A History of the Progressive Movement in Los Angeles: the sixties

1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s

Amid rising affluence, persistent poverty, and a war that threatened to tear the country apart, the 1960s touched many different Angelenos. New heroes like Cesar Chavez, Mario Savio, and Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared on the scene. It was a period of change, sometimes dramatic, eventually tumultuous. At the Los Angeles Times, Ruben Salazar, an ad salesman turned reporter and later columnist, personified the 1960s journey from "acceptance of the American way of life," as he put it, to become a voice for a new progressive politics. Initially skeptical of people who primarily identified themselves politically as Mexican-American, Salazar spoke of this community as "like a fighting bull, but a fighting bull made of paper".

Cautious and thoughtful, Salazar gradually began to adopt a more anti-establishment perspective. "The word Mexican," he wrote later in the decade, "has been dragged through the mud of racism since Anglos arrived in the Southwest". A one-year tour of duty in Vietnam further radicalized Salazar. By the late 1960s, Salazar, with his column at the Times and in his new position as news director of Spanish-language KMEX-TV, sought to bridge the gap between the new generation of "brown power" activists and the older generation of civil rights groups and Roybalistas who had painstakingly created the progressive coalitions of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. All these activists finally came together on August 29, 1970, when 25,000 people participated in the Chicano Moratorium, the largest demonstration ever of Los Angeles Mexican-Americans. But the demonstration ended in tragedy at the Silver Dollar Cafe, where Salazar and his TV crew had retired after recording the day's events. Sheriff's deputies, responding to a rumor about a "man in a red vest," opened fire with tear gas projectiles after hearing Salazar declare, "Let's get out of her." Salazar's odyssey through the 1960s and his untimely death came to symbolize, like so much else during the 1960s, the hopes of Progressive LA magnified, but its dream deferred.

Progressives in the 1950s had laid the groundwork for a revival of political activism in the following decade. It began quietly enough, with the growth of grassroots community organizing. Groups like the Community Service Organization provided the training ground for a new generation of progressives and social activists skilled in identifying issues and campaigns among constituencies formerly thought unorganizable. The best known of those activists was Cesar Chavez. Los Angeles' progressives supported Chavez's efforts to organize a union of farmworkers, primarily in central California. Unions, churches, and Latino community groups became the backbone of the consumer boycott that was an essential ingredient in the union's early success. These actions were complemented by the rise of Chicano activism embodied in such groups as Young Chicanos for Community Action (founded by David Sanchez in 1966) which was soon tagged by sheriff's deputies as "the Brown Berets", and the MEChA (Movimiento Estudial Chicano de Aztlan) organizations that sprouted up on several LA area college campuses.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s now extended into such areas as jobs, welfare, education, housing, and political action. Yet despite its successes in mobilization and even legislation, conservative forces sought to reverse the gains for the civil rights crusade. In November 1964 this counterrevolution succeeded in persuading more than two-thirds of the state's voters to support the repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which outlawed discrimination in the sale of homes. Less than a year later, the Watts Riots effectively changed the dynamics of politics and social action in Los Angeles and elsewhere, heightening the notion of a divided and unequal society while also highlighting the urgency for change.

In the African-American community, there was a significant surge in organizing and mobilization among nationalist and black power organizations. This included the local chapter of the Black Panther Party, a group that had originated from a Community Alert Patrol and which sponsored a wide range of community programs. The Panthers were also caught up in a sequence of violence that ultimately decimated the organization. Two of its leaders, John Higgins and Bunchy Carter, were gunned down on the UCLA campus by rival members of the black nationalist US organization. By the end of the decade, twenty-eight Los Angeles Black Panthers had been reported killed by the police.

Chicano Moratorium

The powerful mood of the times influenced other communities and constituencies. Protests around the Vietnam War, for example, heightened the urgency for change. Students at the college campuses and the high schools began to mobilize around these issues, not only in places like UCLA, but also at the California State University campuses and at junior colleges like Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley. In the summer of 1967, student activists gathered at an old brownstone in Echo Park to establish the Students for a Democratic Society summer school, as this and other LA-based organizations joined with the growing youth and anti-war movements around the country. That summer, Los Angeles witnessed its largest anti-war gathering at Century City where President Lyndon Johnson camped out at the Century Plaza Hotel. A police riot broke up the demonstration, with scores of protesters beaten and injured, while LBJ watched from his hotel room.

A new generation of female activists joined with others who had participated in the progressive union, civil rights, and other battles of the previous decades to forge a new wave of feminism. This grass-roots feminism took many forms, including the growth of consciousness-raising groups, women's rights organizations, and radical political and cultural groups that sought to uproot sexist language, politics, and economics. These groups both influenced and made common cause with the earlier generation of middle class women's advocacy groups, such as Women Strike for Peace, formed during the anti-nuclear testing campaigns of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and Women for Legislative Action and Women For, two women's groups that were part of the progressive advocacy inside and outside the Democratic Party. Together they made feminist politics central to the Progressive LA agenda.

There was never any question as to what these activists opposed - racism, the Vietnam War, the arms race, the urban renewal bulldozer and unending sprawl. But it was not clear at times what vision and reform agenda the various strands of the progressive movement shared in common. In the late l960s and early 1970s, activists reflected the diversity - and sometimes the confusion - of the period's progressive movements. These now included an action-oriented environmentalism, a militant gay and lesbian movement, a burst of activism within the Latino and Asian communities, reform stirrings within the labor movement, and a wave of "community development" efforts by neighborhood activists.

United Auto Worker union leader Paul Schrade symbolized the effort to link these disparate strands of progressive politics. While the national AFL-CIO backed America's Vietnam folly, Schrade and a handful of other local union activists were outspoken in their opposition to the Vietnam war. They sought to bring unions into the broader antiwar movement, participating in such anti-war coalitions as the Peace Action Council. In the wake of the Watts riots, Schrade also helped build bridges between the UAW and the city's black and Latino communities. He helped Ted Watkins form the Watts Labor Community Action Committee and David Lizarraga form the East Los Angeles Community Union (TELACU), which used union and federal funds to build low-income housing, set up job-training programs, and mobilize community residents around neighborhood improvement. Schrade was a key figure in Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968. Kennedy's brief campaign drew on both the energies and frustrations of the civil rights, antiwar, and community organizing crusades. Activists like Schrade, Tom Hayden, Cesar Chavez, and others joined Kennedy's effort, even as other activists talked of "voting in the streets." Kennedy's victory in the June California primary appeared to seal his status as the Democratic candidate. But just as suddenly, following a victory celebration at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Kennedy was assassinated, with Schrade and other activists at his side.