FIGURE 3. Charlotta Bass and Paul Robeson, circa 1949.
LOS ANGELES’S UNIQUE RACIAL POLITICS
Los Angeles became one of the first cities outside the South where antidiscrimination and civil rights struggles incorporated a mosaic of racial and ethnic groups. Of her time in LA working-class communities, Communist organizer Dorothy Healey remembered that “a strong sense of national identity held these workers together, but did not prevent them from making common cause with others.”35 Because several events in LA during the period under consideration had spatial implications for minority communities, this “common cause” takes on particular significance.
African-American citizens had no choice but to settle within the narrow corridor situated just to the south and east of downtown Los Angeles. Mexicans were also limited to specific neighborhoods: in 1940, most still lived in Central, South, and East Los Angeles. Neither Mexicans nor Blacks could purchase homes in other areas because of racially restrictive covenants supported by real estate companies, developers, and banks. The Federal Housing Administration made the adoption of racially restrictive covenants a condition for the insurance of new construction, while savings and loans associations refused to lend money to people of color who wanted to buy in white residential areas. Therefore, Mexican Americans and African Americans were forced to reside several miles away from the burgeoning industrial neighborhoods of Maywood, Pico Rivera, South Gate, and Vernon. Even if there had been no racial discrimination in hiring in wartime industries, many residents in Black and Chicano neighborhoods could not easily work the high-skill, high-wage jobs available in shipbuilding, aircraft assembly, or munitions because very few of the mass transit red cars could transport them to these sites: “There were no runs after dark, and bus, taxi, and jitney drivers were reluctant to drive into or out of South LA at night.”36 White resistance to residential integration kept most African Americans and Chicanos in urban areas while postwar jobs, which historically had been disproportionately in the suburbs, continued to flow into outlying regions.37
Although rooted in national patterns of economic racism already familiar to people of color, Los Angeles’s structures of exclusion manifested in unique ways and produced Conflicted racial experiences for Blacks and Mexicans who arrived in the city during the Second World War. Los Angeles was different from most major cities of the WWII era in that it did not develop an industrial core surrounded by an industrial suburban network. Instead, the working class worked in the industrial suburbs, but did not necessarily live or vote there. Immigration, patterns of segregation, location of defense industries, and city planners’ organization of space scattered the multiethnic working class in fragmented suburbs and produced spatial patterns in wartime and postwar Los Angeles that furthered the hegemony of business owners and their efforts to maintain LA as an open-shop city.38 While wartime manufacturers in oil, movies, apparel, automobiles, rubber, and aircraft were drawn to the region’s climate, land availability, and supply of workers and consumers, they also found the weakness of most Southern California unions to be a desirable condition for establishing industry. Aircraft manufacturing and allied industries were not centrally located, but instead surrounded the central city in “suburban industrial clusters.”39 Aircraft manufacturing had pioneered the economic foundation on which postwar community builders—promoting the ownership of low-cost, mass-produced homes in communities that reflected the principles of modern community planning—could flourish. Federal agencies encouraged, and city planners and contractors capitulated to, the establishment of new housing developments near suburban employment. Through the 1950s, then, suburbs were nearly all residential, whereas shopping and office work were much more concentrated in central business districts or downtowns. But this pattern would change after 1960 and leave urban Blacks and Chicanos in the 1960s and 1970s almost uniformly poor and also left them isolated from high-wage jobs, houses that appreciated in value, and convenient transportation routes.
The second Bracero Program, initiated during WWII in response to acute labor shortages in agriculture, brought thousands of temporary Mexican workers to harvest crops on land throughout the West and Midwest. Although the government planned to terminate the program once potential workers returned from the war front, U.S. agribusiness “acquired an addiction” for the low-cost foreign laborers. This transformed the face of agricultural work. Blacks, along with Mexicans, East Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and Anglos had long constituted farm labor, many since the first development of agribusiness in the state. But many of these laborers were now replaced by large numbers of Mexican immigrant workers. Lobbyists managed to establish Mexicans as more or less the permanent faces of California agricultural labor well beyond the 1940s. By the passage of a series of public laws, the Bracero contract system was legally extended through 1964, but its effects are still visible today in the majority of Mexican and Central-American pickers and packers in the California agricultural industry.
After WWII, Mexican immigrants settled permanently in communities throughout the Southern California basin. LA received the heaviest in-migration, and, consequently, recent immigrants dominated community life.40 But urban Mexican Americans would pay a high price in the postwar restructuring of the city’s ethno-racial order: in Chapter 2, I examine the spatial consequences of the forced removal of several thousand Mexicans from Chavez Ravine to make way for a housing project that was never built but later became the site of Dodger Stadium.
Anglo immigrants from other states brought their own experiences of economic depression into this unique pattern of racial labor relations in Los Angeles. During the Depression, “nothing bothered Okies more than California’s system of racial and ethnic relations. They were shocked by signs reading ‘no white laborers need apply.’”41 But African Americans and Mexicans often suffered material consequences from the racialization of labor in Los Angeles in ways that poor whites did not. The reality was that although some Mexicans and Blacks benefited from increased job opportunities, Anglo immigrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas typically secured better jobs and ascended more rapidly to well-paid, skilled positions. Matt García demonstrates this phenomenon in 1941 in his description of the Ventura County Limoneira Company Strike. According to García, the pickers and packers, who at the time were mainly Mexicans, demanded a modest increase in pay after a decade of low wages. The company responded by evicting the nearly 700 Mexican employees (organized as the AFL-affiliated Agricultural and Citrus Workers Union, Local 22342) and replaced them with migrant farm workers from Oklahoma and Arkansas. García goes on to show that Mexican workers were actually rehired after a four-month strike that was not only tragically unsuccessful but also came with a terribly insulting consequence: White laborers were replaced by the original Mexican laborers, but only after the latter would accept the same wages they had previously worked for.42 These were the kind of tactics that shaped patterns of racism in Los Angeles: business anti-unionism helped to ensure a steady supply of cheap white labor, but cheap white labor feared the even cheaper Mexican and Black labor.43 This ongoing competition for jobs, the large number of Southern white immigrants to the area, and the systems supportive of segregation that were already in existence spawned a reorganization and reinvigoration of the Ku Klux Klan. In the immediate postwar years, the Los Angeles Klan pursued a campaign of intimidation aimed at keeping African Americans out of “white” neighborhoods.44
FIGURE 4. Members of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, Local 700, picket at Phelps-Dodge Cooper Products plant in Los Angeles to demand higher wages and improved benefits, circa 1948.
Antagonism was not limited to Black–white or Mexican–white Conflicts in labor and housing. J. Max Bond observed in 1936 that whereas certain factories categorized Mexicans as “colored,” African Americans not only worked with them but were also given positions over them. In other plants, he found that Mexicans and whites worked together. Further research