alliance with Mexico.”
66
Newspapers, their
editorials, and press releases from the local government argued intensely that juvenile delinquency was
the primary cause of the unrest and almost never blamed the sailors for their actions.
67
This evidence of
differing interpretations from the onset on an issue as large as race is important, and must be
thoroughly understood before discussing any preservation efforts since the riots.

62
Matt García, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 174-178.
63
Eduardo Obregón Pagán, “Los Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot, 1943,” Social Science History 24, no. 1
(2000): 233-235.
64
Mazón, 73.
65
Pagán, 241.
66
Luis Alberto Alvarez, “The Power of the Zoot: Race, Community, and Resistance in American Youth Culture,
1940–1945” (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, 2001), 234.
67
“Not a Race Issue, Mayor Says,” New York Times, June 10, 1943.
19
Juvenile Delinquency
White Angelenos perceived men of color as gang members because of their presence on the
streets, their distinctive clothing, and the color of their skin. Researchers continue to debate the role
that juvenile delinquency might have played in the riots, but many academics agree that the issue was
overblown, particularly in Mexican American communities.
68
At any rate, it was the wartime economy
which left many young people without caretakers throughout much of the day. As Stuart Cosgrove
argues, “The rapid increase in military recruitment and the radical shift in the composition of the labour
force led in turn to changes in family life, particularly the erosion of parental control and authority. The
large scale and prolonged separation of millions of families precipitated an unprecedented increase in
the rate of juvenile crime and delinquency.”
69
With little access to resources of education and
recreation, a presence on the streets was inevitable for many young men regardless of race. But this did
not necessarily entail violence. Carey McWilliams would likely pushback against Cosgrove’s strong
language were he still alive, as he insisted that these groups were not gangs, so much as “boys clubs
without a clubhouse.”
70
Regardless of behavior, their presence on the streets allowed police to
demonize these groups as part of a larger “Mexican crime wave.”
Even though some researchers argue that crime in predominately Mexican American
neighborhoods was decreasing, other writers have no qualms with conceding that this was a period of
general frustration for communities of color. Even racist contemporaries like Los Angeles Police Captain
E. Duran Ayres, who argued that Mexicans were inherently violent because of certain “inborn
characteristics,” recognized Los Angeles as a city of discrimination. In a report to his colleagues at the
Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) “Foreign Relations Bureau” (interesting phrasing for a municipal
police agency) he conceded that Mexican Americans “are restricted in the main only to certain kinds of
labor, and that being the lowest paid.” He continued: “It must be admitted that they are discriminated
against and have been heretofore practically barred from learning trades . . . Discrimination and
segregation, as evidenced by public signs and rules, such as appear in certain restaurants, public
swimming plunges, public parks, theaters, and even in schools, cause resentment among Mexican
people.”
71
Police activity in ethnic enclaves did not help. Historian Eduardo Obregón Pagán described
respect for the police in working-class areas of Los Angeles as “alarmingly low,” with their authority

68
Terry Ann Knopf, “Race, Riots, and Reporting,” Journal of Black Studies 4, no. 3 (March 1974): 319.
69
Cosgrove, 79.
70
McWilliams, “The Zoot-Suit Riots,” 819.
71
Cited in: Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1968), 233.
20
being “openly challenged” by residents in the early 1940s.
72
In this climate, it took little cause for the
state to jump on a chance to conduct broad, racially motivated crackdowns in communities of color. A
prominent murder trial discussed later in this chapter provided just such an excuse.

The Zoot Suit and Wartime Hysteria
73

The oversized suit that gave the riot its namesake was much more than clothing. The draped
fabric coded identity and resistance for men of color in cities throughout the country. Stuart Cosgrove
describes the suit simply as “a refusal,” and “a spectacular reminder that the social order had failed to
contain their [referring generally to men of color] energy and difference.”
74
Oftentimes decorated with
gold chains and accents, shiny shoes, and a wide brimmed hat, the zoot suit was the direct opposite of
white, middle-class fashion (Figure 2.1 and 2.2). But when wartime rationing restricted the usage of
fabric, the zoot suit became hated as both an emblem of racial difference and anti-patriotism.
75
In a
moment when domestic unity was seen literally as a matter of national security, zoot suiting revealed
cracks in the system. Combining this fact with concerns about juvenile delinquency and rising crime
made zoot suiters deeply unsettling for much of white America.

72
Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, & Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 71.
73
Presses often dehumanized men of color by referring to them simply as “Zoot Suiters.” Reducing their identity to
their clothing enabled the racist press to demonize this demographic while skirting the issue of race. I use this
language sparingly here, only when the presence of the zoot suit is of central importance to my argument.
Otherwise, my prose handles people as people, not clothing.
74
Cosgrove, 78.
75
Alvarez, 15.
21

Figure 2.1: Man wearing zoot suit, 1942. Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
Figure 2.2: Illustration of man wearing zoot suit, 1951. Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

As with the supposed wave of Mexican American juvenile delinquency, there are always social
reasons for individual behavior. Luis Alberto Alvarez contends that “At a time when police brutality,
employment discrimination, poor housing, and lack of social services were common features of
everyday life, zoot suiting created a series of cultural engagements where minority youth voiced
displeasure with their poor life chances and manufactured ways to make their lives more livable.”
76

Clothing, then, becomes resistance in micro. In a world that conditions those outside of the mainstream
social order to believe they have little control over their lives and futures, a fashion statement can be a
form of subversion. Both in terms of fashion and politics, donning a zoot soot was a very bold act—one
that put pressure on social environments that were already strained from wartime production and labor
migration. It is telling that while white sailors did great physical harm during their assault, they killed no
one. But it was the suits they used to identify their targets and usually the suits that they destroyed.

76
Alvarez, 5.
22
Gender
Gender’s role in the Zoot Suit Riots is understudied. Women were both directly engaged in the
riots and victims of the cultures of toxic masculinity present on both sides. Multiple writers have argued
that sexual harassment and assault of both white wives visiting sailors and Mexican American women
living in Los Angeles led to the outbreak of violence. One altercation in particular over the harassment of
a Mexican American woman in Chinatown is often cited as the beginning of the riots, and left one sailor
unconscious with a broken jaw.
77
The sailors then retreated to the Armory and reemerged in large
numbers with makeshift weapons.
But despite how some recount this event, women were not just victims. Mexican American
women also wore zoot suits throughout the 1940s to push back against the same norms forced on them
as their male counterparts. Their rejection of American and Mexican ideals about womanhood as well as
patriotism shocked Angelenos. Elizabeth Escobedo argues that “By August 1942, the Los Angeleno
populace recognized young Mexican American women as an integral element of the gang menace
allegedly plaguing city streets.”
78
Throughout the riots themselves, local papers reported that these
women supported zoot suiters in their efforts against sailors through assault and petty theft.
79
Police
arrested several Mexican American women both during gang sweeps in 1942 and the violence of June
1943.
80

Differing ideals surrounding the performance of masculinity are also a root cause of this
outbreak of violence. The gaudy zoot suit versus the understated military uniforms, conscripted life
versus hangouts on street corners and in jazz clubs—the defiance of young men in zoot suits was an
attack on American manhood. Mauricio Mazón argues that the suit represented a freedom soldiers lost
in military life, and a deviant performance of masculinity that they detested as much as the men who
wore the outfit.
81
This may be a reach that downplays the role of race, but it does reveal how the
demands of conscription and wartime production challenged the white American hierarchy in regards to
both race and gender. Any form of heritage conservation work that engages with these events should
attempt to capture the breadth of this upheaval.

77
Esmacher, 93-94.
78
Elizabeth Escobedo, “The Pachuca Panic: Sexual and Cultural Battlegrounds in World War II Los Angeles,”
Western Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (July 1, 2007): 136.
79
“Girl ‘Zoot Suiters’ Gird to Join Gangland Battle, Pachucas Stand by Beaten Pachucos,” Los Angeles Evening
Herald, June 10, 1943.
80
Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, 77-78.
81
Mazón, 101.
23
The Press
At this time the vast majority of Los Angeles’ press was owned by a small group of private
actors, most famously, William Hearst. Hearst’s readership control in the 1930s was astounding: in Los
Angeles it rose to 60%, and in San Francisco, 62%. Even in the most established cities of the Midwest
and east coast—Chicago, Detroit, New York—his control ranged from 30 to 40%.
82
Many of these cities
also experienced some form of widespread racial violence in the summer of 1943. Academics and social
critics have argued repeatedly that conservative, incendiary publications like Hearst’s had a direct
impact on these violent outbursts.
83

Contemporary activist Carey McWilliams summarized how the derogatory treatment of Mexican
Americans in the press worked in the leftist publication The New Republic:
For more than a year now, the press (and particularly the Hearst press) has been building up
anti-Mexican sentiment in Los Angeles. Using the familiar Harlem anti-crime wave technique,
the press has headlined every case in which a Mexican has been arrested, featured photographs
of Mexicans dressed in zoot suits, checked back over criminal records to ‘prove’ that there has
been an increase in Mexican ‘crime,’ and constantly needled the police to make more
arrests….Mexican names and pictures of Mexicans had the effect of convincing the public that
all Mexicans were zoot suiters and all zoot suiters were criminals; ergo, all Mexicans were
criminals.
84

McWilliams’ perspective is only that of one man, but is easily corroborated by even a surface level
perusing of contemporary headlines. On June 7

the Los Angeles Times ran an article titled “Zoot Suiters
Learn Lesson in Fights with Servicemen,” describing the victims of the violence as “gamin dandies”
draped in a “garish costume that has become a hallmark of juvenile delinquency.”
85
According to the
writer, the sailors taught these men “a great moral lesson” through their violence. In the same paper, an
article described how challenging it was for police to identify which zoot suiters were in gangs when in
beach attire. “Some of them had long hair, which curled up at the back like a drake’s tail,” explained one
police captain.
86
The press lamented that the removal of the suit made gang members hard to identify—
unintentionally demonstrating how targeting Mexican Americans for gang activity was obviously based
on little more than their appearance.

82
Susan Marie Green, “‘Give It Your Best!’: The Zoot Suit Riots of 1943” (M.A., University of Minnesota, 1995), 75-
76.
83
For an article on this topic that uses the Zoot Suit Riots as a case study, see: Terry Ann Knopf, “Race, Riots, and
Reporting,” Journal of Black Studies 4, no. 3 (March 1974): 303–27.
84
McWilliams, “The Zoot-Suit Riots,” 819.
85
“Zoot Suiters Learn Lesson in Fights With Servicemen,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1943.
86
“Lifeguards Can’t Tell ‘Zoot Suit’ Bathers,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1943.
24
Throughout the attack, presses described the events as “Zoot Suit Warfare.”
87
On June 8, the Los
Angeles Daily News ran a particularly brazen headline: “Zoot-Suit Gangsters Plan War on Navy.”
88

Several articles argued that the young men of color were working with the Axis powers.
89
Papers as far
removed as The Washington Post ran headlines about people in zoot suits “prowling” the streets
“grotesquely clothed.”
90
In each case, the retaliations of Mexican Americans are discussed at length,
with descriptions of weapons used and the victims named. The activities of the sailors, however, are
minimized.
91
Researchers must turn to alternative publications, like the Black-run California Eagle to find
stories like Lewis Jackson’s, the twenty-three-year-old Black man whose eye was reportedly gouged out
by a group of sailors on June 7, or Joseph Nelson’s, a sixteen-year-old boy pulled from a streetcar,
beaten, and disrobed.
92
An open letter to Mayor Fletcher Bowron from the same publication calls for
solidarity between Black people and Mexican Americans, demanding the state provide real police
protection from the “white heat of lynch fury . . . whipped up by these newspapers.”
93

With the dominant press companies controlled by so few, these differing interpretations were
effectively suppressed. When the rioting began to die down after the Navy finally forced sailors to stay
on base, the Los Angeles City Council began studying the possibility of banning zoot suits, while the
mayor maintained that the issue was never racial.
94
The relationship between the media and social
behavior is of particular interest during times of upheaval. The press will be studied in each of the cases
in this project to demonstrate the role it often plays in eliminating marginalized voices from polarizing
histories.

Sleepy Lagoon and the Police
The causes detailed above find a common ground in the Sleepy Lagoon murder and trial from
1942-1944. The relationship between the LAPD and communities of color has always been hostile. A
murder at Sleepy Lagoon, a natural spring near what is now the City of Commerce, helped city officials

87
“Zoot Suit Warfare,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 11, 1943; “Zoot Suit Warfare Spreads to Pupils of Detroit
Area,” Evening Star, June 11, 1943; “City, Navy Clamp Lid on Zoot Suit Warfare,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1943.
88
“Zoot-Suit Gangsters Plan War on Navy,” Los Angeles Daily News, June 8, 1943.
89
“ILWU Lays Zoot Riots to Fascist Influences,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 11, 1943; “Watts Pastor Blames Riots
on Fifth Column,” Los Angeles Times, June 11, 1943.
90
“Zoot-Suiters Again on Prowl as Navy Holds Back Sailors,” The Washington Post, June 9, 1943.
91
Ibid.
92
“Mob Victim’s Eye Cut Out: Griffith Urges That Injured Sue City,” California Eagle, June 17, 1943; “Rioting Skirts
Negro Community,” California Eagle, June 10, 1943.
93
Charlotte Bass, “An Open Letter to Fletcher Bowron,” California Eagle, June 10, 1943.
94
“Not a Race Issue, Mayor Says,” New York Times, June 10, 1943.
25
and newspapers frame Mexican Americans as a dangerous group. The killing also indicated to some that
the LAPD was strained by conscription and unable to control crime.
A twenty-two year old Mexican American named José Díaz was beaten and stabbed at Sleepy
Lagoon the night of August 1, 1942.
95
He had recently volunteered to join the military. The reasons for
his murder are unclear. It appears that Díaz was caught up in a fight for vengeance between two groups,
neither of which he was directly involved with.
Unpacking this event in detail is not a central concern for this project. It is more important to
note how the state leveraged the murder to rationalize a crackdown involving several law enforcement
agencies on a supposed “Mexican crime wave.” Police brought in six hundred people for questioning in
the aftermath of the Sleepy Lagoon incident (Figure 2.3 and 2.4). All had Spanish surnames.
96
Several
testified that police beat them during their interrogation.
97

Figure 2.3: An “unusual mass oath-taking,” as described by the Herald Examiner, during the Sleepy Lagoon inquest
hearing, August 11, 1942. Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

95
Acuña, 207-208.
96
Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, 71-77.
97
McWilliams, North from Mexico, 229.
26

Figure 2.4: Mass arraignment of arrestees charged with various crimes relating to the Sleepy Lagoon murder, 1942.
Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

On January 13, 1943, an all-white jury convicted seventeen boys aged seventeen to twenty-one:
Henry Leyvas, José Ruíz, and Robert Telles of murder in the first degree; Manuel Delgado, John Matuz,
Jack Melendez, Angel Padilla, Ysmael Parra, Manuel Reyes, Bobby Thompson, Henry Ynostroza, and Gus
Zamora of murder in the second degree; and Andrew Acosta, Eugene Carpio, Victor Segobia, Benny
Alvarez, and Joe Valenzuela of assault. The trail had gained much attention, so to maintain the
appearance of wartime stability, those convicted of murder were sent to San Quinten Prison. The young
men charged in the first degree were sentenced to life—in the second degree, five years to life.
98

Alice McGrath and Carey McWilliams, both prominent activists in Los Angeles, immediately
formed the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee. The organization raised a fund to provide new counsel
and appeal the case. Two years later, by unanimous decision, the District Court of Appeals overturned
the decision for lack of evidence. McWilliams reported that “In its decision the court sustained all but
two of the contentions which our defense committee had raised, castigated the trial judge for his

98
Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, 89.
27
conduct of the trial, and scored the methods by which the prosecution had secured a conviction.”
99
The
boys were released ceremoniously at the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles’ Civic Center after wrongly losing
two years of their youth in San Quentin Prison (Figure 2.5).

Figure 2.5: Release of Henry Leyvas, 21, and Gus Zammora, 22, at the Hall of Justice, 1944. Herald Examiner
Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

This case and its aftermath were a solidifying moment for the Mexican American community in
Los Angeles, as well as for the white sailors that conducted their assault the following year. But the
event was truly part of a larger trend, as argued by Pagán: “The discourse on juvenile delinquency in
World War II Los Angeles, with its all too common references to the imagined biological proclivities of
racialized immigrants, reflected reawakened fears among white Californians of the rapidly expanding
population of racial minorities in Los Angeles.”
100
The hysteria exacerbated by the Sleepy Lagoon murder

99
McWilliams, North from Mexico, 231.
100
Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, 19.
28
encouraged white Americans not only to worry about law and order, but directly reassert their power
and control in society where they saw the police as unable to.

Dissonant Past, Conditioned Future
No list of causes for any historic event is truly complete, but this chapter detailed those above to
demonstrate how heritage engagements with the Zoot Suit Riots are lacking. The point is that there is
no defined narrative that captures this event’s causes in some objective fashion. Rather, interpretations
of these riots come from a large number of perspectives, some powerful and some marginalized, vying
for space and attention. This section summarizes these different tensions before analyzing sites
associated with the events to demonstrate that poor engagement with difficult history creates a
prevailing narrative that is narrow and myopic at the expense of marginalized people. Heritage plays a
pivotal role in this.

Dissonance in the Press
Newspapers cited thus far show how views on the riot and its causes varied widely. What each
paper decided to report and the angle it chose to take affected residents of Los Angeles in ways that are
difficult to track and understand. The press’ engagement with the events was so intense that even
contemporary publications like the California Eagle argued newspapers were directly responsible for the
outbreak of violence.
101
Other alternative publications also weighed in: prominent Black writer Chester
Himes published an essay comparing the riots to a lynching in the American South in the July issue of
The Crisis.
102

It should also be noted that yellow journalism was a national problem. Newspapers in San
Francisco, New York, and Washington all reported on the riots during the month of June. Even First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt drew criticism when she argued in a public statement that racial discrimination
caused the riots and that she “worried about the attitude toward Mexicans in California and the States
along the border.” To her, it was clear that the events of racial violence had “roots in things which
happened long before.”
103
The following day the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial under the title “Mrs.
Roosevelt Blindly Stirs Race Discord,” in which the writer claimed the First Lady’s statement was similar
to “the Communist party line propaganda, which has been desperately devoted to making a racial issue

101
“Rioting Skirts Negro Community,” California Eagle, June 10, 1943.
102
Chester B. Himes, “Zoot Riots Are Race Riots,” The Crisis, July 1943.
103
“First Lady Traces Zoot Riots to Discrimination,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1943.
29
of the juvenile gang trouble here.”
104
Reading through these periodicals makes clear to any researcher
how polarizing these events were.

Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee and the State
The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was the group of progressive activists who pooled
resources to overturn the conviction of the young men wrongly jailed for the murder of José Díaz.
During wartime, governments at all levels hoped to condition the American people to become one bloc
of unified domestic strength. Their opinions on affairs both domestic and abroad were a testament to
the strength of the nation’s war effort. Stepping outside of this paradigm like the Committee did was
quite bold, particularly during war.
The effort was not limited to the trial itself—the Committee released publications during its
legal advocacy demonstrating the connections between the press, the police, and the demonization of
the Mexican American community as a whole. Their language was quite clear: “These boys are innocent.
The court records of the trial contain no evidence to prove them guilty . . . They were found guilty
because they are Mexicans. Anti-Mexican prejudice and hysteria prevailed in the court room, in the
press, and most shockingly in an official report submitted to the Grand Jury by Ed Duran Ayres of the
Sheriff’s Office of Los Angeles.”
105
To draw these connections at a time when even the First Lady was
lambasted for simply suggesting that discrimination played a role in the Los Angeles’ racial strife is
laudable and highlights how extreme both sides of this issue had become.

Dissonance Between California and Municipal Governments
One unexpected place of disagreement was between the state government of California and the
municipality of Los Angeles. Before the sailors’ violence completely died down, the event gained the
attention of the nation and its allies, particularly Mexico. Recognizing that domestic discord and the
explicit targeting of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles could harm the federal government’s relationship
with a critical economic ally and labor source, officials exerted pressure on California and Los Angeles to
study the events.
106
On June 10
th
, 1943, California Governor Earl Warren assembled a citizens’
committee to do just that.
107
That very same day, Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron stated in the New

104
“Mrs. Roosevelt Blindly Stirs Race Discord,” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1943.
105
Pamphlet, Alice Greenfield Papers, Box 2, Folder 2, Southern California Library.
106
For a source that discusses this dynamic in depth, see: Elvia Rodríguez, “‘Por La Guerra de Marinos y Pachucos’:
The Zoot Suit Riots in the Spanish-Language Press” (California State University, Fresno, 2008).
107
“Warren Orders Zoot Quiz,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1943.
30
York Times that the riots were purely a local issue related to the “activities of youthful gangs,” and that
there was “no question of racial discrimination involved.”
108

Warren’s committee disagreed: “Most of the persons mistreated during the recent incidents in
Los Angeles were either persons of Mexican descent or Negroes. In undertaking to deal with the cause
of these outbreaks, the existence of race prejudice cannot be ignored.”
109
In discussing the framing of
zoot suiters as criminals in the years leading up to the violence, the report argues that “It is a mistake in
fact and an aggravating practice to link the phrase “zoot suit” with the report of crime.”
110
Its conclusion
recommended law enforcement training for better sensitivity toward people of color and juveniles,
more robust recreational facilities in communities of color, increased community control, and more
public housing.
111
The local government made none of these changes. Future heritage engagements
with the Zoot Suit Riots could be useful for highlighting how these issues remain active today.

108
“Not a Race Issue, Mayor Says,” New York Times, June 10, 1943.
109
Joseph McGucken, Willsie Martin, and Karl Holton, “Report of the Citizens Committee,” in Readings on La Raza,
the Twentieth Century, ed. Feliciano Rivera and Matt Meier (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 141.
110
Ibid., 140.
111
Ibid., 142-144.
31
Selected Sites
Figure 2.6: Map of Zoot Suit Riots selected sites. Map by author.

White violence was a common response in the 1940s to the migration of people of color in
Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles.
112
These stories undercut what is one of the most salient cultural
moments in the American ethos: a unified nation of people from all walks of life coming together to
crush a form of evil that the world had never seen before. Stories like Sleepy Lagoon, the Zoot Suit Riots,
and the discord detailed above demonstrate that there are massive cracks in this narrative, most of
which continue to be avoided.

112
A useful dissertation on this phenomenon nationwide can be found here: Melissa A. Esmacher, “The Riotous
Home Front: Contested Racial Spaces in World War II Los Angeles, Detroit, and Harlem” (Ph.D., University of
Hawai’i at Manoa, 2013).
32
This chapter covered the causes of and disparate responses to these events to illustrate that
there is contention over what happened in the summer of 1943. This is critical to understand and relates
back to the discussions of how heritage is constructed in Chapter One of this project. When a polarizing
event occurs, there are an infinite number of interpretations. But, once this same event becomes
distant, heritage professionals and government officials enshrine one narrative in books and at heritage
sites which appears fixed and immutable.
Prominent sites associated with the Zoot Suit Riots are analyzed below to demonstrate that this
context of racial tension and violence is largely invisible in Los Angeles’ built environment. There is
virtually no commemoration for those that viewed these events from a deviant angle and little criticism
of the institutions or people that inflicted violence both in this city and throughout the country that
summer. Designations for related sites focus on architectural significance, leaving their association with
this history unnoted. In short, due to political convenience and inadequate preservation approaches,
mainstream heritage engages little with this past.

Herald Examiner Building (146 W. 11
th
Street)

Figure 2.7: Herald Examiner Building, 1970. Photo by William Reagh. William Reagh Collection, Los Angeles Public
Library.

33
The building associated with Hearst’s Herald Examiner is an excellent starting point despite its
oblique association with the riot itself. The Spanish Colonial Revival building from famed Julia Morgan
was constructed for Hearst in downtown Los Angeles in 1914.
113
City Council designated the site in 1977
for its exemplary architecture.
114
The paper published its last edition in 1989, leaving the site a vacant
filming location.
115
Arizona State University recently purchased the structure and is now conducting a
rehabilitation.
116

With its stately massing, it is easy for passersby to associate the site with its important architect
and this famous publication. The monumentality of the building acts as a testament to the expansion of
Los Angeles and its civic infrastructure during the early twentieth century, which included the free press,
an essential component of a democratic society. But this paper was monopolistic and openly
xenophobic, particularly during wartime. Even if a designation were inclusive in its prose, the average
pedestrian would have no idea that William Hearst used this place for nefarious purposes, because they
are not legible in the historic fabric of the building. How do preservationists criticize an institution we
have frozen in time? How can we reuse and call attention to an architectural artifact while recognizing
that the site was used to do harm? These questions will be useful for inspecting all the extant buildings
discussed throughout this thesis.

113
Roger Vincent, “République Owners Opening Restaurant in Downtown L.A.’s Historic Herald Examiner Building,”
Los Angeles Times, December 7, 2017.
114
Los Angeles Department of City Planning, “Historic-Cultural Monuments (HCM) Listing: City Declared
Monuments” (City of Los Angeles, 2007).
115
Judy Pasternak, “Herald Examiner Will Halt Publishing Today,” Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1989.
116
Roger Vincent, “Arizona State to Expand into Downtown L.A. at Historic Herald Examiner Building,” Los Angeles
Times, August 21, 2018.
34
Navy Armory (1700 Stadium Way)

Figure 2.8: Navy Armory Building. Photo by author.

Preservation approaches to the Navy Armory located in the Chavez Ravine suffer from a similar
problem. Constructed in 1940, the Armory was part of a series of civic expansion projects built in the
twentieth century that typically displaced or impinged on communities of color. In the words of
Eduardo Obregón Pagán, planners typically “inscribed the growth of public space not over unused or
unpopulated lands . . . Much of the reconstruction of Los Angeles would pave over neighborhoods long
occupied by predominately Mexican American families.”
117
Between 1939 and 1942, Union Station
leveled Los Angeles’ Old Chinatown, the Navy Armory was placed in the Mexican American Chavez
Ravine, and the internment of Japanese Americans forcibly removed an entire population from the
neighborhood of Little Tokyo in downtown.

117
Pagán, “Los Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot, 1943,” 232.
35
In the Chavez Ravine, the Navy Armory “stood out like an island amid a sea of aging homes.”
118

The construction of the Armory on land acquired through eminent domain reformulated the social
environment for the Mexican American, African American, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods that lined
the downtown district.
119
Pagán describes the building as an “outpost standing watch over the
surrounding enclaves of local population,” which released thousands of sailors on leave into the
neighborhood each week.
120
Between the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1943, incidents of violence
between sailors and members of the local enclaves went from an average of once a week to at least
once daily.
121

It was from this Armory that the sailors exited, hiding their makeshift weapons, riding in cabs
that welcomed their cause with free fares toward downtown, as well as East and South Los Angeles. Its
designation form lauds the building’s understated civic classicism.
122
The only mention the document
makes of the Zoot Suit Riots is in citing one local historian who claims the police used the building as a
headquarters during the attacks.
123
Its role in Los Angeles’ long history of segregation, displacement, and
racial strife is absent. Even someone with an interest in local history would have to dedicate substantial
time to uncover this site’s association with these painful memories.
Once heritage and the state coalesce, there is little room for discussing this site’s history and its
layers of conflict. Not only does its three-hundred-page designation sit in an office full of files far away
from public view, the building itself does not share this rich story. It now functions as a training center
for the City of Los Angeles’ firefighters. While repurposing buildings is a core tenant of preservation,
how could this space also be activated to highlight its past as an epicenter of racial violence in Los
Angeles?

Sleepy Lagoon (5400 Lindbergh Lane, City of Bell)
The location of the original Sleepy Lagoon is disputed and now extremely difficult to locate. A
map from Pagán’s book on the murder and its relation to Zoot Suit Riots places it in the City of Bell, just
south of Commerce in a heavily industrialized area east of the 710 Freeway.
124
This area once included

118
Ibid., 233.
119
Ibid., 232.
120
Ibid., 233. Mazón, 73.
121
Pagán, “Los Angeles Geopolitics and the Zoot Suit Riot, 1943,” 241.
122
“Historic-Cultural Monument Nomination Form: Naval and Marine Corps Reserve Center” (City of Los Angeles,
July 29, 2015), 3.
123
Ibid., 202.
124
Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, 60.
36
some residential and agricultural uses, as well as a reservoir. It is important to note that part of the
reason Mexican Americans congregated here was because they were usually barred from formal
recreational areas to relax and swim.
125

Today, the site is unrecognizable. There is no form of designation and nothing visible in the area
that discusses the murders, their mistrial, or the riots that followed. It is generally surrounded by food
packing plants and light industrial uses. This represents only a slight change from the other historic
industrial uses, also revealing a long chain of environmental racism that took place here.
126
In a painfully
ironic twist, much of the land on and around Sleepy Lagoon is now occupied by a Navy Operational
Support Center and an Army recruitment center. Thus, the same perpetrator that caused this
demographic so much pain decades ago has physically blotted out this uncomfortable piece of heritage.
It is very telling that an event once seen as a rationale for police sweeps against a Mexican crime
wave has now literally vanished from the map. This is an embarrassing location for the government
which wrongly and violently interrogated six hundred people on the basis of race before sending
seventeen to prison on little evidence. A site that once meant so much to terrified white Angelenos fell
out of importance once it was no longer needed.
Heritage work at a site damaged beyond recognition is challenging to imagine. How can one
commemorate an event which took place at a lagoon when it is now a sea of concrete with restricted
access? Who would be able to view it? Moreover, would it not be more insulting than helpful to engage
with this history on a site that now belongs to the main perpetrator of violence during the Zoot Suit
Riots, the United States Navy? This use shows that the neoliberal, growth-oriented paradigm which
dominates America’s cities tells its story more loudly than other claimants to space. And, unfortunately,
once a layer of underrepresented history is gone it can be notoriously challenging to retrieve.

125
McWilliams, North from Mexico, 228.
126
Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon, 60.
37
Hall of Justice (221 W. Temple Street)

Figure 2.9: Hall of Justice. Photo by author.

Constructed in 1925, the Hall of Justice is where the seventeen boys arrested after the Sleepy
Lagoon murder were convicted and eventually released. The foreboding Beaux Arts structure is a
famous testament to state power in Los Angeles’ Civic Center Historic District, which housed both a jail
and court facilities until the Northridge Earthquake in 1994.
127
The LAPD has conducted some of its most

127
Cindy Chang, “At Renovated Hall of Justice, a Bittersweet Return for Key Backer Baca,” Los Angeles Times,
October 11, 2014.
38
high-profile work here, including the autopsy of Robert Kennedy and the detainment of Charles
Manson.
128

As the headquarters of judicial enforcement for a major metropolitan area for nearly seventy
years, the history of decisions made here by the state could easily fill volumes of books. Finding a way to
call meaningful attention to any particular case, whether just or unjust, is challenging in this context.
When a history becomes associated with a massive bureaucracy, it also becomes banal. Many of the
decisions and their corresponding paperwork filed here are symptomatic of an oppressive violence, but
fall into a boring, largely inaccessible place.
Unless stories like that of the Sleepy Lagoon trial are unearthed and displayed in some way,
memory work at this site is incomplete. But figuring out what to include and what not to include is the
perennial challenge of all heritage. Our current preservation framework recognizes that this site has a
rich history, but flattens it by praising only the building’s historic fabric and its association with City
power. The building’s association with the darker pasts of incarceration, segregation, and oppressive
violence are untold.
Meanwhile, sites of painful history that are architecturally banal, such as Sleepy Lagoon, do not
receive even these basic brick-and-mortar preservation efforts. In both cases, important stories are lost.
At the Hall of Justice, preservationists have reduced a multi-faced history until only the building’s
position as a relic of early civic infrastructure is recognized. At Sleepy Lagoon, a story is ignored because
the significance of the site is illegible, particularly in a city that holds the potential for economic growth
as the main metric of land’s value. In both cases, sites of conflict and dissonance, oppression and
resistance, become superficially engaged with their past.

128
Ibid.
39
Lincoln Heights Jail (421 N. Ave 19)

Figure 2.10: Lincoln Heights Jail. Photo by author.

The Lincoln Heights Jail is an infamous building located northeast of Downtown Los Angeles,
sandwiched between the Los Angeles River and Interstate Five. Built in 1927 and expanded in the 1950s,
the Art Deco style jail detained 2,800 prisoners at its peak.
129
It has famously held Al Capone, hundreds
of victims arrested during the Zoot Suit and Watts Riots, and a large number of people detained because
of their sexual orientation during crackdowns on members of the LGBTQ community between the 1940s
and 1960s
130
. In 1951, the jail was the location of the “Bloody Christmas” incident, in which police
brutally beat seven young men, five of whom were Mexican American.
131

129
Los Angeles Conservancy, “Lincoln Heights Jail,” accessed September 8, 2019,
https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/lincoln-heights-jail.
130
Alexia Fernandez, “Al Capone, Zoot Suit Riots, ‘L.A. Confidential’: The Former Historic Lincoln Heights Jail Faces a
Makeover,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2016.
131
Cecilia Rasmussen, “Pasadena’s Gold Line Will Travel a History-Laden Route,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2003.
40
Decommissioned in 1965, the jail is in disrepair today. Graffiti marks what few windows remain.
The Bilingual Foundation for the Arts called the jail home from 1979 to 2014.
132
In 1993, with a threat of
demolition looming, preservation advocates convinced City Council to designate the site.
133
In 2016, the
City of Los Angeles released a Request for Interest, opening the property for sale and redevelopment. In
2017, a developer went public with plans to turn the site into a residential, commercial, and
manufacturing space.
134
Renderings do not call attention to the building’s previous use. It is likely that
highlighting this site’s dark past would be seen as politically out of step with the pedestrian-oriented,
bustling experience the developers hope to create here.
The City’s decision to release this property to the market—a passive action but nonetheless a
calculated one—removes responsibility for the site and its history from the government. While any
project on the site will need to abide by the Secretary of Interior’s Standards, which impose limits on
how historic fabric is altered during a building’s reuse, there is no guarantee that this building’s past as a
center of oppressive violence will be preserved or displayed. Apart from a separate contractual
obligation, there is no legal arm to force an engagement with the events that took place here beyond
the preservation of the building itself. Current renderings show the architectural embodiment of a
violent police force as an ancillary feature to a “Festival Street.”
135
Granted, a standing building is better
than Sleepy Lagoon’s concrete lot, but a building by itself cannot tell these stories.
These examples show how the current heritage framework can remove nuance and discord
from polarizing history though a static, inaccessible designation form, neglect, or outright demolition.
Passively or maliciously, these approaches limit our ability to engage with challenging pasts by making
them virtually invisible in Los Angeles’ built environment. However, the dissonance that made these
sites painful in the first place continues to exist.
What is particularly frustrating is that the preservation tools are working as designed. Although
the project took longer than expected to complete, the Hall of Justice’s rehabilitation following the
Northridge Earthquake was landmark preservation in action. When city officials began pushing to
revitalize Downtown Los Angeles in the 2000s, the Herald Examiner Building became desirable, and is

132
Fernandez, “Al Capone, Zoot Suit Riots, ‘L.A. Confidential’: The Former Historic Lincoln Heights Jail Faces a
Makeover.”
133
Los Angeles Department of City Planning, “Historic-Cultural Monuments (HCM) Listing: City Declared
Monuments.”
134
“LA’s Historic Lincoln Heights Jail to Be Repurposed as ‘The Linc,’” KCRW, November 1, 2017,
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/design-and-architecture/las-historic-lincoln-heights-jail-to-be-repurposed.
135
Bianca Barragan, “City Council Signs off on Developer for High-Profile Lincoln Heights Jail Redevelopment,”
Curbed LA, November 8, 2017, https://la.curbed.com/2017/11/8/16577644/lincoln-heights-jail-redevelopment-
lincoln-property-company.
41
now receiving a multi-million-dollar facelift. Even the Navy Armory remains intact and in use. In each
case, historic preservation helped these buildings remain relevant. But the stories they tell are
desperately incomplete.

Recognizing Alternative Approaches
Where does alternative heritage work go, then, when it is pushed out of city space? This project
is interested not only in criticizing our current approach but imagining a new one. The following
examples of heritage engagements and memory work from small actors provide insight into how people
maintain a sense of the past without recognition from the government.

Preservation of Zoot Suit Culture
In 1978, writer and director Luis Valdez debuted his play Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum in
Los Angeles. It was the first professionally produced Mexican American play in the United States.
136

Valdez, known as the “Godfather of Chicano Theater,” recounted the events of both the Sleepy Lagoon
Trial and the Zoot Suit Riots in his work.
137
Critics lauded the production in Los Angeles, and it enjoyed a
brief run on Broadway.
Valdez also released a production of Zoot Suit at the Mark Taper Forum in 2017 to celebrate his
original troupe’s fiftieth anniversary. Footage of the debut shows audience members filing in wearing
zoot suits and other period clothing. In an interview, Valdez stated that he believed in entertainment
“with a purpose,” that provokes audience members to “think about what they saw” and reassess
“what’s happening in their own lives.”
138
Released just eleven days after the inauguration of Donald
Trump, who openly condemned Mexicans and Mexican Americans throughout his campaign, this
production was indeed timely.
This is a form of heritage unrecognized by Los Angeles’ current preservation techniques. When
people come together and engage with the past through reenactment or dramatization, there is the
development of collective memory. Audience members donning the zoot suit is not simple costuming. It
is an act of heritage which holds space for reflecting on racial discrimination and white violence—one
that has very real impacts in today’s world. Preservationists should hope to capitalize on such

136
Ashley Lucas, “Reinventing the ‘Pachuco’: The Radical Transformation from the Criminalized to the Heroic in
Luis Valdez’s Play ‘Zoot Suit,’” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 3, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 61.
137
‘Zoot Suit,’ a Classic Play About Discrimination, Finds Renewed Purpose (PBS NewsHour, 2017),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le99Z0KVbro.
138
Ibid.
42
engagement with the past, which is fluid and based in connections between human beings rather than
forms and bureaucracies. Preserving sites is helpful, but recognizing heritage work that lies outside of
our current legal framework could be an important tool of memory work when sites are already lost.

The Grave of José Díaz
Less conventional examples exist digitally. José Díaz’s grave lies in Calvary Cemetery in East Los
Angeles. His gravesite is non-descript and makes no mention of the political turmoil sparked by his
murder. While temporary, improvisational celebrations of his life and Mexican American resistance
could happen here, these ephemeral forms of heritage are difficult to trace. However, through the
Internet, people have created new spaces for digitally cataloging grief.
A website entitled “Find a Grave” allows users to write biographies and obituaries, and mark
graves on maps for other visitors. Users can also leave “Flowers” with a comment, a digital equivalent to
placing items at a gravesite. Díaz’s profile has over 170.
139
While many of these could have been left
thoughtlessly, comments like the following show that some users understand the significance of Díaz’s
death: “I pray your death was not in vain but instead may it serve to remind the world of the evil that
discrimination, prejudice and intolerance spawns; and help unite all colors to bring amity, harmony and
goodwill to us all. RIP.” “To you Chuco, You [sic] are not forgotten. Watch over your loved ones from
Heaven above. And watch over that Raza still out on the streets killing each other. Much respect to
you.” “Fighting for us Mexican Americans everywhere, thank you.”
140
All comments and flowers left are
from the last fifteen years, showing how this issue remains active over seventy years later.
Some might dismiss this example as overly inclusive or meaningless. There is no doubt that the
Internet lacks formality. This website could be gone in an instant. But it still demonstrates that despite
the destruction of Sleepy Lagoon and the lack of formal heritage engagement with the story of Díaz,
people are finding valid ways to engage with this past. This is as much a form of heritage as a formalized
tour at any historic site.

139
“Flowers for Jose Diaz - Find A Grave Memorial,” accessed September 8, 2019,
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8106735/jose-diaz/flower.
140
Ibid.
43
The Great Wall of Los Angeles

Figure 2.11: The Great Wall of Los Angeles, Zoot Suit Riots panel. Photo by author.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles is a beautification project along the channelized Tujunga Wash in
the San Fernando Valley created by public artist Judith Baca alongside hundreds of community artists
organized by the Social and Public Art Resource Center. Completed in 1984, the mural is listed on the
National Register of Historic Places.
141
Its panels include paintings on a wide range of topics such as the
Zoot Suit Riots, gay rights activism, the Great Depression, the internment of Japanese Americans, and
more.
Facilitated by the Army Corps of Engineers, this example is not as small voiced as the others
discussed here. However, the actions surrounding its completion demand attention: While Angelenos
now have a space to reflect on the Zoot Suit Riots that addresses this history more directly than any
other site in the City of Los Angeles, its creation was also a form of heritage. Baca assembled a team of

141
“National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Great Wall of Los Angeles, The” (United States
Department of the Interior, 2017).
44
eighty youths out of the juvenile justice program to help paint the mural, a particularly striking fact
considering the language used by presses and city officials during the Zoot Suit Riots.
142
Equally
interesting, is the pressure surrounding community members put on the project out of fear of “juvenile
delinquents” working in their neighborhood.
143
This demonstrates that while the program itself was
progressive, Los Angeles is still in need of change.
Even though this work is associated with the state, Baca’s act of bringing young people together
to engage with public art is an important and replicable heritage act. There is little doubt that this
project had an impact on all those involved, no matter how small. This is the type of active engagement
with the past that goes unseen by current, formal preservation efforts. Designation on the National
Register is a great honor that gives this underrepresented place stature alongside the most mainstream
historic sites this country cherishes. But this example also belongs here because it demonstrates how
engagement with the past can produce much more than what is tangible or visible. While the City chose
not to engage with this history, people still found ways to reclaim this past, place it in the built
environment, and work with young people to ensure that this process also had social impact.

Alternative History Tours
One final example is a “Zoot Suit Riots” Bus Tour from neighborhood activist Shmuel Gonzales,
also known as Barrio Boychik. Of Jewish and Mexican descent, Boychik embodies the ethnic diversity of
Boyle Heights, a neighborhood just east of Downtown Los Angeles that held an extremely diverse
mixture of immigrants before becoming the Latinx enclave it is today. Boychik runs alternative heritage
tours both on foot and by bus throughout East Los Angeles that highlight sites and stories that are far
from typical tourist destinations. His itinerary for his “Zoot Suit Riot” Bus Tour includes Sleepy Lagoon,
the Hall of Justice, and several theatres in the downtown area from which sailors forcibly removed
Mexican Americans during the violence.
144
Boychik also runs a blog and remains active in his community
advocating for better housing and the prevention of displacement due to gentrification.
Tours that call attention to underrepresented narratives are a critical piece of heritage work, but
many still find them unsettling. Without the backing of the state, they appear ephemeral and

142
“The Great Wall - History and Description,” SPARCinLA, accessed September 8, 2019,
https://SPARCinLA.org/the-great-wall-part-2/.
143
Carrie Rickey, “The Writing on the Wall,” in Chicano Art History: A Book of Selected Readings, ed. Jacinto
Quirarte (San Antonio, Texas: Research Center for the Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at San Antonio,
1984), 87-91.
144
“‘Zoot Suit Riots’ Bus Tour,” Eventbrite, accessed September 8, 2019,
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/70459244497?aff=efbneb.
45
challenging to monitor. Their content may be flat out inaccurate. But, as demonstrated above, more
formalized, professional engagements with heritage are not exempt from these same problems.

Conclusion
Because heritage is steeped with power, those who leave comments on websites, run video
blogs and small bus tours, or make plays, appear fringe. Calling attention to these small actors can
ensure heritage is used as a form of conversation rather than indoctrination. Unless all those interested
in heritage make efforts to level the playing field, the government’s use of the past will always appear
most legitimate, even if it glosses over stories that are important not only for marginalized people, but
society generally.
The Zoot Suit Riots are a great example to call attention to this problem. Some writers cite this
event as the beginning of the famous Chicano/a movement of Los Angeles in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Despite this, there is little in this city which grapples with this past in a meaningful way. Meanwhile,
discrimination against Mexicans and Mexican Americans persists, from the federal level to the
municipal. While no person of color needs the government to tell them how discrimination works and
how long it has been around, it is essential that those interested in the past find ways to expose
injustice—how it unfolds and how it is avoided, as well as its staying power. Heritage is where this
happens.

46
Chapter Three: The Black Panther Party in Los Angeles
On May 2, 1967, thirty Black people armed with loaded rifles and shotguns interrupted the
California State Legislature.
145
Their aim was to protest new legislation which made it a misdemeanor to
carry an unconcealed gun in public—a law they argued explicitly targeted their organization, the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense (referred to as the Party in this chapter).
146
They contended the aim was
to undermine their newest practice: Panthers would follow police and observe any law enforcement
activity from a legal distance, all while legally armed with loaded weapons.
147
The group intended to
monitor and intimidate the police, who they believed were continually “intensifying the terror, brutality,
murder and repression of black people.”
148

The nation was shocked, and the demonstration gave the Party center stage. From 1966 to
1982, the Black Panther Party grew from a small, Oakland-based group advocating against police
brutality to a national movement involved in healthcare, housing rights, and childcare. The end goal was
a socialist revolution.
149
The work the Party did, in combination with its militant stance on Black rights
and open advocacy of violence, made the organization, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover, “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”
150

It did not take long for a negative narrative surrounding the Panthers’ radicality to take hold.
Even when reporting on the Party’s occupation of the California Legislature, when the movement was
less than a year old, the New York Times unequivocally described the group as “antiwhite.”
151
This
chapter discusses how this narrative developed, which demonized the Black Panther Party from the
outset and chose to downplay the truly violent and arguably illegal campaign the FBI conducted to
dissolve them. Recontextualizing the Black Panther Party demonstrates that this group did not act alone,
but was part of a larger moment of widespread upheaval along lines of both race and class. Surveying
the movement in general and the Southern California chapter in particular shows that the narrative of
the Black Panthers as a strictly anti-white and inherently violent organization is misguided and reductive.

145
Jennifer B. Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 39-
40.
146
Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 57-58.
147
Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland,
California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 132-133.
148
Huey Newton quoted in: “Armed Negroes Protest Gun Bill,” New York Times, May 3, 1967.
149
“SDS Resolution on the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip Foner (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1995), 225-226.
150
“Hoover Calls Panthers Top Threat to Security,” The Washington Post, July 16, 1969.
151
Quote from Huey Newton in: “Armed Negroes Protest Gun Bill,” New York Times, May 3, 1967.
47
This story avoids the community service carried out by the group across the country, and its
collaboration with other organizations with white, Black, and Latinx membership. Today, the Panthers
and the systemic national campaign carried out against them is hardly visible in the City of Los Angeles.
As a result, their legacy remains plagued by selective memory and misappropriation.

Contextualizing the Black Panthers
The Ten-Point Platform and its Social Context
Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October
1966 in Oakland, California. Critical of the Civil Rights Movement as a middle-class undertaking ignorant
to the needs of poor, urban Black people, Newton and Seale sought out a new, “post-civil rights agenda”
to change fundamentally their community’s economic, political, and social situation.
152
That fall, they
drafted their “Party Platform and Program” as ten points:

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white men of our Black Community. [later changed to
"We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities."]
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American
society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day
society.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group
or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
153

The Ten-Point Platform became the guiding manifesto for Party members. It is important to note that
while race and the protection of the Black community is clearly a central tenant of the program, what
separated the Black Panthers from other contemporary Black nationalist groups was their insistence on
the overthrow of the current political economy.
154
Indeed, rifts would later develop between the

152
Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party, 31-32.
153
The Black Panther Party, “What We Want/What We Believe,” in The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip
Foner (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995).
154
I use Black Nationalism in a general way to capture a variety of movements interested in the unity and
empowerment of Black people. For a useful overview see Robert Carr, Black Nationalism in the New World:
Reading the African-American and West Indian Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
48
Panthers and other groups over this core belief, which they viewed as essential for moving from cultural
advocacy to true social change.
The Platform and actions of the Panthers, particularly their bearing arms, were quite radical.
However, when placed in its broader national and international context, it becomes clear that the Party
fit into a tumultuous political moment. Relatively little change had come to fruition for urban Black
populations, who remained destitute, particularly after the early stages of post-World War II
deindustrialization scaled back the manufacturing jobs they had traveled westward for.
155
A period of
continuous racial strife took place nationwide from 1964 to 1968. In their article on debunking “Panther
mythology,” Charles Jones and Judson Jeffries point out that “forty-three racial riots occurred in the
United States during 1966, a significant increase from fifteen reported racial revolts in 1964.”
156

To Newton and Seale, the Civil Rights Movement was a stalemate and the chronic, disorganized
demonstrations that followed indicated the failure of non-violent protests for social change. Their
platform pushed for a paradigm shift to guerilla tactics which organized people locally and advocated for
wholesale separatism from a white government which they deemed an occupational force in their
community. Newton and Seale were very open about this process involving bloodshed, mainly of “white,
racist, Gestapo cops.”
157

While police brutality was a common spark for unrest, the nationwide socioeconomic situation
for Black people in urban areas was also a major cause. In Newark, for example, as reported by Malcolm
McLaughlin in his book, The Long Hot Summer of 1967, the proportion of dilapidated or deteriorated
housing for Black people in a 1960 survey ranged form forty-three to ninety-one percent.
158
In Los
Angeles, where the Black population increased fifteenfold between 1910 and 1944, white streetcar
workers responded to the influx by striking until they received a guarantee that Black people would be
limited to janitorial jobs on their trains.
159
In the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts,
where a five-day-long racial uprising took place in 1965, residents reported dismal infrastructure in the

155
An in-depth study of this trend can be found here: Richard B. Freeman et al., “Changes in the Labor Market for
Black Americans, 1948-72,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1973, no. 1 (1973): 67–131.
156
Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype’: Debunking the Panther Mythology,” in The
Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 25.
157
Sol Stern, “The Call of the Black Panthers,” New York Times, August 6, 1967.
158
Malcolm McLaughlin, The Long Hot Summer of 1967: Urban Rebellion in America (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014), 25.
159
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, Virginia: Da Capo Press, 1995),
31.
49
years leading up to the unrest: water flow was so poor that there was often not enough pressure to
flush toilets or fight fires.
160

Slum clearance projects in the name of urban renewal throughout the 1950s and 1960s—
sardonically referred to as “Negro removal” projects by some—reduced the supply of available housing
in cities.
161
While the federal government incentivized white populations to move into suburban tract
housing, incoming migrants as well as residents displaced by urban renewal “were squeezed into ever
more densely populated neighborhoods,” according to McLaughlin.
162
Racist deed covenants and
discriminatory lending practices precluded Black people from moving into suburban housing, locking
them into these poor conditions.
163
Even the federal government’s Kerner Commission, a board created
by Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the country’s racial uprisings in 1967, was very clear in
its findings, admitting that discrimination caused massive “exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from
. . . economic progress” and “Crime, drug addiction, dependency on welfare, and bitterness and
resentment against society . . . are the result.”
164
Such was the socioeconomic climate in cities
throughout the country during the advent of the Black Panther Party, making the connections between
this context and the Party’s Ten-Point Platform quite clear.

Interracial and International Collaboration
In contrast to the depiction of the Panthers as stridently anti-white, there is evidence that the
Party frequently collaborated with radical activists from other racial groups. As the movement for Black
power grew, white activists in famous organizations like Students for a Democratic Society reassessed
their role. Eventually the group splintered over the question of Black Nationalism and separatism, with
some factions continuing to advocate against police brutality and sometimes resorting to violence.
165

Despite this shift in which marginalized groups took control of their own advocacy work, interracial
collaboration continued.

160
Ibid., 28-36.
161
Arthur H. Silvers, “Urban Renewal and Black Power,” American Behavioral Scientist 12, no. 4 (March 1, 1969):
43–46; McLaughlin, 25.
162
McLaughlin, 25.
163
A new, exhaustive study of this phenomenon can be found here: Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New York:
Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017).
164
United States Kerner Commission, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders: Summary of
Report (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 9.
165
Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left Radical Activism in Southern California (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 37.
50
This “coalition mentality,” as described by historian W.J. Rorabaugh, was somewhat unique to
the Black Panthers, and possibly related to the general climate of activism that existed in the Bay Area
where Newton and Seale founded the Party. Class warfare was the bonding agent for this cooperation,
and the Party’s leadership recognized that their movement should rely on becoming both “autonomous
and nonracist.”
166
According to Charles E. Jones of Georgia State University, “Under the Party’s
ideological doctrine, all white people were not defined as enemies of African Americans. Rather the
ruling class of the country, high ranking government officials, and the police were deemed the
oppressors by Panther theoreticians.”
167
The Party’s Minister of Information, Eldrige Cleaver confirmed
this in a 1968 memo published in Open City: “we must also be able to realize that there are white
people, brown people, red people, yellow people in this world who are totally dedicated to the
destruction of this system of oppression, and we welcome that. We will always be open to working with
that . . . white racism, ethnocentrism, the arrogance of people in power—these are the major enemies,
and we will never confuse the two.”
168

Additionally, the Black Panthers worked closely with and inspired empowerment movements of
other people of color, including the Chicano/a Brown Berets, the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the
Chinese American Red Guard, and the American Indian Movement. These groups varied in their level of
militance and advocacy of violence, but all grew from the same revolutionary social milieu as the
Panthers. In addition to borrowing principles and approaches from one another, the groups sometimes
worked together explicitly: In the anthology, The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished
Revolution, Jeffrey Ogbar reported that “The Patriots [short for the Young Patriots, a radical white leftist
organization], Lords, and Panthers famously provided security for each other at events, held press
conferences together, and developed community programs to mitigate gang violence and police terror
and provide breakfast for children, along with medical care.”
169
The Panthers’ free breakfast program,
designed to nourish Black children before their days at school, was replicated by Chicano/a allies at the
organization Los Siete de la Raza in Los Angeles.
170
While split along identities and what each group
viewed as a proper course of action, these organizations generally stood against oppression at home
and imperialism abroad. Although the Panthers quickly became the most famous racially motivated

166
W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 76.
167
Jones and Jeffries, 38.
168
Eldridge Cleaver, “Black Panther Black Racism,” Open City: Weekly Review of the L.A. Renaissance, December
27, 1968.
169
Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, “The Black Panther Party and the Rise of Radical Ethnic Nationalism,” in The Black Panthers:
Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution, ed. Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 77.
170
Bloom and Martin, 221.
51
separatist group, it is important to take note of other organizations carrying out similar work
simultaneously.

Non-militant Organizing
Though the image of shotgun-toting Black men in paramilitary gear quickly spread throughout
the country, the Black Panther Party also engaged deeply in non-militant organizing work. These
included petitioning, lobbying, educational programs, tenant organizing, and free healthcare clinics,
meals, and household services.
171
The free breakfast program quickly became the party’s most famous
form of non-violent advocacy and was replicated at chapters across the country. Panthers believed that
there was a direct link between nutrition and school performance and fed thousands of school children
daily—1,200 a week in Los Angeles alone.
172
The Party’s healthcare clinics also provided free sickle-cell-
anemia testing, a disease which disproportionately affects Black people at a rate of one in every five
hundred.
173
Panthers in Milwaukee established free transportation to and from prison for families
visiting their incarcerated relatives.
174
Additionally, the organization provided traditional forms of
political advocacy through legal advice during incidents of police brutality.
175
In West Oakland, the
original Party chapter even managed to petition the city to install a traffic light at a dangerous crossing
where drivers had previously killed several schoolchildren.
176

This work was hyper-local, responsive, and an essential tool for the Party’s ability to gain
legitimacy in communities across the country. Aside from their usefulness as a tool of recruitment and a
demonstration of Black self-determination, these actions drew attention to a socioeconomic situation
some believed did not exist in the United States. As businesses began donating food to the free
breakfast program throughout the country, the Party drew attention to a demographic that
policymakers and everyday citizens alike frequently ignored: poor communities of color in urban
areas.
177

Aside from meeting the immediate needs of impoverished and marginalized people, the
Panthers’ “Survival Programs” also spurred long-term change. Their work on police brutality led to the

171
Jones and Jeffries, 41.
172
Bloom and Martin, 185.
173
Ibid., 188.
174
Yohuru Williams, “To Live For the People: The Rank and File and the ‘Histories’ of the Black Panther Party,” in
The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution, ed. Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (New York:
Nation Books, 2016), 50.
175
Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party, 38.
176
Ibid., 38.
177
Bloom and Martin, 185.
52
formation of a “Citizens’ Complaint Board” by Oakland’s City Council in 1981. Some scholars also argue
that the Party’s free breakfast program acted as a precursor of the National School Lunch Program in
practice today.
178
These effects are only one important part of the legacy of the Black Panthers. Data
cannot fully capture the value communities of color must have derived from the group’s community
organizing.

Assessing the Panther Legacy
Because many Party chapters sought to remain “underground” and out of sight of hostile
federal authorities, understanding the breadth of the Party’s impact is challenging. Membership quickly
ballooned into the thousands, and the group founded chapters in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Newark, Chicago, New Haven, Houston, Dallas, and Los Angeles, as well as in other smaller cities.
179

Unfortunately, the Party’s rapid rise prevented any vetting process for its members.
180
While this made
the organization fluid and responsive to local needs, it also led to ideological fragmentation, the
infiltration of police informants, and difficulty maintaining a centralized platform in practice. The press
and state authorities quickly latched on to any deviance from the Party’s goals in the form of
unprovoked violence or other illegal acts, undermining the important political and social organizing work
of the Panthers. This issue continues to plague the legacy of the organization today.
The context provided here requires some qualification. While in some ways non-militant,
tolerant, and collaborative, the Black Panther Party was indeed violent when necessary, radical, and
arguably authoritarian in its structure. This project does not ignore these facets of the organization.
However, this context is needed to counter the misperceptions that many scholars say continue to
“minimize the historical significance of the Party.”
181
Activist JoNina Abron-Evrin was shocked that even
when interviewing students in the progressive space of a college-level Black American literature class,
most were surprised to learn that the Party engaged in non-militant activism at all, having never heard
of the organization’s work in childcare, healthcare, and education. She blamed this on the fact that “the
establishment news media, historians, and political scientists have not provided a full treatment of the
BPP [Black Panther Party].”
182
In his anthology, The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), Charles E. Jones

178
JoNina M. Abron, “‘Serving the People’: The Survival Programs of the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panther
Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 187.
179
Pulido, 42.
180
Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party, 39.
181
Jones and Jeffries, 26.
182
Abron, 178.
53
also contended that scholarly research on the BPP is needed to counteract “the demonization of the
Panthers in particular and the Black power movement in general.”
183

This reductive understanding of the Panthers is a disservice to both the Party and the people
they advocated for, as summarized by New York Times writer Sol Stern in his 1967 article, “The Call of
the Black Panthers”:
to write off the Panthers as a fringe group of little influence is to miss the point. The group's
roots are in the desperation and anger that no civil-rights legislation or poverty program has
touched in the ghetto. The fate of the Panthers as an organization is not the issue. What matters
is that there are a thousand black people in the ghetto thinking privately what any Panther says
out loud.
184

Recognizing the potential of this movement, the FBI soon clamped down on the Party. Inspecting the
growth and subsequent repression of the Southern California Chapter demonstrates how current
engagements with the Party’s legacy do not capture this history’s complexity.

The Southern California Chapter and the “Undeclared War” on the Black Panther Party
185

Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter founded the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party
in Los Angeles in late 1967.
186
By November of 1969, he, his brother Glen Carter, and his co-leader John
Huggins would all be dead. The following month, the FBI, working in conjunction with the Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD), would storm the Chapter’s headquarters in South Central, starting a gunfight
that lasted over four hours.
187
The raid of the Party’s office at 4115 Central Avenue was part of
systematic, arguably illegal campaign by the FBI to destroy the Black Panther Party nationwide on largely
political grounds. Today, this Chapter’s history, and the story of the FBI’s “undeclared war” on the Black
Panthers remains almost invisible in Los Angeles’ built environment.
Before the Party’s formation, Carter met Eldridge Cleaver in Soledad State Prison, where they
both became interested in the teachings of Malcolm X.
188
Carter was well known throughout Los Angeles
for his activity in the Slauson Renegades, a prominent gang purported to have five thousand members,

183
Jones and Jeffries, 47.
184
Sol Stern, “The Call of the Black Panthers,” New York Times, August 6, 1967.
185
A Party flyer from December 1969 summarized the nationwide raids, arrests, and assassinations as an
“Undeclared War.” Located in: The Black Panther Files, Southern California Library, Box 1, Folder 3.
186
Curtis Austin, Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2006), 108.
187
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther
Party and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 82-88.
188
Austin, 108.
54
according to historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr.
189
It was this position and his deep
connection with the city’s Black community that uniquely positioned Carter to open the Party’s second
chapter in the country. To borrow the concise description from Panther activist Elaine Brown’s memoir,
A Taste of Power: “Everybody had heard of Bunchy.”
190

Carter’s chapter took off, eventually occupying ten buildings throughout the region, and later
helping establish new chapters in Houston and Dallas.
191
The communities of South Central Los Angeles
had remained politically activated after the Watts Uprising of 1965. The event was fresh in the city’s
collective memory and demonstrated that communities of color in Southern California in general and
South Central in particular “were willing to engage in mass violence.”
192
One testament to this was the
existence of the Community Alert Patrol, an unarmed precursor of the “copwatching” squads later
introduced by the Black Panthers in Oakland, who would monitor police behavior throughout South
Central.
193
When Carter declared the following only two years after residents of Watts inflicted $40
million worth of property damage, there is little doubt about the impact it must have had: “it is the
position of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that we are the vanguard of revolution in the United
States . . . And the party is declaring all-out-war on the pig [derogatory slang for police officer] . . .
nobody will speak about Black Power or revolution unless he’s willing to follow the example of the
vanguard, willing to pick up the gun, ready to die for the people.”
194
Many young activists in Los Angeles
aimed to put Carter’s words into practice. His own brother, Glen, would be killed by federal agents in
March 1968.
195
At least ten Panthers from the Southern California Chapter would meet the same fate,
including two young men who engaged in a firefight with police during the Watts Festival on the third
anniversary of the Uprising.
196

As with all Party chapters, the Southern California group engaged in more than violence. Flores
Forbes, ten-year member turned urban planner, discussed how the free breakfast program became an
important organizing tool in Los Angeles:

189
Bloom and Martin, 144.
190
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 118.
191
Pulido, 44.
192
Austin, 109.
193
Pulido, 44.
194
Brown, 122-124. This quote is recounted by Brown in a memoir and could possibly be paraphrased.
195
Murch, 162.
196
Bloom and Martin, 146; Austin, 110.
55
The organizing effort began with us going door-to-door in the projects, passing out free papers
with leaflets advertising the program. We talked to parents, kids, and storeowners near the
projects . . . The response was overwhelming. All types of parents agreed to host and serve our
efforts. We held the program in the homes of junkies, drug dealers, regular public assistance
recipients, gamblers, and gang bangers. Store owners donated bread, eggs, bacon, sausage,
milk, and paper products.
197

The chapter also created free clinics which provided both treatments and education on healthcare to
make medical services less “impersonal” and abate the “alienation people sometimes feel when they
bring their medical needs to the attention of personnel at county hospitals.”
198
In 1970, Southern
California Chapter member Yvonne Carter pointed out that on top of the six-hour wait times many
experienced upon arrival to county hospitals, their locations throughout the region often made them
inaccessible to residents of South Central. Through their free clinic, which continued its services after
the LAPD raid made their central office inhabitable, this Chapter hoped that “once people become
educated to this service, they can begin to demand the kind of care they are entitled to.”
199

The Killing of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins
The success of these programs and their attachment to a politically violent organization did not
go unnoticed by law enforcement agencies. Aside from minor harassment—repeated pullovers, arrests
on false pretenses, and even alleged raids of houses serving breakfasts—the targeting of the Southern
California Chapter became part of a national campaign against the Black Panthers.
200
In late 1967, the
FBI established the Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO, “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit,
or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organization and groupings, their
leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters, and to counter their propensity for violence and
civil disorder.”
201
Following the McCarthy Era, which led to large public outcry concerning blatant
political surveillance, groups like the FBI devised new methods to disrupt illicit activity discreetly.
202

These included preventing recruitment, taking advantage of internal rifts within organizations, and

197
Flores A. Forbes, Will You Die With Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party (New York: Atria Books, 2006), 50.
198
“Panthers Use VW Bus for Free Clinic,” Los Angeles Sentinel, January 22, 1970.
199
Ibid.
200
Kit Kim Holder, “The History of the Black Panther Party, 1966-1971: A Curriculum Tool for Afrikan-American
Studies.” (Ed.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1990), 308; Wayne Pharr, Nine Lives of a Black Panther: A
Story of Survival (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2014), 128-129.
201
Reprint of COINTELPRO Black Extremist Memorandum, August 25, 1967 in Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams,
eds., The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 252.
202
McLaughlin, 133.
56
fomenting tension between groups, on top of direct assault, when possible.
203
Conservative estimates
place the Panther death toll at the hands of law enforcement nationwide at two dozen, but at least one
account tallied three hundred victims.
204
In the words of historian Robert Carr, “the state was
determined to exterminate the BPP by any means necessary.”
205
This remains an underrepresented
aspect of the Black Panthers’ legacy, particularly in Los Angeles, where the Party came under both
violent and surreptitious attacks from the FBI in 1969.
Due to the confidentiality surrounding the program, compiling evidence about COINTELPRO can
be challenging. However, many scholars agree that the FBI was directly involved in creating tension
between the Southern California Chapter and the Black nationalist group, US. US was founded by
Maulana Karenga in 1965.
206
While the Black Panthers advocated for armed revolution, they viewed US
as a tepid organization that accommodated current systems of power.
207
The Los Angeles branch of the
FBI noted this friction and began anonymously sending cartoons to both parties depicting each of the
organizations conspiring with law enforcement.
208
More serious, however, was a letter campaign which
led both groups to believe the other planned to assassinate members of their leadership.
209
“It is hoped
this counterintelligence measure,” wrote one FBI operative, “will result in an ‘US’ and BPP vendetta.”
210

On January 17, 1969, the tensions came to a tipping point on the University of California, Los
Angeles’ (UCLA) campus. College campuses were an essential recruiting location for radical
organizations throughout the 1960s, and thus became an ideological battleground between differing
groups like US and the Black Panther Party.
211
This, combined with the misinformation campaign

203
A deep study on the use of the FBI as a “political police” can be found here: Ward Churchill and Jim Vander
Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian
Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988).
204
A death toll of twenty-eight was found in this study, which is widely cited: Charles R. Garry, “The Persecution of
the Black Panther Party,” in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip Foner (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995). A less
reputable but still noteworthy account which found three hundred deaths can be found here: Michael Newton,
Bitter Grain: Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party (Los Angeles: Holloway House Publishing Company, 1991),
223.
205
Carr, 187.
206
Although Panthers claimed US stood for United Slaves, the organization intended to use the pronoun “us” to
indicate a unity of Black people. It is typically written in all capital letters despite its not being an acronym. Floyd
W. Hayes III and Judson L. Jeffries, “Us Does Not Stand for United Slaves!,” in Black Power in the Belly of the Beast,
ed. Judson L. Jeffries (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 67-69.
207
Ibid., 78-80.
208
Churchill and Wall, 41-43.
209
Bloom and Martin, 218-219.
210
Ibid., 218.
211
Churchill and Wall, 41.
57
conducted by law enforcement, caused the selection of a new head for the African American Studies
Department to become the cause of a shootout in Campbell Hall.
Bunchy Carter and John Huggins claimed their organization was not represented during the
selection process. A fight commenced after the meeting which led to the killing of Carter and Huggins by
representatives of US.
212
Rather than pursue the shooters, law enforcement used the assassination as an
excuse to raid the homes of several Panthers. Huggins’ wife, Ericka, and sixteen others were arrested
and eventually released.
213
Numerous attacks of revenge between US and the Panthers took place in
both directions in the following weeks.
214

Cleaver and other top Party leaders lambasted US and dubbed the murders “a political
assassination.”
215
At Carter’s funeral—attended by hundreds, including famous Black author and political
activist James Baldwin—Party Chairman Seale denounced Karenga as “reactionary” and a “tool of the
power structure.”
216
Researchers remain unsure about how involved US was with the FBI.
217
However,
COINTELPRO documents paint a clear picture of law enforcement’s systematic approach to drive a
wedge between US and the Black Panther Party. At any rate, the violence delegitimized the two groups,
portraying them as disorganized and volatile, ultimately fulfilling the FBI’s initial goal.

The Central Headquarters Raid
At 3:30 A.M. on December 8, 1969, police officers armed with automatic weapons began
cordoning off sixteen blocks surrounding 4115 Central Avenue in South Central Los Angeles.
218
Acting
Chief of Police Daryl Gates, with the backing of the FBI, planned his raid with a new division of the LAPD
called Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT). This specialized group was seen as “a breakthrough in urban
police assault tactics,” with many of its members having undergone training from marines at the Naval
Armory in Chavez Ravine.
219

212
“Two Dead, Militants at War: Campus Fracas Ends in Shooting,” Los Angeles Sentinel, January 23, 1969.
213
Douglas Kneeland, “17 Black Panther Members Are Arrested at the Home of Slain Youth in Los Angeles,” New
York Times, January 19, 1969.
214
Pharr, 132-133.
215
“A Political Assassination,” The Black Panther, January 25, 1969.
216
Ray Rogers, “Hundreds Attend Rites for Panther Slain in UCLA Hall,” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 1969.
217
Bloom and Martin, 220.
218
Steven Roberts, “Panthers Battle Police on Coast,” New York Times, December 9, 1969.
219
George Percy Bargainer III, “Fanon’s Children: The Black Panther Party and the Rise of the Crips and Bloods in
Los Angeles” (Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2011), 58. This is the same building that the Navy
used as its launching point for its assault on the Mexican American community during the Zoot Suit Riots of the
previous chapter. Also worth noting: Acting Chief Daryl Gates would assume his role in full, holding it during the
1992 Uprising analyzed in the following chapter.
58
The Black Panthers awaited the assault. FBI attacks on the Party were taking place across the
country. Just four days earlier, law enforcement had raided the home of Chicago Panther leader Fred
Hampton, killing him while he slept with two gunshots to the head at close range.
220
The building at
4115 Central avenue was heavily fortified with sandbags.
221
After announcing their warrant to enter the
premises and search for illegally owned guns, three officers were immediately wounded from Panther
gunfire.
222

The battle lasted for over four hours.
223
The police used tear gas which the Panthers lobbed back
while using cigarette filters to plug their noses.
224
Dynamite was detonated on the roof, but the building
held.
225
Over time, three hundred officers arrived on the scene and became desperate. Gates recalled
his decision to obtain a grenade launcher in his book Chief: My Life in the LAPD:
Only the military had them [grenade launchers]. They were tantamount to a rocket device
today, capable of firing a mortar shell that would blast a hole in the building . . . I called the
marines at Camp Pendleton to ask if we could borrow their grenade launcher. The commanding
officer said, “You’re going to have to get permission from the Department of Defense and
probably the President of the United States.” . . . Anytime you even talk about using military
equipment in a civil action, it’s very serious business. You’re bridging an enormous gap.
The Pentagon got back to us within the hour. We had permission to use the grenade
launcher.
226

Fortunately, press arrived, and the Panthers, reassured by their presence, finally surrendered. Eleven of
them exited the building, including three women (Figure 3.1).
227
Three Party members were wounded,
as were three police officers.
228
In a National-Guard-grade vehicle with tank tracks parked nearby sat the
grenade launcher delivered from Camp Pendleton in San Diego, “Primed and ready to blast the house to
kingdom come,” recollected Gates.
229
Weeks later, the City of Los Angeles condemned the damaged
building (Figure 3.2).
230
The site has remained a vacant lot since.

220
Churchill and Wall, 70-73.
221
Pharr, 6-10.
222
Bloom and Martin, 223-224.
223
“Police Seize Panther Fortress in 4-Hour Gunfight, Arrest 13,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1969.
224
Pharr, 8.
225
Bargainer III, 58-59.
226
Daryl F. Gates and Diane K. Shah, Chief: My Life in the LAPD (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 117.
227
Bloom and Martin, 223.
228
Roberts, “Panthers Battle Police on Coast.”
229
Gates and Shah, 123.
230
“L.A. Pigs Condemn Peoples’ Office,” The Black Panther, December 21, 1969.
59

Figure 3.1: Black Panthers surrendering outside 4115 Central Avenue, 1969. Herald Examiner, Los Angeles Public
Library.
60

Figure 3.2: Damaged headquarters building following raid, 1969. Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public
Library.

As with the killing of Carter nearly a year before, there was widespread support for the Panthers
in the days that followed the raid. On December 11, around four thousand protestors rallied at City Hall
(Figure 3.3 and 3.4).
231
The demonstrators held signs criticizing the police as fascistic and politically
repressive. Legendary activist Angela Davis spoke, calling the nationwide campaign against the Black
power movement a genocide.
232
The crowd moved on to the Hall of Justice, where the arrestees were
imprisoned (Figure 3.5). One protestor yelled from atop the building’s stairs that “this building or any
other building belongs to the people,” and that “eventually we will take power and we will destroy this

231
Art Berman, “Thousands Protest Panther Raid in Rally at City Hall,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1969;
Bloom and Martin, 225.
232
Charles Baireuther, “Community Makes Show of Unity at City Hall,” Los Angeles Sentinel, December 18, 1969.
61
goddamn place.”
233
This demonstration, with some newspapers estimating the crowd to have exceeded
6,000, seriously undercuts the notion that the Panthers were a wantonly militant or fringe group.
234

Figure 3.3: Protestors gather at City Hall on December 11, 1969 following the FBI’s raid on Panther headquarters.
Herald Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

233
Art Berman, “Thousands Protest Panther Raid in Rally at City Hall,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1969.
234
Baireuther, “Community Makes Show of Unity at City Hall.”
62

Figure 3.4: Protesters gather on Spring Street outside City Hall, December 11, 1969. Photo by Rolland J. Curtis.
Rolland J. Curtis Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.
63

Figure 3.5: Protestors move from City Hall to Hall of Justice, December 11, 1969. Photo by Ober Jim. Herald
Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

64
The FBI and Political Repression
Police seized two other buildings in Los Angeles at the same time as the raid on 4115 Central
Avenue, arresting twenty-four in total.
235
Two years later, all those taken into custody after the four-
hour shootout were acquitted of the most severe charge brought against them: conspiracy to murder
policemen. The jury found that the police were overly aggressive in their assault. Nine were still
convicted of the more minor crime of possessing illegal weapons.
236
Additionally, researchers later
discovered that a police officer had lied to obtain a search warrant for the raid.
237

Illegal, or at least questionable tactics were commonplace in the war against the Black Panthers,
and despite claims from the police that there was no concerted effort being made against the Party, the
consistent harassment that took place in cities across the country showed otherwise.
238
Tactics varied
from repeated arrests and releases, which “distracted Panther activists from organizing and . . . depleted
Party funds,” to outright violence in the form of raids, shootouts, and killings.
239
Surveillance through
informants and planted electronic devices was also common. In San Francisco, for example, operatives
bribed a building engineer to plant a microphone inside the wall of Huey Newton’s apartment after his
release from prison in 1970.
240
On the spectrum of intrusion, this was minor: in the case of the raid on
Fred Hampton’s Chicago apartment, one shot was fired by the Panthers, while ninety came from law
enforcement, killing two and wounding several others.
241
The willingness of the Pentagon to deploy a
grenade launcher domestically also speaks volumes about the federal government’s opinion of the
Panthers. Additionally, prison statistics support the idea that the FBI’s response to the revolutionary
period of the 1960s disproportionately targeted the Black Panthers. In 1998, Akinyele Omowale Umoja’s
pointed out the following in his article on political prisoners: “More than one hundred inmates in U.S.
prisons have been identified by human rights groups as political prisoners . . . Approximately one-third
of these were members of or were affiliated with the Black Panther Party. Consequently, there are more

235
Bloom and Martin, 222-223. A Party flyer entitled “What Really Happened in Los Angeles” provides a summary
of each raid, located in: The Black Panther Files, Southern California Library, Box 1, Folder 3. Arrest statistics are
from: Steven Roberts, “Panthers Battle Police on Coast,” New York Times, December 9, 1969.
236
“Verdict on the Panther Raid,” Los Angeles Times, December 26, 1971.
237
Churchill and Wall, 83-84.
238
Roberts, “Panthers Battle Police on Coast.”
239
Winston A. Grady-Willis, “The Black Panther Party: State Repression and Political Prisoners,” in The Black
Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 363.
240
Ibid., 367.
241
Ibid., 373.
65
political prisoners from the Black Panther Party than any other political formation in United States
prisons.”
242

In their exhaustive work on the FBI as a form of political police, Agents of Repression, Ward
Churchill and Jim Vander Wall plainly argue that the agency “was founded, maintained and steadily
expanded as a mechanism to forestall, curtail and repress the expression of political diversity within the
United States.”
243
The examples above illustrate this on their own, but, in 1976, even a United States
Senate investigative committee recognized that the FBI and other intelligence agencies were abusing
their powers to the extreme. The majority-white board conceded that “The Government, operating
primarily through secret and biased informants, but also using other intrusive techniques such as
wiretaps, microphone ‘bugs,’ surreptitious mail opening, and break-ins, has swept in vast amounts of
information about the personal lives, views, and associations of American citizens.”
244
COINTELPRO and
other programs like it were criticized for their questionable evidence collection and open pursuit of
federal charges, even when their targets were not suspected of “having committed . . . any specific
Federal crime.”
245
Rather, the committee found that victims were “assaulted, repressed, harassed and
disrupted” because of “their political views, social beliefs, and their lifestyles.”
246
Following the report’s
release, the New York Times published an article highlighting how COINTELPRO’s dubious tactics
targeted the Panthers in particular. The publication pulled one especially troubling quote from the
Commission, which argued that the agency’s tactics “would be intolerable in a democratic society even
if all the targets had been involved in violent activity; but Cointelpro went far beyond that.”
247

Unfortunately, little reform came from the investigation’s findings.

242
Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Set Our Warriors Free: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party and Political
Prisoners,” in The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998),
418.
243
Churchill and Wall, 12.
244
Church Committee, “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II” (United States Senate, 1976),
accessed October 4, 2019,
https://web.archive.org/web/20061019170937/http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIa.h
tm.
245
Church Committee, “Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of
Americans, Book III” (United States Senate, 1976),
http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/contents.htm., 512.
246
Ibid., 512.
247
John Kifner, “F.B.I. Sought Doom of Panther Party,” New York Times, May 9, 1976.
66
The Decline of the Panther Party and Its Legacy
The misinformation campaign conducted alongside the FBI’s violent, semi-legal war against the
Party has had lasting impacts. The already fragmented Party continued to splinter under state pressure.
Informants intentionally broke the law to undermine the Party’s public image.
248
With each misstep, the
Party recoiled and became more autocratic. By the late 1970s, with the Black Panthers beginning to fray
and Newton struggling with drug addiction, the group became challenging to support, even for
leftists.
249
By the early 1980s membership dwindled and the party fell apart.
250
Newton was killed by a
drug dealer in 1989.
251

The Party’s erratic final years, combined with its demonization by the state throughout its
lifespan, led to an ultimately tarnished image. Its acts of radical community service—several of which
were adopted at different levels of government—became overshadowed. As articulated by Joshua
Bloom and Waldo Martin, in their book, Black Against Empire, “nothing did more to vilify the Panthers
than the widely publicized evidence of intraorganizational violence and corruption as the Party
unraveled. Any attempt to replicate the earlier Panther revolutionary nationalism was now vulnerable to
provocation and vilification. The political ‘system’ had been inoculated against the Panthers’ politics.”
252

This effect has lasted decades. When Hillary Clinton ran for U.S. Senate, the mere rumor of an
association with the Panthers during her years as a Yale law student posed an imminent threat to her
campaign.
253
In 1994, city officials in Los Angeles withheld a $250,000 contract with a local public art
non-profit until it agreed to drop a Black Panther mural from its list of proposed projects.
254
There is no
doubt that this organization remains politically contentious today.

248
Melvin Dickson, “Anatomy of a Setup No. 2: As Told by Melvin Dickson,” in The Black Panthers: Portraits from an
Unfinished Revolution, ed. Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 182.
249
Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams, eds., “Larry Little,” in The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished
Revolution (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 169.
250
Ollie A. Johnson, III and Judson L. Jeffries, “Explaining the Demise of The Black Panther Party: The Role of
Internal Factors,” in The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press,
1998), 401-406.
251
“Huey Newton Killed; Was a Co-Founder of Black Panthers,” New York Times, August 23, 1989.
252
Bloom and Martin, 401.
253
Yohuru Williams, “To Live For the People: The Rank and File and the ‘Histories’ of the Black Panther Party,” in
The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution, ed. Bryan Shih and Yohuru Williams (New York:
Nation Books, 2016), 49.
254
Nicholas Riccardi, “Black Panther Mural Backers Reject Funding,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1994.
67
Selected Sites
Figure 3.6: Map of Black Panther Party selected sites. Map by Author.

Historian Jennifer B. Smith argued that in the media, politics, and even academia, “Organizations
such as the Black Panther Party have often been absent or misrepresented . . . rather than being
presented as an integral key to this epoch.”
255
This chapter has demonstrated what this organization
accomplished in its short existence, as well as the ferocious resistance its doctrine inspired. In general,
this legacy is only somewhat displayed in the City of Los Angeles. Due to the ephemeral and secretive
nature of both the Panthers and the FBI, locating sites to analyze for this case study was challenging.
Three are inspected here to illustrate that engagement with this past is limited but growing.

255
Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party, 7.
68

Southern California Chapter Headquarters (4115 Central Avenue)

Figure 3.7: 4115 Central Avenue. The parking lot between these two buildings is the site of former Southern
California Chapter Headquarters. Photo by author.

The former headquarters of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party is now a
parking lot, flanked on either side by non-descript, two-story buildings. Historic photos show an aging
brick building with painted signs advertising the Panthers and their free breakfast. No remnants of the
building remain, and no commemoration of the Party’s acts of service or the raid against it exist here.
This site presents a unique challenge. Here, an era of resistance and repression unfolded in
micro. As the second chapter founded in the country, the Los Angeles office represented the rapid
expansion of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. But its decimation is also an important narrative in its
own right, reflective of the FBI’s nationwide campaign against Black Nationalism. Ideally, memory work
here would highlight both of these stories.
69
The issue now, however, is not only which story to tell, but what to tell it with. Building permits
show that the structure was demolished a year later.
256
The City’s role in the demolition is unclear, but
one article from the Party’s local newspaper claims that the government condemned their headquarters
as unfit for habitation within two weeks of the raid.
257
Whether this was a malicious act, intended to
erase the Panthers’ legacy is an intriguing but ultimately fruitless debate. But it is reasonable to believe
that if a building still stood onsite, an interested party would push for its designation. The site is marked
as a potential historic resource in the Historic Places L.A. database, the online inventory compiled from a
city-wide historic resources survey.
258
This honor, however, holds no legal weight.
Designation aside, this site shows that mainstream heritage approaches struggle to
accommodate places of difficult history, especially if they have been razed. Unlike Sleepy Lagoon
(Chapter Two), this site’s location is clear, and it remains accessible today. The problem is that the legal
tools available to call attention to this place were not designed to accommodate stories like this.

256
City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, http://ladbsdoc.lacity.org/idispublic/.
257
“L.A. Pigs Condemn Peoples’ Office,” The Black Panther, December 21, 1969.
258
“Black Panther Raid (Site Of).” Historic Places L.A.,
https://www.zotero.org/jacksonloop7/items/action/newItem/collectionKey/PVBJVLWK/itemType/webpage/mode
/edit.
70
Campbell Hall and the Carter-Huggins Memorial (UCLA Campus)

Figure 3.8: Campbell Hall, UCLA, the building in which Bunchy Carter and John Huggins were killed. Photo by
author.
71

Figure 3.9: The Carter-Huggins Memorial stone, located near Campbell Hall’s main entrance. Photo by author.

The classroom hall where assailants from the US organization shot and killed Bunchy Carter and
John Huggins remains standing. A memorial stone sits in the landscaping adjacent to the building,
reading simply “Carter-Huggins 1969.” Relatively little information is given about who these men were,
while even less is offered about the role the FBI played in their killing. Installed relatively recently in
2010, the memorial demonstrates how the Panthers’ legacy has evolved since their deaths. Still, the lack
of context provided on the site—particularly regarding the relationship between the Panthers, US, and
the FBI—is troubling.
259

259
Samuel Temblador, “Memorial Honors Anniversary of Black Panther Students’ Deaths,” Daily Bruin, January 21,
2014.
72
Despite this, the classroom hall and its memorial attract the attention of political organizers and
others interested in commemorating this movement. When an expansion project came to Campbell Hall
in 2015, students pushed for the university to rename the building after the slain activists, which did not
take place.
260
One editorial from the student newspaper expressed frustration regarding how “the story
behind their 1969 killings is not mentioned in traditional tours of UCLA.”
261
Another article discussing the
fiftieth anniversary of the deaths in 2019 lamented the fact that “for years after the shooting, there was
no marking or sign to denote that such an incident had taken place . . . After all, they were just activists,
not rich megadonors filling UCLA’s coffers.”
262
While the stone itself represents a new form of
engagement with this painful story, following sections discuss how annual gatherings at this site, along
with these fights over its presentation, are an equally notable form of heritage engagement.

Wilshire Federal Building (11000 Wilshire Boulevard)

Figure 3.10: Wilshire Federal Building, main Los Angeles office of the FBI. Photo by author.

260
“Editorial: UCLA Should Recognize Activists on Expansion of Campbell Hall,” Daily Bruin, January 26, 2015.
261
Ibid.
262
Abhishek Shetty, “Throwback Thursday: Fifty-Year Anniversary of ‘Bunchy’ Carter, John Huggins Shooting,” Daily
Bruin, January 17, 2019.
73
A major shortcoming of dominant narratives surrounding the Black Panther Party is that they
avoid the role the state played in crushing the organization. However, finding ways to draw attention to
the FBI’s involvement is challenging. By nature, the organization is secretive and distant. As the main
field office of the FBI in the City of Los Angeles, the Wilshire Federal Building is worth inspecting.
263

Opened in December 1969, it is unlikely that the organization worked on the 4115 Central Avenue raid
from this space.
264
However, the war against the Panthers did continue nationwide into the 1980s,
making this site important as a symbol of the expansion of the agency and its increased involvement in
urban policing during this era.
The Wilshire Federal building stands on Los Angeles’ Westside near UCLA’s campus. The
seventeen-story structure cost $14 million to build, and is lauded by the Los Angeles Conservancy as an
example of “corporate Late Modernism at its finest.”
265
Initially, the structure housed offices of the FBI,
the Post Office, and the National Aeronautic and Space Administration.
266
Architecturally, the building is
notable for its efficient, minimal design, but the activity that takes place inside its walls makes the
building’s story much more complex.
The Los Angeles branch of the FBI remains stationed in this building today. As with the Hall of
Justice downtown, the bureaucratic nature of the work that takes place here confounds current
mainstream preservation approaches. For some, this office’s long history represents a necessary security
agency, responsible for stopping terrorist attacks, and even bringing corrupt politicians to justice.
267
For
others, the site represents the unchecked surveillance, harassment, and aggression of the state against
its political enemies. No legal approach exists in the City of Los Angeles today that can cast a net wide
enough to capture both this place’s architectural merit and the complex relationship its tenant holds
with people across the nation.
Still, this is one of few sites in Los Angeles that could draw attention to how the federal
government targeted the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 70s. Investigative committees and

263
“Los Angeles,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed October 4, 2019, https://www.fbi.gov/contact-
us/field-offices/losangeles.
264
“Community Welcomes New Federal Building,” Los Angeles Times, December 4, 1969.
265
Ibid. “Federal Building,” Los Angeles Conservancy, accessed October 4, 2019,
https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/federal-building.
266
“Federal Building to Begin Opening Its 17 Stories in June,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1969.
267
I refer here to the arrest of people like Ahmad Ressam, which thwarted a plot to bomb Los Angeles
International Airport on December 31, 1999, as well as the raid conducted by the agency on Los Angeles City
Councilman Jose Huizar’s house and office. “FBI Los Angeles History,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed
October 4, 2019, https://www.fbi.gov/history/field-office-histories/losangeles; David Zahniser, “FBI Raids Home
and Offices of L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2018.
74
academics alike agree that the FBI severely overstepped in this era, and yet, there is no place for this
story to be processed, memorialized, or even refuted. One could argue that this absence has a direct
relationship to the Black Panthers’ legacy continuing to be defined by violence rather than service.
Moreover, with the War on Terror being, in the agency’s own words, “the overriding focus of the FBI,”
this building remains a center of surveillance and intense enforcement of the law.
268
In this context, how
might the FBI view preservationists calling attention to the agency’s troubling approach to the Black
Panthers? This question is posed here to demonstrate how this site’s past, like all those discussed in this
project, has important connections to the present.

Recognizing Alternative Approaches
Recontextualizing the legacy of the Black Panthers creates new heritage questions. In debating
how the Party and its doctrine should be enshrined in the built environment or appropriated for use in
current politics, different groups in Los Angeles sift through a complex, polarizing past with varying
motivations. The memory work discussed below illustrates how, through both tangible and intangible
heritage, the Panthers’ reductive legacy of violence is being reframed in real time.

Commemorating Bunchy Carter and John Huggins
Since 1999, thirty years after the killings of Carter and Huggins, students have organized an
annual gathering at UCLA’s Campbell Hall.
269
In 2010, the Afrikan Student Union, working in conjunction
with the Academic Advancement Program, advocated for the creation of the Carter-Huggins memorial
stone discussed in the previous section.
270
In her seminal work Uses of Heritage, Laurajane Smith argues
that what people do with heritage sites—from designation to candlelight vigils—is arguably more
significant than the sites themselves.
271
The memory work done at Campbell Hall is a perfect example of
this.
In 2014, the Afrikan Student Union held a panel along with its annual vigil. Current students
exchanged ideas with colleagues and family members of Huggins and Carter about the status of Black
people in general and Black students in particular.
272
A central issue was the fact that UCLA still did not
have a standalone African American Studies Department, which the Faculty Senate voted unanimously

268
“FBI Los Angeles History,” Federal Bureau of Investigation.
269
Temblador, “Memorial Honors Anniversary of Black Panther Students’ Deaths.”
270
Ibid.
271
Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (London: Routledge, 2006), 11-16.
272
Temblador, “Memorial Honors Anniversary of Black Panther Students’ Deaths.”
75
to establish three months later.
273
Using this site as a place to not only work through the past trauma of
the shooting itself, but also fight for the current needs of Black students, is exactly the type of heritage
this thesis aims to call attention to. While designations and memorials are a useful tool for protecting
places of significance, how these spaces function is equally noteworthy. Through commemorative
gatherings people use places like Campbell Hall to create meaning, or, in the words of UCLA student
Semaj Earl, to “recognize the history of students of color” and “ignite the fire in other people for this
cause.”
274

Universities and cities around the country are beginning to reckon with difficult pasts and the
often-problematic role these institutions have played in them. At the University of North Carolina, a
monument to dead Confederate soldiers known as Silent Sam was illegally torn down by students in
2018.
275
A memorial to Confederate General Robert E. Lee became a central gathering point for white
nationalists and counter protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia during the “Unite the Right” protests in
which a vehicle-ramming attack left one dead.
276
Names of classrooms and colleges that glorify
slaveowners are also a point of contention.
277
As with the social movements in the late 1960s, it is
students that are agitating for changes, and they are often meeting just as much resistance as they did
decades ago.
Whether pushing for commemoration or advocating for its removal, these fights ultimately boil
down to differential understandings of the past and how it should be used. Overcoming powerful forms
of collective memory regarding topics like slavery or revolutionary movements is a sometimes violent,
but always contentious process. Finding ways to recognize all forms of engagement with the past—from
designation, to even vandalism—as pieces of the heritage process is an important step for including
voices that have historically been ignored. History is reinspected and recycled with each passing
moment, always affected by the perspective of the present. While uncomfortable, bringing this process
onto campuses and into cities is the best way to guarantee that new perspectives on the past are not
only available in books and articles.

273
“Faculty Senate Unanimously Votes to Create African American Studies Department,” UCLA, accessed October
5, 2019, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/faculty-senate-unanimously-votes-to-create-african-american-studies-
department.
274
Temblador, “Memorial Honors Anniversary of Black Panther Students’ Deaths.”
275
Jesse James Deconto and Alan Binder, “‘Silent Sam’ Confederate Statue Is Toppled at University of North
Carolina,” New York Times, August 21, 2018.
276
Joe Heim and Ellie Silverman, “One Dead as Car Strikes Crowds Amid Protests of White Nationalist Gathering in
Charlottesville,” The Washington Post, August 13, 2017.
277
Noah Remnick, “Yale Grapples With Ties to Slavery in Debate Over a College’s Name,” New York Times,
September 11, 2015.
76
The New Black Panther Party
Aside from the annual gathering at UCLA, fights over how to handle the Panthers’ legacy
continue throughout the country. The New Black Panther Party, regarded by the Southern Poverty Law
Center as a “hate group,” claims to be the rightful descendent of the ‘60s Panther platform, and openly
advocates for attacking white people, Jewish people, and their children.
278
Whether the organization
deploys this rhetoric simply to attract attention is debatable. At any rate, the original Black Panther
Party’s living founders vehemently disavow the group and its teachings.
279

The New Black Panther Party represents what can happen to an historic legacy when neglected.
It can be argued that if the prevailing narrative surrounding the original Panthers did not demonize the
Party for its advocacy of violence, it might be clear that this group is using their name inappropriately.
While the new party seems to remain a truly fringe organization, their very existence is still a heritage
issue. By advocating for underrepresented narratives—in this case, the Black Panthers as a community-
serving Party, repressed by the state—those interested in heritage can build an understanding of the
past that counters those who coopt it to do harm. Drawing the line on what is an acceptable amount of
political violence is far outside the scope of this project. But, both the New Black Panther Party and the
attack in Charlottesville demonstrate what role history plays in building all social movements, and how
important heritage work is.

SoCal BPP Memory Project
Groups that hope to change how the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panthers is
remembered are engaging with this past actively. Operating under the slogan “educate to liberate,” an
organization of educators, students, artists, politicians, and former members of the Party are working
together on a holistic “SoCal BPP Memory Project.”
280
A conference is tentatively scheduled for
December of 2019, fifty years after the LAPD attacked the Chapter’s main office. Speakers on the
program’s provisional schedule include important figures like Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, and
Elaine Brown; all important party members who took on leadership roles at various points during the
Party’s early years.
281
The conference will include art exhibits with ephemera and memorabilia, panels

278
“New Black Panther Party,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed October 7, 2019,
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/new-black-panther-party.
279
Erica Evans, “Who Are the New Black Panthers?,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2016.
280
“SoCal BPP Memory Project,” accessed October 7, 2019,
https://ultrawav0.wixsite.com/socalbpp50/anniversary-commitee.
281
Ibid.
77
discussing the political climate of the late 1960s, a grocery giveaway, and free healthcare trailers. Two
panels also plan to discuss conflicts between the LAPD and the Panthers, as well as a discussion of the
relationship between police and Black people today.
282

Conferences like this can be an important heritage tool that brings people together to work
through the past. Researchers can boil down cumbersome work into short talks, delivering a bigger
picture than one might receive from the prevailing narrative on the Panthers in the media. Moreover, as
the original Panther members age, this form of memory work shapes what image of the Party is passed
on to younger activists interested in capitalizing on their work.
Surviving members of the Chapter have also held monthly Black Panther breakfasts in the spirit
of the Party’s activism around food justice.
283
Wayne Pharr, one of the Panthers wounded during the
raid at 4115 Central Avenue, stated that the breakfast helped former party members “maintain our
camaraderie” as well as “raise funds for political prisoners and those still suffering from the effects of
the state’s war against us.” Additionally, the group honors those who died for the cause and engages
with “newer activists.”
284
Through conferences, vigils, or breakfasts, former Panthers and their
sympathizers reflect on their own version of the past and appropriate it for present gain. These forms of
commemoration are an important part of memory work that counters the Panther legacy scarred by
disinformation and political manipulation.

282
Ibid.
283
Wayne Pharr, Nine Lives of a Black Panther: A Story of Survival (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2014), 291.
284
Ibid., 291.
78
“Our Mighty Contribution” Mural

Figure 3.11: “Our Mighty Contribution” mural, Black Panther Party panel, painted by Enkone Goodlow. Photo by
author.

Activists have also brought the memory of the Black Panthers into Los Angeles’ built
environment through public art. Not surprisingly, this effort has received resistance, both from city
officials and in the form of anti-Black vandalism. The murals and their reception in the city demonstrate
how politically charged the memory of the Black Panthers remains today.
Near Leimert Park in South Los Angeles, a 787-foot-long wall stretches along Crenshaw
Boulevard between Fiftieth Street and Fifty-Second Street. In 2002, twelve artists created “Our Mighty
Contribution,” a collection of murals on Black culture spanning the entire wall. The panels depict historic
events and portraits of famous Black historical figures, artists, and athletes. According to the collective,
the project was completed “without any financial support or permission from the city [sic].”
285

285
“Crenshaw Wall,” accessed October 7, 2019, https://ultrawav0.wixsite.com/crenshawwall.
79
One section by muralist Enkone Goodlow depicts four Black Panthers. Three stand in their now-
iconic all-black outfits with one fist raised. Centered is a take on the widely circulated photo of the
Party’s Communications Secretary Kathleen Cleaver, in which she stood proudly aiming a shotgun from
her hip in an apartment doorway. As a demonstration of the Party’s willingness to defend itself against
police searches, this portrait has particular significance for the history of the Southern California
Chapter.
Sadly, in 2018, each of the Panthers’ faces were spray painted over with a white swastika.
286

Goodlow was particularly shocked because he claims that his portion of the mural had never been
defaced during the wall’s sixteen-year history.
287
His work, which he restored immediately, was the only
section of the wall targeted.
288
Police investigated the act of vandalism as a hate crime. The event made
national news and concerned residents held a community meeting with the LAPD.
289

As with the heated discussions regarding Confederate memorials, this mural’s defacement
represents how politically charged heritage work is and how contentious public-facing engagements
with polarizing history can be. There are perturbing parallels between the destruction of Silent Sam by
the students of the University of North Carolina and the defacement of Goodlow’s mural. Both are
immediate acts that aim to project an alternative version of the past than that of the current memorial.
While most would agree that the students have a stronger moral case for their actions, both examples
demonstrate that heritage is a living discourse, reinforced daily.
Vandalism can provide insight into how different people understand the past. In the case of the
hate crime on Crenshaw Boulevard, this act is disturbing evidence that ideologies like Nazism persist in
America. However, the restoration of the mural and the sympathetic reactions of the press and the
police are also a form of heritage maintenance that nurtured this representation of the past back to
health, in the process reinforcing its meaning and significance. This site’s defacement demonstrates that
holding space for the heritage of underrepresented groups is extremely important. Even as these
narratives become more accepted, progress is never truly guaranteed.

286
“Vandalism of Hyde Park Black Panthers Mural With Swastika Graffiti Investigated as Hate Crime,” KTLA,
November 30, 2018, https://ktla.com/2018/11/29/hyde-park-black-panthers-mural-vandalized-with-swastika-
graffiti/.
287
“Black Panthers Mural in Los Angeles Defaced with Swastikas,” CNN, November 20, 2018,
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/29/us/black-panther-mural-swastikas/index.html.
288
“Vandalism of Hyde Park Black Panthers Mural With Swastika Graffiti Investigated as Hate Crime,” KTLA.
289
“LAPD Investigating Swastikas Painted on Crenshaw Mural,” Los Angeles Sentinel, December 6, 2018.
80
“To Protect and Serve” Mural

Figure 3.12: “To Protect and Serve Mural” by Noni Olabisi. Photo by author.

A second mural located at 3406 11
th
Avenue in South Los Angeles just north of Leimert Park also
handles the heritage of the Black Panthers. Working in conjunction with Judith Baca and the Social and
Public Arts Resource Center (SPARC), muralist Noni Olabisi proposed her work, “To Protect and Serve,”
in 1994.
290
The Panther-themed mural features several incendiary scenes, including Huey Newton with a
gun; Bobby Seale bound and gagged under court orders following his several outbursts during his trial
for conspiracy and inciting a riot in Chicago; a Black Panther with a rifle saving a victim from a Ku Klux
Klan lynching; and two police officers forcefully arresting a Black man. The mural also depicts the
Panthers’ social services, namely their free breakfast program. On the far-right corner, excerpts from the
Party’s Ten-Point Platform are listed.
Unlike most other public representations of the history of the Black Panthers in Los Angeles, this
mural explicitly includes representations of white violence. Towering over Seale is the white judge who

290
Carla Hall, “Controversial Black Panther Mural OK’d,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1994.
81
ordered him to be bound and gagged during his trial. Members of the Ku Klux Klan stand in close
proximity to the two white police officers, both committing acts of violence on Black men. Throughout
the mural, Olabisi depicts the Panthers as righteous victims of racial violence, rather than simply
aggressors. These scenes portray the Panthers’ legacy holistically, capturing the Party’s advocacy of
violence and its social programs, as well as the state’s war on the organization. The mural thus avoids
the reductive pitfalls that most other engagements with the Panthers suffer from.
The work was initially one of several projects that SPARC planned to complete using an
endowment from the City.
291
The City’s Cultural Affairs Commission—a body which reviews publicly
funded art projects and is expressly forbidden from making decisions based on content—approved the
mural after much contention in October of 1994.
292
Soon after, however, City Council withdrew its
support. Councilman Nate Holden tried to have the monument canceled and then moved, arguing that
its depictions of violence in an area he deemed drug- and gang-infested were a public health risk
comparable to “shouting fire in a crowded theater.”
293
There is little doubt that the recent memory of
the 1992 Uprising affected this concern. Eventually, the City threatened to pull all $250,000 of SPARC’s
funding if the group did not drop Olabisi’s work from its package of proposed works.
294
The group
withdrew the project and it was later funded through private donations.
295

The project was also polarizing for everyday residents. One adjacent business owner believed
the Black Panthers were a fundamental aspect of Black history, while another contended that the
Panthers discredited the Black community with their advocacy of violence.
296
A patron named Kimberly
Armstrong argued positively for the mural as protected by the First Amendment in the Los Angeles
Times: “We see guns on TV . . . If Hollywood can do it, why not Crenshaw? I don’t see the big deal of
putting a mural on a wall if the KKK can walk down the street and say it’s their freedom of
expression.”
297
Another nearby resident, Altair Bey, fifty, argued that Newton and his teachings were “so
old” and that his advocacy of violence was a “concept [that] doesn’t fit with the time.”
298
Particularly

291
Riccardi, “Black Panther Mural Backers Reject Funding.”
292
Hall, “Controversial Black Panther Mural OK’d.”
293
James Rainey, “Council Rejects Holden’s Bid to Move Site of Planned Black Panthers Mural,” Los Angeles Times,
October 29, 1994; Riccardi, “Black Panther Mural Backers Reject Funding.”
294
Nicholas Riccardi, “Black Panther Mural Backers Reject Funding.”
295
“City Wide Mural Program - To Protect and Serve,” SPARCinLA, accessed October 7, 2019,
http://SPARCinLA.org/to-protect-and-serve-noni-olabisi-cd-10/.
296
Nicholas Riccardi, “Neighbors Divided Over Mural,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1994.
297
Ibid.
298
Ibid.
82
revealing is that nearly thirty years after the Party’s creation most people maintained strident opinions
on who the Panthers were and what role their memory should play in society.
Later that year, the LAPD raided the barbershop on which Olabisi was to paint the mural,
confiscating small amounts of marijuana and two illegally owned weapons from customers and store
owners.
299
Baca claimed that the raid was designed by the police as a way to make the area appear
dangerous and decrease support for the controversial artwork.
300
Inspecting the political process
surrounding the mural’s creation reveals how troubling the legacy of the Panthers remains. These
conversations, while secondary to the work of art itself, are a substantive part of memory work. Olabisi’s
mural inspired different people to voice their ideas about this past, revealing how prevailing
understandings of history are reinforced and resisted through heritage.

Conclusion: An Unclear Future
In 2017 the City Council of Los Angeles finalized an action to erect a “permanent ceremonial
sign” at the site of the LAPD’s raid on the Black Panther Party headquarters. The language of the report
argues that “prior to becoming infamous for a daytime shootout,” the location “was known for
providing hot meals to low-income students whose families could not afford to provide breakfast.”
301
At
the time of this project’s writing, there remains no commemorative material onsite. Nonetheless, the
action taken by Council demonstrates that sympathetic activists are changing the legacy of the Black
Panther Party in real time.
The alternative approaches listed above demonstrate that even when the built environment
provides few visible memorials to the Panthers, much of this work continues to happen intangibly.
These forms of commemoration allow those in favor of the movement to build their own understanding
of the Party’s history, countering the dominant narrative produced in part by the federal government’s
national vendetta against the organization. However, the fleeting nature of this heritage leaves the
Panthers’ legacy vulnerable. Even in academia, the earnest reconsideration of the Black Panthers is a
relatively recent development. The New Black Panther Party; the Los Angeles City Council’s blocking
Olabisi’s mural funding; and the white supremacist vandalism of “Our Mighty Contribution”—each of
these examples illustrates that heritage engagements with the Panthers are susceptible to pressure
from a variety of interests, not just state repression. It is thus more important than ever that those

299
Hall, “Controversial Black Panther Mural OK’d.”
300
Ibid.
301
City of Los Angeles, “Public Works and Gang Reduction Committee Report, File No. 16-1167,” February 13,
2017.
83
interested in this history inspect sites of erasure and recognize unconventional forms of memorialization
while this past is reconfigured.

84
Chapter Four: The 1992 Uprising
For three days in the spring of 1992 Los Angeles burned. Footage from helicopters and home
video cameras of beatings and torched cars put the city in the international spotlight, exposing the
image of Los Angeles as a multiracial center of prosperity and sunshine as a blatant fiction. $1 billion
dollars in property damage, sixty-three dead, and over 16,000 arrested attested to this.
302

Despite the shock that the unrest caused worldwide, many contemporary researchers and
commentators agreed that the rebellion was far from unexpected.
303
Changing demographics combined
with decades of federal, state, and municipal policies which gutted urban industrial economies had left
people of color struggling in particular. In the early 1990s, the Black male unemployment rate in some
areas of South Central Los Angeles hovered around fifty percent.
304
To make matters worse, between
1965 and 1992, the state at all levels of government replaced the social safety net with “a criminal
dragnet.”
305
The War on Drugs was in full swing, which involved police disproportionately targeting
young Black men.
306
In the pointed words of journalist and native Angeleno Marc Cooper, these policy
changes sent “a clear message that the only public service that would be freely offered to minority
communities was a shit-kicking police department to keep the lid on.”
307

The takeaway point of this case study is that while the beating of Rodney King is frequently cited
as the main cause of the uprising, this narrative dismisses a broader social context of discrimination and
oppression. Rather than activate sites associated with the Uprising to call attention to how systemic
discrimination caused this unrest, heritage engagement with the events tepidly focuses on police
brutality or completely avoids this difficult past altogether. By simplifying and avoiding this polarizing
past, the municipal government can shirk responsibility for its underlying causes, many of which are

302
Melvin L. Oliver, James H. Johnson Jr., and Walter C. Farrell Jr., “Anatomy of a Rebellion: A Political-Economic
Analysis,” in Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge,
1993), 118-120.
303
Rebellion, uprising, unrest, insurrection—scholars and journalists have used many words to describe what
happened in Los Angeles that spring. I use these words interchangeably and opt for titling the event “The 1992
Uprising” because the word riot is often used to undermine the legitimacy of a rebellion’s grievances. Riot implies
wanton violence, while uprising connotes at least some sort of social purpose.
304
James H. Johnson et al., “The Los Angeles Rebellion: A Retrospective View,” Economic Development Quarterly 6,
no. 4 (November 1, 1992): 361. South Central Los Angeles has since been rebranded as South Los Angeles in an
attempt to move away from media depictions of the area as inherently criminal and dangerous. I use South Central
here because it was the contemporary title. When I discuss this area today, I switch to South Los Angeles.
305
Ibid., 364.
306
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New
Press, 2010), 59-74.
307
Marc Cooper, “LA’s State of Siege: City of Angels, Cops from Hell,” in Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really
Happened—and Why it Will Happen Again, ed. Don Hazen (Los Angeles: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992),
14.
85
ongoing. Alternative engagements detailed at this chapter’s end show how marginalized communities
counter this reductive approach by turning to exhibitions, vigils, and performances.

The Uprising: April 29-May 4, 1992
The footage of police officers striking a Black motorist fifty-six times with solid aluminum batons
and tasing him twice with 50,000 volts of electricity circulated widely.
308
Twenty-one officers surrounded
the man, with four assailants doing the brunt of the beating.
309
The motorist’s name, Rodney King,
became a household one. When a majority-white jury acquitted three of the four officers on April 29,
1992, the region held its breath.
310

While a crowd of protesters gathered at Parker Center, the Los Angeles Police Department’s
(LAPD) headquarters downtown, Chief of Police Daryl Gates left to attend a fundraising event against a
potential City amendment designed to reign in police misconduct.
311
The multi-racial crowd grew and
eventually became violent (Figure 4.1). By nightfall, the crowd moved through downtown, burning
objects, overturning vehicles, and blocking traffic on U.S. Route 101.
312
In South Central Los Angeles, at
the intersection of Florence and Normandie, looting began around 6 p.m. A crowd pelted passing cars
with objects, pulled motorists from their vehicles, and beat them. Most infamously, the white truck
driver Reginald Denny fell victim to the protestors while a helicopter crew captured his beating on
film.
313

308
Max Felker-Kantor, “Managing Marginalization from Watts to Rodney King: The Struggle Over Policing and
Social Control in Los Angeles, 1965-1992” (Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2014), 419.
309
Cooper, 13.
310
Josh Sides, “20 Years Later: Legacies of the Los Angeles Riots,” Places Journal, April 19, 2012.
311
Joe Domanick, “Daryl Gates’ Downfall,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 2010.
312
Rubén Martínez, “Riot Scenes,” in Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really Happened—and Why It Will Happen Again
(Los Angeles: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992), 35-36.
313
Penelope McMillan, “‘Other Trucker’ Sues L.A. Over Beating at Outbreak of Riots,” Los Angeles Times, February
23, 1993.
86

Figure 4.1: Protestors gather outside Parker Center, April 29, 1992. Photo by Gary Leonard. Gary Leonard
Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

A Guatemalan immigrant and construction worker, Fidel Lopez, was also beaten and maimed. A
Black reverend named Bennie Newton pulled him from the crowd to safety.
314
One other such story also
became famous, in which a Black man named Alan Williams saved Japanese American Takao Hirata from
several attackers. Two police officers backed up their patrol car when Williams hailed them down for
aid. They looked at Hirata bleeding on the street for approximately twenty-five seconds and left.
Another Black bystander offered to take Hirata to the hospital.
315
The LAPD continued its retreat and
remained largely absent from South Central.
Over the next several days, looting and arson spread throughout the region. Years of racial
tension between Korean immigrants and Black residents led the demonstrators to target over 2,000
Korean-owned businesses, about half of the total number of establishments damaged.
316
Some business

314
Steve Lopez, “The Forgotten Victim from Florence and Normandie,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 2012.
315
Paul R. Watts, “Mapping Narratives: The 1992 Los Angeles Riots as a Case Study for Narrative-Based
Geovisualization,” Journal of Cultural Geography 27, no. 2 (June 1, 2010): 213-215.
316
While recognizing that this was no conventional protest, I use terms like demonstrators as opposed to
something like mob to call attention to the social purpose of the Uprising. Chanhaeng Lee, “Conflicts, Riots, and
Korean Americans in Los Angeles, 1965–1992” (Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2012), 183.
87
owners placed signs in front of their properties reading “Black owned,” in the hope that looters would
spare their stores. Fires and looting spread north into Hollywood with some isolated incidents occurring
in the San Fernando Valley.
317
Violent demonstrations also broke out in Pomona, Long Beach, the South
Bay, and Las Vegas. The Bay Area, Atlanta, Omaha, Minneapolis, and Toronto witnessed sympathetic
activity as well.
318

Figure 4.2: Building burned during the 1992 Uprising. Photo by Gary Leonard. Gary Leonard Collection, Los Angeles
Public Library.

Mayor Tom Bradley instituted a city-wide curfew on April 30.
319
While local police forces tended
to protect areas with financial and political capital like Bunker Hill downtown and enclaves like Beverly
Hills and Pasadena, city officials called on the state and federal governments for help with South Central
and Koreatown, which they had essentially abandoned (Figure 4.3).
320
By May 2, the fourth day of the
insurrection, the total federal troop strength in Los Angeles reached 13,500, armed with bulletproof

317
Watts, 212.
318
Edward Soja, “Los Angeles 1965-1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to Restructuring-Generated Crisis,”
in The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory, ed. Allen Scott and Edward Soja (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1996), 460.
319
Dean E. Murphy, “Bradley Lifts Curfew Tonight,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1992.
320
Lynn Mie Itagaki, Civil Racism: The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion and the Crisis of Racial Burnout (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 38.
88
vests, automatic weapons, and Humvees. These reinforcements remained in the area until May 14.
321

What meant safety to some was further trouble for others. In one incident in Compton, a
miscommunication between the LAPD and the Marines while responding to a domestic dispute led to
troops firing more than two hundred rounds into a home. Luckily the man, woman, and children inside
were left uninjured.
322
The combined power of the federal troops and several local police agencies
eventually quelled the unrest by its fifth day. Bradley lifted the curfew on May 4.
323

Figure 4.3: National Guard soldiers stand in front of a grocery store, May 3, 1992. Photo by Gary Leonard. Gary
Leonard Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Many recognize the Rodney King Trial as the main cause of the Uprising, but question the
legitimacy of the reaction to this grievance.
324
The vignettes of violence presented here do not intend to
propagate this same narrative by focusing on stories of violence, which is a reductive approach that

321
Max Felker-Kantor, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2018), 229-230.
322
James D. Delk, Fires & Furies: The Los Angeles Riots of 1992 (Palm Springs, CA: ETC Publications, 1995), 221.
323
Dean E. Murphy, “Bradley Lifts Curfew Tonight.”
324
An in depth study of public opinion on race and its shifts after 1992 can be found here: Lawrence Bobo et al.,
“Public Opinion Before and After a Spring of Discontent,” in The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons for the Urban Future,
ed. Mark Baldassare (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994). Pages 110-115 offer concise tables with breakdowns on
answers by race.
89
oftentimes demonizes people of color. However, glossing over the violent nature of this human tragedy
in the name of social discourse is problematic. Theorizing about these events as a response to structural
racism before addressing the pain and loss suffered by so many could be seen as disrespectful. The
following sections, however, demonstrate that this violence was far from mindless. Preservationists
cannot change the past pain inflicted by the rebellion, but they can guide how it is processed and
understood.

Causes and Context
As with previous case studies, this chapter calls attention to how powerful people can dilute
complex history through heritage. This section outlines some of the major causes of the 1992 Uprising to
contextualize the beating of Rodney King in a larger backdrop of widespread oppression and
discrimination. Mainstream heritage engagements with these events tend to gloss over this complex
context by focusing heavily on the issues of police brutality and interracial conflict between Black
residents and Korean immigrants in South Central.

Police Brutality
Standing outside of the Simi Valley courthouse where the jury delivered its acquittals to three of
the four cops who beat King, filmmaker John Singleton told press that “By having this verdict, what
these people done, they lit the fuse to a bomb.”
325
Decades of rage were pent up within South Central
over the brutal treatment of Black people by the police, which one could argue is a fundamental aspect
of Southern California’s history. Famous sundowner municipalities like Glendale, in which the police
guaranteed a beating and removal to any Black person found on the street after dark, embodied this.
326

In August of 1965, when police clashed with a Black motorist named Marquette Frye, the South Central
neighborhood of Watts devolved into chaos.
327
Over five days crowds caused $40 million worth of
property damage. Thirty-four people died.
328
In this context, the brutality of the police and the unrest
that followed in 1992 is one bullet point on a lengthy timeline of oppression and resistance.
Contemporary researchers sympathetic to communities of color argued that “the strongly held
perception in Los Angeles' racial minority communities, at the time of the insurrection, was that the

325
Race and Rage: The Beating of Rodney King, Documentary (CNN, 2011).
326
James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns (New York: The New Press, 2005), 236.
327
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville, Virginia: Da Capo Press, 1995),
54.
328
Ibid., 1.
90
police had no limits on what they could do to minority citizens.”
329
Both qualitative and quantitative
analyses demonstrate that people of color had little reason to believe otherwise. Between 1986 and
1990, residents of Los Angeles filed 2,152 complains of excessive force by the police. Only forty-two
were sustained.
330
In 1991, the City of Los Angeles paid $11.3 million in settlements to victims of police
brutality. Two decades earlier, that number was $11,000.
331
Throughout the 1980s, LAPD officers killed
eighteen people though the use of chokeholds. Sixteen were Black.
332
In 1982, Chief of Police Gates
claimed that the department “may be finding that in some blacks when it [the chokehold] is applied, the
veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.”
333
He refused to retract the
statement. There is little doubt that despite the shock the King tape caused in 1992, its contents were
sadly symptomatic of systemic problems within the police.
While the problems were broad, the direct link between the Rodney King incident and the 1992
Uprising is undeniable. The tape and the acquittals that followed are cited by both the state and its
opponents as the mainstay cause of the rebellion. Graffiti tags of King’s name in South Central showed
that those partaking in the looting, arson, and violence were in touch with this. But, to return to the
words of Singleton, chronic police brutality without legal recourse was the fuse that lit the bomb.
Housed within that explosive was also frustration with decades of socioeconomic oppression that
abandoned people of color in urban areas to fight amongst themselves to survive. In their article, “Some
People Don’t Count” Marc Cooper and Greg Goldin argue that “What looks to the television cameras like
so many mounds of rubble is, in reality, a mosaic of anger over decades of LAPD brutality, of agony over
a court system that sends a black man to jail for shooting a dog while freeing a Korean shopkeeper who
shot a black teenager, of frustration over an economy that no longer provides a real living, of discontent
with a welfare system that punishes.”
334
Thus, despite how frequently the relationship between Rodney
King’s beating and the insurrection is discussed, this relationship is not linear.

329
Walter C. Farrell Jr. and James H. Johnson Jr., “Structural Violence as an Inducement to African American and
Hispanic Participation in the Los Angeles Civil Disturbance of 1992,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social
Environment 4, no. 4 (December 1, 2001): 350.
330
Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed the LAPD (New York: Times Books,
1997), 592.
331
Cooper, 14.
332
Johnson et al., 359.
333
“Coast Police Chief Accused of Racism,” New York Times, May 13, 1982.
334
Marc Cooper and Greg Goldin, “Some People Don’t Count,” in Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really Happened—and
Why It Will Happen Again, ed. Don Hazen (Los Angeles: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992), 42.
91
Socioeconomics
Between 1965 and 1992, both major political parties at the federal level emphatically gutted
social programs and liberalized trade in an effort to make American businesses more competitive on a
global scale.
335
These policies incentivized industries to leave cities across the United States in search of
cheap labor. In Southern California, unionized industrial jobs left Los Angeles’ core for places like
Tijuana, while high-skill job centers developed on the suburban periphery closer to the moneyed,
educated, and generally white populations.
336
The departure of accessible decent jobs from urban
centers, combined with the removal of any semblance of a social safety net, put communities of color in
America’s cities in crisis.
Researchers have grounded these claims in hard data. 70,000 high-wage jobs left South Central
between 1978 and 1982.
337
At the time of the rebellion, the unemployment rate in South Central was
over twenty percent, with the majority of employed residents commuting outside the area for work.
338

Some areas held an unemployment rate for men of color aged eighteen to thirty-five at fifty percent.
339

Simultaneously, the criminal dragnet wreaked havoc. One 1992 study from Economic Development
Quarterly argued that “nationally, 25% of prime working-age young black males are either in prison, in
jail, on probation, or otherwise connected to the criminal justice system . . . the anecdotal evidence
suggests that at least 25% of the young black males in South Central Los Angeles have had a brush with
the law. What are the prospects of landing a job if you have a criminal record? Incarceration breeds
despair and in the employment arena, it is the scarlet letter of unemployability.”
340

The dragnet had impacts at both the individual and neighborhood levels. The demonization of
poverty disincentivized development, which ensured South Central remained on the margins.
Countywide, the ratio of residents to general stores in 1990 was 203:1. In South Central that ratio was
415:1.
341
At the time of the unrest, forty percent of the housing stock was constructed before 1940.
342

Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters went on record

335
Cedric J. Robinson, “Race, Capitalism, and the Antidemocracy,” in Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban
Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 74-75.
336
Farrell Jr. and Johnson Jr., 343.
337
Johnson et al., 359.
338
Cynthia Hamilton, “The Making of an American Bantustan,” in Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really Happened—and
Why It Will Happen Again, ed. Don Hazen (Los Angeles: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992), 20.
339
Farrell Jr. and Johnson Jr., 339.
340
Johnson et al., 364.
341
Study by Claritas Corporation, cited in Don Hazen, ed., Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really Happened—and Why It
Will Happen Again (Los Angeles: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992), 53.
342
Hamilton, 20.
92
claiming that “Only 2 percent of all of BofA’s [Bank of America’s] loans were made to California’s 2.5
million African Americans.”
343
In one year, the institution loaned only $8 million—one tenth of one
percent of its mortgages—to low-income Black households. Only a handful of banks located themselves
in South Central, forcing most residents to cash their paychecks at predatory check-cashing stores,
whose fee rates can rise to ten percent.
344
This de facto push of people of color away from wealth was a
centuries-old practice with powerful cumulative effects: in 1991 the median net worth of Anglo
households in Los Angeles was $31,904. For non-whites the median was $1,353—a ratio of one to nearly
twenty-four.
345
Considering these facts, several researchers argue that the uprising was in fact a
“postmodern bread riot.”
346

Race, Changing Demography, and Latasha Harlins
This troubling economic climate arrived in conjunction with massive demographic changes. In
the 1960s South Central was predominately Black. By 1992, the area was half Latinx.
347
Moreover,
following the Watts Rebellion of 1965, shop owners that were mostly Jewish moved to other areas of
the city.
348
Korean immigrants arriving mostly in the 1970s and ‘80s experienced barriers to employment
and sought out small business ownership to make ends meet, locating themselves in South Central,
where depressed land values made overhead cheap.
349
These changes frustrated some longstanding
Black residents of South Central, who believed Latinx newcomers were taking scarce low-skill jobs, while
Korean immigrants refused to offer Black people employment or develop a relationship with the
community. In one study from 1989, Black participants contended that Korean shop owners frequently
watched or followed them, accused them of stealing, refused to serve them, and were generally
disrespectful.
350

343
Maxine Waters, “Testimony Before the Senate Banking Committee,” in Inside the L.A. Riots: What Really
Happened—and Why It Will Happen Again (Los Angeles: Institute for Alternative Journalism, 1992), 32.
344
Ibid., 26-27.
345
Ibid., 32.
346
Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., “Uprising and Repression in L.A.: An Interview with Mike Davis by the
CovertAction Information Bulletin,” in Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge, 1993),
142.
347
Max Herman, Fighting in the Streets: Ethnic Succession and Urban Unrest in Twentieth-Century America (New
York: Peter Lang, 2005), 117-120.
348
Horne, 109-110.
349
Lee, iii.
350
Ella Stewart, “Communication between African Americans and Korean Americans: Before and After the Los
Angeles Riots,” in Los Angeles—Struggles toward Multiethnic Community, ed. Edward T. Chang and Russel C. Leong
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 32-33.
93
Most of the friction between these two groups of people took place at one problematic
battleground: liquor stores. While Korean shop owners used these businesses and their relatively low
commercial rents to gain footing in their new country, many residents saw these establishments as a
nuisance which increased the presence of alcoholism and acted as “magnets for other negative activities
like drug dealing, public drunkenness, sales to minors, and other criminal activity.”
351
In one article, Erich
Nakano of the Little Tokyo Service Center contended that in public testimonies at municipal hearings
residents of South Central regularly complained of “drug deals openly taking place in store backrooms,
of children purchasing liquor, [and] of violence outside stores involving inebriated customers.”
352

While the interracial friction between Black residents, and Korean and Latinx immigrants was
palpable, it is also important to note that the presence of liquor stores as a site of conflict was an issue
of urban policy that a negligent municipal government left unaddressed. Supermarkets and other
grocers left South Central as part of the widespread, macro-level disinvestment from Los Angeles’
industrial core discussed above. Liquor stores began replacing these uses at alarming rates, with City
Hall doing little to stem the tide. Nakano reported that in 1993, in the forty-square-miles that constitute
South Central, there were 17 liquor stores per square mile, versus 1.6 per square mile countywide.
353

Turning to art can provide a far more intimate perspective on this issue and its interaction with
race than the data and scholarly sources cited thus far. In a scene from John Singleton’s 1991 directorial
debut, Boyz n the Hood, Laurence Fishburne’s character, Furious Styles, Jr., stands in front of a billboard
for a house flipping company called “Seoul to Seoul Realty.” Speaking to a group of several interested
residents, he accuses the government of purposely devaluing property in South Central through land use
policy at the expense of longtime residents: “Why is it that there’s a gun shop on almost every corner in
this community? I’ll tell you why, for the same reason that there’s a liquor store on almost every corner
in the Black community. Why? They want us to kill ourselves. You go out to Beverly Hills you don’t see
that shit.”
354
Through the pointed naming of the realty company and Styles’ monologue, Singleton
argues that Korean immigrants played a role in a much larger system—one that pitted impoverished

351
Erich Nakano, “Building Common Ground—The Liquor Store Controversy,” in Los Angeles—Struggles toward
Multiethnic Community, ed. Edward T. Chang and Russel C. Leong (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993),
167.
352
Ibid., 168.
353
Ibid., 167.
354
John Singleton, Boyz n the Hood (Columbia Pictures, 1991). Art can sometimes go overlooked in scholarly work,
despite its close ties with the subjects we study. I recognize that this is an unconventional choice of source, but I
believe Singleton’s presentation of Black radicalism and the platform he achieved with this very popular film is
noteworthy. Its timing, released less than a year before the uprising, makes its content very relevant for this
project.
94
people against one another and harmed communities of color obliquely through malignant land use,
while the municipal government appeared innocent. The director’s stance—undoubtedly radical to
some in its belief of a coordinated white conspiracy to destroy Black communities—demonstrates that
the racial conflict in South Central was much more intricate than feuds between shopkeepers and drug
addicts. Within this context, conflicts in liquor stores become motivated not only by race, but also
economics and politics.
The murder of fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins by a Korean liquor store owner, Soon Ja Du,
embodied the racial conflict of South Central, as well as the failure of the American justice system to
protect Black lives. Du owned Empire Liquor with her husband, located at the intersection of 91
st
Street
and Figueroa Street (Figure 4.4).
355
Harlins entered the store on March 16, 1991. She placed a bottle of
orange juice in her purse and approached the counter. Du accused Harlins of attempted shoplifting. The
two tussled at the counter and Harlins struck Du in the face three times. She then threw the orange juice
on the counter and headed toward the store’s entrance. Du produced a handgun and shot Harlins in the
back of the head once, killing her instantly.
356
Closed circuit cameras captured grainy footage of the
incident.

355
Location and ownership was confirmed through an alteration permit from 1989, City of Los Angeles Department
of Building and Safety, http://ladbsdoc.lacity.org/idispublic/.
356
Scott Gold, “In South L.A., a Bitter Case of Mistaken Identity,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2013.
95

Figure 4.4: Empire Liquor in 1992. Photo taken by Al Seib. Courtesy of Los Angeles Times.

In November of 1991 a jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter and recommended the
maximum sentence: sixteen years in prison. Trial Judge Joyce Karlin disagreed, sentencing Du with five
years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine.
357
In defending her decision, Karlin
argued that “This is not a time for revenge . . . and no matter what sentence this court imposes, Mrs. Du
will be punished every day for the rest of her life.”
358
An appeals court upheld the sentence in April of
the following year, one week before the uprising.
359
Harlins’ murder and Du’s sentence are frequently
cited as important factors leading up to the interracial violence that took place during the Uprising.

Dissonant Past, Conditioned Future: Interpreting and Responding to an Uprising
The causes listed above paint the 1992 Uprising as arguably the most contentious historical
event in Los Angeles’ history. The process of rebuilding was hardly different. In the months that
followed, different perspectives on the unrest itself and how best to respond further highlighted
tensions between the municipality and its residents. The reform package crafted by policymakers,

357
Dean E. Murphy, “Reiner to Seek New Sentence in Girl’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1991.
358
Jennifer Bihm, “Say Her Name: Latasha Harlins,” Los Angeles Sentinel, May 4, 2017.
359
Dennis Schatzman, “Du Sentence Upheld by State Appeals Court,” Los Angeles Sentinel, April 23, 1992.
96
known as “Rebuild L.A.,” is seen today as having had mixed success. Additionally, while the Uprising
changed the LAPD permanently, its violent role in mass incarceration and the War on Drugs persisted.
This section briefly analyzes these band-aid reforms and the tensions that surrounded them before
inspecting several sites associated with the uprising. Ultimately, leveraging a watered-down version of
this difficult history allowed the state to provide tokenistic reforms while dodging the uprising’s deepest
underlying causes. This same practice of avoidance is evident in the lack of formal heritage engagement
with this event, which is now nearly three decades into the past.

Narrative Building: Riot, Uprising, and Race
The rampant violence that took place during the Uprising made it easy for some to delegitimize
the underlying social causes of the unrest, particularly regarding Black people. A narrative quickly
developed in the press that depicted the main form of violence as Black rioters attacking Korean-owned
stores.
360
Other critics, however, sought to highlight how the riot was actually multicultural, and argued
that the villanization of Black people during the unrest was a harmfully simplistic depiction.
361

A discussion of the role Latinx individuals played during the insurrection demonstrates this fact.
Despite the angle that the media took in the following weeks, with both Newsweek and Time running
covers of a young Black man in front of a burning building, the growing Latinx population in South
Central engaged in the uprising as both “victims and vandals,” according to one Los Angeles Times
writer.
362
Statistics gathered since confirm this: the majority of those arrested were Latinx, and up to
forty percent of the businesses damaged during the insurrection were Latinx-owned.
363
The LAPD also
abandoned its normal practice of limiting its role in questions of immigration by aiding Immigration and
Naturalization Service officials during the uprising.
364
1,200 arrestees were undocumented.
365
Prominent
scholar on Southern California, Mike Davis, claimed in one interview that federal authorities deported

360
This narrative development and the role it played in protecting white culpability for the unrest is analyzed in
depth here: Hemant Shah and Michael Thornton, Newspaper Coverage of Interethnic Conflict: Competing Visions of
America (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2004), 227-230.
361
An anthology on the role race played in the Uprising as a multicultural phenomenon can be found here: Los
Angeles—Struggles toward Multiethnic Community, ed. Edward T. Chang and Russel C. Leong (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1993).
362
Cited in: Armando Navarro, “The South Central Los Angeles Eruption: A Latino Perspective,” in Los Angeles—
Struggles toward Multiethnic Community, ed. Edward T. Chang and Russel C. Leong (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1993), 72.
363
Ibid., 72; Joan Petersilia and Allan Abrahamse, “A Profile of Those Arrested,” in The Los Angeles Riots: Lessons
for the Urban Future, ed. Mark Baldassare (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).
364
Navarro, 73.
365
Ibid., 73.
97
between six and seven hundred people during the unrest, mostly arrested during sweeps of Macarthur
Park without having been charged with any riot-related offense.
366

The role that race played during the uprising is undeniable, but the way that this component has
been framed since is suspect. By concentrating on violence between Black residents and Korean
immigrants the dominant narrative became simplified. In the words of Elaine Kim, “the U.S. news media
played a major role in exacerbating the damage and ill will toward Korean Americans . . . by spotlighting
tensions between African Americans and Koreans above all efforts to work together and as opposed to
many other newsworthy events.”
367
Over time, however, researchers and social critics have tried to
reframe the unrest as the first multicultural riot, in response to not only police brutality but oppression
and extreme poverty. This shifts the dynamic from a lateral one—Black mobs versus Korean
shopkeepers—to something more vertical: people of color responding en masse to a greater, less
defined enemy of oppressive systems steeped in white supremacy. Repeatedly focusing on Rodney King
and the specifically Black violence that followed the acquittal of his assailants eliminates these
important components of this troubling story. By focusing on interracial conflict in South Central,
attention is moved away from the role the municipality played in creating the social conditions which
led to the chaos.

Police “Reform”
The LAPD instituted several reforms after the Uprising, including sensitivity training and efforts
to diversify staff. At the time of the insurrection, around 60% of the force’s officers were white. In 2015,
that number was 44%.
368
LAPD officials hoped that changing this would help the force develop a more
intimate relationship with the communities they policed.
At the federal level, however, the War on Crime and the War on Drugs continued. Programs like
Operation Weed and Seed—which intended to remove criminals from struggling neighborhoods while
shoring up these communities with “human services encompassing prevention, treatment, and
neighborhood revitalization”—did not fundamentally change the police’s role as a borderline
occupational force in America’s cities.
369
The burden again was placed on the community, rather than

366
Robert Gooding-Williams, ed., “Uprising and Repression in L.A.: An Interview with Mike Davis by the
CovertAction Information Bulletin,” 150-151.
367
Elaine Kim, “Home is Where the Han Is: A Korean-American Perspective on the Los Angeles Upheavals,” in
Reading Rodney King: Reading Urban Uprising, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams (New York: Routledge, 1993), 221.
368
“Infographic: LAPD Diversity over the Years,” Los Angeles Times, March 28, 2015.
369
United States Department of Justice, “Weed and Seed,” accessed September 26, 2019,
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/weed-and-seed.
98
the state, as argued by scholar of policing Max Felker-Kantor: “Although many observers had high
hopes that the violence [of 1992] would lead to renewed attention to racial inequality and poverty, the
dominant understanding of the uprising viewed urban problems and violent uprising as ones of
individual misbehavior, poor work habits, the failure of antipoverty programs, and a lack of effort by the
poor themselves.”
370
This meant that even when much needed investment entered South Central in an
attempt to address broader systemic inequities, the movement of this money “depended on a
partnership with law enforcement and the criminal justice system.”
371
A robust police force had become
such a large facet of American city management that even when responding to an uprising against police
brutality, criminal justice reform remained tepid. The limited improvement of relations between the
LAPD and communities of color was a direct byproduct of the narrative which focused on the
relationship between Rodney King and the uprising, rather than broader systems of oppression. Carrying
out reforms without fundamentally reassessing this context produced a generally myopic response from
the LAPD and the larger municipal government.

Economic Reform
City officials also created “Rebuild L.A.,” a program to bring new investment into South Central
that could “remedy the conditions of economic marginalization and decline” which caused the explosion
in 1992.
372
However, Rebuild L.A. deflected the role bad urban policy played in creating the economic
conditions it hoped to fix. Rather than inspect holistically how the municipality produced these areas of
disinvestment through discrimination, the program turned to partnerships with the private sector to
help the market economy “correct” itself. This essentially led to the program’s failure. By relying on
private interests to bring dollars to an area they had essentially abandoned decades ago, Rebuild L.A.
became both difficult to monitor and ineffective, satisfying “neither those who demanded open
processes nor those who demanded results in the form of economic development.”
373

Extreme imbalances of wealth persist throughout Los Angeles, and despite how many property
owners in South Central wished to rebuild, the promise of this reform work never came to fruition.
374

Lots made empty by arson still dot the region today. Owners continue to struggle to obtain financing to

370
Felker-Kantor, “Managing Marginalization from Watts to Rodney King,” 418.
371
Ibid., 418.
372
Dennis Downey, “Between Partnership and Privatism: The Case of Rebuild L.A.,” Research in Social Problems
and Public Policy 8 (2001): 196.
373
Ibid., 213.
374
Ricardo Lopez, “Blacks in South L.A. Have a Bleaker Jobs Picture Than in 1992,” Los Angeles Times, April 28,
2012.
99
develop them, leaving them as painful reminders that even through the combined power of the public
and private sector, Rebuild L.A. could not find a way to prioritize this part of the city, even after the crisis
of 1992.
The central demands of the 1992 Uprising remain basically unmet. In this disagreement
between the municipality and its most marginalized there is fundamental dissonance about race, equity,
and justice. Rather than answer to the crisis with a thoughtful engagement with this past, these
neighborhoods were offered limited reforms and asked to further rely on the same economic system
which had abandoned them in recent memory. These fundamental frictions between the government
and the people are unseen in this city’s engagement with this past.

Selected Sites
Figure 4.5: Map of 1992 Uprising selected sites. Note that the scale has been doubled from the other two case
studies to highlight the regional impact of this event. The Simi Valley courthouse where the acquittal of Rodney
King’s assailants was served lies twenty-two miles west of the site of his beating, still not visible at this scale. Map
by author.
100
Empire Liquor (9127 S. Figueroa Street)

Figure 4.6: Building of former Empire Liquor store, now occupied by a Numero Uno Market. Photo by author.

The site of the Latasha Harlins shooting is a non-descript stucco building in the heart of South
Los Angeles. With the help of neighbors who doused several attempts of arson at the site, Empire Liquor
survived the unrest. Despite the work of these bystanders, there is little doubt that the site remained
contentious for some time. After Du’s business closed soon after Harlins’ murder, signs and graffiti
covered the building’s façade with phrases like “Closed for Murder & Disrespect of Black People” and
“Burn This Mother Down!”
375
The location has since been replaced by a Numero Uno Market, a franchise
of a large chain grocer. Constructed in 1962, photo evidence and permits show that the building has
gone through substantial alterations, including the addition of an accessory structure in its parking lot in
2001.
376
The site has no preservation protections.

375
Patt Morrison, “Symbol of Pain Survives Flames,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1992.
376
City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety Records, http://ladbsdoc.lacity.org/idispublic/.
101
In 2005, the City of Los Angeles’ Planning Department denied a zoning permit to allow the sale
of beer and wine at this location, as part of a larger effort to reduce the availability of alcohol in South
Los Angeles. In their decision, they quoted a letter from the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse
Prevention and Treatment, which argued that “Permitting the sale of alcohol at the site where a child
was murdered [adds] insult to injury and would be indicative of very poor judgement.”
377
While this
location remains undesignated, this advocacy work from community-based organizations represents an
interesting form of engagement with the past. By pushing for land use changes in the name of Harlins,
this coalition is leveraging a difficult history to produce tangible benefits in the present.
The change of use from liquor store to grocer is also worth noting. As of 2015, there were 0.57
grocery stores per 10,000 residents in South Los Angeles, making it a food desert.
378
West Los Angeles
maintains a ratio nearly double that size: 1.03 per 10,000.
379
Despite its lack of architectural merit, the
shift from liquor store to grocer in this building represents a benefit to this area of the city. It is unlikely
that business owners would be interested in reminding customers of a murder that took place in their
store. However, some form of interpretation or public art onsite could build on the benefits this change
in use is already delivering to this community.

377
Rong-Gong Lin Il, “Liquor Permit Denied at Site of 1991 Killing,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2005.
378
Hayley Fox, “Fighting South L.A.’s ‘Food Apartheid’ With the Help of Urban Agriculture,” LA Weekly, August 14,
2017.
379
Ibid.
102
Site of Rodney King Beating (Lot Near Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street)
380

Figure 4.7: Intersection nearest to the lot where police officers beat Rodney King, now occupied by Discovery Cube
Los Angeles, the low-slung building in the background. Photo by author.

A 1993 article from the Los Angeles Times discussed the lot where police officers beat Rodney
King as an “odd landmark.” “It really helps the late-night pizza delivery. All the guys know the place right
off,” reported one area resident.
381
Discovery Cube Los Angeles, an educational museum constructed in
2006 with hands-on exhibits for children, now stands on the site. It is undesignated and there is no
information about King’s beating available there.
Activating the site, which is geographically very distant from the heart of the uprising, would be
challenging, and not just because this past is polarizing. Where some might see the beginnings of a dark
chapter for Los Angeles’ history, others, like Rod Dotson, see something sadly unremarkable. The
mechanic was quoted in the same Los Angeles Times article from 1993:

380
There is some dispute about the exact location of the beating, but the empty lot at the corner of Foothill
Boulevard and Osborne Street is the most agreed upon.
381
John M. Glionna, “King Arrest Site Becomes Odd Landmark,” Los Angeles Times, February 21, 1993.
103
For most black people that particular spot has no significance whatsoever because a lot of blacks
I know have been manhandled by police the same way Rodney King was. The only difference
was that this one was captured on videotape . . . But I could take you to a thousand other spots
where black people have had their face smashed into the concrete. If you are black in this city
and you are not 100% cooperative with the police, you are in serious trouble, no matter what
you have done. This King thing was no different, man. It’s like trying to find a significant spot on
a battlefield. Take your pick.
382

Understanding how widespread circulation affects memory is an important issue in the field of heritage
conservation. How can those interested in this event’s preservation call attention to its role in a larger,
episodic system of oppression, particularly when many of its iterations go unnoticed? Moreover, is it
possible to memorialize the Rodney King beating without pulling attention away from other important
issues, such as disinvestment, municipal neglect, and the continuing beatings and murders of Black
people by police in the United States?
383
Finding ways to hold attention on a site of painful history is the
first step that could be attached to a larger effort of meaningful, connective storytelling. At any rate,
while these questions might not have defined answers, the current lack of engagement is troubling.

382
Ibid.
383
Famous cases in recent years include: Stephon Clark, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner,
Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and many more.
104
Parker Center (150 N. Los Angeles Street)

Figure 4.8: Parker Center in 1955. Photo by Jack Kemmerer. Security Pacific National Bank Collection, Los Angeles
Public Library.

Parker Center, the now-demolished former headquarters of the LAPD, is deserving of a
standalone research project. The International Style building started as an urban renewal development
which demolished two blocks of downtown’s Little Tokyo district in 1954, just twelve years after the
community was left permanently altered by the internment of Japanese Americans during World War
II.
384
The site received its namesake from polarizing Chief of Police William H. Parker, who was famous
for militarizing the LAPD and maintaining poor relations with communities of color.
385
The building
served as the LAPD’s headquarters until 2009, holding famous criminals throughout its tenure and
playing a prominent role in several television dramas.
386

384
D. J. Waldie, “Should the LAPD’s Old Headquarters Be Preserved? Or Demolished?,” KCET, January 11, 2017,
https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/parker-center-preserve-repurpose-demolish.
385
“Parker Center, Home to Police Dramas Real and Fictional, Comes Nearer to Demolition,” Los Angeles Times,
October 29, 2017.
386
Ibid.
105
Repeated pressure to demolish the site and construct different civic buildings started serious
dilemmas in Los Angeles’ preservation community. The site represented so much to so many: rampant
redevelopment which scarred a minority community; a testament to an efficient, yet brutal police force;
and a flashpoint for the largest insurrection in American history. Despite two major efforts to designate
the building, one of which reached City Council, the building never achieved Historic-Cultural Landmark
status.
387
In July of 2019, during the writing of this project, the Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering
completed the demolition of Parker Center with unanimous support of City Council, who hope to build
an office tower for City employees onsite.
388

Places like Parker Center represent a serious conundrum in heritage conservation and
management. Sites of difficult history are particularly apt for demonstrating that those affected by a
place’s history are not a single bloc of opinion. Falling into a developer-versus-preservationist binary
comes easily, but this model is simplistic and can sometimes place preservationists out of step with
community members. In other words, to complicate the matter through a pointed question: what does
it mean when a white, middle-class preservationist advocates for a building a person of color sees as a
testament to police brutality or the embodiment of a municipality whose civic infrastructure grows
violently into their neighborhood? In these politically charged contexts, it is important that
preservationists craft their approach around the idea that not every person advocating for demolition is
a power-hungry politician or greedy developer. For some, sites like Parker Center may represent one out
of many forms of violence repeatedly inflicted on their community. It is this friction over the past that
this project hopes to highlight. While it is indeed troubling that Parker Center’s story is now lost in Los
Angeles’ built environment, the conversations surrounding its future were a valuable and instructive
form of heritage engagement in and of themselves.

387
“Editorial: Raze or Rehabilitate Parker Center? City Must Make a Decision Soon.,” Los Angeles Times, April 17,
2015.
388
Dakota Smith, “L.A. City Council Backs Plan to Knock Down Parker Center, Build Office Tower,” Los Angeles
Times, March 24, 2017.
106
Florence and Normandie

Figure 4.9: Intersection of Florence and Normandie, a major flashpoint of the 1992 Uprising, with Tom’s liquor
visible at the northeast corner. Photo by Author.

The intersection of Florence and Normandie in South Los Angeles is widely cited as the major
flashpoint of the 1992 Uprising. It was from this intersection that police retreated as angry crowds
became violent following the announcement of the acquittal.
389
Tom’s Liquor, a store at the
intersection’s northeast corner, was one of the first businesses looted.
390
It was also here that four men
pulled Reginald Denny from his eighteen-wheeler and beat him while a helicopter crew circled above,
filming. Fires raged here, burning both buildings and cars. Today, the site is undesignated and as non-
descript as the hundreds of other wide intersections that make the grid covering Los Angeles’ flatlands.
In an article discussing a graduate studio in the Journal of Architectural Education, landscape
architect Alison Hirsch discussed how her students experimented with spaces of resistance associated

389
“Twenty Years on, Los Angeles Riot Flashpoint a Grim Tableau,” Reuters, April 20, 2012.
390
Esmeralda Bermudez, “Fading Memories at Florence and Normandie,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2012.
107
with the 1992 Uprising. Students crafted interesting design solutions that preserved the site’s past of
resistance by providing spaces for demonstrations, while bringing much needed change to the area’s
built environment. Still, even this exercise made clear how challenging the preservation of a painful past
can be. Hirsch concisely summarized the central dilemma: “The fact that many of the sites most
impacted by the unrest were the result of looting or arson rather than obvious activism complicates
questions.”
391
Analysis of other case studies in this project has revealed that in some cases the state
avoids preserving a site because its story is embarrassing or could tarnish the government’s image as
benevolent. The case of Florence and Normandie, however, is not so simple. Urban theorists can
philosophize about how the violence that took place there was part of a street-level discourse, or a form
of instant redress and resistance against an oppressive municipality—but the relationship between this
discourse and the looting of stores or beating of bystanders is a muddled one. This was not conventional
activism and the sections above demonstrated that these five days of violence were and still are
extremely contentious, which rightfully gives those interested in memorializing this past pause.
Moreover, as previously discussed, conventional approaches to preservation may not benefit
places like this site or the communities surrounding them. Designation would not automatically “restore
the ethos that made these once-everyday spaces significant,” as Hirsch argues.
392
Additionally, even an
effective designation program could run the risk of further tying this already disinvested area of the city
to a narrative of danger, crime, and violence. In short, calling attention to such a site haphazardly would
make this sensitive situation worse. But, as time carries on, residents and visitors alike continue to lack
any central place of remembrance for the events that took place at this intersection in particular and
throughout the city in general.

391
Alison Hirsch, “Restoring Los Angeles’s Landscapes of Resistance,” Journal of Architectural Education 72, no. 2
(2018): 253.
392
Ibid., 253.
108
Lots Made Empty through Arson (Vermont and Manchester)

Figure 4.10: Lots made empty through arson at Vermont and Manchester, surrounded by chain link fencing. Photo
by author.

Hirsch’s students also studied an area about a mile south of Florence and Normandie near the
intersection of Vermont and Manchester, where incidents of arson left behind large vacant lots. Several
of these empty swathes of land remain throughout South Los Angeles today, acting as “a stubborn
reminder that the repeated vows to ‘rebuild L.A.’ were never fully realized,” in the words of one Los
Angeles Times writer.
393

Landowners still struggle to obtain financing for projects in South Los Angeles, making the lots a
painful and extremely public reminder not only of the violence that took place there, but also the
persistent lack of investment from both the public and private sectors in this area of the city. Residents
complain of the lots attracting litter and people experiencing homelessness.
394
Some repurpose the

393
Emily Alpert Reyes, “‘It Looks Bad. It’s Dangerous.’ Vacant Lots Dotting South L.A. a Painful Reminder of L.A.
Riots,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2017.
394
Ibid.
109
fencing surrounding the lots to display merchandise during “swap meets.” In some sense, for better or
worse, these scars remain an active piece of the neighborhood, but their connection to a troubling past
is far removed.
This example is listed here because it is an unconventional preservation dilemma. Here there is
the threat of erasure not through demolition, but through building. Developers have attempted to
deliver a glitzy, high-end shopping mall to the large lot at Vermont and Manchester, but these plans
have stalled.
395
As rents in urban areas around the world rise, it is marginalized communities that face
the biggest threat of displacement and erasure. Cases like this demand that preservationists interested
in maintaining a sense of place develop a toolkit that is holistic. Where development is welcome, what
role might preservation play in helping bring growth to a disinvested place that is mindful of the past?
Hirsch’s students experimented with this question and proposed multi-use projects that facilitated new
connections between residents while offering space for public gathering. The centerpiece of these plans
was increased community control.
396
Regardless of what does eventually fill these lots, this component
is crucial. In this process, a new, more inclusive form of preservation advocacy could develop—one that
welcomes needed growth and helps it coalesce with the past.

Recognizing Alternative Approaches
The examples presented above demonstrate that formal engagement with this past is largely
absent and that there is no simple way to fix this problem. Some sites suffer from blatant erasure, while
others are plagued by avoidance. In each case, the issue is not necessarily that powerful people are
presenting a dominant narrative in the city’s built environment, but that the government is conducting
very little memory work at all. While it is easy to understand why the region struggles with calling
attention to this dark chapter of its history, it is still shocking that nearly thirty years later there is no
central place of remembrance for this internationally significant event. There is little risk that the
uprising will be entirely forgotten, but without some form of discussion memory can fester. The next
section presents some alternative engagements with this past to demonstrate how memory work
continues outside of the built environment.

395
Sassony Properties, “Vermont Entertainment Village,” accessed September 26, 2019,
http://sassonygroup.com/vermont/location.html.
396
Hirsch, 264.
110
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992
Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is a one-woman play that premiered at the Mark Taper Forum on
March 24, 1994.
397
The debut was performed by the playwright, Anna Deavere Smith. Smith interviewed
over three hundred people and produced a script that consists of monologues pulled verbatim from
these transcripts. She also included quotes from prominent politicians and government officials such as
Police Chief Daryl Gates and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Together, the monologues create a
riveting form of documentary theater. The use of one actor jars the viewer from any willing suspension
of disbelief, instead placing them into a position of social criticism. The compilation of monologues
creates a fascinating depiction of what comprises an historic event: jumbled perspectives, vying for
attention and space.
From the interviews conducted by Smith to her performance, Twilight represents a unique form
of heritage engagement, in which the past is worked through, reshaped, and then delivered
performatively. This structure allows Smith to provide nuance to a story that is often simplified both in
the built environment and the media. What was a simple equation—the beating of Rodney King leading
to five days of unrest—becomes a complex tapestry presented all at once through a single individual. In
his book Performance and Activism, Kamran Afary lauds Smith’s ability to note how both explicit and
implicit forms of discrimination shaped Los Angeles in the months leading up to the acquittal which
sparked the rebellion: “Smith’s particular skill was in the way she captured various manifestations of
racism in different sectors of society, beginning with the top—the office of the president and the U.S.
Congress—and continuing down though the streets of Los Angeles.”
398
Through a careful selection of
dialogue, Smith curates a collection of experiences which presents dissonant perspectives on this event
in a way that is not legible in Los Angeles’ built environment.

The Graves of Latasha Harlins and Rodney King
As demonstrated through the example of José Díaz, victim of the murder at Sleepy Lagoon,
inspecting gravesites can provide insight on alternative forms of heritage engagement. The grave of
Latasha Harlins is located in Santa Fe Springs in Paradise Memorial Park. In 1995, Denise Harlins,
Latasha’s aunt, learned through an unofficial document that cemetery management had disturbed

397
Kamran Afary, Performance and Activism: Grassroots Discourse After The Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 160-161.
398
Ibid., 167.
111
several hundred graves, unearthing bodies and dumping them into a dirt pile to resell burial plots.
399
It is
unclear if Latasha’s remains are onsite.
On Findagrave.com, the same digital catalog of gravesites where Díaz received commemoration,
visitors have left Latasha over one thousand flowers.
400
Many are mindful of both the circumstances
surrounding her death and the mistreatment of her remains: “My heart breaks for what happened to
you in life, and in death. The desecration of your grave and callous discarding of your remains saddens
and infuriates me. Continued rest and divine love eternally.” “You will never, ever be forgotten. Sad
shame that what happened to you is still going on now. Rest in sweet peace Latasha.” “How I would love
to have you for a big sister who I could look up to and love like my very own. Rest in peace, beautiful
beloved child. You are forever safe in God's loving arms.”
401
As with José Díaz, all comments are from the
last fifteen years, demonstrating a continued engagement with this past despite the disturbance of
Harlins’ grave and the lack of commemoration present at the site of her murder.
In 2012, Rodney King drowned to death in his swimming pool at the age of forty-seven. An
autopsy concluded that King was under the influence and dismissed the possibility of foul play.
402
He is
interred in Los Angeles at Forest Lawn Memorial Park. The base of his headstone reads “Can we all get
along?,” the famous phrase he uttered with a shaky voice during a press conference at the height of the
uprising. Digital visitors to King’s grave have left over four hundred flowers with comments like the
following: “No one deserved what was done to you that night Mr. King, I pray that you are finally at
peace.” “It's still happening Rodney . . . We even have a racist president! [this comment, left in 2019,
refers to Donald Trump]” “Your name will forever be linked to the Cry for Justice [sic], in all places, in all
situations. Thank you for trying.”
403

Again, it is necessary to qualify these examples. While the Internet is an informal and almost
hyper-public space, its openness is exactly what makes these comments intriguing. There are no
admission fees or barriers to entry. Anyone around the world can create a commemoration in an
instant. Moreover, the digital realm is challenging to discuss because commentary quickly becomes
dated as technology changes. Still, these comments are significant acts of memory, mindful of the

399
Gary Libman, “Families Grieve Again After Graves Disturbed,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1995.
400
“Latasha ‘Little Latasha’ Harlins (1976-1991),” Find a Grave, accessed September 26, 2019,
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/62862209/latasha-harlins.
401
Ibid.
402
Jennifer Medina, “Rodney King Dead at 47,” New York Times, June 17, 2012.
403
“Rodney Glen King (1965-2012) - Find A Grave Memorial,” accessed September 26, 2019,
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/92047665/rodney-glen-king.
112
contexts surrounding both King and Harlins’ lives. While it remains unclear exactly what could be done
with this work, validating its existence is an important early step.

Exhibitions
Museum exhibitions are a key component of heritage work which are particularly useful for
polarized history. They are generally more flexible than commemoration in the built environment and
allow for direct interaction with everyday people. In this way, they capture the discursive nature of
heritage in a way that designated sites by themselves cannot. One drawback, however, is that they are
usually temporary.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1992 Uprising, curator Tyree Boyd-Pates presented “No
Justice, No Peace: L.A. 1992” at the California African American Museum.
404
The exhibit ran from May
through August and displayed the long arc of the insurrection’s history dating back to the region’s past
of housing discrimination in the early twentieth century.
405
Photos and ephemera displayed alongside
substantial text juxtaposed the Uprising with information on structural racism and resistance, touching
on the Zoot Suit Riots, “Bloody Christmas,” the Watts Rebellion, the murder of Latasha Harlins, and
more.
406
One critic writing for KCET described the exhibition as “a reflective space for patrons to
examine the underbelly of racial tension,” that “is not conceived to make you feel warm and cozy.”
407
At
the end of the exhibition, visitors were asked, “In the midst of today’s political climate, how can we
bring change to unify ourselves?”
408
They then pinned their answers to the wall for others to read.
While the ephemeral and temporary nature of museum exhibitions is a major drawback, those
interested in heritage should recognize the role that this work can play in appropriating the past. This
pointedly political exhibition, which took a provocative approach to recontextualize the beating of
Rodney King into a broader system of white supremacy and oppression, is exactly the type of work this
project calls for. It is this nuance and richness that is frequently removed from history by static
engagements with heritage that are motivated primarily by political convenience.

404
“No Justice, No Peace: LA 1992,” California African American Museum, accessed September 26, 2019,
/exhibitions/2017/no-justice-no-peace-la-1992.
405
Chelle Barbour, “This L.A. Riots Exhibit Traces the Roots of Discontent Going Back to the 1900s,” KCET, May 9,
2017, https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/this-la-riots-exhibit-traces-the-roots-of-discontent-going-back-to-
the-1900s.
406
Ibid.
407
Ibid.
408
“No Justice, No Peace: LA 1992,” California African American Museum.
113
Finding ways to connect the management of heritage sites with the interpretive work done at
other institutions is essential for engaging with pasts that are painful. Without a dedicated space in
which curators can present and support their understanding of the past, important details remain only
in the hands of those with time to conduct their own research. Despite the California African American
Museum’s location on the northern fringe of South Los Angeles, exhibits displayed here do not enhance
or maintain an historic sense of place at sites like Florence and Normandie or Vermont and Manchester.
Bringing these more political, in-depth interpretations of the past outside of museums and into the city’s
fabric is a real challenge that involves policymakers, public artists, and politicians. But, making
provocative interpretations of the past more public and permanent than museum exhibitions is a critical
step in the effort to democratize heritage, even if the attempts fail for political reasons.

Public Gatherings and Intangible Commemoration
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Uprising also brought people to into public to remember and
commemorate. One such gathering took place at Florence and Normandie, in which a small group came
together to share space and commemorate Rodney King, Latasha Harlins, and those who died during the
unrest. Denise Harlins, aunt of Latasha Harlins, was present. The group prayed and lit several candles,
placing them on the ground near a street sign, a sort of ad hoc memorial.
409

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Denise Harlins argued that people had forgotten the
complex context that preceded the insurrection. “It’s important to remember what started it . . . Rodney
King and Latasha Harlins and many social ills that was going on at the time brought April 29, 1992,
about,” she contended.
410
She then connected this past with the current moment in 2017, a year in
which police killed 1,100 people nationwide, arguing that “When you look at the news and social media
and police brutality, it hasn’t gotten better.”
411
These quotes demonstrate that while these gatherings
and any memorials they produce are momentary, they still engage with this past in a meaningful and
complex way.
Today, this moment lives only in newspaper articles and the minds of those present. While both
tangible and intangible forms of heritage can be linked to space—in this case the intersection of

409
Matt Hamilton and Angel Jennings, “At the Corner of Florence and Normandie, Marking Causes of L.A. Riots:
‘It’s Important to Remember What Started It,’” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2017.
410
Ibid.
411
“2017 Police Violence Report,” Mapping Police Violence, accessed September 26, 2019,
https://policeviolencereport.org. Hamilton and Jennings, “At the Corner of Florence and Normandie, Marking
Causes of L.A. Riots: ‘It’s Important to Remember What Started It.”
114
Florence and Normandie—it is also important to recognize how other forms of heritage engage with the
past. This widening of the lens of heritage management becomes particularly important when there is a
prevailing lack of formal commemoration in the built environment.

Conclusion
Engagement with this past is happening outside of formal channels, but the question is whether
or not this is sufficient. What is most concerning about the lackluster formal management of these sites
is that the 1992 Uprising is decidedly something that the municipal government cannot sweep under the
rug. Until people in power bring broad, meaningful reforms to neighborhoods like South Central
throughout the country, unrest will continue to happen. In 2017, an interview from The Seattle Times
quoted area resident Nathan Smith saying, “We’re just one more little slap in the face away from
another one.” Eavesdroppers surrounding him in the South Central diner of M’Dears “nodded in
agreement.”
412

In 2014, police killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and left his body
exposed on the street for four hours. An uprising broke out in multiple waves after the killing itself and
after a grand jury refused to indict the assailing policing officer.
413
Nearly fifty years after the Watts
Riots, it seems that this explosive dynamic in America’s cities remains unchanged.
In the past, both preservationists and historians have avoided present-day issues, particularly
those that were politically charged. What role might those interested in the past take on in a fight that’s
happening in real time? Connecting Ferguson, 1992, Watts, and the various other fights for liberation
that occur regularly in this country and beyond is an important step for helping people see a timeline
rather than isolated incidents.
In his famous case for reparations published in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that “To
proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte.”
414
Heritage professionals
can undergird thinkers like this by holding attention on narratives of oppression and marginalization that
some might wish to avoid. Effective storytelling and informative, political accounts of history are
important fodder for resisting against issues that are systemic. Advocating for these sites is one piece of
that process.

412
Jennifer Medina, “25 Years After Rodney King Riots, L.A. Takes Stock,” The Seattle Times, April 28, 2017.
413
Anthony Zurcher, “How One Shooting Sparked National Protests,” BBC News, August 10, 2015.
414
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 2014,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
115
Chapter Five: Analysis and Recommendations
Many open-ended questions have been presented throughout this thesis. Some are purposely
ambiguous, simply intended to provoke thought. I believe most of the others, however, can be
answered with the following: mainstream heritage conservation tools like designation are poorly
designed to address these case studies. Where memory work is taking place, it is often intangible,
outside the purview of the government. The question remains, then, should this gap be bridged, and
how? This chapter inspects all selected sites and alternative approaches together, highlighting how
formal heritage approaches have struggled with these pasts. Other examples from around the world
which face difficult history more effectively are then presented. The chapter finishes with
recommendations to improve how we handle sites and stories like these case studies.

116

Figure 5.1: Map comparing the City of Los Angeles’ Historic-Cultural Monument distribution with this project’s selected sites. Map by Author.
117

Selected Sites
(Shaded = Site of the Disempowered; Unshaded = Site of the Powerful)
Zoot Suit
Riots (1943)
Resource Name Type Address Condition Current Use
Herald Examiner
Building
Building 146 W. 11
th
St.
Under
Rehabilitation
Arizona State
Education
Facility
Navy Armory Building
1700 Stadium
Way
Good Condition
Firefighter
Training Facility
Sleepy Lagoon Site
5400 Lindbergh
Lane
Unrecognizable
United States
Navy Facility
Hall of Justice Building
211 W. Temple
St.
Recently
Rehabilitated
L.A. County
Sheriff’s Office
Lincoln Heights Jail Building 421 N. Ave. 19 Fair Condition Vacant
Black
Panther
Party (1969)
Southern California
Chapter
Headquarters
Site
4115 S. Central
Ave.
Demolished Parking Lot
Campbell Hall,
UCLA
Building UCLA Campus Good Condition Classrooms
Wilshire Federal
Building
Building
11000 Wilshire
Boulevard
Good Condition
Federal
Government
Offices
1992
Uprising
(1992)
Empire Liquor Building
9127 S.
Figueroa St.
Fair Condition Grocery Store
Site of Rodney King
Beating
Site
Foothill Blvd.
and Osborne St.
Unrecognizable Museum
Parker Center Building
150 N. Los
Angeles Street
Demolished N/A
Intersection of
Florence and
Normandie
Site
Florence Ave.
and Normandie
Ave.
Unchanged N/A
Lots Made Empty
through Arson
Site
Throughout
South Los
Angeles
Unchanged Vacant
Table 5.1: Table compiling selected sites from all case studies. Table by author.
In the table above, sites are categorized as those associated with power (typically of the
government), and those associated with the disempowered. Like most binaries, this arrangement is
118
simplistic and not intended to be steadfast. Florence and Normandie, for example, categorized here as a
site of the disempowered, is mostly public property, but its association with state power is less palpable
than at sites of civic grandeur like the Hall of Justice. And while Campbell Hall is associated with a
powerful public university, the story Bunchy Carter and John Huggins’ murder is one that is attached to a
political organization that was systematically disempowered by the government. Despite these
limitations, these two categories proved useful for inspecting how current heritage approaches privilege
certain narratives over others.
The distribution of designated landmarks throughout Los Angeles should be noted before
discussing these sites specifically. The map above shows that the city’s historic core in and around
downtown is dense with Historic-Cultural Monuments (Figure 5.1). This continues to the north, west,
and east in neighborhoods like Hollywood, Highland Park, Koreatown, etc. But the number of
designations declines steeply south of Interstate 10, where sites associated with the Black Panther Party
and the 1992 Uprising are located. Further research is needed to better understand why municipal
preservation policy is not finding value in South Los Angeles’ built environment, despite its longstanding
role in the city’s history.

Sites of the Powerful
Inspecting designations is a good place to start, but this issue is also complicated. The Wilshire
Federal Building belongs to the federal government and Sleepy Lagoon lies beyond Los Angeles’ city
limits, putting these places outside the City’s preservation jurisdiction. Traditional historic preservation
policy also privileges aged sites over newer ones, making buildings like the Hall of Justice and the Navy
Armory more likely to receive this honor. Indeed, every site of power associated with the oldest case
study, the Zoot Suit Riots, is locally designated, but not for reasons relating to this event.
Generally, the sites of powerful institutions were more likely to be designated as local landmarks
for architectural rather than social reasons. As argued in previous chapters, this approach minimizes the
painful narratives associated with each of these buildings, favoring instead stories about their
relationship with Los Angeles’ civic expansion and their contribution to the city’s built environment.
Additionally, those sites of power that remain undesignated—the Wilshire Federal Building and Parker
Center—also avoid their painful pasts, through either an absence of heritage engagement or outright
demolition.
Because of the fixed nature of designation, there is also little room to draw connections
between historical events, let alone history and the present. This means that when places do tell stories
119
of the past, they are typically very limited or self-aggrandizing. The Hall of Justice, for instance, played a
role in all three of the case studies presented here and will continue to be an important site in stories of
resistance, repression, and disorder in the future. The long struggle to rehabilitate the building and its
continued use are a testament to the power of heritage conservation policy and advocacy. But while
preservationists restore its materials, the site’s underrepresented stories—like the conviction and
release of those wrongly jailed for the death of José Díaz, the 4,000 protestors at the building’s steps
decrying the LAPD’s actions against the Black Panther Party—remain undertold.
The Navy Armory turned firefighter training center struggles similarly. A passerby might remark
at its beauty as an architectural artifact. A passionate researcher could even toil through its three-
hundred-page designation to learn one version of the building’s past. Both, however, would remain
ignorant to the fact that sailors departed from this base for a week with makeshift weapons to attack
Mexican Americans in 1943, or that the new Special Weapons and Tactics division of the LAPD received
training from marines there before conducting a violent, politically motivated raid in 1969.
These examples show that even when current approaches to heritage conservation are applied
properly, the narratives they produce are lacking. The tools available to preservationists protect
beautiful buildings, but typically avoid discussing the problematic institutions or oppressive actions
these places can represent. Through mainstream conservation, dissonant pasts and marginalized
perspectives become funneled into narratives that gloss over stories of struggle and oppression.

Sites of the Disempowered
In contrast, none of the sites of the disempowered listed above have been locally designated,
and the reasons are somewhat clear: For the municipal government, these places are politically charged
and, in some cases, downright shameful. Several of these sites have already been leveled, leaving little
material to tell a story, even if the political will existed. These blank landscapes, like the burned-out lots
of South Los Angeles, remain unchanged due to avoidance, rather than any concerted preservation
efforts.
The lack of engagement with the sites of the disempowered exposes some major flaws in
preservation. Typical approaches like designation and on-site commemoration would be a good starting
point for interacting with these pasts, but the sites of the powerful discussed above demonstrate how
much can be lost through that process. Imagining how these tools might handle the 1992 Uprising
makes this clear: Can a designation form, stored miles away in a government office, truly capture the
pain that unfolded at Florence and Normandie in a meaningful way? And would the preservation of this
120
particular intersection capture the regional, even national significance this event had? Similarly, it is
challenging to imagine a plaque or designation at Empire Liquor doing justice to the complex social
context that surrounded the murder of Latasha Harlins. But despite how many sites of significance are
associated with the Uprising, this building is one of few places that fits into a standard, architecture-
based preservation approach. Cases like this make clear that while designation is still a useful tool, more
flexible approaches with greater community involvement are still needed.
There are also active social problems in Los Angeles that make these conservation dilemmas
even more challenging. Should the lots made empty through arson in South Los Angeles be used as a
tool of commemoration without addressing the discriminatory finance practices that have allowed their
vacancy to persist for this long? Moreover, for residents in South Los Angeles interested in engaging
with this traumatic past, commemoration at the far-removed site of Rodney King’s beating—thirty miles
north of Florence and Normandie—offers little benefit, particularly for people without automobiles.
Each of these case studies has demonstrated how complex histories are reduced and manipulated. But
these heritage dilemmas show that even well intended commemoration or protection could perpetuate
this same problem.
Criticizing similarly tepid and avoidant models of preservation in post-war Berlin, historian Brian
Ladd argued that “a recurring demand has been that the land ‘must be made to speak’ . . . But in the
end someone must speak for it.”
415
The questions posed above and throughout this thesis demonstrate
that landmark designations will not provide the nuanced voice these places need. The current
approaches protecting places like the Hall of Justice or the Herald Examiner Building freeze history,
telling one story, oftentimes locking out marginalized perspectives in the process. Worse than a
truncated story, many less grand sites have no voice whatsoever. Looking beyond buildings and
materials to social practices reveals that memory work has continued, despite the overwhelming trend
of avoidance and erasure surrounding these events.
At Campbell Hall, Empire Liquor, and Florence and Normandie, people have activated the past
where the government refused to. Through discussion panels, vigils, and advocacy for changes in public
policy, residents and activists leverage the past to create a symbiotic relationship between themselves
and history. These heritage acts that are decoupled from material and space offer a voice to
perspectives that have been historically repressed. But government approaches to preservation—which

415
Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 167.
121
privilege buildings over social history, particularly when that history is uncomfortable—do not recognize
this work and the power it offers both people and places.
These sites were selected because they illustrate how current approaches routinely miss the
ephemeral, the marginalized, and the painful. Perhaps a deeply researched analysis of designation
policies could eventually lead to the amendment of the documents that protect some of these sites. But
how many adjustments using the current tools should be made before inspecting the tools themselves?
Unless the preservation movement begins to recognize alternative engagements with the past, it is
liable to continue undergirding oppressive forms of heritage.

Alternative Approaches
Intangible Cultural Heritage
In order to convey the significance of these alternative approaches, the concept of intangible
heritage must be revisited. Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) generally sits in opposition to the sites,
monuments, and architectural wonders that Western nations have historically valued and protected. It
can take many forms, including knowledge, skills, oral traditions, performing arts, rituals, music, dance,
and cuisine.
416
Long unrecognized and even discredited in Western heritage management, it was only in
2003 that UNESCO produced a guiding piece of legislation for the management of ICH.
417
Over time, it
gained widespread support, with 178 nations accepting the treaty today.
418

The United States abstained from the initial vote. This became especially problematic in 2011,
when UNESCO accepted Palestine as a member of its organization. It is against the law in the United
States for the government to pay dues to United Nations organizations that hold Palestinian
membership.
419
After coming in and out of UNESCO and claiming to advocate for ICH in other ways, the
federal government still has not ratified the document.
420

This is especially troubling because this thesis has shown that where government heritage
engagement is lacking, marginalized groups have carried out memory work through less tangible
practices. Most of the heritage acts in the table below do not require buildings and sites to conduct their

416
For a more holistic definition, see: Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa, eds., Intangible Heritage (London:
Routledge, 2009).
417
“Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage,” United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization, accessed October 27, 2019,
http://www.unesco.org/eri/la/convention.asp?KO=17116&language=E.
418
Ibid.
419
Richard Kurin, “U.S. Consideration of Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention,” Ethnologies 36, no. 1–2 (March
22, 2014): 351.
420
“Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.”
122
work. They also generally come from the grassroots and are independent of the government. Three
categories have been applied under the “Type” column: performative heritage, digital heritage, and
public art. Each of these approaches helps people maintain a fluid relationship with history, making
them better suited to accommodate marginalized perspectives than mainstream preservation
approaches used by the government.
Alternative Heritage Approaches
Zoot Suit Riots
(1943)
Alternative Approach Type Tangibility State Involvement
Zoot Suit Culture and
Luis Valdez’s Play
Performative
Heritage
Intangible None
Findagrave.com:
José Díaz
Digital Heritage Intangible None
Mural:
“The Great Wall of Los
Angeles”
Public Art Tangible
National Register
Designation
Alternative History
Tours
Performative
Heritage
Intangible None
Black Panther
Party (1969)
Public Gatherings
(Campbell Hall)
Performative
Heritage
Intangible None
The New Black Panther
Party
Performative
Heritage
Intangible None
Conference
(SoCal BPP Memory
Project)
Performative
Heritage
Intangible None
Mural:
“Our Mighty
Contribution”
Public Art Tangible None
Mural:
“To Protect and Serve”
Public Art Tangible None
1992 Uprising
Twilight:
Los Angeles, 1992
Performative
Heritage
Intangible None
Findagrave.com:
Latasha Harlins and
Rodney King
Digital Heritage Intangible None
Museum Exhibitions
Performative
Heritage
Intangible/
Tangible
Dependent on
Institution
Public Gatherings
(Florence and
Normandie)
Performative
Heritage
Intangible None
Table 5.2: Table compiling alternative heritage approaches from all case studies. Table by author.

123
Performative Heritage
People engage in memory work through different kinds of performance. I use the term
“performative” here not to imply falsehood or disingenuity, but to highlight how actions and behaviors
shape our relationship with the past as much as places do. By visiting exhibitions, organizing politically,
and attending tours, commemorative gatherings, or research conferences, people come together to
shape and discuss their relationship with the past. These interactions allow for the development of
memory in a fluid and discursive setting, oftentimes outside the purview of any government institutions.
Because performance-based heritage embraces subjectivity, it is free to include voices that
designations often overlook. Projects like the SoCal BPP Memory Project and the commemoration of
Bunchy Carter and John Huggins at UCLA offer a degree of nuance and discussion that slower, policy-
based approaches struggle to capture. Tours and museum exhibitions can accommodate longer
historical arcs and provide important contextual information to show how stories of urban uprising
relate to topics like police brutality, deindustrialization, and housing discrimination. Performance art
pieces interested in the past can also anchor history in engaging storytelling and first-hand perspectives,
like in the interview-based script of Twilight. In short, these approaches embrace the dissonance and
complexity that mainstream heritage typically avoids.

Digital Heritage
Digital heritage is an intriguing form of ICH because it relies less on professional expertise.
Websites like Findagrave.com are becoming more accessible every day and require little training to use.
These forums are open and disengaged from political bureaucracies, making them suitable for discussing
politically charged history with less fear of backlash. The outpouring of digital commemoration for
people like José Díaz, who died long before the Internet existed, demonstrates the power and
persistence of collective memory. Digital heritage can provide an outlet to process painful events like
this when no such space exists in a city physically.
Additionally, digital engagements with the past are independent of space and move quickly.
When a person can commemorate a gravesite from anywhere in the world, the eighteen miles between
the site of Rodney King’s beating and the cemetery he rests in become less impactful. Websites can also
deliver information rapidly to everyday people, while attaching the important background research and
context that on-site commemorations usually lack. Such digital displays can be revisited, cost free, which
lessens the risk of viewer fatigue that text-heavy exhibitions cause. Examples are discussed later which
demonstrate how these new forms tell rich and accessible stories, without glossing over important
124
connections like those between Watts and Ferguson, or between the raids on the Southern California
Chapter of the Black Panther Party, and its analogue in Chicago.

Public Art
Public art is the most place-based, tangible approach analyzed here. For that reason, it is
particularly suited to bring underrepresented perspectives on the past to the built environment,
particularly in cases where significant sites have been demolished. As opposed to digital or performative
heritage, public art does not rely on the interest of heritage consumers—no tickets are necessary, and
viewers are not required to seek out a particular website. Murals and monuments simply exist in public
view, giving any person nearby an opportunity to consider the past, even if only for a moment.
The mural projects studied in this thesis demonstrate that there is a desire from the grassroots
to enshrine difficult history in the built environment, but that navigating this process is challenging.
Public officials may withhold funding from politically charged projects. Maintenance and vandalism are
also an issue. These hurdles demonstrate, however, that art in the public sphere can spark different
discussions than landmark designation. Even a holistically researched designation form which accounts
for oppressed perspectives will be an unwieldy document, usually stored somewhere other than the site
itself. But through both restoring “Our Mighty Contribution” and debating “To Protect and Serve,”
everyday residents and city officials grappled with how best to represent history. If the goal of heritage
is to shape how people understand their pasts, this shows that public art plays as much of a role in this
process as preserving buildings does.

Case Studies in Facing Difficult History
These grassroots actions build alternative understandings of the past and directly address some
of the preservation movement’s biggest shortcomings. Acknowledging their importance, as well as the
significance of all ICH, could be a critical step in moving this field away from its role as an institution of
the white and monied. While a haphazard attempt by governments to engage these forms of heritage
could do more harm than good, the current paradigm of avoidance also has serious implications for
disempowered people throughout the United States. The following section discusses some examples
outside of Los Angeles where activists and preservation professionals are engaging with difficult history
more purposefully.

125
Monuments, Guerilla Memorialization, and Vandalism
Monuments are sites of heritage contention. They project particular versions of history into
public space and tell a story about what a society chooses to remember. Unfortunately, they are often
coopted by powerful institutions, and used to present a very narrow perspective on history.
A monument on display during the writing of this thesis in Times Square in New York City pushes
the boundaries of what a memorial can look like and commemorate. Kehinde Wiley’s bronze sculpture,
“Rumors of War,” depicts a young Black man with dreadlocks, dressed casually in a hoodie and jeans,
atop a warhorse. At twenty-seven feet tall, its form is identical to many depictions of famous war heroes
in American history. Acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the sculpture will be displayed in
front of the institution in the City of Richmond after its stay in New York.
421
Located a short walk away
from Monument Avenue, a boulevard lined with several memorials to veterans and politicians of the
Confederacy, this statue’s presentation will be a stark departure from the area’s historic use.
422

This confrontational heritage decision by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts accomplishes
multiple goals. For one, it memorializes Black people in a space they were historically excluded from.
Moreover, its depiction of a present-day figure in such a historical format subverts how monuments
normally function. “Rumors of War” makes clear that the boundary between the past and present is
flexible and permeable. Its juxtaposition gives viewers pause about the supposed fixedness of history
and calls attention to what a small sliver of the past places like Monument Avenue memorialize.
The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama also brings underrepresented stories to the
forefront by facing some aspects of the United States’ dark racial history. The memorial includes
artworks, sculptures, and interpretive panels on the enslavement and lynching of Black people. The
space does not shy away from connections with the present: the museum’s broad arc connects this
historic pain with the ongoing issue of mass incarceration. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
is also located on site. Opened on April 26, 2018, it is the first memorial dedicated to racial violence
against Black people in the United States.
423
Documented through research by the Economic Justice
Initiative, the memorial dwarfs viewers with over eight hundred suspended steel rectangles, each
representing a county where a lynching has taken place (Figure 5.2).

421
Reggie Ugwu, “Kehinde Wiley’s Times Square Monument,” New York Times, September 27, 2019.
422
“Artist Kehinde Wiley Unveils Rumors of War Sculpture in Times Square, New York, to be Permanently Installed
at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, September 27, 2019,
https://www.vmfa.museum/pressroom/news/artist-kehinde-wiley-unveils-rumors-war-sculpture-times-square-
new-york-permanently-installed-virginia-museum-fine-arts/.
423
“The National Memorial for Peace and Justice,” Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice,
accessed October 27, 2019, https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial.
126

Figure 5.2: The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Photo taken by and courtesy of Wikimedia user:
Soniakapadia.

Other less stately examples of confrontational heritage engagement also exist. In acts of what
cultural studies professor Alan Rice calls “guerrilla memorialization,” activists in Bristol, England
repeatedly defaced a statue of Richard Colston, a slave trader.
424
From the 1990s onward people have
splattered the statue with red paint, placed a ball and chain around its feet, and laid figures resembling
dead bodies on the ground surrounding the monument. The acts of vandalism inspired the City to
rewrite the plaque which glorified Colston, dedicated in 1895. This process has met intense pushback
and remains active at the time of writing this thesis.
425

These examples show that people at various levels of power can disrupt heritage management
by making difficult history more prominent. The idea of every person projecting their own version of the
past into the public realm is intimidating, even anarchic. The repeated vandalization of a memorial to
fourteen-year-old lynching victim Emmet Till shows this. The marker has been riddled with bullets

424
Alan Rice, “The History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Heritage from Below in Action: Guerrilla
Memorialisation in the Era of Bicentennial Commemoration,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and
Identity, ed. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 210.
425
Tristan Cork, “Second Colston Statue Plaque Not Axed But Mayor Orders Re-Write,” Bristol Post, March 25,
2019, https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/second-colston-statue-plaque-not-2682813.
127
several times, once by three white students from the University of Mississippi, who even took a photo
proudly standing next to their work. It has since been bulletproofed.
426

Confrontational heritage acts, whether they come from everyday people or powerful
institutions, force us to have uncomfortable conversations we might otherwise avoid. They may debunk
a dearly held narrative, complicate the legacy of an important figure, or, in the case of Till, even provide
a disheartening truth about present-day society. Each circumstance makes a strong case for the
importance of confronting painful history, rather than burying it.

Preserving Avoidance
When history is avoided, however, these periods of inaction can become shameful in and of
themselves. Post-war Germany struggled similarly into the 1980s and 90s, with some sites associated
with Nazi history being literally buried following demolition. Once heritage officials do confront
challenging history, they must make careful decisions about both these pasts and their repression.
The Topography of Terror Museum stands on the site of the Main Security Office of the SS—Nazi
Germany’s military organization responsible for managing much of the country’s political violence,
including the Holocaust. Destroyed by Allied bombing and then buried, it was not until the mid-1980s
that government officials rediscovered the security office’s foundations, along with underground prison
cells.
427
The museum today holds exhibitions on various topics of Nazi history. The excavated trenches
remain open, with the original building’s footprint displayed below grade as a glaring reminder that this
past remained untold for decades (Figure 5.3). The sites discussed in this thesis may not offer such a
striking visual metaphor. But, without a well thought out approach like that of The Topography of Terror
Museum, a decades-late memorial could simply replace one avoided chapter of history with another.

426
Aimee Ortiz, “Emmett Till Memorial Has a New Sign. This Time, It’s Bulletproof,” New York Times, October 20,
2019.
427
Ladd, 160-165.
128

Figure 5.3: Topography of Terror exhibition, showing excavated building footprints of the Main Security Office of
the SS, as well as preserved sections of the Berlin Wall. Photo taken by and courtesy of Wikimedia user: Dennis
Jarvis.

Activating Extant Sites
The Slave Dwelling Project is a nationwide undertaking focused on preserving and activating the
quarters of enslaved people in the United States. Through living history programs, talks, and technical
assistance, this organization helps bring these underrepresented sites the prominence on plantations
they deserve.
428
The group has also created an overnight stay program, which brings visitors together at
museums and plantation houses to sleep in the dwellings overnight. Intangible actions like these
reactivate voiceless places that laid dormant in heritage narratives. Bringing life to neglected or even
demolished sites through such approaches could prove useful for the case studies discussed here.

428
“The Slave Dwelling Project,” The Slave Dwelling Project, accessed November 10, 2019,
https://slavedwellingproject.org/.
129
Publications, Digital Heritage, and Advocacy
Other heritage approaches can directly educate people on difficult history and its
memorialization. A People’s Guide to Los Angeles from Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy
Cheng compiles over one hundred alternative tourist sites that involve stories of resistance and
oppression. The authors group these both geographically and thematically, while recommending tours
for topics like “Radical People of Color Movements” or “New Labor Organizing.”
429
In a city frequently
experienced via moving vehicle, these important sites are easy to bypass, even if they are well marked.
Publications like this place alternative heritage engagements in the pocket of any interested party and
provide an accessible historical background to visitors and residents of Los Angeles, a city that usually
does not present its rich history on its surface.
Place Matters is a digital project with similar aims based in New York City. The organization
surveys community members for information on places they deem significant. These sites are then
catalogued into a “census” and mapped online. The organization also builds on this work in the policy
arena by advocating for “place marking, asset mapping, broadening the historical record to include
previously overlooked narratives, [and] historic preservation.”
430

Public-facing digital projects can also turn historical research into a full-blown heritage
engagement. “Mapping Violence” tells the story of lynchings against Mexican Americans in Texas in the
early twentieth century.
431
Dots on a map link to further information on the murders, including a date
and the name of the victims. By relying on these intimate pieces of information rather than
overwhelming statistics, this approach is both provocative and personal. Overlaying the dots on a
modern map also quickly demonstrates how current places and towns relate to these events, even if
their built environments do not tell the story of this connection. Organizers of the project hope to
leverage its digital forum to their advantage by allowing users to share information on other similar
events.
432
These steps would be less feasible without digital heritage’s independence from physical sites.
Other organizations shape heritage through advocacy work. The International Coalition of Sites
of Conscience pushes for the protection of sites of difficult history and connects them with present-day

429
Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng, A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012).
430
“About,” Place Matters, accessed November 10, 2019, https://placematters.net/about/.
431
“Mapping Violence,” accessed October 27, 2019, https://mappingviolence.com/. See also: Monica Muñoz
Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2018).
432
“Mapping Violence.”
130
stories of human rights abuses. The group also conducts training seminars for public-facing institutions
to educate staff on presenting painful narratives in their interpretative material.
433

Another organization, The Humanities Action Lab, connects people with suppressed but urgent
memory projects on contentious issues like incarceration, neo-imperialism, and environmental justice.
Their Guantanamo Public Memory Project brought together hundreds of students to research the
United States’ detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The group then worked with six hundred
community stakeholders of “Haitian refugees, former service people, and attorneys representing
current detainees” to create an exhibit.
434
The project traveled to eighteen cities, accessing more than
500,000 people.
435
The organizers also linked the project with a web platform, archive, and collection of
interviews. With Donald Trump’s signing of an Executive Order in 2018 to keep this prison open
indefinitely, this is a clear case of how important heritage-based engagements with active and painful
issues are.
436

These examples are all unique. The purpose of this thesis is not to recommend a generic
approach for handling the legacy of the Zoot Suit Riots, the Black Panther Party, and the 1992 Uprising.
Instead, this project has demonstrated how insufficient professional heritage management can be at
engaging with such pasts. But the intangible memory work happening in Los Angeles and other
successful examples of facing difficult history from around the world show that this can change.

Recommendations
This short list of policy recommendations provides some techniques for improving how we
interact with sites of difficult history and support those grassroots movements that engage with these
pasts independently from the government.

Begin Recognizing and Supporting Intangible Heritage
By its very nature, intangible cultural heritage is challenging to track and protect. Scholars have
criticized organizations like UNESCO for relying on designation policies which tend to propagate the
same problems that landmarking does—fixing sites, attracting damaging tourism, or not recognizing

433
“Essential Engagement: Training and Coaching,” International Sites of Conscience, accessed October 27, 2019,
https://www.sitesofconscience.org/en/what-we-do/training/.
434
“About,” Humanities Action Lab, accessed October 27, 2019, https://www.humanitiesactionlab.org/about.
435
Ibid.
436
“Presidential Executive Order on Protecting America Through Lawful Detention of Terrorists,” The White House,
accessed October 27, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-executive-order-
protecting-america-lawful-detention-terrorists/.
131
certain stories and perspectives.
437
Avoiding this pitfall will require massive amounts of research and
public participation.
San Francisco has developed policies that protect ICH through cultural districts which highlight
the city’s queer and ethnic histories.
438
The city government also provides rent relief to historic small
businesses that may otherwise be priced out by its tumultuous real estate market. This “Legacy
Business” program was funded through a tax voters imposed on themselves for this express purpose.
439

These programs are very new and their potential for handling challenging history is unknown.
But this thesis has demonstrated that intangible memory work is an important realm where alternative
narratives are maintained and passed on. As programs like San Francisco’s evolve, it may become clear
that they are better suited for protecting businesses than intangible forms of commemoration.
Nonetheless, opening the door to policies which protect not only buildings, but also the intangible
relationships people have with their neighborhoods, could be an important early step for recognizing
the memory work already being done from the grassroots for these case studies.

“Sites of Contention” Designation
One major cause for government avoidance of painful pasts is that they are politically charged.
An open recognition of these unresolved histories could cost a politician votes or harm a policymaker’s
reputation. In this context, the desire for stability causes repression.
Florence and Normandie, for example, is an intersection rife with tension between races,
economic classes, as well as the government and the governed. Despite this, there are few who would
argue that this place is not significant to this country’s history. A specific preservation policy for “sites of
contention” could provide recognition of past pain without glorifying any particular perspective. Simply
acknowledging that something uncomfortable occurred here could be a useful step for starting more
contentious discussions about the preservation of these stories.
The specifics of this designation and its protections would need honing over time. In cases like
Florence and Normandie, which is largely open space, safeguarding material could be a lower priority.
But in other cases, like the Navy Armory, or the Hall of Justice, adding a recognition of conflict to an
existing landmark could show that the narratives at heritage sites are not universal, and that it is
possible to face painful history while still celebrating beautiful pieces of architecture.

437
See: Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa, eds., Safeguarding Intangible Heritage (London: Routledge, 2019).
438
“Cultural Heritage,” San Francisco Planning, accessed October 27, 2019, https://sfplanning.org/cultural-
heritage.
439
Ibid.
132
Incentivizing Alternative Heritage Engagement
If the political will exists, incentives for protecting sites of painful history are also useful. Texas
began an “Undertold Marker” initiative in 2006, which levies a fee against all other state landmark
designation applications and pools that money to fund projects for underrepresented stories.
440
Each
year the Historical Commission judges applicants on their ability to address “gaps in [the state’s]
historical marker program” and the present endangerment of the property, site, or topic.
441
The
Commission has accepted dozens of designations that call attention to important historical figures of
color, as well as events like sit-ins, desegregation in schools, migrations, and massacres. The marker
locations are logged digitally on a map accessible through the Commission’s website.
442
While this
program may struggle with the same limitations as landmark designation, it still demonstrates that overt
efforts to bring these stories to prominence can be successful.
Historic context statements also provide useful background on particular themes and
demographics. These reports distill complex research for professionals in preservation, students, and
everyday people. The City of Los Angeles has already begun this work, producing documents that cover
the history of women, queer people, and various ethnic groups.
443
By providing this information to
policymakers, curators, and grassroots advocates simultaneously, these public reports push for changes
in preservation from multiple angles. A statement on painful history would be contentious to produce
but could later guide heritage efforts toward case studies like those analyzed here, or help existing
institutions revise their interpretive materials.

440
“Undertold Markers,” Texas Historical Commission, accessed October 27, 2019,
https://www.thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/state-historical-markers/undertold-markers.
441
Ibid.
442
Ibid.
443
“Los Angeles’ Citywide Historic Context,” Office of Historic Resources, City of Los Angeles, accessed October 27,
2019, https://preservation.lacity.org/los-angeles-citywide-historic-context.
133
Conclusion
Changing dominant narratives and supporting grassroots heritage practices requires both an
expansion of what is considered heritage and how this construct is managed. The significance of ICH is
slowly becoming apparent in Western heritage management. But what role these knowledges, skills,
and practices play in our urban environments is poorly understood. Neighborhoods that lack the
resources to build and maintain monumental historic sites are likely still rich with intangible practices
unrecognized by current preservation approaches. In what other ways can we help people bring
attention to pasts that matter to them, even in the absence of a grand building? More studies are
needed to better understand what role governments can play in aiding this process without stifling it.
This is a particularly important question when discussing how best to memorialize histories in which the
government has done great harm.
Bringing attention to underrepresented narratives helps demonstrate who is entitled to space in
the city. But if gentrification pushes these same groups out of their homes, then this effort is less
meaningful. As capital continues flooding into historically disinvested communities, preservationists
should work to not only protect historic fabric but prevent the displacement of long-time residents.
Research on the intersection between heritage management and neighborhood change will be a critical
discussion for this discipline in the coming decades, with important implications for engaging with sites
of marginalized or painful history.
The intention of this thesis was to criticize how we typically approach difficult history in
preservation and to acknowledge the existence of alternatives. Each of the grassroots approaches
discussed here is deserving of its own research. Future projects that work with suppressed history
should meet everyday people where they conduct their memory work through legitimate community
engagement. Non-institutionalized sources like oral histories should be used whenever possible and
taken seriously when presented in other forms of heritage management like designations. Connecting
these small heritage actors with greater resources—if that is desired—requires more intimate
engagement and research methods than conducted in this thesis.
Beyond academic projects, leveraging heritage policy to respond to urban challenges like
housing crises, gentrification, climate change, and resilience will also require robust and meaningful
community engagement. The past has shown that a lack of public participation leads to unnecessary
demolitions and erasure. If this is not corrected, we will continue unsustainably destroying resources
that are important for maintaining stories like those discussed in these case studies.
134
Lastly, aside from changing how this field functions, researchers and policymakers should hope
to change how it looks. More research on how to continue improving hiring practices, diversity
scholarships, and public participation will improve this field immeasurably. The best way to ensure these
stories are told properly is to employ the people most affected by them and allow them to speak for
themselves.
History can be ignored, manipulated, or embraced. Regardless of which approach is taken, the
past affects every policy decision we make in ways that we will never completely understand. Just like
the politicians and heritage professionals who avoided these case studies, preservationists and planners
today hope to shape our cities for the benefit of tomorrow. And rightfully so: the story we tell through
our cities—in buildings, books, and art—is one of the greatest gifts we can pass on. But how we handle
pain speaks just as much to our moment’s legacy as any glittering urban environment we construct or
preserve. Finding the tools to tell that story as fully as possible is what this thesis asks. We may never
attain the ideal, but we can certainly do better than we are now.

135
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Asset Metadata

Creator Loop, Jackson (author)

Core Title "It's important to remember what started it": conserving sites and stories of racial violence in Los Angeles, 1943-1992

School School of Architecture

Degree Master of Heritage Conservation / Master of Planning

Degree Program Heritage Conservation / Planning

Publication Date 07/17/2021

Defense Date 01/16/2020

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

Tag 1992 unrest,1992 uprising,Black Panther Party,black panthers,California,civil unrest,difficult history,dissonant heritage,heritage,heritage and race,Heritage Conservation,Historic Preservation,intangible heritage,Los Angeles,memory,OAI-PMH Harvest,Oppression,Race,racial violence,Riots,southern california chapter,southern california history,urban heritage,Urban Planning,urban policy,Violence,zoot suit riots

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sandmeier, Trudi (committee chair), Hirsch, Alison (committee member), Hoyos, Luis (committee member)

Creator Email jacksonloop7@gmail.com,loopj@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-260159

Unique identifier UC11674777

Identifier etd-LoopJackso-8125.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-260159 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LoopJackso-8125.pdf

Dmrecord 260159

Document Type Thesis

Rights Loop, Jackson

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 a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA