What I’m Reading: Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters – 32 in a series – “White military personnel were at the forefront of racial violence…”

““However segregation may be rationalized,” argued Sterling A. Brown in the same collection, “it is essentially the denial of belonging.”11 Fighting for democracy at home and abroad was a form of belonging that made the exclusion from recreation particularly painful. While some blacks expected participation in the war effort to ease segregation and racial violence, the opposite proved to be true.12

White military personnel were at the forefront of racial violence in public spaces and often instigated conflict. Detroit’s 1943 riot and the zoot suit riots in Los Angeles that same year both involved white soldiers. During the zoot suit riots white servicemen infiltrated the working-class spaces of leisure frequented by African American and Mexican American youth, who were easy to spot and abuse in their stylish outfits.”

From Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America by Victoria W. Wolcott

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