Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
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for all the people,” Bass wrote in 1946, “they must first be prepared to have their heads cracked, their hopes frustrated, and their financial strength weakened.”114
The Tenney Commission, the California legislature’s equivalent of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee, denounced the SLDC as a Communist front organization, later reporting that its meetings were facilitated by “trained rabble-rousers [who] orated of [sic] police brutality against minority groups, of the unfair treatment of the Mexican and the Negro population and of racial discrimination and segregation.”115 As a direct result of Bass and Moreno’s work on the Sleepy Lagoon case, as well as other activities, Senator Tenney targeted both of them during Commission hearings. “Now [that] there was no more Sleepy Lagoon or Pachucos to blame,” Moreno reasoned, “politicians scrambled to find Communists.” Tenney further used the case and red baiting to support segregation, oppose miscegenation, and to divide the Mexican community in Southern California.116
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 . . . [N]or have I hesitated in the face of that most Un-American Un-American activities committee—and I am willing to face it again.”117 This was Bass’s second run for elected office. In 1945, she ran for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, hoping to represent the 45 percent African-American Seventh District. She lost this race, but she went on to run for Congress against future mayor Samuel Yorty in 1950. Regina Freer has pointed out that although Blacks held elected positions in Chicago and New York as early as the 1920s, Los Angeles did not elect its first Black city councilperson until the 1960s. This made Bass’s local runs for office remarkable and made her run for national office in 1952 all the more significant: she was the first Black woman to run for vice president. Freer writes:
At the Progressive Party’s national convention, Bass was nominated by Paul Robeson, with W. E. B. Du Bois seconding the nomination. The Progressive Party’s slogan in 1952—”win or lose, we win by raising the issues”—reflected Bass’s own orientation toward electoral politics as a forum (sometimes successful, sometimes marginalized) for political education.118
Far from being a departure from grassroots politics, Bass’ electoral political activism was an extension of the working-class politics that had previously been confined to areas outside the formal arena. It was an effort to expand the discursive space available for antiracist action.
Luisa Moreno faced more permanent personal consequences for her activism. In 1950, she was deported as a result of the Commission’s successful campaign to label her a “dangerous alien.”119 The FBI offered Moreno an opportunity to secure U.S. citizenship in exchange for testifying against Harry Bridges, an Australian-born International Longshoremen Labor Union leader who had been charged with being a communist. Moreno refused to be “a free woman with a mortgaged soul.”120 For the rest of their lives, she and her husband Gray Bemis suffered poverty and displacement in Mexico and Guatemala. It is significant that the government could counter Moreno’s challenges to the racialized spaces of U.S. society by physically removing her from those spaces.
Bass’s persecution and Moreno’s ultimate deportation at the urging of the Tenney Commission demonstrate the severe costs exacted upon radical grassroots activists 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. 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 directions which reformulated the boundaries of Chicano culture and society.”121 Forced deportation across one border did not diminish Moreno’s influence on reformulating the boundaries of Chicano physical and discursive spaces in Los Angeles. The connective resistance integral to the politics of Bass and Moreno alike expanded the notion of “local” politics, which made the struggles of Mexican youth, Chicana cannery workers, and Black property owners in Los Angeles relevant to Black and Brown struggles everywhere. And yet “Bass’ politics were a direct engagement with the particular demography, geography, politics, and economics of Los Angeles and African-Americans’ expectations of what life should be like”122 in this particular city. Both women created and expanded meaningful space for coalitional movements, not only in terms of material spatial struggles, as in the fight to acquire and maintain assets through fair housing, but also in terms of symbolic space in history. This is why examining these women together reveals critical interventions in structures of racism, imperialism, and spatial oppression over several decades.
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 WWII. The retaliation that both women endured because of their activism was part of the particular strategies of divisiveness wielded by Los Angeles city officials during this period. In this instance, the failure to build a sustained multiracial movement out of the SLDC had more to do with white racism than reluctance or distrust on the part of Black, white, or Chicano communities represented in the struggle for equal rights in WWII Los Angeles.123 Nonetheless, the intersecting efforts of Moreno and Bass on behalf of the communities affected by the case allowed both to identify the cross-racial and intracommunal effects of economic disenfranchisement and structural racism for their own and future struggles.
The history examined here suggests the significance of activism among aggrieved minority groups in Los Angeles during the 1930s and early 1940s for later struggles.124 Mexican and African-American women’s activism in the 1930s and 1940s advanced cultural pluralism, integration, and intercultural understanding prior to some of the more renowned interracial activism of later periods, which is important in several respects.
First, it reveals the significance of gender to the history of interracial politics and culture. In her history of the Mothers of East Los Angeles, Mary Pardo argued that because of men’s and women’s differing social obligations to their families, group solidarity and local collective action can emerge in particularly powerful ways from neighborhood networks clearly organized by gender.125 Several labor and feminist historians have shown that the success labor struggles, from sit-down strikes to unofficial boycotts, have depended on community support largely driven by women.126 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. 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. To properly understand the varying forms of radical activism in aggrieved communities, we must look beyond official histories to take into account the unofficial spaces where women and minority groups fashioned their own representation. 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 WWII Los Angeles offer an important example of the ways ordinary people illumined contradictions in U.S. immigration policy, racial restrictions, and official democracy. It was women who often took the lead in revealing these contradictions.
Second, across significant moments in which the politics and people of Black and Brown communities intermingled, and in which each constellation of struggle coalesced, a cross-racial and intercommunity legacy formed and became foundational for future interracial struggles in Los Angeles. While scholarship has explored this rich early history, few works underscore the relationship between the formation of interracial alliances in the 1930s and 1940s, patterns of segregation and inequality during WWII, and the repression of interracial spaces in the 1940s and 1950s. Bass’s and Moreno’s strategic deployment of community-centered consciousness and interracial politics of struggle provide rich instruction about the protracted struggles that involve