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…
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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…