In the 1920s, Southern California’s Inland Region (Inland Empire) was a bucolic place, dotted with small towns set amid orange groves. It was also a growing outpost for the Ku Klux Klan, whose members subjected the region’s minority residents to exclusion, harassment, and violence in following decades. Today, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-Latino, anti-Asian and anti-LGBTQ movements persist.

The Inland Region exemplifies an ongoing tension between hate and resistance, harboring grassroots movements that have banned lessons about race in public schools at the same time as it celebrates the opening of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture. This duality makes the region a perfect place to grapple with the history of hate in California, and understand past and present efforts to strike back and fight for justice. Can the region’s battles against discrimination chart a path forward for the rest of the state, and nation?

Event sponsors Zócalo and California Humanities welcome California State Assemblymember Corey A. Jackson, Mapping Black California Project Director Candice Mays, and ACLU SoCal Senior Policy Advocate and Organizer Luis Nolasco to discuss hate’s impact on the Inland Region, and highlight efforts to resist. 

The Advocates for Justice honors individuals, firms, and organizations who have worked directly with the ACLU of Southern California to advance our priorities in the pursuit of equality and justice.

Join us at the 2024 Advocates for Justice reception on Thursday, July 18, at the Los Angeles Center Studios. Tickets start at $200. All proceeds support our work.

For over 100 years, the ACLU of Southern California has worked to defend and ensure that rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights apply to all people – including women, youth, people of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and non-binary people, immigrants and refugees, members of minority religions, disabled people, people experiencing poverty or houselessness, and people who are incarcerated.