Errata: The first version of this story read June Burlingame-Smith moved toLil Dixie, Missouri. It has been corrected to Lil Dixie, Illinois. And Burlingame-Smith wrote her research paper to support the the National Environmental Policy Act. We regret the error.
June Burlingame-Smith on life, love, and activism in San Pedro.
By Rosie Knight, Community Reporter
The storied history of environmental activism in San Pedro began, as so many radical movements do, with a moment of direct action. Decades ago, a group of Point Fermin residents chained themselves to the pine trees on Cabrillo Beach to protest the proposed construction of a marina that would have destroyed the open-water side of the beach. Since then, San Pedro has been a hub for environmental activism as local residents and community organizers have fought to make the Harbor Area a safer place for the people who live here. In this series, Random Lengths will be profiling some of the activists who have made those changes possible through their own organizing, the tradition of activism in San Pedro, and the future of the ports.
June Burlingame-Smith had lived many lives before she made it to San Pedro in the fall of ’68 alongside her husband, Greg. As a young girl she’d moved across the country from the bustling hubbub of New Jersey to the segregated sundown town of Lil Dixie, Missouri. She’d relocated along with her family again and again thanks to her father’s work as an engineer. Whilst in college she was part of the famed Allegheny Singers, who traveled the East Coast It was after transferring to Reed College to be closer to family that she would take on the role of dorm supervisor, which would shape her career for many years. While many San Pedro residents likely know her academic background, they probably aren’t aware that she also spent time as a buyer for Macy’s in San Francisco. Alongside her husband Greg, who she’d met in college before marrying 10 years later, she lived in a serene cottage looking over Lake Washington, where the pair kept pet ducks and lived a “very outdoorsy” life.
It was the opening of Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson that set June and Greg on their journey to San Pedro. With their new jobs at the college, the pair first settled in the beach cities area of Long Beach before ultimately moving to the Los Angeles Harbor Area, finding the home where Burlingame-Smith still lives now, in the Point Fermin neighborhood of San Pedro.
Almost immediately, Greg, an environmental geographer, became involved with local community activism. “He was very aware of how the environment influenced public policy — or how it should inform it — he was the great environment environmentalist in town. I was into the rights of children, women and the arts,” said Burlingame-Smith who was so invested in bringing music to public schools that she would take her guitar with her to her children’s classes and play for the younger kids each day, bringing her musical background into the classroom. Hailing from a musical family of singers, her passion for music and art has been ingrained in her as a lifelong mission and one that has shaped much of her work and life as an academic and activist.
So as the big environmentalist, was Greg involved with the Point Fermin residents who chained himself to the pine trees on the beach, sparking generations of activism in San Pedro? “I’m afraid he was,” Burlingame-Smith laughs. “I’m not sure he did it but he certainly knew.” And how about June, was she there on Cabrillo Beach that day? “Not me, I’m unchainable!”
Though Burlingame-Smith had been involved with the women’s rights movement in college and had been a dorm supervisor through the Vietnam War protests, she feels that her first true bit of environmental activism came when she began to get involved with the American Association of University Women (AAUW). “I started getting involved in local groups because I was interested in activism, and became president of AAUW. Then I was chair of a state committee redefining education.”
But it was when she got interested in whales and the emerging National Environmental Policy Act via working with the Cabrillo chapter of the American Cetacean Society that she really began to make waves. “I wrote a 50-page research paper in order to help the Cetacean Society, (to support the the National Environmental Policy Act) and eventually I ran for president because I wanted the AAUW to expand their purview outside of the sort of sorority life many of them were involved in. So I presented the paper to them, saying that we also need to be involved in the environment because it impacts women and children too.” Though Burlingame-Smith lost the election, she did change a few minds with some women becoming involved in the activism around the Environmental Protection Act too. It also allowed June to make contacts up and down the coast, as well as some lifelong friends.
June and Greg became a formidable team. The latter had already been working hard to make San Pedro more environmentally safe for its locals, fighting to get conifer trees planted along 39th Street, and at Angels Gate Park where they’d eventually name the grove after him. “We were just mutually supportive. He supported me and I supported him.” The pair shared a love of music, though Burlingame-Smith chuckles recalling that he wasn’t a singer, “so he didn’t try!”
Burlingame-Smith’s no-nonsense attitude means she’s found herself at the head of many committees and chairing a lot of meetings. “With my background, I’m not easily impressed by titles. Because I don’t have to be, there’s enough of that stuff in my family. And I know what it means and what it doesn’t mean. We’re here to focus on this problem, not the fact that you’re famous. I think that’s been my attitude. I don’t put up with any nonsense. And I make it very clear to people that I won’t tolerate personal attacks. I’ll stop you immediately.”
After getting a master’s at Dominguez Hills University, she began teaching part-time at El Camino and Harbor colleges, and while working at the Dominguez Hills’ dean’s office she helped set up the Performing Arts Center at South Shores. All while running a household with two young kids. When she became a full-time teacher at Harbor College in Wilmington, Burlingame-Smith suddenly found herself becoming more and more involved with organizing around the ports. “We were always involved in these environmental causes, but when we got involved with the San Pedro United Homeowners group, it was more central port-related issues, and covered a broader area because it brought in all the residents and homeowners associations to speak about the whole of San Pedro, rather than just Point Fermin.”
It was then that June became part of the Ports Community Advisory Committee, which gained increased importance after a group of local people worked to sue the ports over what would become the China Shipping Agreement. “So they needed a group to tell them how to spend the money, and I was part of that. So we’d go monthly to the ports and fight the ports,” she laughs. After the tragic death of Greg in 1997, June tirelessly continued their work, becoming chair of the neighborhood council and leading the Point Fermin Residents Association — that Greg founded decades before — until 2023. “I said, it’s time for younger people to get their hooks into all of this. It’s time to step aside and if they want some help, fine, and if they don’t, fine.”
People are already taking her up on that and it’s no surprise, as Burlingame-Smith has been a leading light in San Pedro and the Los Angeles Harbor Area for decades. But if you look at the official narrative around the ports and the changes that were heralded by June, Greg and other community members you won’t hear their names. “It’s because the port is business-oriented and it’s only about the bottom line,” she says. “It’s still a Republican economic system and until that culture changes, they aren’t interested in supporting the community, except for doing as little as they possibly can.”