The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee Records 1942-1945 focus on media and PR materials created and/or gathered by the group of the same name in their efforts to rouse and sway public opinion in the indictment of 22 young Hispanic men on trial for murder. After 12 of the defendants were convicted 1st degree murder in 1942, the committee’s efforts garnered celebrity attention and backing and was successful in changing public opinion – which eventually led to the reversal of the murder convictions in 1944. It is a collection of 11 boxes of archived material, available through the UCLA Library Special Collections with advance notice. The archival collection ranges from biographies, press releases, petitions and correspondence all the way up to a copy of the transcript of the appeals trial.
The Sleepy Lagoon Murder of Jose Diaz predates the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles but the crime and the subsequent trials and media campaigns figure into the political and cultural climate in which the riots occurred, and are often mentioned in histories as a direct precursor to those events. This collection’s extensive documentation of institutional and cultural prejudice against the Latino population of Los Angeles could prove useful to scholars seeking to understand the cultural context of the Zoot Suit Riots and the changing face of Los Angeles during World War 2. However, more interesting would be using the records to delve into the relationship between celebrity, Hollywood and social activism.
The story told by these records details the waging of an aggressive public relations campaign by the committee on behalf of the defendants, enlisting the aid of Hollywood influencers whose efforts are documented therein. The first item in Box 1 of the collection is a letter from Orson Welles written directly to the parole board overseeing the cases of the defendants. The letter articulates his concerns regarding the role of prejudice against the Mexican-American community may have led to an unjust conviction, and pleads for their release. The breadth of the records cover a flurry of media activity over a three-year period that demonstrate public relations and social activism best practices. A media scholar looking for a deeper understanding of public relations practices before the advent of television would find this material rich and rewarding. Being able to place the media campaign in a specific space and place would make cross-referencing other local collections that tackle Mexican-American history in Los Angeles possible. However, one might not necessarily be able to access the contextual information needed to understand the leveraging of relationships and professional networks in place that made the waging of the campaign possible. To remedy that shortcoming, it would be helpful to locate a separate archive detailing the professional lives and connections of press members also working in Los Angeles during the early to mid-1940’s.