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Earlier this month, the San Pedro Neighbors for Peace and Justice and Code Pink commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Industrial Workers of the World and their activism on behalf of labor in the face of attacks by the press, the police, the Ku Klux Klan and commercial titans operating the shipping lines at the Port of Los Angeles.
SPNPJ and Code Pink’s demonstration acknowledged a single day in which more than 1,200 members of the Ku Klux Klan staged a March 1 demonstration (which fell on a Saturday back then and was reported on the following Monday, March 3) that started from a short distance from the steep mound from which Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, United States Constitution the year before on 4th and Harbor Blvd. The Klansmen marched to 6th and Pacific, then from 6th and Pacific to 12th Street, and then from there to Centre Street, attracting supporters and curious onlookers along the way. These Klansmen marched without their hoods and circled the block four times where the Wobblies’ union still stands as the La Sirienta corner market.
The Wobblies had forewarning of the march and promptly called the LAPD from downtown Los Angeles (instead of the Harbor Division which was run by an anti-communist commander). The newly installed Chief August Vollmer, a reformer, showed up and had his officers serve as a barrier to potential violence, as happened before between the Wobblies and the American Legions, resulting in casualties on both sides and a lynching no one was ever charged for.
That night, every 15 feet, two policemen marched beside the Klan members, including local members from San Pedro’s Klan Local 51 and from surrounding areas such as Long Beach, Riverside, and Bakersfield.
Later in the month, however, when police conducted their March 17 raid on Wobbly Hall, K.K.K. members in full regalia, this time riding in automobiles, again circled the block where the hall was located.
Inside the hall, 200 Wobblies kept up each others’ morale by singing Solidarity, “The Red Flag,” and “Forever,” and giving the Wobbly cheer. Fearing “a California Centralia,” the Wobblies had taken what they cautiously described as “vigorous precautionary measures.”
It should be remembered that the March 1 attack and the attack on the union hall two weeks later were but two blips in a sustained multiyear effort by the mainstream press, the San Pedro police department, the San Pedro Chamber, the shipping terminal operators, and the Klan. The Wobblies saw their newspaper boys being arrested and sent to juvenile hall, their meetings infiltrated by the San Pedro Police, and the Klan holding demonstrations like the one on March 1, 1924, or engaging in more violent expressions of their opposition, which ultimately forced the Wobblies out of San Pedro.
On June 14, 1924, the Wobblies Hall was directly attacked by plains-clothes policemen and sailors. Though none were in Klan garb, it was widely believed Klan members participated in the raid in which the union hall’s windows and furniture were destroyed, several Wobblies were kidnapped and transported to the Santa Ana mountains where they were tarred and feathered, and two children were scalded with boiling water from a coffee pot.
By the 1920s and 30s, the reemergent Klan got the art of gaslighting down to a science, preening in the spotlight when a community target is threatened with violence, following the modus operandi of Klan locals elsewhere in Southern California and the rest of the country.
Examples of such gaslighting include the Braxtons, an African American family who ran a bed-and-breakfast hotel in San Pedro from the 1920s through the 1940s. In 1922, they purchased a lot and had a house built on it in the vicinity of 15th and Grand. When the family was close to moving in, their new home was 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.
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 building, 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.
Several months later, a Japanese company attempted to purchase 10 acres of land at White Point. It was a huge enough deal that California Senator Hiram Johnson (he had served as California’s governor from 1911 to 1917) presented the issue to the United States Secretary of War to investigate. A district attorney formed a grand jury to investigate.
The commander of the Fort MacArthur army base claimed that ownership of the land at White Point by the Japanese would be a menace.
It was reported at the time that the owner of the land, Ramon Sepulveda, received a letter warning that if the lease was consummated, his dead body would be found floating in the ocean.
The San Pedro’s Ku Klux Klan, Local 51 denied any connection to the letter and the San Pedro Police captain denied there was a connection, citing as proof that the letter wasn’t signed using the organization’s official seal.
The granddaughter of Art Almeida, Shannen Maas, Joe Gatlin, the vice president of the San Pedro/Wilmington chapter of the NAACP and CD 15 Councilman Tim McOsker spoke on the 100th anniversary of the Klan march on the IWW meeting hall in San Pedro.
Maas, a member of IWW and granddaughter of this town’s most noted authority on the Wobblies and historian, spoke briefly about her ties to this labor struggle.
She was followed by Gatlin, who recounted his family’s migration from Arkansas to San Pedro starting in 1916, chased by the resurgent Ku Klux Klan.
McOsker in his commentary was perhaps the most thorough in covering the good, the bad, and the ugly, noting that the past is always present.
“These conversations are not 100 years old,” the councilman said. “They are every day. And I have had conversations with offshore companies who come in here and have multi-billion dollar interest in the terminals and they’re doing automation and we have to make it very clear to them that our interests are different.
“We are a community where we stick up for the people that are working,” McOsker said. “We make sure that human beings are moving that cargo, making sure that they’re treated with respect and also have safe living environments and that’s not the offshore companies’ interests, their interest is to move a piece of cargo at the highest profit possible.
“They don’t care if it’s one container as long as it makes every bit of profit that they need to pass on to their shareholders. What we want to do is we want to move cargo and we want it moved by human beings. It’s the same sort of thing that the Wobblies were going through. They were fighting against folks who would crush them for a dollar.“
