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The Fight for Fairness in San Pedro’s Labor Movement
Editor’s note: This is the third installment of the Hidden History of Black San Pedro series. This is an updated reprint of a story I wrote in 2005 centered on African American migrants from the South joining the workforce on the waterfront during World War II.
Thelma Gatlin recalled when she decided to move to San Pedro 62 years ago (80 years today). Her sister had come home from Los Angeles and told her that she earned $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. She felt she was 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, John A. 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 Black people had already been trickling into the West Coast by the 1920s, during the 1930s they were leaving the South en masse.
Mostly, those Blacks who grew up in San Pedro during the 1940s 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. And Black Angelenos fought hard to keep it that way.
In 2005, the late Art Almeida, a second-generation Mexican American, recalled his transition from Barton Hill Elementary School to Dana Middle School 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 International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
At Barton Hill, his friends were primarily Mexican American, largely because that was the predominant population. But, when he entered Dana Middle School, he found himself with white, 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 independence 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 longshore workers at the docks in San Pedro began when Almeida was still in middle school, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent entry into World War II. With massive numbers of young men going to war, individuals like John Gatlin and his brothers Henry and Isaiah 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 with good, well-paying jobs, it was by far the largest, thanks to the ILWU. Organizing and protecting the workers was a long and difficult process, with business interests winning every battle up to the General Strike of 1934.
In that “Old America,” workers who asked for a fair wage and working conditions that wouldn’t kill them were treated like treasonous criminals who had to be stamped out by police and the Ku Klux Klan, sometimes by the same perpetrators trading one uniform for the other.
The ILWU was the successor of the Industrial Workers of the World, colloquially known as the Wobblies ― successor indeed, given that the General Strike led by Aussie-born labor leader Harry Bridges succeeded where the Wobblies failed in unionizing the ports on the West Coast. The result was a workplace where workers had achieved a measure of ownership over their labor and believed workers could hand their jobs down to their sons like inherited wealth.
Though the ILWU and San Pedro shone as a working man’s paradise, they still had limits. As the numbers of Black dock workers began to increase, union members often told them that their jobs were “temporary,” sometimes taunting, “When the war ends, 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 and 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 dilemma of labor oversupply with little available work. The Membership Committee for Local 13 decided to deal with the problem by laying off 500 longshore workers “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 to their old jobs.
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, deregistration reversed the ratio: four out of five men on the deregistration list were Black.
The deregistration did not conform to the ILWU’s non-discrimination policies, and none of the other West Coast ports deregistered their workers. Deregistration was instituted to make room for returning World War II veterans. Ralph Griffen, an outspoken Black man unwilling to stay quiet about this injustice, gathered two dozen other Black longshore workers, contacted a lawyer, and sued Local 13 to be compensated for loss of work and denial of union membership.
Walter Williams, another Black longshore worker who wanted to stay on the waterfront, thought little good could come from litigation. Williams said it was more justified “To sue on the moral grounds of being discriminated against.” In either case, for a longshore worker 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.
Eventually, many of the Black longshore workers returned to the waterfront, becoming full-fledged class A union members. It happened slowly, due in part to the fact that the Local did not bring in new labor for nearly a decade, while the other part was due to the practice of sponsorship, a practice in which new members had to be vouched for by other Class A members with seniority. Local 13 didn’t begin registering new members until the early 1960s, just after the California Fair Employment Practices Act was passed and enacted in 1959, which barred businesses and labor unions from discriminating against employees or job applicants based on their color, national origin, ancestry, religion or race.
The FEPA was modeled after the Fair Employment Practices Commission set up by the federal government during World War II. When it was disbanded in 1945, California assemblyman Augustus F. Hawkins and William Byron Rumford (both members of the California Democratic Party) led the effort to pass fair employment legislation in the state. Hawkins drafted the initial legislative proposal in 1945 but would alternate with Rumford in introducing a fair employment bill during each succeeding session from 1945 to 1959. The bill that was passed and signed into law by Governor Pat Brown in 1959 was authored by Augustus F. Hawkins.
This set up the legal basis of the civil suit and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case filed against the union by Henry Gatlin, his brothers, and a dozen other Black longshore workers. Black San Pedrans and Black Angelenos in general were always assertive in their demand for civil rights. After fighting in two world wars, they were no longer patient enough to wait for change. Instead, they became the agents of change, frequently using the legal system 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?” Instead, Black workers 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 longshore workers who 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, Local 13 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 many senior longshore workers were given a gang but didn’t know how to 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 African American 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.”
Joe Gatlin, the nephew of the primary litigant in the case against ILWU Local 13, noted that San Pedro was made up of recent immigrants and that a lot of them had a difficult time due to language barriers and ethnic chauvinism. “Everybody was trying to protect their own,” he explained. “This wasn’t unusual, as sponsorship existed in all the industries operating in the Harbor Area.”
Indeed, sponsorship was a part of the ILWU from its inception ― a process that required unregistered workers, known as “casuals” to work a certain number of hours on the waterfront at assignments not picked up by registered union members. Usually, that meant the hardest and most dangerous jobs. After working that set 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 the benefits full-fledged union members receive.
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 National Labor Relations Board rules against discrimination as well as the newly passed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act unlocked the doors to jobs that women and Blacks were traditionally locked out of, including that of the longshore clerk. However, implementation in the real world still requires many more battles, including ones in San Pedro.
Charles Ray Ellis, San Pedro High’s class of ’51, was part of the first group 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. Ellis recalled his father giving him a heads-up, saying,” You might have an inside track.”
Ellis said he was tired of working rotating shifts at UnitedOil, 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 the 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 on the docks off and on since the mid-1940s, was one of them. A union officer informed them 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 casual workers to the class B registration list without 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 warehouse workers to longshore jobs ahead of the casuals already in the hiring hall.
Ultimately, the old guards’ insistence on maintaining sponsorship delayed the induction of longtime longshore casuals and warehouse workers into the class B registration status.
“It took nearly nine years, ’til 1978. ’Til 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.
“The Gatlins, 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 years, there were hard feelings against the Gatlin family, and Black workers in general,” said Joe Gatlin, nephew of Henry Gatlin. “Dave was part of the new leadership who came in and said, ‘Hey, this is what’s fair.’”
The struggle to fully integrate the ILWU and Local 13 took decades of hard work and sacrifice, 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 as those who got their first taste of a brand new world at Dana Middle School and San Pedro High School.
A casual observer at San Pedro’s Juneteenth celebration might easily have mistaken it for an ILWU picnic. Indeed, the Harry Bridges Institute, the union’s educational outreach arm, was a co-sponsor of the event. And 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. Call it “teaching solidarity.”
This story is based on resources provided by Shannon Donato of the Harry Bridges Institutes’s Oral History Archive, Art Almeida, Hans Koleman, Blacks in the ILWU, San Pedro California 1942-1949.
