Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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local cemetery. Edward Roybal, the only Mexican to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council between 1881 and 1985, had been the candidate of a 1949 popular front that included Jews and Blacks, as well as Mexicans.
By 1960, however, the Eastside had decanted most of its Jewish population to the Westside, and Boyle Heights, although still surprisingly diverse, was majority Mexican and would become progressively more so over time. Despite the concerted voter registration efforts over the previous decade of the Community Services Organization (one of its organizers was Cesar Chavez), Los Angeles’s Mexican population (260,389) possessed only marginal political clout. When Roybal went to Congress in 1962, it would be twenty-three years before it again had representation on the city council (Richard Alatorre in 1985).45 Freeway construction had displaced significant numbers of Mexican voters in Roybal’s district, leaving it with a Black political majority who subsequently elected Gilbert Lindsay, the future “emperor of downtown,” and kept him in office for the next twenty-seven years. Moreover, the impact of the Mexican-American vote was sabotaged by political boundaries: 70,000 Eastsiders lived on the other side of Indiana Street (where the pueblo grid became the Jeffersonian) in a county enclave called East Los Angeles.
Unincorporated East L.A. had insignificant influence over a county government administered by five supervisors with huge electoral districts. Incorporated, however, East L.A. might become a power base for Chicano political aspirations—an idea that caught fire in the spring and summer of 1960. One prominent advocate for cityhood, Father William Hutson of the Catholic Youth Organization, even suggested that it might aid the United States in the Cold War: “In a time when Fidelismo is making strides among Latin Americans … the incorporation of East Los Angeles would make the residents better Americans.”46 In August the Committee to Incorporate East Los Angeles, led by attorney Joseph Galea, submitted a petition signed by 7,000 property owners to the LA County Board of Supervisors; in December the board heard contending arguments. The enemies of cityhood included business owners along Atlantic and Whittier Boulevards (majority Anglo) who feared higher taxes, as well as white homeowners from a new tract in the area’s northwest corner (West Bella Vista) who were unwilling to accept Mexican-American dominance.47
What blindsided proponents, however, was the decision of labor leaders, led by IBEW Local 11, to oppose cityhood without even hearing the arguments for incorporation. “We state without qualification,” Galea and another community leader told a press conference, “that COPE, as the strategic right arm of political action for the AFLCIO, has in Southern California consistently supported those interests that have opposed the development of Mexican-American leadership and the expansion of Mexican-American influence. We would like to feel that this is not due to racial bias or prejudice. However, it’s a little hard to try to figure otherwise.”48 In the event, cityhood was narrowly defeated in April 1960.
Ruben Salazar later wrote in the Times: “At a time in Southern California when new cities are popping up like toadstools after a rain, East Los Angeles—which perhaps had better reasons to incorporate than other areas because of its supposed homogeneity—turned down incorporation by 340 votes.”49 (Over the next half century there would be three more closely fought but failed attempts at incorporation.) In contrast to Los Angeles’s Black community, with its national civil rights organizations and incipient alliances with liberals on the Westside, Mexican-Americans (10 percent of the population) had no municipal representation, few allies, and a solitary voice (the young Salazar) in the English-language media. After 1965, ethnic competition for War on Poverty funds destroyed what little remained of the Black-Mexican political alliance. Eastsiders, spurned by city hall and Sacramento, would wander in the political wilderness for the next generation.
Warden of the Ghetto: LAPD Chief William H. Parker
During its January 1960 hearing, the US Commission on Civil Rights tepidly attempted to open a window on the police abuse of minorities in Los Angeles. Chief William H. Parker, notorious for his explosive behavior under questioning, immediately slammed it shut: “There is no segregation or integration problem in this community, in my opinion, and I have been here since 1922.” But long-suffering Los Angeles, he testified, was being inundated by barely civilized poor people from other regions. He suspected that Southern states in particular were sending their thriftless unemployed westward. “I attended a conference of mayors,” he submitted, “in which I had certain mayors tell me flatly that they would pay fares for certain people to move them into Los Angeles.” The result? “The Negro [in Los Angeles] committed eleven times as many crimes as other races.” As for Mexicans, “some of those people [are] not too far removed from the wild tribes of the district of the inner mountains of Mexico. I don’t think you can throw the genes out of the question when you discuss behavior patterns of people.” But Parker did not totally discount a civil rights problem in Los Angeles: “I think the greatest dislocated minority in America today are the police … blamed for all the ills of humanity.” “There is no one,” he complained, “concerned about the civil rights of the policeman.”1
When Councilman Edward Roybal voiced the outrage of the Eastside about the “wild tribes” remark, Parker denied that he had ever said it. His lie was exposed when a tape of the testimony was played to the city council, but the chief refused to apologize. Police critics, as he always reminded the public, were deliberately or ignorantly doing the laundry for gangsters and Communists.2 In this controversy, as during every other during his seventeen-year tenure (1950–66), he could count on the city’s press (the Chandler family’s Times and Daily Mirror as well as the Hearst-owned Examiner [later Herald-Examiner]) to automatically editorialize in his support. Although his blood enemies ranged from J. Edgar Hoover to Governor Pat Brown, Parker was politically invulnerable thanks to lifetime tenure, a Hollywood publicity machine, and a blackmail bureau that rivaled Hoover’s.
Parker, who had earned a law degree while walking a beat, was adroit at conflating boss control of the police with civilian oversight. In 1934 he orchestrated, on behalf of the Fire and Police Protective League, a charter amendment that established a board of rights, composed of ranking LAPD officers, with exclusive jurisdiction over police misconduct. A subsequent amendment in 1937 gave chiefs life tenure and made it virtually impossible for the city to fire them. These were promoted as reforms that would once and for all remove political corruption from police administration. Joe Domanick, in his history of the LAPD, however, characterized the amendments as the equivalent of a coup d’etat: “A quasi-military organization had declared itself independent of the rest of city government and placed itself outside the control of the police commission, City Hall, or any other elected public officials, outside of the democratic system of checks and balances.”3
As chief, Parker liked to flaunt his power in the face of an impotent and captive police commission. Before the Second World War the LAPD, especially its infamous Red Squad, had been the military arm of the open shop, of Harry Chandler and the anti-union Merchants and Manufacturers Association. Parker changed the balance of power. He continued to feed the conservative Republican appetite for political intelligence on their enemies, but he seldom broke strikes and absolutely never took orders. He had his own expansive dark agenda as well as an independent and largely impregnable political base. He replaced boss rule with cop rule and used the police commission to rubber-stamp his authority.
In June 1959, Herbert Greenwood, a Black attorney appointed to the commission by Mayor Norris Poulson, resigned in disgust, telling reporters that Parker “runs the whole show.” He cited the example of Ed Washington, a spectator at a fight the year before who “was told to move along by an officer and apparently didn’t move fast enough … the