The Zoot Suit Riots, June Nineteen Forty-Three

In the first week of June nineteen forty-three, sailors and soldiers stationed in the Los Angeles area spent roughly six days moving through the city's streets attacking Mexican American young men wearing zoot suits: the broad-shouldered, high-waisted, wide-lapeled clothing that had become a style particularly identified with Chicano youth. The attacks spread to Black and Filipino neighborhoods as well.

The LAPD's response, documented in contemporaneous press coverage and in subsequent scholarship, was to arrest the victims. Officers arrived after attacks to take into custody the young Mexican Americans who had been beaten, on charges of disturbing the peace. The Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution during the violence declaring the wearing of zoot suits a public nuisance.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, in a column published during the riots, wrote that the attacks reflected deep-seated discrimination in the United States, and that the young men attacked had legitimate grievances about how they were treated as citizens. The Los Angeles press criticized her for saying so.

The California History journal has characterized the Zoot Suit Riots as a precursor event to the Watts Rebellion of nineteen sixty-five, part of a documented pattern of official indifference or complicity in anti-Brown violence in Los Angeles history. The streets where the attacks occurred are not marked.