Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Afrikans and Asians on the West Coast grew larger and
larger in 1943. The climax came in the "Zoot Suit Riots"
in East Los Angeles on the nights of June 2-7th. They were
so named because Euro-Amerikans were infuriated that
the "hip" clothing styles of Chicano-Mexicano youth expressed
disrespect for "American" culture. Groups of settler
servicemen would beat up and cut the clothing off
Chicano-Mexicano men.
The June 7th climax involved thousands of settler
G.I.s, who with the protection of the Los Angeles police
and their military commanders invaded the barrio,
destroying restaurants and taking movie theater-goers captive.
Street cars were seized, and one Afrikan who was
pulled off had both eyes cut out. Finally, the social chaos
- and the intensely angry wave of anti-U.S. feeling in
Mexico - grew so large that the U.S. military ordered
their troops to stop. (33)
Similar incidents took place throughout the U.S.
Sailors from the Naval Armory near Detroit's Belle Isle
park joined thousands of other settlers in attacking
Afrikans, resulting in the city-wide fighting of the 1943
"Detroit Race Riot." 25 Afrikans and 9 settlers were killed,
and many hundreds seriously wounded. The growing
Afrikan resistance and community self-defense there was
also seen in the August 1, 1943 great '"Harlem Race Riot."
Oppressed communities in the major urban areas had now
grown so large that ordinary settler mob attacks were less
and less successful. The New Deal didn't need the Northern
industrial cities burning with insurrection, and so
moved to "cool" things.
Bourgeois historians in writing about the various
multi-class settler offensives on the "home front," invariably
relate them to the "tension" and "uncertainty"
of the war. But these government-sponsored attacks and
repressions were not random explosions of "tension."
They had a clear direction.
It is easy to see this by contrasting the above events
to the treatment of the thousands of German P.0.W.s
brought to the U.S. after their defeat in North Afrika.
These enemy soldiers met no mob violence or other attacks
from "tense" Euro-Amerikans. In fact, the German Army
prisoners were widely treated with hospitality and respect
by Euro-Amerikans, and fed and housed like settlers.
Many were let out on "work release" to join the civilian
U.S. economy, with some even going off on their own to
live on small, Midwestern family farms.
While overseas they were enemies, here in
Amerika they became honorary settlers, since they were
fellow citizens of European imperialist Powers (in contrast
to the colonial subjects). Literally, captured Nazi officers
were freer than Albizu Campos or the Hon. Elijah
Muhammad. One Afrikan in the U.S. Army wrote about
how his unit was sent in 1942 to open Smoky Hill Army
Air Field in Salinas, Kansas. They discovered to no surprise
that they were barred from the town's best movie
theater, the hotels, restaurants and grills, and so on. Their
only real surprise came when they saw a restaurant serving
ten German prisoners with "the distinctive high-peaked
caps of Rornmel's Afrika Korps. No guard was with
them. " The owner of the restaurant rushed over to remind
them that no Afrikans were allowed inside. Nazi soldiers
ranked far above Afrikan G.1.s as far as settlers were concerned.
(34)
The "race riots" were the war, just on the "home
front." This was not the only development in the relationship
between the U.S. Empire and the nationally oppressed.
Underneath the violent surface, not separated from the
violence but drawing power from it, there grew a trend of
neo-colonialism within the U.S. Empire.