L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

The primary draw was jobs. The need to arm America’s forces in the Pacific had transformed Los Angeles into a major industrial center. But L.A. also seemed to offer blacks an escape from the Jim Crow South, at least at first glance. African Americans responded to this new opportunity by migrating west by the thousands. In 1941, the year before Bill Parker left Los Angeles to join the U.S. Army, Los Angeles’s African American population numbered approximately 70,000 residents. By the time he returned, Los Angeles had become a city with the largest African American population west of St. Louis, with an African American population of more than 125,000.

The city did not take this change particularly well. The torrent of countrified newcomers shocked black and white Angelenos alike and created serious problems for local authorities. The first and most acute problem was housing. There wasn’t any, particularly at a time when even middle-class African Americans couldn’t legally purchase a home in most of the Los Angeles basin. So the newcomers crowded into the only residential district that was available, Little Tokyo—the previous residents of which had been relocated to interior concentration camps up and down the coast. Soon, the area had a new name—Bronzeville. Little Tokyo had suddenly become Los Angeles’s most fearful slum. It also became a center of crime. The understaffed, wartime LAPD responded poorly, with the slap of the blackjack and the crack of the truncheon. Officers policed African American neighborhoods with a heavy hand. Respect was mandatory—for officers, not residents. White officers demanded to be addressed as “Sir”—or else. (Tales of black men who were beaten and booked for drunkenness after some perceived slight were a common feature of black papers like the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Sentinel.) Black officers were, by some accounts, even rougher. According to white veterans of the 77th Street Division, black residents often requested “white justice” out of fear of what black officers might mete out.^*

African Americans weren’t the only minority group that often found itself at the receiving end of a policeman’s baton. In 1942, L.A. county sheriff’s deputies and the LAPD responded to the brutal murder of a twenty-two-year-old Latino farmworker at the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir by rounding up more than six hundred Latino youths. Many were severely beaten during their interrogations. After a flagrantly unfair trial (during which the counsel for the defense were denied the right to communicate freely with their clients), twelve of the youths were convicted of murder and another five of assault. The convictions were later overturned on appeal, and prosecutors declined to retry the case.

Los Angeles even experienced something very much like a pogrom. In the summer of 1943, a handful of Chicano youths got into a fight with a group of servicemen on shore leave who’d been messing with their girlfriends. Three days later, servicemen responded with a five-day rampage through downtown and East L.A., during which time hundreds of Chicano youths, particularly those wearing “zoot suits” (whose long coats and balloon pants were widely associated with gang activity) were brutally beaten by military servicemen while the LAPD stood by. The pogrom ended only when the military placed downtown Los Angeles off-limits to all military personnel. Not since the days of the “third degree” had Los Angeles experienced such naked brutality. By 1945, it was clear that culling recent hires who should never have joined the department in the first place and improving race relations would be major challenges. Parker recognized the first challenge but not the second. By the time he faced the latter, it was too late.

      WHILE COHEN thumbed his nose at Bobby Kennedy, Chief Parker found himself facing his own judicial inquiry. In the spring of 1959, a Los Angeles municipal judge, David Williams, threw out gambling charges against twenty-five African Americans, on the grounds that “the vice squad enforced gambling ordinances in a discriminatory fashion.” When a resident wrote the judge to ask why he’d taken it upon himself to nullify the law, Judge Williams essentially accused the LAPD of racist law enforcement.

“I feel that when police officials instruct their subordinate officers to arrest only Negroes on a given charge, it will not be long before their newly-gained power will prompt them to enforce other statutes only against certain other groups,” wrote Williams. The recipient of this letter promptly forwarded this provocative response to Chief Parker, who immediately dashed off an angry note to the judge. (“I have no knowledge of any such instruction issued in this Department, either orally or in writing.”) Parker demanded that Williams defend himself.