The LAPD Red Squad, the police department's anti-radical unit, crashed a political meeting and art show hosted by a number of leftist organizations.

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.'

"[7] The Red Squad then turned its attention to portable "frescos on cement" created by Bloc of Painters artists 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.

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.

"[8] According to a history of Japanese-American activism 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.

[10] When members of the John Reed Club and the Workers Ex-Service Men's League protested the raid in front of the Los Angeles City Council, the Red Squad was there to eject them, along the way taking the time to pummel lawyer Leo Gallagher, "leaving him with broken glasses and two black eyes".

[11] In 1934, Arthur Millier, the art critic for the arch-conservative Los Angeles Times, which was owned by Harry Chandler, who was all but a personal sponsor of the Red Squad,[12] wrote a column about anti-communist censorship.