LeRoy King, the Equal Rights Struggle, and Labor Politics

Introduction by Harvey Schwartz

LeRoy King

Edited by Harvey Schwartz, Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

I was born in Fresno, California, in 1923. My background is African American, Cherokee and Irish. My father was born in Tennessee, my mother in the Carolinas. They were married in Oklahoma, migrated to Canada, then came to Fresno. I’m the youngest of six kids. My father worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad for almost 45 years. He laid bricks in them steam engine boilers. As a kid I used to go to the round house and take him his lunch. I had to climb that big steam engine to do it.

Fresno was a racist town when I was growing up. We lived on the other side of the tracks, the west side. We went to school with mostly Mexicans and Blacks. You could­n’t go across the tracks until later years when they broke segregation down. The police was very rough back then. At the theaters in town we had to sit upstairs. The Whites sat downstairs.

When I was seven or eight, maybe ten, I did a little farm work picking grapes, cotton a couple of times, and figs during the summer. In my teens I worked with my oldest brother shining shoes in a big barber shop. I used to visit my older sister in San Francisco when I was little. After I graduated from high school she said, “You want to come live with me and my husband?” So I moved to San Francisco in 1941.

We had our own segregated thing in the city’s Fillmore District then. A bowling alley and a theater were nearby. I told my sister I’d like to go over there. She said, “No, you can’t.” That section was for Whites only. They talk about the South, but you had the South right here in San Francisco. The struggle for breaking this down came after World War II.

I worked in the mail room at Commercial Union Insurance Company. Back then the Blacks sorted and carried mail for all these San Francisco insurance companies. Next I learned how to weld and be a boilermaker at Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond. The boilermakers had a segregated union. Later, after they integrated, my brother Ernest became secretary-treasurer of that Richmond local and led it for 35 years. I was at Kaiser for a little bit, then left there and worked at Marin Shipyard in Marin City until I was drafted into the Army.

Basic training was at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I’d never been South. On the trip from California to Fort Sill they’d stop the train. We’d all go in a restaurant and eat together, Black and White. It was beautiful—until we got to Texas. When we got to Brownwood, Texas, they said we could no longer eat together and that the Blacks had to get in the back of the train. That was the first time I felt Southern segregation.

At Fort Sill I was put into an ammunition supply unit. It was segregated too. We couldn’t have a gun, we couldn’t have nothing. All we could do is handle ammunition. When we went overseas we landed in England and then shipped over to Le Havre, France, after it was liberated from the Germans in 1944.

From Le Havre we moved up near the front lines. We were loading trucks and supplying ammunition like the devil. We supported the famous 101st Airborne Division. German planes flew over regularly—we called them “Bed Check Charlie.” They’d drop bombs on us. A few came very close, but we didn’t lose anybody. Through all this our unit remained segregated.

After the war we sailed home to a camp in New Jersey. People were friendly on the ships going overseas and returning, but the racism came back at that New Jersey camp. Any time a couple of Blacks would go by, some of these White guys’ barracks, those Whites would come out and taunt them. I’ll never forget one Saturday afternoon when we had so many fights. We had to fight every day.

When the young Blacks left the Army they challenged segregation and changed San Francisco from being a racist town. We had demonstrations on Fillmore Street and along Auto Row. All that was basically led by these young Black soldiers who came back. They felt like me—I served my country, I did everything I could to try to make this a decent place and make sure we got rid of fascism. So when we came back home, we figured there’d be some change.

I got discharged, came back to San Francisco, and went down to the Department of Employment. There I met Julius Stern, who was recruiting for the ILWU. He sent me to Warehouse Local 6. I went out to Edward’s Coffee and worked in the warehouse unloading 100 pound green coffee sacks. I’d stack them up for the roasters. There was various other work—roasting, blending coffee, loading box cars. But my first job was unloading that green coffee. I was at Edward’s for four years.

Two progressive Local 6 White guys, Henry Glickman and Clarence Paton, used to hold meetings every noontime in a park near Edward’s. This was before the 1949 warehouse strike. They’d organize demonstrations, have people stop work, all that stuff. Not many Blacks were active in Local 6 then. Those two guys were trying to get the young Blacks involved. Glickman used to say, “You gotta go to union meetings, you gotta do this, you gotta do that.” This got me interested in the union. My interest peaked when 400 of us got fired after a stop-work protest over grievances the coffee house refused to settle.

In 1951 I married Clarence Paton’s daughter Judy. I met her at the California Labor School that closed in the mid-1950s. Clarence’s brother, Eugene Paton, was the president of Local 6. He’d been one of the union’s key leaders before the war. So that’s how I got really involved.

I began to get into politics, something I’d always been kind of interested in. My folks were very religious and their church was active in politics as a way to get certain things done. I got mostly into San Francisco politics, like the mayors’ and supervisors’ races.

Around the same time the union started a systematic church-labor movement where we worked with the Black churches getting politicians elected. Bill Chester, a Black leader out of Local 10, became ILWU Northern California regional director in 1951. He led the church-labor effort and I was part of it. So were Ed Becks, Revels Cayton, Roland Corley, Curtis McClain and Richard Moore.

The Right Wing tried to attack our church-labor program with red-baiting in the McCarthy era. The Right didn’t like Harry Bridges or our union. They didn’t like it when we got Paul Robeson concerts in Black churches after he was denied at the San Francisco opera house. This was early, about 1947. Paul was a great Black singer who was associated with the Left. We took up his cause. I remember how my wife and all the women stood guard around Paul at the Booker T. Washington Hotel.

Dave Beck, the Teamsters International president, used McCarthyism too when he raided Local 6 in San Francisco around 1950. I was put on as an International organizer to help stop the raid. That job lasted about a year and a half. I went around making sure our warehouses were organized and I got the churches and the community to support the ILWU.

The Teamsters kept picketing us so we mobilized our membership. Finally there was a big battle at United Grocers. Paul Heide led us. He was a great Local 6 organizer and leader from the 1930s. Paul hit this Teamster, George Pedrin, over the head with a whip. Blood spurted everywhere. Pedrin and a few others had left Local 6 to join the Teamsters and raid us. That battle broke the Teamsters from picketing any more of our warehouses.

When my wife and I first got married we tried to get housing in San Francisco. But as soon as the landlord found out we were an interracial marriage we’d get kicked out. Luckily, Vince Hallinan owned some apartments. He was one of our attorneys in the early 1950s during the trial of Harry Bridges and two other ILWU men, Bob Robertson and Henry Schmidt. I was Northern California chair for the Bridges-Robertson-Schmidt defense committee. One day I mentioned my problem to Vince and he gave us housing. We had moved nine times the year before that.

My major early thing in Local 6 was serving on the board of trustees. I did that for about 15 years in the 1950s and 1960s. Betty DeLosada and I led an effort that brought the local’s finances under more rank and file control.

The Black guys also organized a group to get more of us involved in the union. It was about ten or 12 of us. This was around 1950. Basic guys was Roland Corley, Curtis McClain, Leon Cooper—mostly young Blacks. Revels Cayton was in there too. Bill Chester helped us from his post as regional director. We were called the Frontiersmen. This was really a Local 6 Black caucus. We took on some issues to make sure we’d get some Black leadership in the local.

The first big struggle was over running for office. To get elected business agent you had to run for an individual slot. Eliminating these A, B, C and D business agent slots meant everybody would have to run at large. The way it was before, guys who had not had opposition for years just campaigned for that one guy we ran someone against. That blocked out the Black candidate.

Keith Eickman supported our position. He was a young White guy coming up then. Keith became a business agent with our backing before we could get a Black elected. Then, at this big membership meeting, Keith spoke out from the officer’s platform saying to eliminate A, B, and C. He was one of a mixed, progressive group we had in the local.

It was a big fight, but we broke up the A, B, C and D system. Candidates now had to run at large, so everybody had to run on his own. We got newer people in and gave ’em an opportunity. In 1960 Curtis McClain became the first Black to get elected business agent.

Around 1957 I helped bring the Black and Hispanic cotton compress workers in Fresno into the ILWU as Local 57. They’d been in the International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU). Fresno’s my home town. I understood the communi­ty down there. I knew all the Black compress men from the earlier days. The ILWU compress workers in Bakersfield had the best contracts in the Central Valley, but the ICWU was undercutting us in Fresno. We had our members show the Fresno workers their contract and ours. The Fresno people knew that the ICWU wouldn’t service them. So they decided to come into the ILWU.

I was appointed International representative in 1961. Getting the Cargill, Inc., copra (dried coconut) processors and warehousemen who worked next to Pier 84 in San Francisco into the ILWU was my project. I worked five years on it. They were in an affiliate of the Seafarers International Union (SIU) that functioned like a company union. I worked with Woody Box, who had been in one of our plants in the early days. He’d gone on to Cargill and then he came to me. Box wanted out of SIU. Later I worked with Don Ruth.

This went on for over three years before we even moved on the thing. It was tough with me being a Black organizer because a bunch of the workers were Whites from Oklahoma and Arkansas. But I’d meet with Box, Ruth, or little groups at least once a week. I’d tell ’em how our union independently elected stewards, how we were run by the rank and file from the bottom up, not from the top down. I’d explain our grievance machinery. Finally they had an election and the warehouse came into Local 6.

During the 1960s civil rights movement, we had a big demonstration when these four young ladies were killed by a bomb in a Black church in the South. We had about 60,000 people march in San Francisco. This was part of that church-labor movement I’ve talked about.

When Martin Luther King, Jr., came to San Francisco in 1967 we had a big thing around him. Local 10 gave him an honorary membership and we had a big rally in Oakland at Sweet’s Ballroom. Harry Belafonte sang. Bill Chester planned a lot of this and I was involved. Bill and I were very close. Everything he did, I was right there with him.

I also helped Louis Goldblatt, our International secretary-treasurer, when we set up St. Francis Square, the integrated San Francisco housing cooperative I’ve lived in myself since 1963. We worked on it for years until it finally opened.

In the late 1960s Revels Cayton, Bill Chester, Dave Jenkins from our union and I met with Joseph Alioto, who was a candidate for mayor of San Francisco. He was a lawyer who had represented the rice growers in the Central Valley. He’d been pretty fair and we knew him. Alioto said, “If you guys go with me I’ll be loyal to the ILWU. I’ll appoint Blacks to commissions and I’ll have somebody Black in my administration. When appointments are needed, Black and White, I’ll run ’em by the union.”

So we decided we’d support Alioto, who won and kept his word. He proved to be more of a mover and shaker than John Shelley, a labor guy we’d help elect mayor in the mid-1960s. Shelley was good, but Alioto was even better. He appointed Revels Cayton deputy mayor. Several appointments of ILWU guys to San Francisco commissions followed—Joe Johnson was named deputy mayor after Revels—and we got real influence in city politics.

We’ve supported and worked with San Francisco’s current mayor, Willie Brown, too, ever since he first ran for assemblyman way back. We wanted some Black representation and he qualified. He was a friend of labor for years in the state assembly.

I didn’t want any part of those city commission appointments myself, ’cause I liked working out in the community and in the union. But I did get appointed to San Francisco’s Economic Development Advisory Council in 1978. I finally agreed to be on the Redevelopment Agency commission in 1980 after Mayor Dianne Feinstein beat me up about it. I’ve been on there 22 years now.

Feinstein wanted me to help Wilbur Hamilton, a member of ILWU Local 34 who became the director of the Redevelopment Agency in the late 1970s. A lot of minority residents of the city’s Western Addition got moved out during redevelopment. Wilbur did a good job trying to make sure they got back and into affordable housing. Some of ’em did, but not all of them.

They’d already been moving people out of another area south of Market Street when I came onto the Redevelopment commission. This was to make room for a new development called Yerba Buena Center. When I joined the commission I criticized the use of eminent domain to tell people they had to move.

An ILWU veteran named George Woolf led a group of retired longshoremen and other south of Market residents in a movement called Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TOOR). They demanded affordable housing. One result was the building of Woolf House, named after the TOOR leader, that provided some beautiful places right across from the Yerba Buena Center.

When I went on the Redevelopment Commission I was secretary-treasurer of Local 6. I’d followed Bill Chester as Northern California regional director in 1969 when he became an International vice-president. I was regional director from 1969 until I retired in January 1992, except for 1977-1981, when I served as Local 6 secretary-treasurer.

As regional director I used to travel from Bakersfield to the Oregon border. In the 1970s, we took some more ICWU people into the ILWU in plants around Fresno and Delano. These were mostly White processing workers who had an inferior contract. They weren’t getting full representation, either. The ICWU people at one mill had a strike they couldn’t get settled. We took it over for ’em and got it resolved. That’s what brought ’em into the ILWU.

We also had a big organizing push in Salinas when I was regional director. I worked on that one for about seven years in the 1970s. We reorganized Shillings, a company that had moved to Salinas from San Francisco, where they’d been a Local 6 house. We went after a new Nestle Chocolate plant in Salinas, too. Ole Fagerhaugh and Felix Rivera, two of our organizers, and I stayed down there a lot. There were about 500 workers involved. They were all in Local 6 at one time.

I’ve also been active for years in the union’s regional political action arm, the Northern California District Council (NCDC). NCDC has often been influential in the state legislature. Once we got Assemblyman Willie Brown to rewrite a whole bill so it provided better funding and protection for the ferry workers in the Inland Boatmen’s Union (IBU). That was in the 1980s, when the IBU had only recently affiliated with the ILWU.

Through NCDC we’ve also fought for legislation to improve worker safety, workman’s compensation, disability insurance, and many other things. We didn’t fight just for economics and pork chops for our union. Instead we used our legislative committee and NCDC to benefit the whole community and to protect things like civil liberties and civil rights.

We relied on NCDC for wider unity with the rest of the labor movement, too. Before 1988, when we were not in the AFL-CIO, Don Watson, another long-time NCDC activist, and I always used to attend the legislative conferences of the California State Federation of Labor. Even back when the other unions disagreed with some of our programs, like our opposition to the Viet Nam war, we were there.