The Hidden History of Black San Pedro

Below is an updated version of the 2006 Random Lengths News feature, “The Hidden History of San Pedro’s Black Family Story.” It is the first of two stories focused on Black San Pedrans before World War II. In reprinting this updated version, RLn is kicking off a series of columns about Blacks in the fabric of Los Angeles Harbor history and culture. 

In the early morning of summer, the wind blows cool through the trees of Peck Park, sending the scent of barbequed chicken, beef and pork ribs to trigger taste glands to salivate. The sound of children playing in this place seems timeless. This park was once the crown jewel of the Spanish land grants, and at least since the 1920s, this ground was a meeting place for picnicking families, a walk-through for school-age friends and a safe space tucked away from busy streets to learn horseback riding and milking cows. Every Juneteenth, members of the San Pedro Committee Network would set up the picnicking area of Peck Park, arriving in caravans loaded with prepared food and drinks, tablecloths, and chairs. This would be a familiar scene on any given summer day over the past 40 years.  

Every so often, a conversation began with,  “Don’t I know you?” The response wouldn’t be enough to jog memories, so the conversation continued, “Where did you live?” And the response would often be, “I lived in Banning Homes,” or “I lived in Channel Heights or Western Terraces.” Occasionally someone claimed Rancho San Pedro as a former residence.  Sometimes, even the place of residence wouldn’t be enough, so the next question would be, “What year did you graduate from San Pedro High?” And then almost like magic, a friendship that lay dormant for 40 years is rekindled, as if there were no interruption at all.

Other workforce housing units were built in Harbor City, Wilmington and the rest of the city, but it should be noted that these housing developments were intended to be as much a marvel in social engineering and building of democratic institutions as it was a marvel architecturally.  

Many of these developments were intended to be self-contained neighborhoods serviced by their own grocery stores and health clinics. Under the aegis of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, these developments had their own democratically elected governing systems. Today, the last of housing developments, Rancho San Pedro, is near the tipping edge of history’s trash bin as the One-San Pedro is set to replace it.

Every year for the past 42 years, black families that once lived in these World War II-era workforce housing, get together in a kind of family reunion. This Black family reunion has since been rolled up into Juneteenth, a celebration that dates back to June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas when the last of the enslaved received news that they were free — two-and-a-half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

This picnic is extraordinary in that it emphasizes the extendedness of the family unit while recovering and documenting their almost forgotten history in San Pedro. This is essentially what the period between Kwanzaa and the end of Black History Month aims to do — affirming familial bonds, and cultural heritage and passing it on to the next generation. Many people at this picnic were former neighbors and classmates, best friends and colleagues whose families stayed connected through marriage or friendship.

The San Pedro Committee Network is always working to make the Juneteenth celebration a bigger and better event. In 2006, the organization had hoped to work with the Harry Bridges Institute to collect oral histories from the oldest Black residents in town and document the history of Black families in San Pedro. The project hasn’t yet materialized. 

Most of the families who attended the picnic arrived in the early 1940s from Southern states like Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and Arkansas to escape Southern racism and take advantage of the many new jobs opening up during WWII. As early as the first decade of the 1900s, a handful of Black families lived in San Pedro. At the turn of the 20th Century, Black folks, like other migrants were already well fed on the image of California being warmer in climate and attitude toward race relations, considering the prevalence of lynching in the South and the cold overcrowded conditions in the North. The opportunities on the docks, the naval shipyard, the canneries, steel mills, and petroleum processing plants made San Pedro a logical destination.  

Ask any of these baby-boomer San Pedrans who grew up in Pedro. They will answer that it was a great place to live without hesitation. People like the late Walter Clements, a deacon of Mount Sinai Baptist Church who moved to San Pedro in 1943, had a similar, though measured view. In 2006, Clements noted, “We knew our place.” People knew where they could and could not go in town. The community leader who once led the Barton Hill Neighborhood Watch in the 1980s.

Claudette Garnichard-Bowie didn’t experience the racial animus she witnessed in the South on her television screen. Hers is one of the few families who settled in San Pedro before World War II. 

Garnichard-Bowie, a retired schoolteacher, made it a hobby piecing together her family history beyond their arrival in San Pedro. She received a great deal of her information from her father, Joseph Garnichard. The fact that she knows as much as she does is a feat unto itself considering her father was a man of few words.

“When we go to brunch, he would drop a little information. I know what I know just from talking to him over the years — which is a heck of a lot considering how old I am,” Garnichard-Bowie said.

Joseph, with his older brother, August, came to San Pedro by way of Chicago when he was nine years of age to live with their great aunt and uncle, Alice and Charles Warren until their mother and younger sister could rejoin them in San Pedro. The Warrens had been established in this port town for 10 years before Joseph and August came to live with them in 1924. Charles cleaned office buildings after befriending James Gaddis, who initially worked as a train porter, but started a janitorial company in San Pedro. 

The year Joseph Garnichard moved in with his aunt and uncle was the year the Ku Klux Klan marched down 12th Street past his family’s house on their way to the Wobblie Hall (Industrial Workers of the World) on Centre Street. The Klan counted many police officers, a sitting mayor, and business leaders in their ranks. 

Garnichard’s father, Joseph, was a standout athlete in track and field and football. He would eventually also work cleaning offices before gaining work as a longshoreman and joining the ILWU. 

According to the family’s oral history, the Warrens purchased a home on Knoll Hill and eventually moved it to lower 12th Street. By 1940, Joseph purchased the Warren’s home, while Warren’s moved further up the hill on 6th Street, not far from Weymouth.

San Pedro is a town of contrasts — reactionary and progressive; bigoted and liberal. The rank and file of the ILWU launched work stoppages in protest of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese aggression against China, and Mussolini and Hitler’s assault on Spain’s democratically elected communist government. Yet, some of the San Pedrans at this picnic can recall a time when they couldn’t buy a home south of 7th Street.

The Braxton family learned firsthand in 1922 after finding their home vandalized with threatening messages scrawled on their property: “You’d better get out” and  “Our property is at stake,” were the more tame of the graffitied inscriptions. 

Fred Braxton had purchased a lot in the vicinity of Grand Avenue and 15th Street.

According to contemporaneous reporting, both the police and the residents joined the hunt for those responsible for the vandalism. The home had just been completed and was ready for occupancy, when the Braxtons found the home spattered with filth, windows smashed, and threats written on the sides of the domicile. 

After the Braxtons purchased the lot and began preparations to move in, neighbors started a petition directed at the family asking them to change their plans and build a home elsewhere. Braxton declined the invitation, with the result that a committee of neighbors called upon Fred’s wife, Marie, to change his mind and build elsewhere. She refused. At the time, the Braxtons fixed and repainted the home, but ultimately remained in their home which was both a restaurant and hotel known as the Carolina Kitchen in homage to Mrs. Braxton’s state of her birth.

A few years before the Braxtons purchased the property, Rudecinda Sepulveda de Dodson sold the 880-acre ranch to the Averill-Weymouth company. The developers promised then that “they would enforce restrictions sufficiently rigid to ensure the development of the property along attractive and substantial lines and declare they would make it the sightliest part of the harbor region.”  

Black folks coming to San Pedro before, during, and after WWII worked with an eye toward business and homeownership — taking heed to Booker T. Washington’s advice of acquiring wealth but without falling under the delusion that wealth alone would insulate them from a system determined to uphold white supremacy.

Black Business and Activism at the End of Beacon Street
It’s not known how many regular attendees of Juneteenth had paid the $3 general admission to the Last Night on Beacon Street in August 1971. But a sizable number blame the redevelopment for losing black-owned businesses at that time. To be fair, only property owners are paid any sort of regard when it comes to redevelopment. Small business owners renting space aren’t paid much regard. 

Many at the Juneteenth picnic recall the Black-owned businesses they patronized in San Pedro, including Daniels Auto Laundry, owned by Roosevelt Daniels. He was listed in the 1928 San Pedro directory as a collier (a person who carries coal, particularly on steamships). By 1931, he was listed as the owner of Daniels Auto Laundry on 18th Street and Pacific Avenue. By the 1940s he had moved his carwash to 330 W. 5th, where he added a service station.   

The Senate Club Cafe at 118 W. 5th St. was originally operated by Mitchell and Andrew Zankich from 1939 to 1941 until a fire gutted it. Around 1944, Eugene J. Walker became co-owner of the Senate Club in San Pedro, which he eventually owned outright and renamed the Little Hat Senate Club. It was during this time Walker acquired the nickname “Little Hat.”

By 1952, Walker obtained a liquor license and changed the name of the cafe to the Harlem Hot Spot, likely after the popular film that came out around that time. 

Walker, grew up and attended school in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. He moved to San Pedro in 1935 and began doing cotton compress work. From then until retiring in 1976, he was active in organized labor, first with CIO Local 160 of which he was a secretary. When Local 160 dissolved in 1947, he joined Local 26 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. His employers through the years included Crescent Compress Co., Marine Terminals Corp, Western Compress, Crescent Warehouse, and the Pacific Maritime Association in several positions, including gang leader and foreman.

Running a good time house comes with its own set of problems, such as being targeted for robberies and burglaries, and harassment from police. In 1950, Walker and his wife Imogene were arrested by local police for assault with a deadly weapon and his wife on a charge of resisting an officer after provoking the tavern owners. 

As Walker and his wife were being led from the tavern, the crowd watching the interaction protested the treatment of the tavern owners. The officers, fearing for their safety, drew their guns to clear a path to the exit.

Walker ultimately got out of the business , selling his interest to John C. Coleman and Emerson Swanigan.

Interestingly enough, Carolina’s Kitchen became what many restaurants in Pedro become after sticking around for more than a decade. It became an institution where civic organizations such as the Shriners and the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War held regular meetings. Mrs. Braxton never had children of her own, but she adopted a cousin as her own, a talented young girl who became a skilled pianist, Evelyn Braxton. Evelyn was frequently written about in the Black-owned newspaper, the California Eagle, and the News Pilot’s society pages, which pointed to the prominence of the family in general during the 1930s and 40s.

One of the more storied Black-owned bar and entertainment venues is Leo’s Cocktail Lounge operated by Leo Jackson, who migrated to San Pedro a few years after his mother, Frances Jackson (Frances Johns after she remarried sometime in the 1940s) had arrived in 1931. Young Leo Jackson worked various jobs until he started bartending at bars around town including the 409 Club and Paradise Club through the 1940s. By the 1950s he had opened Leo’s Malt Shop and Leo’s Cocktail Lounge in quick succession. 

In reporting by the News Pilot in the 1970s, Frances said Leo opened the Malt Shop just so she had something to do. She had kept the books for the shop and the other businesses until she retired. She credited her business acumen to her upbringing on an Arkansas farm. She said her father made her the bookkeeper of the farming business.

As for Leo, he had partnered with George Kohler, who owned the George Kohler Music, to open Leo’s Cocktail Lounge, a venue that regularly showcased talent on its stage, including Howard Scott, one of the founding members of the 1970s funk band, WAR. Scott, in a 2019 interview with Random Lengths, recalled being chaperoned by his father to the adult entertainment venue in the late 1950s, playing his guitar. 

The cocktail lounge was originally at 427 S. Harbor Blvd., before it relocated to First and Gaffey in 1971, timing that coincided with the Beacon Street redevelopment. 

Black Labor and Organizing
At the 2006 Juneteenth celebration, many of the men seated at the domino table were longshoremen, from casuals to A-book workers. Gentry Montgomery worked as a casual for nearly 20 years before he was initiated into the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in 1978. Gentry recalled, “There weren’t that many Black longshoremen and no Black clerks,” at the port during his time — at least not until the Gatlin and Goldin cases ended the practice of sponsorship in the ILWU.

To understand San Pedro’s temperament and culture is to understand the origins of the ILWU. The Pacific Coast District of the International Longshoreman’s Association, the precursor to the ILWU, launched a general strike in 1934 to get a better deal than the national ILA had acquired. While the ILA was able to secure wage increases and preferential hiring, it wrote off control of the hiring process and the lack of a grievance system made it ripe for a split.

Within the week of the strike, seamen and other maritime workers joined the Pacific Coast Longshoremen. Teamsters refused to handle each cargo, and in July, a bloody confrontation between the police and union workers triggered a strike of more than 100,000 workers in San Francisco and Alameda Counties. With the leadership of Harry Bridges and the discipline of the rank and file, they shut down the entire West Coast, winning on behalf of the workers’ control of the hiring process and the six-hour workday. In practice, they worked an eight-hour day with the last two hours counted as overtime. 

The ILWU was formed after longshore workers voted to leave the ILA to become an independent union affiliated with the CIO. The ILWU had established an anti-racist stance, but this principle clashed with their cherished principles of local autonomy, rank-and-file democracy, seniority, and preferential hiring of sons, nephews, and brothers. Essentially, a worker had to have roots in the community to work on the docks.

During the later part of the 19th and early 20th century, blacks had often been used as strikebreakers. The AFL didn’t want them in their ranks and when the CIO was formed, they expected Blacks to pay the same dues without equal representation. During a 1916 strike in Seattle, 1,400 scabs were used to break the strike — 400 of them were Black. A number of them were pulled off of train cars and beaten or killed. 

It took a multi-racial effort to change the conditions at the port and the habits of real estate agents in this town. There are many unsung heroes whose stories have yet to be told. Still water runs deep here, while submerged memories wait to surface. Listening to these folks catch up on old times, and snacking on deviled eggs. It was fertile ground in which to plant seeds and establish deep and sturdy roots.