February 4, 2005

San Pedro History:
The Changing of the Guard
Part II of the Black Family Story
By Terelle Jerricks, Editor

     Thelma Gatlin recalled the moment she decided to move to San Pedro 62 years ago. Her sister had come home from Los Angeles, telling her how she was earning $40 a week, five times the pay Thelma was taking home cleaning white people’s houses in Shreveport, Louisiana.
     “My sister gave me $40 and my mother gave me $15. That’s what I came out here with. I worked for two weeks before I could get any more money.”
     Thelma immediately found a job as a rigger assistant at the shipyard. Thelma felt lucky, considering that she was able to learn a skilled trade rather than just “sweeping up floors as the other women were.” Three months after she arrived, Thelma met her future husband, Henry Gatlin, a longshoreman.
     San Pedro held the promise of the American dream. Here it was possible to get clean, affordable housing. And, with the United States’ entry into the Second World War, jobs were plentiful. Though blacks had already been trickling into the West by the 1920s, during the 1930s they were leaving the South en mass.
     For the most part, those blacks who grew up in San Pedro during the’40s and ‘50s generally have positive memories. This town’s only middle and high school served as a multicultural training ground that helped break down the barriers of language, race, and ethnicity. Founded during the first decade of the 20th century, the student body of Richard Dana Henry Junior High and San Pedro High School was made up of second-generation Eastern European, Japanese, and Mexican-American immigrants. They played, studied, and competed together, and learned from each other in the process. The black experience in San Pedro’s schools was a paradise compared to the separate but unequal schools elsewhere in the nation.
     Art Almeida, a second-generation Mexican American, recalled his transition from Barton Hill Elementary school to Richard Dana Henry Junior as an experience that “opened up a whole new world for me.” In that world, he would eventually become President of Local 13 of the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union).
     At Barton Hill, his friends were primarily Mexican-American, largely because that was the predominate population. But, when he entered Richard Dana Henry Junior High, he found himself with Anglo, Japanese, black, and Italian friends. Almeida confided that occasionally some of his Mexican-American friends thought he was uppity because he had such a diverse group of friends. He often retorted, “You can’t tell me who I can be friends with!”
     Almeida, San Pedro’s historian, considers himself a middle-of-the-road kind of guy with a fierce independent streak. After graduating from San Pedro High in 1947, like many of their graduates, he began working on the Waterfront in 1950.
     The first black longshoremen began working at San Pedro’s Waterfront when Almeida was still going to Richard Dana Henry Junior High, soon after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent entry into the Second World War. With massive numbers of young men going to war, individuals like Henry Gatlin made up the labor shortfall, entering fields and occupations that had previously been off limits for them.
     Though the port was not the only place hiring in town, it had the ILWU, a union known for its racially liberal policies and for backing the working man 100 percent. Organizing and protecting the workers was a long and difficult process in San Pedro, with big business interests winning every battle up to the General Strike of 1934.
     In that “old America,” workers who asked for a man’s wage and decent working conditions were treated like treasonous criminals that had to be stamped out by the combined forces of frontier law and the Ku Klux Klan. The formation of the ILWU became the first real chance to elevate the worker and turn manual labor into a civilized endeavor. The strikes and work stoppages leading up to the General Strike of 1934 crystallized that ideal. Workers achieved such a measure of ownership over their labor that they believed they could hand their jobs down to their sons like a tradition.
     Though the ILWU and San Pedro shone as a working man’s paradise, they still had their limits. As the numbers of black dock workers began to increase, union members often told them that their jobs were “temporary,” sometimes taunting that, when the war ended, the waterfront would again be as “lily white” as it was before.
     Few blacks felt threatened by these remarks at the time. They had filed their union papers, sat under the microscope of the Membership Committee as it scrutinized their strike records. They were admitted into the union, and as a result were under the protection of the ILWU’s rules and bylaws against discrimination.
     When the war ended and the work slumped as a consequence, Local 13 was faced with the problem of an oversupply of labor with little available work. The Membership Committee of Local 13 decided to deal with the problem by laying off 500 longshoremen “who have not worked for extended periods.” About 400 of these men were black. According to the minutes of the meeting, no one was to work on the docks before these men had been allowed to return.
     A few years after the General Strike of 1934, Harry Bridges led the Pacific Coast division of the International Longshore Association to independence—pledging to create an effective grievance system, a rank and file democracy, local autonomy, and a policy of anti-discrimination. Though Local 13 hired one black man for every five men they hired, deregistration reversed this ratio: four out of five men that were on the deregistration list were black.
     This deregistration did not conform to the ILWU’s non-discrimination policies, and none of the other West Coast ports deregistered any of their workers. Deregistration was not only intended to reduce the oversupply of labor, but also to make room for returning veterans and members. Ralph Griffen, an outspoken black man not willing to stay quiet about this injustice, gathered two dozen other black longshoremen, contacted a lawyer and sued the Local for financial compensation for loss of work and the denial of union membership.
     Walter Williams, another black longshoreman who wanted to stay on the waterfront, thought little good could come from that sort of litigation. Williams felt it was more justified “to sue on the moral grounds of being discriminated against.” In either case, for a longshoreman to sue the union on any grounds was simply taboo—especially during a time when the Labor Movement was under attack by a Republican-dominated Congress that had passed the Taft-Hartley Act.
     Though eventually many of the black longshoremen returned, this return happened slowly and didn’t pick up until the Korean War. Though San Pedro was an ideal place to live, blacks became more assertive in demanding their civil rights, no longer patient enough to wait for change. The legal system was increasingly becoming the tool of choice to knock down doors previously closed to them.
     Almeida explained, “A lot of black brothers were tired of being sweepers, they wanted to be trained in the elevated positions. They wanted to [also] drive winches and cranes. Who could blame them?” However, they were often dispatched to jobs that prevented them from picking up new skills.
     Hezikiah Watson, who arrived in San Pedro during the war, applied to lead a gang, (a team of longshoremen that loaded and unloaded banana cargo, requiring the leader to know how to operate a winch) by entering his name on the list. He was expecting to have his turn by the time his five-year residency was established. But, just before this date, the local decided to change its policy and assign gangs based on a seniority list, giving preference to workers who had long been on the waterfront.
     Almeida said that there were a number of older longshoremen given a gang that did not even know how operate a winch. They would “just sit down while someone in their gang came along to run it for him.”
     Although he was to be the first black offered this position, Watson had to wait until the local offered him his gang leadership in 1961. By then, according to Almeida, it became “a non-issue because Hezikiah learned how to drive a crane.”
     “San Pedro was made up of recent immigrants,” Gatlin explained. “A lot of them had a difficult time due to language barriers and ethnic chauvinism. Everybody was trying to protect their own.” This wasn’t unusual, as sponsorship existed in all the industries operating in the Harbor area. So it took lawsuits to change that.
     ILWU Local 13 began the practice of sponsorship at its inception, requiring unregistered workers, known as “Casuals,” to work a number of hours at whatever extra assignments that were available, which usually meant the hardest and most dangerous jobs. After working a given number of hours, a worker could become a class B registrant. As a class B registrant, the workers get second priority in job assignments and benefits short of being a full fledged member.
     To become a class A registrant, a class B registrant had to be sponsored by a current member or a former member with a valid withdrawal card. In 1965, the Joint Coast Committee, composed of representatives from the Pacific Maritime Association and the ILWU International, passed a directive to abolish the practice of sponsorship to avoid violating the National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) rules against discrimination as well as the newly passed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII of the Civil Right Act unlocked the doors to jobs that women and blacks were traditionally locked out of, including that of the Longshore clerk. But implementation in the real world would still require many more battles, including ones in San Pedro.
     Charles Ray Ellis, San Pedro High class of 51, was a part of the first groups of blacks to become a clerk in the late 1960s. He was the son of a longshoreman who came to San Pedro during World War II. Ray recalled his father giving him a heads up when word of the test, “You might have an inside track,” he said.
     Ellis was tired of working rotating shifts at United Oil, so he took a chance. “Information about the clerking test dates wasn’t widely distributed,” Ellis recalled. “Supposedly about 75 people passed the test, but one black guy passed. The blacks I knew didn’t know about the test. A lot of the membership’s sons and relatives that took the test didn’t get into group that was accepted.”
     Between 1966 and 1968, two casual workers requested an application to get on the class B registration list. Henry Gatlin, who had been working as a longshoreman off and on since the Second World War, was one of them. They were informed by a union officer that they would need a sponsor. This was the first they had heard of this policy, considering that sponsorship was usually applied to class B registrants trying to become full members of the union. The two filed a complaint with NLRB against local 13.
     During this time, Local 13 was allowed to add 400 casuals to the class B registration list without the use of sponsorship. Despite the sponsorship ban, the old guard of Local 13 continued to advocate for the old system. To get around the impasse, the local began dispatching Terminal Warehouse workers to longshoring jobs ahead of the casuals who were already in the hiring hall.
     Ultimately, it was the old guards’ insistence on maintaining sponsorship that delayed the induction of both longtime longshore casuals and Terminal Warehouse workers into the class B registration status.
     “It took nearly nine years, till 1978. Till we got all of them in,” said ILWU Local 13 President Dave Arian, then an activist involved in the struggle to get the workers registered.
     “Gatlin, they were casuals the same time I was,” Arian said. “They’re the ones who broke the sponsorship system, and rightfully so,” he added. “I never was involved in lawsuits against the union. I always took the political route, and organized for change.”
     “For a number of years there were hard feelings against the Gatlin family, and black workers in general,” said Joe Gatlin, son of Henry Gatlin. “Dave was part of the new leadership who came in and said, ‘Hey, this is just what’s fair.’”
     The struggle to fully integrate ILWU 13 took decades of hard work, but it wasn’t just blacks struggling to get in. It was also leaders like Almeida and Arian working on the inside, along with plenty of rank-and-file members as well who had their first taste of “a whole new world” at Dana Junior High and San Pedro High School.
     A casual observer at San Pedro’s Juneteenth celebration last year might easily have mistaken it for an ILWU event. Indeed, the Harry Bridges Institute (HBI), the union’s educational outreach arm, was a co-sponsor of the event. And Joe Gatlin sits on HBI’s Black History Board.
     Teaching tolerance has become a part of the American fabric of life in the decades since the 1960s. But here in San Pedro, there’s something deeper going on. Call it, “teaching solidarity.”

This story is based on resources provided by Shannon Donato of the Harry Bridges Institute’s Oral Histories Archive, Art Almeida, Hans Koeleman, Blacks in the ILWU, SanPedro California: 1942-1949.

Thelma Gatlin holdsa picture of her late husband, Henry Gatlin. The two met, and made a life together in San Pedro in the early 1940s. Henry worked as a longshoreman and built janitorial service. Thelma worked with the YWCA, Toberman Settlement House and currently a board member of the Central San Pedro Neighborhood Council. Photo: Taso Papadakis.