The Battle for Los Angeles: Racial Ideology and World War II (ISBN 0826340474)

WWII racial troubles in Los Angeles and what they tell about nation's racial issues in following decades:
The subject necessarily begins with the California Attorney General and future Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren's decision to allow the state's Japanese-Americans to be interred shortly after the opening of World War II. Warren was ambivalent at the time, and later regretted his controversial decision. But that the decision arose at all evidences the presence of the racial ideology; whose depths, strength, and effects are so hard to fathom and grasp in today's multicultural culture. The discrimination against the Japanese is a starting point and something of a focal point because it is the most well-known and notorious. But Leonard, with the department of history at Western Washington U., ranges much beyond this to prevalent discrimination and related overt hostility against blacks and Hispanics. The L A. "Zoot-Suit Riots...involv(ing) attacks by navy and army personnel" upon young men of these minorities are but one instance of the acceptance and virulence of the area's racism. Leonard's study pays particular attention to the part of "repeated verbal conflicts about the meaning of 'race'" in the racially-oriented "battle for Los Angeles."