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"Where Vandals Wrecked Paintings" Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News, February 13, 1933

Reproduction of Reuben Kadish mural, note on verso: "R.K. 1932? Destroyed by LA police Dept Raid by "Red" Hynes" (Smithsonian Archives of American Art 17084)

The LAPD Red Squad raid on the John Reed Club art show raid took place in Los Angeles, California, United States on February 11, 1933. The police department's anti-radical unit crashed an art show hosted by a number of leftist organizations. Red Squad members destroyed several works of art in a manner that suggested racial animus as well as anti-communism.

History

The event in question was a multiracial affair at which Los Angeles leftists had gathered to publicize the plight of and to express support for the Scottsboro Boys. The sponsors were Puroretaria Geijutsu Kai (Japanese Proletarian Art Club), Rodo Shimbun, and the Horiuchi Tetsuji Japanese branch of the Los Angeles International Labor Defense. The venue was the Communist-affiliated John Reed Club in Hollywood. A handbill later claimed that 450 people were guests at the event. As the crowd moved from a theater space to an auditorium for a dance, Red Hynes and his Red Squad burst in the building. The LAPD cleared out the building and arrested Karl Yoneda. Loren Miller, an African-American attorney, was present at the event. According to an article about his lifetime of social activism and communist leanings, "The Club paid for a hall and the audience began to gather, 'when up steps the Red Squad and lets us know that the thing was off.' Miller had a bitter face to face confrontation with a cop afterwards who had told him to leave the scene."

The Red Squad then turned its attention to portable "frescos on cement" created by Philip Guston, Reuben Kadish, Harold Lehman, Murray Hantman, and Luis Arenal for the Negro America show, which was intended to highlight the racist railroading of the Scottsboro Boys as well as other racial justice issues in the United States. The paintings were confrontational "if somewhat aesthetically unsophisticated, images deploring the recent increase in the United States of atrocities against African Americans. Among the situations pictured were a black man hanging from a tree, the whipping of an African American by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and a rapt white audience awaiting the imminent demise of a 'boy' tied to a stake while flames licked at his feet." According to a history of Japanese-American activitism during the 1930s, the Red Squad seemed "to have been especially disturbed by a mural painted by the Japanese Proletarian Art Club symbolizing cross-racial solidarity. Underneath a bilingual English-Japanese banner reading 'Workers of the World Unite' was a large painting of the Scottsboro Boys." Eyewitnesses described the Red Squad firing bullets into the foreheads of "each of the nine defendants depicted in Murray Hantman's mural; Guston described the policemen also aiming for the genitals and eyes of the images of Alabama defendants.

The artists and attendees were disregarded when they went to the press and the courts about the incident. The media described the Communist and leftist-aligned partygoers as "misguided individuals" and "a reactionary judge dismissed their case" when they tried to sue. For their part, the Red Squad proudly claimed that the raid was a successful attack on "Japanese militarist elements."

See also

• América Tropical: Oprimida y Destrozada por los Imperialismos
• Art Students League of Los Angeles

References

Sources

• Gordon, Walter Lear III (Fall 2012). "Loren Miller: The Red and The Black, A Political Portrait". Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. 12 (1). Institute of African-American Affairs (IAAA): no pag. ISSN 1089-3148.
• Kurashige, Scott (2009). "Chapter 9. Organizing from the Margins: Communists in Los Angeles During the Great Depression". In Koditschek, Theodore; Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita; Neville, Helen A. (eds.). Race Struggles. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. pp. 211–230. ISBN 978-0-252-03449-7. OCLC 317922889.
• Landau, Ellen G. (March 2007). "Double Consciousness in Mexico: How Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish Painted a Morelian Mural". American Art. 21 (1): 74–97. doi:10.1086/518295. ISSN 1073-9300.
• McClellan, Scott Allen (2011). Policing the Red Scare: The Los Angeles Police Department's Red Squad and the Repression of Labor Activism in Los Angeles, 1900–1940 (Thesis). University of California, Irvine. ProQuest 3442998.