Cleophas Williams:

The Dispatcher, August, 1998
Edited by Harvey Schwartz

CLEOPHAS WILLIAMS

I was horn in 1923 in Camden, Arkansas, a little place about seven miles from the Ouachita River. My father, John Henry Williams, was principal of a school for Black children. My mother, Bertha, was a school teacher also, but she died when I was three-and-a-half. Later my father married a wonderful lady named Ardella, who was a very caring, meticulous and loving mother. She taught me my ABC’s and my first numbers. She’s still alive in L.A. at 94 years old.

My father was feared by local Whites because he was very courageous. When he went to the country store in Lester, Arkansas certain deferences were expected of him that he didn’t offer. And when Whites would come to the house for some reason, they would come in twos and threes, never one-on-one.

In 1929, when the Crash occurred, my father was teaching school as principal in Chidester, Arkansas, for a hundred dollars a month. When he got his next assignment his wages came down to ninety dollars. He decided to pull his money and buy a truck farm, 12 or 15 acres. He planted corn. When the crop came in, a group of night-riders, or Klansmen, tore the fence down, rode up and down the roads screaming and hollering, and totally destroyed the corn.

The night-rider attack wiped us out, so my father went to Ashdown, Arkansas, to teach school. His wages there were down to thirty-five dollars a month. Then we moved to Hope, Arkansas, but things were still very difficult.

In Hope there were always White families who would come to our house asking for food. Dad would never refuse them. Our food was just basic getting-by food, but whatever we had, we shared. These White migrants would get off the train at this little whistle stop and knock on our door. They never expressed the antagonism we often saw displayed in other places.

My sisters and I tried to pick cotton so we could get shoes and school clothes. It was tough to go out there with people who had experience with these long canvas cotton bags. At the end of a week I hadn’t earned enough for a pair of shoes. Finally my father and mother decided to teach us at home that year. They made sure we were well educated. We were poor, but we had good books and an encyclopedia.

The only White kids we saw were on the street or in the store. The lines were clearly defined. Black and White were segregated, including when we went back to elementary school in Hope. Later I went to Booker T. Washington High School in Texarkana. It was an all-Black school too. We have an alumni association now from that school. I’m the Secretary of the Northern California Chapter.

I was at another segregated school, Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College in Pine Bluff, when the draft board got on me in 1942. Before I went into the Army I came out to California to work at Moore’s Shipyard in Oakland as an electrician’s helper. I’d made a dollar-and-a­half a day as an assistant maintenance man in a hotel in Texarkana. At that time it was the best job I’d ever had, and the White engineer there taught me a great deal about electricity.

When I got to California I went to the employment office and told them I had done electrical work. They sent me to Local 595 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) for some kind of clearance as a union person to work at Moore’s. That was the first time I’d ever been in a union hall. I made 90 cents an hour working on these Victory and Liberty Ship freighters.

There was discrimination, of course, but things were so much better than where I had come from that I appreciated the improvement. The money seemed astronomical, to make close to fifty dollars a week. The IBEW took my dues money and gave me the right to work on a permit. But they didn’t invite me to any union meetings, and I didn’t go to any.

I was drafted into the Army during 1942-43, got discharged because of a knee injury, and returned to Moore’s. But contracts were getting slimmer and slimmer for Moore. I heard a fellow talking in a barbershop about longshoring. There was a surplus of longshore work in those days. I looked into it and got referred down to the waterfront for processing on February 15, 1944. That was the date I was hired.

The next day I went to work at pier 23 in the hold of a ship discharging coffee. That first job was with “Goat” Labin’s gang. The work—it was all break bulk then—was very hard because I didn’t know what I was doing. The old-timers would let you fail for a while and enjoy the comedy. Then they’d come over and show you how to do the work.

There was a lot of hard work, too. Sugar in 100-pound sacks, for example, was stored in very tight. The sweat from the ship or any moisture would cause it to become compacted, and you had to break it loose with your hook. We had special sugar hooks that were, different from regular cargo hooks. We tried to make slides to take advantage of gravity to bring the sugar down, but when it got low we had to muscle it.

Back then more White fellows worked in San Francisco than in the East Bay. When I got on the East Bay side I ran across lots of Black longshoremen from the Gulf Coast who had had experience. They’d heard there was plenty of work here, and longshoring was kind of short on the Gulf. They taught me lots about the work.

I didn’t feel any hostility from the White longshoremen, although some were very indifferent. You were kind of a non-person to them. They’d walk by and wouldn’t speak to you. Those who were more active in expressing concern, I later found out, were considered to be left-wingers. They were the ones that would come over and speak to you and ask you about your housing and your transportation.

In ’45, when the war wound down, work reached a point where they didn’t need all the men who were here. They had to lay off about 800, and they were just about all recently hired Black fellows. But because of seniority of hiring that was understood. We were used to being hired last and hired first. The group of fellows who were knocked off were given the impression that if work ever improved, they’d get back on. That never did happen. I survived because my registration predated theirs.

There was antagonism between some Whites and Blacks then because the new Black leaders articulated our vision and our hopes very well. Albert James from the Gulf and Johnny Walker from New Orleans were the most vocal. They brought their labor background here from their history with the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) in the Gulf. They transferred their skills to the union combats here. James was so fluent he could take an idea and make it visible. Walker was very courageous and Bill Chester, a new leader then, too, was very methodical. I was still very young; I listened. I didn’t even understand how you made a motion on the union floor. I had to learn totally from scratch. But I learned from them and from others.

In the meantime Harry Bridges talked at most meetings. He made one remark that took him off the fence completely and put him on the Blacks’ side. He said that if things reached a point where only two men were left on the waterfront, if he had anything to say about it one would be a Black man. So that was very clear where he stood. No vacillating at all.

After that the hounds were really at his tail. There was an element in the union that constantly vilified him at meetings. The comments might not be directly racial, but you didn’t have to be very brilliant to understand that one of the reasons for these attacks upon Harry was his stand on race. Bridges was not a personal friend of mine, but I don’t know anybody I admired more. Some of the things he did were just incredible for the time.

Around this same period, in the mid-’40s, I attended the California Labor School. The ILWU backed it and many of its teachers were identified with the Left. The first time I went in order to get my union book. I was forced to go then. Later on, I chose to go. I took history, sociology and economics. These classes expanded my mind. This was the first time I had ever gone to an integrated school. I was curious. I wanted to know. And what I wanted to know, the California Labor School taught.

In 1950 the McCarthy era and the waterfront screening program came along almost simultaneously. The Korean War brought on the screening. It was devastating for all of us, Black and White, because many of the fellows who had flirted with the Communist Party were screened out and couldn’t get cleared for Navy or Army work. Just being on the waterfront, it seemed, we were suspect.

I’d gone to the California Labor School, I was in all the marches, I subscribed to the Party’s paper, The People’s World, and still I got my government work pass. Somebody else did less than I and didn’t get in. I had friends that wanted to know why I was cleared. I don’t know, but I do know I never put my name on any paper. I had a heartbeat for what the Party was doing in many areas, because it chose to do things that nobody else would touch, like speak out for Black people. But that didn’t mean I cared to be a member. I had an interpretation of what their agenda was, so that was that.

I’d been involved in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1949, but after 1955, during the early stages of the integration movement in the South, I took membership cards and began to solicit members on the waterfront. This was Whites and Blacks. Most of them said “yes.” Doing this, I learned many names that I never knew before. One good thing that happened from this was that years later, when I began to run for union office, a trail of men would come by and I could call them almost all by name.

No new longshoremen were hired in numbers after World War II until the ’59 B-list men came in. With that program, here again Harry defined his social consciousness—in conjunction with Bill Chester, who later became an International officer—because Bridges had to take on the conservatives of the local’s “Democratic Club” and “Fathers’ and Sons’ Club.” The conservatives argued, “These jobs are ours, and our sons have a right to them.” But Harry said, “Jobs are not a trust of the workers—jobs belong to all people, and we are going to have an open sign-up.” The B-list committee then solicited new workers from Black communities with high unemployment rates. Most of them became good union men.

Around 1959 Odell Franklin and 1joined the “Longshore 56 Club” started by Eddie Parker, a gang boss from Gang 56. The group started as a welfare club, but I suggested that we broaden the agenda to include financial investment. Then we petitioned that we didn’t have any Black walking bosses or ship’s clerks on the waterfront. I became the secretary and did lots of writing and agitating for the group. The Club only had 12 members, but out of the club Odell Franklin became a Local 10 business agent and secretary-treasurer, Parker became a walking boss, and I became a dispatcher and president of the local. The club lasted until maybe ’68.

My wife urged me to get involved in union politics. She said, ”Those who have been better educated and better exposed have a responsibility to the rest of the people. You cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.” It was Odell Franklin who encouraged me to run for dispatcher in ’64. I ran ninth out of the nine dispatchers elected that year, but I was elected.

I was also the most vocal of the dispatchers when it came to taking on the hierarchy under James Kearney, the local’s conservative president. At that time I just didn’t believe a circle saw would cut me. I defended a White guy named Richard O’Toole who was deregistered; I took on Kearney because he did nothing to help O’Toole or two Black guys who had been in trouble a bit earlier. That lifted me above and made me visible. A little later I ran for dispatcher again, ran second that time around, and became assistant chief dispatcher. I was elected president of the local for the first time in ’67.

In late ’71 I was elected president during the 1971-72 longshore strike. I solicited support for the union from my church and from the Black community, and I was very well-received. I had worked previously for the NAACP, so when I carried the banner for the union I had credibility. Getting support wasn’t so difficult because people knew where I stood.

When I was elected president in the mid-1970s, there was a crisis I had to deal with. The local had this huge deficit that people did not want to face. I went home and read the constitution. This particular article stated that when the caucus and convention funds reached a certain low, the membership should be automatically assessed.

At the next union meeting I told the members, “As of tomorrow morning, we are running this union out of the caucus and convention fund, and every member is assessed sixty dollars for six months.” For the first and only time in my life as a member of Local 10, members came up on the stage and picked me up as you would pick up the Super Bowl coach who had won the big game. They said, “We like you because you have guts.” George Kaye, our Secretary-Treasurer, who backed me up, the staff and I went on a 36-hour instead of a 40-hour week, too. Soon that deficit was gone.

Just before we went out of office, George Kaye and I decided, “We shored up the finances, now we’re going to shore up the dispatch system.” We instituted a new sophisticated rotary dispatch system that limited every man from the hall to one shift only. Jobs came into the hiring hall that hadn’t ever been in the hall before. It was everybody back to the hall unless you were steady men. So we eliminated the preferred list where jobs weren’t shared.

I was going out of office, as I said, but I had made up my mind that there were some things I intended to do as part of what I felt was right. My parents had taught me about sharing, and I’d broken into fair play and the sharing of jobs in 1944 at our old Clay Street hall in San Francisco. That hall is still dear to my heart, and so are its standards.

When I first came on the waterfront, many Black workers felt that Local 10 was a utopia. Even the level of struggle we faced in Local 10 was something so high above what most of us had experienced in Arkansas, Texas and other places in the South that we were willing to get involved and take our chances at the results. We’re talking about a union that gave you a chance to be somebody, to hold your head high.

Local 10 was the most democratic organization I’ve ever belonged to. If you wanted to go out there and face that membership and campaign and work with them and relate to them, that was your challenge, and you won and you lost. When it came to the hiring hall, the boards were controlled democratically by seniority. Favoritism was minimized.

This union was the greatest thing in my life, other than my family. In terms of economics and social growth, this union was a platform on which I made my stance and found a place in the sun. I was political and became president, but when I was out of office and working I was even more proud. I had the most prized thing on the waterfront, a longshore registration, and I didn’t mind working. Some called this arrogance, but it wasn’t arrogance. It was pride.