also sought to fight against the still rampant racism and discrimination experienced by the community. Sleepy Lagoon murder In late-1942, California Governor Culbert Olson, who was facing a tough re-election battle against future incumbent Earl Warren, sent a memo to Los Angeles County's law enforcement agencies, ordering them to launch a vicious campaign against the city's youth gangs. Under these orders, the office of the Los Angeles County District Attorney decided to use the August 2, 1942 death of José Gallardo Díaz, a Mexican American youth, as a test case to launch the new war against juvenile delinquency by turning the investigation into a major media event. In the weeks following Díaz' death, the LAPD launched mass raids in Mexican and African American neighborhoods, arresting more than 600 young men and women to be held in custody and interrogated. The Los Angeles press hailed the arresting officers as heroes. As a result of their often brutal interrogations of the adolescents, the police announced they had found the murderers: twenty-two alleged members of the 38th Street gang and two female accomplices. The public discourse in California surrounding the arrest of the youths was viciously racist, and high-profile debates emerged whether Mexicans and Mexican Americans were "culturally, politically, intellectually, and biologically capable of living within a white, civilized, democratic society". The resulting criminal trial, People v. Zammora (1942), is infamous for its fundamental denial of due process. Of the twenty-four charged youth, seventeen were indicted on murder charges and placed on trial. The courtroom was small and, during the trial, the defendants were not allowed to sit near, or to communicate with, their attorneys. None of those charged were permitted to change their clothes during the entirety of the trial by order of the presiding Judge Charles W. Fricke at the request of the district attorney. Judge Fricke also permitted the chief of the Foreign Relations Bureau of the Los Angeles sheriff's office, E. Duran Ayres, to testify as an "expert witness" that Mexicans as a community had a "blood-thirst" and a "biological predisposition" to crime and killing, citing the supposed human sacrifice practiced by their Aztec ancestors. After Judge Fricke's guilty verdict in January, the Mexican-American youths were imprisoned. The Mexican American community was outraged and several attorneys challenged Judge Fricke's decisions. The famous journalist Carey McWilliams noted that a few months earlier, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were detained and interned