Constellations of Struggle Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the Legacy for Ethnic Studies

Home , Charlotta Bass, Jack Tenney, Luisa Moreno

Gaye Theresa Johnson

Charlotta Bass was ecstatic. In early 1949, as editor of the most enduring black newspaper in Los Angeles, she was invited to attend the Women’s Asiatic Conference in Peking. “It never dawned on me,” she wrote, “that I would ever have the opportunity even to consider a visit to that part of the world” (Bass 1960, 156). From the time Bass began editing the California Eagle in 1912, her writings and activism made black Los Angeles relevant both to local communities of color and to international organizations. As a member of the sponsoring committee for the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, she campaigned forcefully against the racial brutalities inflicted upon Mexican American zoot suiters during the summer of 1943. Activist Alice McGrath recalled that the California Eagle was “one of the first papers to recognize and publicize the racist and discriminatory nature” of the Sleepy Lagoon case (1987), doing so even before La Opinión, the city’s Spanish-language daily. When Bass arrived at the airport for her trip to China, she was detained. In an organized effort, U.S. officials delayed the processing of her paperwork for so long that she missed her flight.

After a night’s wrestle with sleep, I awoke the next morning . . . with a renewed determination to make the California Eagle a bigger and better newspaper . . . and as I settled down to the production of the next issue . . . I whispered to it, “I can’t go to China, but you can. And you will tell the people how disappointed I was.” (Bass 1960, 157)

Efforts to build interethnic identification and solidarity are often accompanied by disappointment. Devastating consequences have resulted

Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33:1 Spring 2008 © University of California Regents 155 Johnson at times from lapses in inter-community cooperation, but more often from organized efforts to undermine solidarity among aggrieved groups. Moreover, those efforts have been accompanied by divisive discourse, by language that measures the histories of interethnic struggles by their shortcomings rather than their successes. Understanding the legacy of Afro-Chicano coalitional politics in Los Angeles is one way to counter that disappointment: strategies deployed in the mutual activism of these communities can change the story that we tell ourselves about our history and our future. This essay examines the wartime activism of two women: Luisa Moreno and Charlotta Bass. It reveals interracial and antiracist alliances, divisions among aggrieved minority communities, and important insights into the infra-politics that informed and shaped a common urban antiracist culture of struggle within these two communities of color. I choose these two women in part because of a particular, and what I consider a “mutual,” moment in struggle: their participation in the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee (SLDC) in 1943. This participation, I argue, was one aspect of the activism of Bass and Moreno that generated new political sensibilities and alternative identities among the women and men in their respective racial/ethnic communities during World War II. Moreover, the plural, egalitarian, democratic, and intercultural “America” envisioned and enacted by these women, and by the artists, intellectu- als, and activists in their communities, makes the intersection between their particular political histories—and larger historical developments— particularly meaningful. Like Bass, Luisa Moreno was among the most visible women in labor and civil rights activism in the United States from the 1930s to 1950. The Guatemalan-born Moreno was a powerful force in the Los Angeles Chicano community beginning in 1935. Also like Bass, Moreno focused her activism on the efforts of one community but kept a steady emphasis on the common oppressions suffered by Chicano, African American, and Jewish communities in Los Angeles and San Diego. It may seem strange to examine Bass and Moreno together. No archived correspondence or anecdotal record of their interactions exists, even though they were active on the same committee and in the same communities at the same time. But it is important to consider them in a common framework

Ga y e Th e r e s a Jo h n s o n , an assistant professor of black studies and Chicana/o studies at UC Santa Barbara, has published essays on Afro-Chicano culture, race and space in Los Angeles, and the Mexican influence on jazz in the borderlands. She is completing a manuscript titled “The Future Has a Past: Politics, Music and Memory in Afro-Chicano Los Angeles.”

156 Constellations of Struggle of World War II-era interracial, antiracist struggle for two reasons. First, Bass’s and Moreno’s work on the SLDC is representative of the grassroots mobilizations among black and Chicano communities during that period: it reveals a cultural world of unity and division. In neighborhoods on the west, south, and east sides of Los Angeles, blacks and Chicanos have shared more than histories of racism and segregation, of economic discrimination and immigrant exclusion, of brutality and inequality. Mutual struggles waged in response to institutional and social repression have created both moments and movements in which African Americans and Chicanos in Los Angeles have unmasked power imbalances, sought recognition, and forged solidarities by embracing the strategies, cultures, and politics of each other’s experiences. Second, studying these women together reveals a critical moment not visible when we study them individually, a moment in which the communities and struggles they respectively represented entered into the same “constellation” of struggle. My notion of “constellation” embraces an array of activities, histories, and identities that each woman symbolically brought with her to the SLDC. Similarly, the concept suggests the mobility of many parts, as well as the ability to re-form around different nuclei. The constellations of struggle that informed the SLDC in turn produced a cross-racial and inter-community “inheritance” that we can draw upon in our own critical moment. When we examine this inheritance in comparative perspective, a critical moment is revealed, one that underscores the importance of understanding the potential of coalitional politics even when the gains are not immediate or do not appear radical. While the SLDC was not the most radical (or successful) coalition of the 1940s, the antiracist legacy left by its members and their communities provides important lessons about both the histories and the future of interracial struggle among Mexican American, African American, and Anglo working-class people in Los Angeles. Moreover, it can reveal the kind of radical antiracist and egalitarian cultural politics that helped nurture and sustain working-class alliances, intellectual advances, and cultural practices that blurred the boundaries of hegemonic categories of race. These politics have resulted in critical interethnic challenges to structures of dominance in Los Angeles, making this story relevant to the history of diverse urban political cultures in every American city.

157 Johnson

The SLDC and Coalitional Politics The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee was formed in Los Angeles in 1943 by an interracial coalition of labor leaders, journalists, and community activists. Co-chaired by Luisa Moreno, labor organizer Bert Corona, and writer/activist Cary McWilliams, it included among its members Charlotta Bass, labor organizer Josefina Fierro de Bright, and Congress of Industrial Organizations activist Alice McGrath. For two years the SLDC fought for the release of several Chicanos convicted of murder by an all-white jury in the heavily publicized case of People v. Zammora. The case began when the body of José Diaz, a twenty-two-year-old farmworker, was found at the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir in southeast Los Angeles. Twenty-two Chicanos were originally charged with criminal conspiracy in the death. Diaz had been seen leaving a neighbor’s birthday party early on the morning of August 2, 1942, in the company of two young men, but they were never questioned during the investigation or the ensuing trial. Instead, Los Angeles police used Díaz’s murder to launch a widespread attack on Mexican American youth, whom they perceived as unruly. Six hundred Chicanos were arrested, and the press consistently referred to Díaz and his assailants as gang members. Moreover, presiding judge Charles W. Fricke routinely allowed prosecution attorneys to make racist remarks about Mexicans during the trial. At the end of the trial, three of the defendants were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, nine were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to five years to life, five were convicted of assault and released for time served, and five were acquitted. Taken together, the judgments constituted the largest mass con- viction in California history. The defendants began serving their sentences in January 1943 (Acuña 1988, 112; Escobar 1999; Pagán 2003).1 During the trial, labor activist La Rue McCormick established an ad-hoc committee to publicize the events surrounding the case. After the defendants were sentenced, the committee reorganized as the SLDC. Carey McWilliams recalled,

I wanted to make it clear that the committee would have to be broadened, because there was no way of raising the money that was needed with that committee; it was too narrow. You’d have to have some labor people on it, some prominent Jewish businessmen, and motion picture people, and some blacks, one or two blacks. (1978)

The racial and organizational diversity of the SLDC’s members was evi- dence of the mutual interests of working-class white, black, and Chicano

158 Constellations of Struggle

communities in wartime Los Angeles. The committee worked not only toward an appeal for those convicted, but to expose anti-Mexican discrimination in the Southwest. The Defense Committee was immediately denounced as a communist front organization. In the California legislature, the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, led by State Senator Jack Tenney, later asserted that the SLDC’s meetings were facilitated by “trained rabble- rousers [who] orated of police brutality against minority groups, of the unfair treatment of the Mexican and the Negro population and of racial discrimination and segregation” (California Legislature 1945, 209). Instigated by the press, the “zoot suit riots” that ensued the follow- ing summer constituted sanctioned and collective white violence against Chicano youth. Mainstream reportage on the case reinforced damaging racial stereotypes, and comments by law-enforcement officials character- izing Chicano zoot suiters as the “predictable results of the primitive and backward culture of the ‘Mexican colony’” were given prominence in the Los Angeles Times and the Herald Express (Gutiérrez 1995, 125). As George Sánchez demonstrates through the story of Pedro García—the U.S.-born son of Mexican immigrants who was beaten and left unconscious by servicemen in the company of police witnesses—the physical and ideological violence unleashed by white vigilantes made clear to many second-generation Chicanos that “much of their optimism about the future had been misguided” (1993, 267). In his work on labor unions and working-class resistance, Robin Kelley has argued that to properly understand radical activism in marginalized communities, we must look beyond official histories to take into account the unofficial spaces where women and minority groups fashioned their own representation (1999, 42–58). The efforts of the SLDC, the coalescence of activists and the communities that were implicated in their activism, as well as the broad antiracist efforts that characterized black and Chicano concerns in World War II Los Angeles offer an important example of the ways ordinary people exposed contradictions in U.S. immigration policy, racial restrictions, and official democracy. Therefore, the full import of the constellations of struggle brought by each activist to the SLDC is best understood by considering their respective histories of activism and community sensibilities, including the community activism that engendered and resulted from their work. Born into an elite Guatemalan family, Moreno traveled as a teenager to Mexico City, where she worked as a journalist and pursued her talents

159 Johnson as a poet. In 1928 she migrated to New York with her husband, becoming a mother the same year. Her experience as a garment worker living in Spanish Harlem provided the impetus for her political awakening, and in 1930 Moreno joined the Communist Party. Her activism in Spanish Harlem’s Centro Obrero de Habla Española, a leftist community coalition, led her to mobilize her peers on the shop floor into La Liga de Costureras, a small garment workers’ union. In 1935 she accepted a job organizing Latino, African American, and Italian cigar rollers in California as an organizer with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). In 1938, after resigning from the AFL to join its newly established rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), she joined the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) (Ruiz 2004, 4). That same year, Moreno helped organize the Congress of Spanish Speaking People, held in April 1939. It was the first national civil rights assembly for Latinos in the United States and attracted over a thousand delegates representing more than 120 organizations. The Congreso addressed employment, housing, education, health, and immigrant rights. As David Gutiérrez has argued, this event was distinctive in part because Moreno and other congress leaders rejected the assimilationist strategies proposed by groups such as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), insisting instead that Anglo Americans accept responsibility for the racial and ethnic stratification that had evolved in the Southwest (1995, 111–14). The success of the Congreso was a significant milestone in Moreno’s record of activism, but it was UCAPAWA that remained at the core of her commitment. The union’s dedication to rank-and-file leadership was important to Moreno, but it was the official commitment to recruiting members across race, nationality, and gender lines that resonated most with her political aims. She remained with UCAPAWA for the remain- der of her career, rising to the position of vice president in 1941—the first time a Latina was elected to a high-ranking national union post (Ruiz 2004, 6). At the same time, as African American and Chicano communities were under siege, Moreno protested the harassment of youth who patron- ized mixed-race bars and clubs (Griswold del Castillo and Larralde 1997). Best known for organizing Chicana cannery workers and for her work as co-founder of the Congreso, she garnered a little-documented victory when she waged a struggle with UCAPAWA to break discriminatory hiring practices at Cal San cannery. The union victory, in early 1942, forced factory owners to hire black women (Ruiz 1987, 74–78, 83).

160 Constellations of Struggle

Born in Sumter, South Carolina, in the late 1870s, Bass was the sixth of eleven children. She moved to Rhode Island at the turn of the century and then in 1910 migrated to Los Angeles to improve her health. Soon after arriving, Bass sold subscriptions for the Eagle, a black newspaper founded by John Neimore in 1879. Bass became the editor and publisher of the Eagle in 1912 upon the deathbed request of Neimore, and she remained in this role for over forty years. In 1914 Bass hired and subsequently married Joseph Blackburn Bass, a Kansas newspaperman, who edited the paper until his death in 1934. Bass ran for several elective offices, including the Los Angeles City Council, the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. vice presidency. She was also a founding member of California’s Independent Progressive Party. Moreover, she founded, led, and participated in numerous civil rights organizations, where she met and befriended prominent activists such as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. While she was always active at the national level, Bass used her positions as journalist, candidate, and activist to expose and eliminate racism and injustice in Los Angeles (Freer 2005). Both Moreno and Bass made white accountability and inter-communal affinities central components of their activism, long before their work on the SLDC. In the case of fair housing, Bass refused to accept the idea of restrictive covenants as the sole burden of African Americans: “since [this] question concerns such minorities as Asians, Mexican-Americans, Indians, the Jewish, Italian and Negro people, our discussion of the Negro people’s struggle against restrictive covenants applies to the struggle of all minority groups” (1960, 95). Bass and other leaders took the housing covenant issue all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled in 1948 that such covenants were unconstitutional. In her important and generative work, Regina Freer has argued that Bass’s activism in defense of Chicanos on the issues of police brutality and repatriation “implicitly challenged racialized definitions of citizenship, revealing the speciousness of hyper-sanctioned cultural purity and authen- ticity of the 1940s and red-baiting in the 1950s” (2004, 607–32).2 When one considers the histories and critical struggles mutually incorporated by Chicano and African American communities in this moment, what becomes clear is that such challenges to racial regimes of the postwar era are an important site of praxis. These sites, or moments, are particularly instructive for current coalitional politics. It is important to note that Los Angeles became one of the first cities outside the South where antidiscrimination and civil rights struggles

161 Johnson incorporated the mosaic of racial and ethnic groups. Of her time in L. A. working-class communities, communist organizer Dorothy Healey remem- bered “a strong sense of national identity held these workers together, but did not prevent them from making common cause with others” (Healey and Isserman 1990, 70). When one considers the magnitude of change created by the activism of Bass and Moreno, as well as the lessons spawned by both the failures and successes over the course of their respective careers, the force of their impact upon the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee becomes more visible. Edward Escobar’s important study on race and police in Los Angeles distinguishes the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee from other organizations of its time, in part because its strategies made whites across the United States aware for the first time of anti–Mexican American discrimination in the Southwest. The SLDC’s mission was to reveal the ways in which Mexican Americans were systemically victimized by racial prejudice by arguing that the defendants were casualties of a biased criminal justice system (Escobar 1999, 228). Escobar suggests that the SLDC campaign “could only have a limited effect on the growing zoot-suit hysteria in Los Angeles,” in part because its members limited themselves to publicizing the trial to raise funds for the defendants’ appeal rather than “discussing generalized discrimination against Mexican Americans” (229). Escobar’s observation is accurate, although it considers only the SLDC’s main effort: to publish a pamphlet entitled “The Sleepy Lagoon Case.” But if one considers the number of communities represented by the members of the SLDC, and therefore the constellations of struggle that were affected, his conclusion becomes too narrow to account for the SLDC’s effect on future attempts at interracial solidarities. Moreover, examining the ways in which these different communities engaged the project of countering anti-Mexican hysteria brings the legacy of the SLDC politics and activists into sharper relief. Rhetorical resistance to ideological and physical racism in the wake of the Sleepy Lagoon case and the zoot suit riots powerfully supported the efforts of the committee. Letters to the Eastside Sun by East Los Angeles teenagers about the riots reflected their positionality as wage workers and citizens who “sought to carve out their own social space, not in terms of exercising union leadership, but by defining a youth culture” (Ruiz 1998, 84).3 Mexican, Anglo, and black activists and reporters such as Chester Himes and Al Waxman countered mainstream press reports with their own in the Eastside Sun and the California Eagle. There they reframed the

162 Constellations of Struggle issue by linking official national rhetoric in support of the principle of self-determination for oppressed peoples with the extension of rights to America’s minority communities (128). This strategy was clearly visible in a letter from the SLDC to trade unionists asking them to adopt a resolu- tion asking Governor Earl Warren to pardon those convicted: “In its first rounds,” wrote McWilliams and Bella Joseph, “[the Sleepy Lagoon case] represents a fascist victory.”4 Both Bass and Moreno expanded this ideological affiliation of the case with fascism, making it relevant to communities of color. Bass likened the Los Angeles Police Department’s response to Hitler’s race theories, harshly criticizing the sheriff’s department for urging the grand jury to consider a “biological basis” for the criminal behavior of Mexican youth and their “desire to kill” (Freer 2004, 607–32). In a 1950 speech, she contended that police attacks historically targeted “minority communities—Mexican American and Negro.” 5 Moreno shrewdly identified the Sleepy Lagoon grand jury testimony as “a reflection of the general reactionary drive against organized labor and minority problems, [sowing] all sorts of division among the various racial, national, and religious groups among the workers” (Griswold del Castillo and Larralde 1997). Bass further used the Eagle to change community understandings of this case and others during the war: in successive weeks, the newspaper carried two-inch headlines across page one, such as “TRIGGER-HAPPY COP FREED AFTER SLAYING YOUTH” and “POLICE BRUTALITY FLARES UP AGAIN.”6 By deflecting blame onto white officials, Bass and Moreno rejected a divisive tactic long used by Los Angeles city officials, the media, and moral pundits to discredit workers and communities of color: assigning to them ideological and biological predispositions to “un-American” behavior (Molina 2006). The women’s critical strategy was an important ideological weapon against the sharpening demarcations of race, class, and community that were strengthened in the postwar era and were manifest in segregated social and residential spaces, the growth of privatized redevelopment, and the kind of urban renewal that prized white entitlement over economic and social inclusion. Bass wrote in 1946: “When a person, an organization, even a newspaper gets the courage and fortitude that [it] is going to require to put this old world into such condition that it will be a fit and happy abode for all the people, they must first be prepared to have their heads cracked, their hopes frustrated, and their financial strength weakened.” As a direct result of their work on the Sleepy Lagoon case, as well as their various other activities,

163 Johnson both Moreno and Bass were targeted by Senator Tenney during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Bass was accused of being a member of the Communist Party, and the FBI’s investigation of Bass turned many of her readers away from the Eagle. Moreno was deported for her activism. “Now [that] there was no more Sleepy Lagoon or Pachucos to blame,” Moreno reasoned, “politicians scrambled to find Communists.” A red-baiting Tenney further used the case to support segregation, oppose miscegenation, and divide the Mexican community in Southern California (Griswold del Castillo and Larralde 1997). Bass was defiant. In her acceptance speech for her nomination as vice presidential candidate of the Progressive Party six years later, she declared, “I will continue to cry out against police brutality against any people, as I did in the infamous zoot-suit riots . . . when I reached scared and badly beaten Negro and Mexican American boys . . . nor have I hesitated in the face of that most Un-American Un-American activities committee—and I am willing to face it again” (1952). Luisa Moreno faced far more enduring personal consequences. In 1950 she was deported after being labeled a “dangerous alien” by the Tenney Committee (Sánchez 1993, 252). The FBI then offered Moreno an opportunity to secure U.S. citizenship in exchange for testimony against Harry Bridges, an Australian-born leader of the international longshoremen’s union who had been charged with being a communist. Moreno refused to be “a free woman with a mortgaged soul.”7 “They can talk about deporting me . . . but they can never deport the people that I’ve worked with and with whom things were accomplished for the benefit of hundreds of thousands of workers—things that can never be destroyed” (Ruiz 1987, 113–15). For the rest of their lives, she and her husband Gray Bemis suffered poverty and displacement in Mexico and Guatemala.8 Bass’s persecution and Moreno’s ultimate deportation by the Tenney Committee demonstrate the severe penalties imposed upon radical grassroots and cultural workers in the postwar era. But they also show us what is possible when people dedicate themselves to a politics of struggle that scales ideological walls containing different spheres of activism. George Sánchez has argued that despite her deportation, Moreno and other immigrant labor leaders “managed to root a new ethnic identity among the Mexican-origin population in Los Angeles [who] immediately involved themselves in direc- tions which reformulated the boundaries of Chicano culture and society” (1993, 252). The connective resistance integral to both Bass’s and Moreno’s activism expanded the notion of “local” politics, making the struggles of

164 Constellations of Struggle

Mexican youth, Chicana cannery workers, and black property owners in Los Angeles relevant to every American city.

A Legacy of Struggle The SLDC brought Moreno and Bass into dialogue with the politics of oppression across race, but it also led them to broader conclusions about the connections between domestic racism and the corporate globalism solidified during World War II. The retaliation that both women endured because of their activism was part of the strategy of division deployed by Los Angeles city officials during this period. It is important to recognize that the failure to build a sustained multiracial movement out of the SLDC had more to do with white racism than with reluctance or distrust on the part of black, white, or Chicano communities represented in the struggle for equal rights in Los Angeles during the war (Kelley 1999).9 Nonetheless, the intersecting efforts of Moreno and Bass on behalf of the communities affected by the case were also a way for both groups to identify the cross- racial and intra-communal effects of economic disenfranchisement and structural racism, for their own and future struggles. Ruiz has argued that Moreno modeled one of the basic themes of Chicana feminism—leadership that empowers others—decades before people articulated it in those terms (1998, 100). Mexican and African American women’s activism in the 1930s advanced cultural pluralism, integration, and intercultural understanding, predating some of the more renowned interracial activism of later periods. This is important in several respects, and it reveals some gaps in current scholarship on Los Angeles. First, the emergent “L.A. school” of urban studies lacks a sustained analysis of gender in the history of interracial politics and culture. In her history of the Mothers of East Los Angeles, Mary Pardo (1998) has argued that because of men’s and women’s differing social obligations to their families, group solidarity and local collective action can emerge from neighborhood networks clearly organized by gender. The success of the 1930s sit-down strikes in the Midwest and the South, as well as the struggles of Latina and Asian Pacific cannery workers in the West, depended on community support largely driven by women, as documented by Herbert Gutman (1976), Tera Hunter (1997), Robin Kelley (1999), Earl Lewis (1991), Vicki Ruiz (1987), Joe Trotter (1990), and others. “Families and friends and sympathetic organizations brought food and blankets, joined picket lines and got the word out, pooled money together to help struggling families survive the loss of a

165 Johnson paycheck” (Kelley 1999, 2). Women’s activism in the politics of education, desegregation, and gender and racial equality set the stage for new kinds of urban activism in postwar Los Angeles. Particular community activism, antidiscrimination, and civil rights struggles among women of color incorporated a mosaic of racial and ethnic groups, contributing to new sensibilities about horizontal antagonisms, identities, and alliances. Second, several monographs and case studies have uncovered a rich history of activism among minority groups in Los Angeles during the 1930s and early 1940s (F. Anderson 1980; S. Anderson 1996; Bunche 1990; De Graaf 1970; De Graaf, Mulroy, and Taylor 2001; Horne 1995; Sides 2003; Tolbert 1980). Yet few works underscore the relationship between the formation of interracial alliances in the 1930s, patterns of segregation and inequality during World War II, and the repression of interracial spaces in the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, the intersecting activism of Bass and Moreno during the Sleepy Lagoon trial and the ensuing riots shows that generating comparative studies of race and history can help move us to a stronger position from which to counteract the rhetorical and material attacks on scholars and students of color in the academy. Drawing upon existing strengths in ethnic studies, we can generate new methodologies and creative epistemologies to fortify antiracist politics. In the context of ethnic studies in the twenty-first century, studying the strategic antiracism of Moreno and Bass becomes more useful than ever. The radical critique that underlay their activism is the same critique that engendered ethnic studies. Today, however, ethnic studies is under such persistent attack that many departments have become trapped in the parochialism of American exceptionalism, succumbing to what E. San Juan Jr. has termed “the managerial ethos of official multiculturalism” (2002, 254). This trap often leads to particular gaps in critical awareness about the connections between activism and scholarship, as well as between ethnic studies departments themselves. Edward Said attributed these limitations to the “tendency to exclusivist, professionalized, and above all an uncriti- cal acceptance of the principal doctrines of one’s field,” considering such limitations “a great danger within the academe for the professional, for the teacher, for the scholar” (2000, 501). The historical moment I have examined, of mutual activism among black and Latina/o communities in Los Angeles, provides a critical lens through which to view the protracted struggles of black and Latino working-class people as well as of cultural, grassroots, and intellectual workers.

166 Constellations of Struggle

Bass’s and Moreno’s strategic deployment of community-centered consciousness and interracial politics gives academics and activists both strategies and legacies that are useful in present struggles. For example, the legacy of de jure exclusion faced by these women and their contemporaries can be seen in the present realities of aggrieved minority communities, which are afflicted more than ever by declining wages and government budget cuts. In research universities across the country, radical scholars of color have inherited the benefits of struggles for equality waged by Bass and Moreno, but they also witness the continuing need for such struggles to combat persistent systemic racism. The deplorable record of minority admis- sions at institutions like the University of California at Los Angeles and San Diego reflect the refinement of a more sophisticated form of exclusion in which class and racial privileges are normative.10 This is evident across the educational spectrum: African American and Latino children are less likely than white and Asian children to have parents with higher education and are more likely to be low-income, even when their parents have some college education and are employed full-time. In 2006, 44 percent of black children and 40 percent of Latino children live in low-income families; only 51 percent of black children and 35 percent of Latino children have a parent with at least some college education (Koball, Chau, and Douglas- Hall 2006). Almost nine-tenths of segregated African American and Latino schools experience concentrated poverty. The average black or Latino student attends a school with more than twice as many poor classmates than the average white student (Harvard University 2001). Many radical scholars in research institutions, therefore, work in deeply ironic contexts: rhetorical endorsements of diversity appear to be stronger than ever, but the material manifestation of diversity is not. Moreover, scholars who speak too frankly of this irony can often bear professional consequences. This has been the case with several radical academicians who have refused to adhere to what David Horowitz imagines to be “the educational principles that were in place before the generation of sixties leftists infiltrated the university and corrupted it by transforming it into an ideological platform” (B. Anderson 2005). The discourse of interracial affiliations and cooperation, therefore, is being generated from damaging sources: interpretation of the relationships of aggrieved communities to each other is more and more frequently directed by those with a vested interest in deepening divisions. A contemporary case in point is the prisonwide fight, reportedly between black and Latino prisoners, at the Pitchess Detention Center outside Los

167 Johnson

Angeles in February 2006. In the months that followed, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and prominent research centers presented this event as well as other antagonisms between blacks and Latinos outside of their historical, regional, and structural contexts. On February 21, the Washington Post reported that the recent jail riots illustrated a black-Latina/o racial divide in California: “In almost every arena of public life—schools, politics, hospitals, housing and the workplace—African Americans and Hispanics are engaged in an edgy competition,” wrote Post reporter John Pomfret (2006). In March, the Pew Research Center (2006) stated, “For blacks, the growing presence of immigrant workers adds to the formidable obstacles they face in finding a job.” Pew ignored the fact that many economists disagree that immigration is the reason for high black unemployment and instead focus on shrinking budgets for job training and job creation and on industry downsizing and flight to foreign countries (Wood 2006). Approaches that play up conflicts between minority groups implicitly elide the structures of institutionalized racism that give rise to such violence, making these interactions appear capricious and illogical. These narrow depictions undermine collective memories of interracial solidarity by denying existent material and ideological connections between these communities. Comparative radical histories of antiracist activism are one way to strengthen the connections between past successes and present struggles, both in the academy and in the community. Studying the politics of Moreno and Bass, therefore, yields important lessons relevant to our current reality. To form strategies modeled on their politics means understanding injustices in their full historical and social context, making resistance a part of public discourse, rejecting strategies of division, and employing tactics of unity. Not least important, we must change the language of oppression into a discourse of struggle and cooperation that not only influences current sensibilities but leaves a legacy of resistance for others. The project of teaching intercultural knowledge and political activism must be accomplished in a hostile environment and, more and more frequently, with a student body that comes to the classroom convinced that the course materials have nothing to do with them or with their experiences (Curiel 2000, 208). For this reason, it is imperative that we generate studies that underscore the importance of horizontal relationships of culture and politics and that legitimize the theoretical frameworks, life experiences, and multivalent identities that make liberation a more significant force than domination (Manley 1982, 11). In this moment,

168 Constellations of Struggle immigration and homeland security policies severely damage the freedom and mobility of black and brown people, but employing strategies like those engaged by Bass and Moreno can help us to declare to those in power how disappointed we are.

Notes 1. Further background on Sleepy Lagoon can be found in the Alice McGrath papers and Guy Endore papers in the Department of Special Collections, University Library, University of California, Los Angeles. 2. Freer has also created the Charlotta Bass website for the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research (http://www.socallib.org/bass/ index.html), a significant achievement. 3. See also White and White (1999) and Kelley (1996). 4. Correspondence between SLDC and Trade Unionists (1943 or 1944), “Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee’s Correspondence,” box 2, folder 7, Special Collections, University Library, University of California, Los Angeles. 5. Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Register of the Civil Rights Congress, “Wolf Pack Hysteria,” 1950, box 5, folder 7–9. 6. California Eagle, November 8, 1945, and November 29, 1945. 7. Quoted in H. R. Landom, District Director of U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and George W. Scallorn, Chief Entry, Departure, and Expulsion Section, to Luisa M. Bemis, file 246-121334, December 15, 1949, Los Angeles, folder 54, Robert S. Kenny Collection on Communism and Radicalism, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. 8. Some of Moreno’s experiences are described in “The Case of Luisa Moreno Bemis,” a pamphlet issued by the Labor Committee for Luisa Moreno Bemis (in author’s possession). See also U.S. Department of Justice (1950) and Murdoch (1949). 9. Similarly, Robin Kelley has argued that the failure to build a strong multiracial labor movement had more to do with white racism than with reluctance or distrust on the part of workers of color. Ironically, he argues, “the (white) labor movement [in the late nineteenth century] was partly forged because of racism, which in the long run substantially weakened the movement while providing a basis for solidarity” (1999, 7). 10. In 2006, ninety-six African American freshmen were enrolled at UCLA and fifty-one at UC San Diego.

169 Johnson

Works Cited Acuña, Rodolfo. 1988. Occupied America. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1996. Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles. New York: Haymarket Press. Anderson, Brian C. 2005. “On Campus, Conservatives Talk Back.” City Journal (Winter). http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_campus_conservatives. html. Anderson, Frederick E. 1980. The Development of Leadership and Organization Building in the Black Community of Los Angeles from 1900 Through World War II. Saratoga, CA: Century Twenty-One. Anderson, Susan. 1996. “A City Called Heaven: Black Enchantment and Despair in Los Angeles.” In The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja, 336–64. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bass, Charlotta A. 1946. “On the Sidewalk.” California Eagle, January 31, 1. ———. 1952. “Acceptance Speech as Vice Presidential Candidate of the Progressive Party.” March 30. http://www.socallib.org/bass/story/candidate.html. ———. 1960. Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper. Los Angeles: privately printed. Bunche, Lonnie G. 1990. “A Past Not Necessarily Prologue: The Afro-American in Los Angeles.” In 20th Century Los Angeles: Power, Promotion, and Social Conflict, ed. Norman M. Klein and Martin J. Schiesl, 103–10. Claremont, CA: Regina Books. California Legislature. 1945. Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. 1945. Report of the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California. Sacramento. Quoted in Gutiérrez 1995, 126. Curiel, Barbara Brinson. 2000. “My Border Stories: Life Narratives, Interdisciplinarity, and Post-Nationalism in Ethnic Studies.” In Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe, 200–22. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Graaf, Lawrence. 1970. “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto 1890–1930.” Pacific Historical Review 5, no. 39: 323–52. De Graaf, Lawrence, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor, eds. 2001. Seeking El Dorado: African-Americans in California. Los Angeles: Autry Museum of Western Heritage. Escobar, Edward J. 1999. Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. Freer, Regina. 2004. “L.A. Race Woman: Charlotta Bass and the Complexities of Black Political Development in Los Angeles.” American Quarterly 56, no. 3: 607–32. ———. 2005. “Charlotta Bass and the California Eagle.” Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. http://www.socallib.org/bass/story/ index.html.

170 Constellations of Struggle

Griswold del Castillo, Richard, and Carlos Larralde. 1997. “Luisa Moreno and the Beginnings of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement in San Diego.” Journal of San Diego History 43, no. 3: 284–311. Gutiérrez, David G. 1995. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gutman, Herbert. 1976. “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1913.” In Work Culture and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History, 3–78. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Harvard University. 2001. “School Segregation on the Rise.” Harvard University Gazette, July 19. Healey, Dorothy, and Maurice Isserman. 1990. Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party. New York: Oxford University Press. Horne, Gerald. 1995. Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Char lottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hunter, Tera. 1997. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kelley, Robin D. G. 1996. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. New York: Free Press. ———. 1999. “Building Bridges: The Challenge of Organized Labor in Communities of Color.” New Labor Forum 5 (Fall/Winter): 42–58. Koball, Heather, Michelle Chau, and Ayana Douglas-Hall. 2006. “The Racial Gap in Parental Education.” National Center for Children in Poverty, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY. http://www .nccp.org/publications/pub_660.html. Lewis, Earl. 1991. In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Manley, Michael. 1982. Jamaica: Struggle in the Periphery. London: Third World Media. McGrath, Alice. 1987. “The Education of Alice McGrath.” Interview by Michael Balter, UCLA Oral History Program. Oral History Collection, Department of Special Collections, University Library, University of California, Los Angeles. McWilliams, Cary. 1978. “Honorable in All Things: The Memoirs of Carey McWilliams.” Interview by Joel Gardner, UCLA Oral History Program. Oral History Collection, Department of Special Collections, University Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Molina, Natalia. 2006. Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press. Murdoch, Steve. 1949. “Our Times.” File 53, Robert S. Kenny Collection on Communism and Radicalism, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Pagán, Eduardo Obregón. 2003. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pardo, Mary S. 1998. Mexican-American Women Activists: Identity and Resistance in Two Los Angeles Communities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

171 Johnson

Pew Research Center. 2006. “America’s Immigration Quandary: No Consensus on Immigration Problem or Proposed Fixes.” Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Washington, DC. Pomfret, John. 2006. “Jail Riots Illustrate Racial Divide in California: Rising Latino Presence Seen as Sparking Rivalry with Blacks That Sometimes Turns Violent.” Washington Post, February 21, A1. Ruiz, Vicki. 1987. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 1998. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2004. “Una Mujer sin Fronteras: Luisa Moreno and Latina Labor Activism.” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1: 1–10. Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sánchez, George. 1993. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. San Juan, E., Jr. 2002. Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sides, Josh. 2003. L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tolbert, Emory. 1980. The UNIA and Black Los Angeles. Los Angeles: University of California, Center for Afro-American Studies. Trotter, Joe William. 1990. Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. U.S. Department of Justice. Immigration and Naturalization Service. 1950. “Closing INS Report (Los Angeles District) on Luisa Moreno.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice. White, Shane, and Graham White. 1999. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wood, Daniel B. 2006. “Rising Black-Latino Clash on Jobs.” Christian Science Monitor, May 25.

172