Remembering Joe Maiman

Just weeks ago, in mid-August, the 50th anniversary of the Watts Riots was marked — with many recollections, many observations, many reflections on what has occurred since as markers of change or failure to change as a society.

One event that has gone unmarked is the death of Joe Maiman.

Joe Maiman was shot to death by a patrol of the National Guard on Aug. 16, 1965, the 33rd person to be killed during the violence.

He was a milkman on his way to work at 4 a.m. to deliver to his regular route in South Central Los Angeles. He was complying with his employer’s request that he maintain service during the disturbance, and he was committed to pursuing his obligations to his customers.

Maiman, too, was hearing impaired.

National Guardsmen were patrolling during the curfew when they spied Maiman’s red Corvair stopped at a traffic light in the dark morning.

According to the official transcript, the jeep pulled up at an angle to his car and a captain yelled, “Halt!” But when the light turned green, perhaps not hearing the warning or not understanding who was speaking, Maiman proceeded on Degnan Boulevard. The Guardsmen pursued him in jeeps mounted with machine guns, shooting at his vehicle. The bullet that killed him entered through the front of his brain.

Maiman was a Jew of extraordinary genealogy. He was a descendant of Maimonides and from a family that was justifiably proud of its heritage. Theodore Harold Maiman, the son of Joe Maiman’s brother, for example, was one of the inventors of laser technology.

Maiman’s personal history became relevant because of the result of the coroner’s official inquest into his death — a proceeding then permitted under California law. The coroner’s jury concluded that Maiman’s death was “justifiable homicide,” along with 26 other deaths that occurred from Aug. 11 to Aug. 16, 1965.

Family members, partly out of respect for their generations-extensive standing as leaders, philosophers and people of compassion, could not abide by the idea that Maiman’s death was justified. They questioned the rushed process of the coroner’s inquest, and that no one was allowed to challenge the Guardsmen’s reports. They enlisted James Adler, then a young labor lawyer, to seek review of the verdict, an unheralded procedure. Fighting to clear Maiman’s reputation, Adler got the verdict vacated.

Now, a half century later, while there is renewed attention, one could ask what, if anything, we should consider when reflecting on Joe Maiman’s death?

It would be a more useful history of those events if Maiman’s place were an articulated part of it. He was a kind of everyman, an ordinary person doing his job. He was caught up in circumstances he probably could not comprehend.

In a time of renewed attention to confrontations between law enforcement and citizens, the tragedy of Joe Maiman is yet another marker.

And these markers should be fresh in memory, not forgotten.

Maiman’s case reveals something about efforts of family and friends to clear a record. We don’t know how many verdicts rule state-initiated deaths are justifiable when they are not. Maiman’s appeal illustrates how important it is to question what we are told, and to fight for justice. 

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For the Record:

This article was changed to reflect the correct date of Joe Maiman's death. It was Aug. 16, 1965