How San Francisco Longshoremen Made Their Union a Powerhouse

Peter Cole

Every port is different, and some ports are more powerful than others. But in San Francisco, which again was the heart of this union and port industry on the Pacific coast, Harry Bridges was the key longshore leader, and he was a committed anti-racist. He had learned that from his experiences as a sailor, where he saw persecution of Indians and others in his early journeys.

Employers cleverly, cynically but brilliantly, played race in San Francisco on the waterfront.

He grew up in Australia, born and raised where the Aborigines were horribly treated and where a “white Australia” policy was in effect, meaning that non-white people could never immigrate to Australia. He came to the United States, and he saw a society that was not so different from the one he had left. As a young sailor, he ended up in New Orleans in the early ’20s, where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and where he experienced and participated in multiracial activism. When he moved to San Francisco a few years later, although not a member of the Wobblies anymore, he took that with him that first experience with multiracial radical unionism. We see the presence of the Wobblies in other ways, including in the motto of the ILWU, of which Bridges was the first president: “An injury to one is an injury to all,” which, of course, is the IWW motto.

But Bridges was not alone. There were also communists on the waterfront, as well as other forms of leftists. It was really the white leftists who were at the forefront of fighting against racism in the union. They were saying this before the “Big Strike” [of 1934] in their waterfront newsletter. They said, “Look, we got killed in 1919.” There was an appeal to people based on their pragmatism, but also on their ideology.

So they integrated the gangs after they won in San Francisco in 1934. There…