As discussed in the previous post, the Los Angeles Plaza, or La Placita was the site of sporadic but violent and deadly clashes between capital and labor since the early 1900s, years before Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. In the late 1920s, especially after the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, a more organized…
All posts tagged cooperative center
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: Radical Voices and the Free Speech Fight Move to La Placita
While an influx of East European emigrants with socialist inclinations began moving to Boyle Heights by the second decade of the 1900s, a powerful and organized Los Angeles coalition of fervent open shop proponents (“a union against unions”) were busy waging a war to crack down on a growing militant labor movement from establishing a…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: Cooperative Center Surveillance Photos
This blog post will primarily feature Los Angeles Police Department surveillance photos of the communist-run Cooperative Center at 2708 Brooklyn Avenue (now Cesar Chavez Avenue) in Boyle Heights. But first, a little background on these photos. In 1930, Rep. Hamilton Fish, Jr. (R-New York) chaired a congressional committee called the Special Committee to Investigate Communist…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: Raids and Riots on Brooklyn Avenue
On a February morning in 1919, a group of citrus growers and law enforcement officers decided to meet inside a packing house in the agricultural town of Charter Oak, 24 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, because of their concerns over a looming problem that threatened the region’s highly profitable citrus industry. Specifically, it was…
RED BOYLE HEIGHTS: The Cooperative Center and the Open Shop
Not long after it opened in 1925, the three-story Cooperative Center at Brooklyn Avenue and Mott Street in Boyle Heights was often described by both the Los Angeles Police Department and the city’s dailies as a “bastion,” or “stronghold” for local communist organizers and “labor agitators.” The inflated rhetoric referred to the fact that during…