Zoot Suit Riot. - Cherry Poppin' Daddies - Bedroom Ballroom

On May 31, 1943, a group of white sailors on leave clashed with a group of young Latinos in the downtown area. One sailor, Joe Dacy Coleman, was stabbed in the melee. The violence escalated as around 200 sailors and Marines hired a fleet of cabs and drove into East Los Angeles to continue the clash with Mexican-American youths, specifically targeting young men dressed in Zoot Suits and calling themselves pachucos. The Los Angeles Police Department initially refused to intervene as newspapers, headed by various Hearst Publishing dailies, placed the blame entirely on the pachucos.

As the violence escalated over the ensuing days, thousands of servicemen joined the attacks, marching abreast down streets, entering bars and movie houses and assaulting any young Latino males they encountered. Although police accompanied the rioting servicemen they had orders not to arrest any of them. After several days more than 150 people had been injured and police had arrested more than 500 "Latinos" on charges from "rioting" to "vagrancy".

An eyewitness to the attacks, journalist Carey McWilliams described the scene as follows

"Marching through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot suiter they could find. Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, the mob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ran up and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats. Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked from their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy.

The local press lauded the attacks by the servicemen, describing the assaults as having a "cleansing effect" that were ridding Los Angeles of "miscreants" and "hoodlums."[ The Los Angeles City Council issued an ordinance banning the wearing of "zoot suits" after Councilman Norris Nelson stated "The zoot suit has become a badge of hoodlumism". Sailors and Marines had initially targeted only pachucos, but African-Americans in Zoot Suits were also victimized in the Central Avenue corridor area. This escalation compelled the Navy and Marine Corps command staffs to intervene on June 7, confining sailors and Marines to barracks and declaring Los Angeles as off-limits to all military personnel with enforcement by U.S. Navy Shore Patrol personnel. However their official position remained that their men were acting in self defense.

A week later, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt described the riots, which the local press had largely attributed to criminal actions by the Mexican American community, as having actually been "race riots" rooted in long-term discrimination against Mexican-Americans. This led to an outraged response from the Los Angeles Times, which printed an editorial, the following day, in which it accused Mrs. Roosevelt of having communist leanings and stirring "race discord".

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