History of Phoenix

t 1942, an illegal prize fight between a champion boxer of a black regiment and a white boxer of another army regiment, degenerated into a melee between competing camps. Subsequently, the black regiment left their barracks en masse, and began racially motivated attacks, against whites and started rioting into downtown. Unable to contain the spreading violence by the black soldiers, local police called in the military.

The rioters were met by several military police units that attempted to arrest the rioters. Instead, the rest of the black soldiers based nearby joined the rioters with firearms. The Army quickly responded to the mutiny, and surrounded the area with armored personnel carriers and machine guns, ordering soldiers to use full military force against the mutineers, which resulted in dozens of fatalities.

The Colonel of Luke Field, who had oversight of the city, soon declared Army personnel banned from Phoenix. This pressured civic leaders to reform local government, by firing a number of corrupt officials, in turn getting the ban lifted. This same bipartisan effort also successfully convinced the city council to give more power to the city manager to run the government and spend public funds, making Phoenix one of the largest cities in the country to not use the strong mayor structure for municipal government.

Another wartime incident took place at a prisoner-of-war camp that was established at the site of what is now Papago Park and Phoenix Zoo, for the internment of German soldiers captured in Europe. In 1944, dozens of prisoners had devised a plan to escape from the camp and use boats to go down the nearby Salt River to reach Mexico. They were unaware, however, that the river was mostly dry and had not been navigable for decades, and were thus easily apprehended near the