How street fashion sparked a WWII race riot in Los Angeles

Eighty years ago in June 1943, fashion on the streets of Los Angeles made its young men a target. Newspaper editor Al Waxman described a scene where angry white servicemen stopped a streetcar downtown, commanding the driver to let them on board.

The men “proceeded to inspect the clothing of the male passengers. ‘We’re looking for zoot-suits to burn,’ they shouted,” Waxman reported. Around him, a growing mob beat zoot suit-clad youths and literally tore the clothing from their bodies. Local officers rebuffed his appeals for help, telling him it was a matter for the military police.

But those targeted for their clothing were also being targeted for their skin color, and Waxman was literally watching a race riot unfold: the Zoot Suit Riots—a week of unbridled violence against Latino, Black, Filipino-American and other L. A. youth of color unleashed by servicemen, inflamed by racial tensions, and fanned by one of 1940s’ most iconic fashions.

‘An emblem of ethnicity’

The flamboyant zoot suit had come into fashion a decade earlier in the 1930s, when London-based tailor Frederick Scholte designed the “drape” or “London” suit. Unlike the structured men’s fashions of the time, Scholte’s suit emphasized the shoulders and featured flowing fabrics. It was enthusiastically embraced in the U.S., and soon Black jazz performers like Cab Calloway were wearing the suits. Their fans, young men of color who associated the suits with physical and societal freedom, also adopted the look, buying too-large suits off the rack and modifying them for maximum danceability and flair.

Though the origins of the word “zoot” are murky, the word seems to have developed out of rhyming slang popular at the time as a purposeful mispronunciation of the word “suit.”

Zoot suits, as they eventually became known, were for dancing and showing off, and eventually the look became associated with Mexican-American, Black, and Filipino-American youth on the West Coast. The suits were what historian Stuart Cosgrove calls “an emblem of ethnicity…a subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the manners of subservience.”

Not everyone loved the zoot suit. Since the outfits were worn predominantly by minority youth, mainstream white culture increasingly associated them with their grievances against non-whites—and in the tense atmosphere of World War II, racial grievances abounded. The nation was just emerging from the Great Depression, when a backlash against people of color “taking white jobs” resulted in an immigration crackdown and deportation of large numbers of Latinos and others.

In the aftermath of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, the federal government forcibly relocated about 125,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps, and in urban areas with large immigrant and minority populations, hostile whites complained about the increasing visibility of young, non-white men. Some lacked citizenship and thus had not been drafted or volunteered for military service. Others had migrated to city centers following new job opportunities created by the war. In Los Angeles in particular, those jobs abounded, infuriating whites who didn’t trust the new arrivals. The young men wore zoot suits, and second-generation Mexican Americans who enthusiastically adopted the distinctive dress along with jazz music and a distinctive slang were nicknamed pachucos.

‘Unpatriotic’ fashion

The U.S. Navy’s decision in 1940 to erect a million-dollar training facility in the midst of a low-income Mexican-American L. A. neighborhood set the stage for conflict: White sailors complained that the baggy outfits of their Latino neighbors flouted wartime rationing measures and were “unpatriotic,” while pachucos proudly wore the zoot suits as a symbol of their embattled community.

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In 1942 tensions grew even worse with the murder of Jose Diaz, a 22-year-old who was beaten and stabbed after a party that had turned violent. In a highly publicized and racially charged case, described by one community member as a “pageant of prejudice,” police rounded up more than 600 Latino youth. Prosecutors charged 22 with murder, and several were convicted in a highly charged trial accompanied by press reports that painted young immigrants and “zoot suiters” as dangerous hoodlums. (In 1944, a California judge dismissed all charges associated with the event, citing insufficient evidence.)

The L.A. powder keg sparked again in late May 1943, when a group of white sailors falsely claimed they’d been jumped by young Latinos wearing zoot suits. Pandemonium ensued. On June 3, a group of unruly sailors chartered 20 cabs to drive them to majority Latino neighborhoods, where they beat up Latino youth. “Pachuco hysteria spread like a communicable disease among the other military men stationed in and around Los Angeles,” writes Eduardo Obregón Pagán, a historian of the riots.

‘Those gamin dandies’

Soon white men of all military branches were going to Latino neighborhoods and attacking minority civilians. Rumors also circulated that pachucos were raping white women, and minority men defending their own neighborhoods were beaten, disrobed, and often arrested. Over the coming days, other white men joined in, with white cab drivers offering free fares to those traveling to minority neighborhoods and plain-clothes police also participating in the attacks.

The violence peaked the night of June 7, when a crowd of 5,000 civilians and servicemen marauded downtown Los Angeles, armed with clubs and other weapons. These actions were largely encouraged by the press, including the Los Angeles Times, which crowed at the time: “Those gamin dandies, the zoot suiters, having learned a great moral lesson from servicemen, mostly sailors, who took over their instruction three days ago, are staying home nights.” (In 2018, the Times apologized for its coverage of the riots as part of a larger reckoning with race.)

The violence only calmed beginning June 8, when military authorities banned servicemen from leaving their bases in the LA area. Meanwhile, the mayor defended the city’s lack of response, claiming there was no racial discrimination in Los Angeles, while the City Council contemplated what the Times called a “ban on freak suits.” By then, the riots had garnered national attention—and a variety of similar incidents unfolded nationwide in the weeks that followed. According to Pagán, an estimated 94 civilians and 18 servicemen were treated for injuries in the riots’ aftermath, and the police only arrested civilians but no servicemen. No deaths occurred, but it is likely the number of injured is higher than that included in police records.

In the riots’ aftermath, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the chaos, calling on Americans to battle longstanding racial discrimination in the country. California governor Earl Warren formed a citizen’s committee to investigate the riots’ causes, which determined that racism was a primary cause of the riots; L.A. police officers were subsequently instructed to treat all citizens equally.

In the years that followed the riots, youth who had been assaulted for their fashion choices went on to become activists. Historians can draw a line from the youthful resistance of the pachucos and the increasingly contentious racial confrontations of World War II to what became the Chicano Rights Movement, labor activism, and the Civil Rights Movement. Figures like Cesar Chavez and Malcolm X, for example, wore zoot suits in their youth, then went on to fight racial discrimination in their adulthood. Eighty years later, street fashion may have changed. But the echoes of the Zoot Suit Riots still resound in a nation still coming to terms with its long history of racism.