Asian American immigrant communities had long organized their own associations and service organizations, often dominated by community business leaders. Starting in the late 1960s, young activists—most of them born in the U.S.—formed groups that crossed ethnic lines and gave birth to an inclusive Asian American movement.
Asian street gangs organized in self-help groups to fight gang warfare and drug addiction. In Los Angeles, Filipinos formed Pagkakaisa and Samoans Omai Fa’atasai, but the Yellow Brotherhood and Asian American Hardcore recruited from all Asian nationalities. By 1969, self-help organizing in San Francisco gave rise to the Asian Community Center, which ran a food co-op and summer programs for children.
Admiration for the People’s Republic of China inspired some activists to create organizations like the Red Guards in San Francisco, East Wind in Los Angeles, and I Wor Kuen (“Righteous and Harmonious Fists”) in New York City. They combined political organizing with service projects such as medical clinics, breakfast programs, day care, and language classes. IWK also protested Chinatown tourist bus tours in April 1970, and built the Chinatown People’s Association, a coalition that mobilized mass community rallies against police brutality and for Asian workers’ employment on the federally funded Confucius Plaza housing project.
Activism—sometimes explicitly racist—also intensified in white working-class communities. Alabama ex-governor George Wallace ran for president in 1968—his American Independent Party had chapters in the North and West as well as the South. That same year, Italian Americans in Newark’s North Ward elected a white vigilante leader to the city council. In the mid-1970s, white residents of South Boston organized ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights), which violently protested busing students to integrate schools. Like-minded groups emerged in several midwestern cities.
But interracial alliances developed too. The Congress of Italian American Organizations joined black and Puerto Rican groups to push for open admissions at New York City’s public colleges. Greeks and Arabs in Dearborn, Michigan, joined Native Americans and others in a community council to fight plans to tear down low-cost housing. Struggles against real estate developers in Honolulu united virtually every ethnic group on the island. Chicago’s Black Panthers and Young Lords formed a “rainbow coalition” (Fred Hampton’s phrase) with the Young Patriots from the North Side’s Appalachian white community. Newark’s CFUN united with local Young Lords behind a “Community Choice” slate in 1970 and elected Newark’s first black mayor. In cities across the country, tenants unions, parents associations, and other neighborhood groups organized for common goals across racial and ethnic lines as never before.
The most common cause of the sixties was stopping the Vietnam war. No one contributed more to popular and working-class opposition to the war than the protesters who were also veterans. Individual veterans started denouncing the war in 1965. In June 1966, the “Fort Hood 3” became the first soldiers to refuse to go to Vietnam. In 1967, Vietnam Veterans Against the War formed in New York City, the first antiwar veterans organization in U.S. history. In April 1971, VVAW organized 1,500 veterans to camp on the Mall in Washington in defiance of a Supreme Court injunction; 800 threw their service awards and combat decorations over the barricade built to keep them away from Congress, and a thousand veterans—many on crutches or in wheelchairs—led half a million people marching against the war. By then some antiwar and black power organizations operated inside the military. Mutinies compromised combat operations, and soldiers stateside refused to deploy against demonstrators.
Ruling the country and running the war were jobs for men. In radical movements, women did crucial work, but in almost every organization, men ran the show. Women confronted this inequity by challenging male leadership, launching independent projects, and forming their own organizations.
The welfare rights movement exemplified the problem. Protests by women welfare recipients proliferated in the mid-1960s, especially in black communities. By 1966, action groups had sprung up in seventy cities across twenty-six states. They gathered under the umbrella of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the brainchild of middle-class civil rights leaders. Professional men staffed the national office, and they repeatedly made policy decisions that properly belonged to the women on NWRO’s elected governing board. In 1972, the women pushed the men out. New executive director Johnnie Tillmon, a welfare activist from Watts, declared in a press release that “NWRO views the major welfare problems as women’s issues and itself as a strictly women’s organization.”
In many other quarters women found ways to work with men and enjoy autonomy too. In Los Angeles, the Asian Sisterhood ran its own counterparts to the Yellow Brotherhood’s youth projects, and the Chicano movement included the Comisión Femenil Mexicana, a women’s rights group. In New York, women in the Young Lords insisted that the Party platform include the demand, “We want equality for women, down with machismo and male chauvinism.” They launched a Women’s Union to press for day care, family health services, and laws to stop doctors from sterilizing women under duress. Sterilization was also a central issue for Women of All Red Nations, affiliated with the American Indian Movement, the Latin Women’s Collective that worked with El Comité, and the Women’s Committee of the Black United Front in Brooklyn. Down south, black and white women married to UMW activists founded Alabama Women for Human Rights to support strikes and campaign for day care, health care, and prison reform.
If feminism developed rapidly, the gay and lesbian liberation movement appeared almost overnight. Early one Saturday morning (June 28,1969), police began a routine roundup of homosexual patrons at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. A lesbian patron resisted arrest, and within minutes a crowd barricaded the police inside the bar and torched it. Days later activists formed the Gay Liberation Front, “radical and revolutionary men and women committed to fight the oppression of the homosexual as a minority group and to demand the right to the self-determination of our own bodies.” Gay and lesbian organizations numbered nearly 800 by 1973, thousands by the end of the decade, enrolling working people as well as students, artists, intellectuals, and street hustlers. Some groups recognized multiple kinds of oppression (or cultivated multiple sources of pride)—Gay Youth, Third World Gay Liberation, Radicalesbians, Hispanos Unidos Gay Liberados. Others, like the gay and lesbian caucus in the Young Lords, worked to bring their issues into broader struggles.
THE SIXTIES IN THE WORKPLACE
The causes that galvanized communities also resonated at work. Unions, union caucuses, and other worker organizations aligned with movements in the larger society. By the late 1960s, a strike wave was rising, and labor leaders were facing increasingly militant dissent from below. Like its predecessors, this surge of labor activism centered on workplace rights, but more broadly defined than ever before.
For some workers, organizing unions was a civil rights struggle. New York City hospital workers—mostly black and Puerto Rican women—were excluded from federal labor law protection, barred from striking by state law, and paid less than a living wage. Hospital and Health Care Workers Local 1199 started to organize private nonprofit hospitals in 1958, won better pay and benefits with a forty-six–day strike in 1959, and struck for union recognition in 1962. When 1199 President Leon Davis went to jail for contempt of court, A. Philip Randolph organized community leaders in a Committee for Justice for Hospital Workers. When Davis got a second sentence, Randolph called for a “Prayer Pilgrimage” to join the pickets, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller promised bargaining rights for hospital workers. At a victory rally, Malcolm X pronounced the lesson: “You don’t get the job done unless you show the man that you’re not afraid to go to jail.”
In late 1968, Charleston, South Carolina, public hospital workers—mostly women, all black—formed Local 1199B and started a strike described by Coretta Scott King (Dr. King’s widow) as “part of the larger fight in our nation against discrimination and exploitation—against all forms
of degradation that results from poverty and human misery.” SCLC provided substantial support, and after 113 days and more than a thousand arrests, the Drug & Hospital Workers News reported, “1199 Union Power Plus SCLC Soul Power Equals Victory in Charleston.” Local 1199 became the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, organizing in Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Farmworkers were also excluded from Wagner Act coverage. Community organizers César Chávez and Dolores Huerta started the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 in Delano, California. NFWA organized in the mutualista tradition—self-help through mutual aid—and by 1965 had about 1,700 members.
That year Filipino grape workers in the AFL-CIO Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee called a strike in Delano, and local AWOC leader Larry Itliong asked Chávez for help. NFWA joined the grape strike and spread it to thirty-seven growers. Union members slipped into the fields to talk to workers, while loudspeakers blared appeals to join the strike. Women and children set up picket lines—Huerta credited the union’s nonviolence to their presence.
The growers were not moved. Chávez called for a national grape boycott. Farmworkers went to union halls, churches, and colleges all over the country to drum up support, and activists everywhere responded, picketing markets and volunteering as organizers. The union signed its first contract in 1970, with increased pay, employer-funded health care, housing and job training programs, a ban on the use of toxic pesticides like DDT, and union hiring halls. United Farm Workers (the merger of AWOC and NFWA) began a campaign against lettuce growers, recruiting mainly Mexican Americans, but also Arabs—the first UFW member killed on a picket line was Nagi Daifallah, a young Yemeni shot by police in August 1973. UFW activists joined community struggles for bilingual education, food stamps, housing and public-health projects. Jessie Lopez de la Cruz, the UFW’s first woman field organizer, looked on labor and community work the same way: “The way I see it, there’s more poor people than rich people. We’re trying to get together, organize, stay together.” Farmworker organizing groups started in Arizona and Texas; the Farm Labor Organizing Committee began organizing migrant tomato harvesters in Ohio and Michigan.
The Black Power movement had a strong workplace component too. In Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other cities, black construction workers formed independent unions to rival the AFL-CIO’s building trades affiliates. Harlem Fightback started in 1965, and developed the tactic of bringing bus loads of unemployed black construction workers to a building site and shutting it down until their demands were met. (Fightback coalitions then developed in New York’s Puerto Rican and Chinese communities too.)
Black workers also mobilized inside existing unions. After a wildcat strike against speedup in May 1968, black UAW members at the Chrysler Dodge main plant in Detroit found themselves targeted for retaliation by management and abandoned by the union. They formed the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, which forced the company to rehire most of the fired strikers. The success inspired more RUMs in many Detroit-area auto plants—they fought against discrimination by union and employer alike, and for more control over working conditions. In 1969, RUM leaders and Inner City Voice activists founded the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, which maintained contact with other black workers’ groups like the United Black Brotherhood in Ford plants at Mahwah, New Jersey, and Lexington, Kentucky, and the Black Panther Caucus in the G.M. plant in Fremont, California.
Hit hard by layoffs during the 1969–70 slump in the auto industry, the League turned to community organizing. But black rank-and-file caucuses pushed black officials in bolder directions. An Ad-Hoc Committee of Concerned Negro Auto Workers got the UAW to stop opposing black candidates for local offices, and they began winning elections in black- and even white-majority locals. In September 1972, some 1,200 black members and officers of thirty-seven different unions met in Chicago to discuss how to “enhance black influence and power in the American labor movement”; they launched the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists to further that agenda.
Latinos formed a parallel organization, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), founded in 1973 at a conference in Washington, D.C., attended by union officers and staff. The United Steel Workers had a Chicano Caucus, organized in 1971, with chapters in nine cities from California to Pennsylvania and 3,000 members in Los Angeles alone. New York City was another hub of activity, with the multiunion Spanish Labor Committee in the lead.
In Puerto Rico, government repression of student antiwar activists drove a new generation of radicals into the labor movement. Beginning in 1968, a strike wave swept the island. In 1971, forty independent unions formed the Movimiento Obreros Unidos. MOU activists favored independence, opposed the island’s exceptions from the federal minimum wage, brought labor support to socialist May Day activities, and fiercely defended their autonomy from the AFL-CIO. Since their strikes were opposed by the prostatehood governing party, their mobilizations built popular support for independence. They also drew the attention of the authorities: in 1975, MOU’s executive secretary Federico Cintrón Fiallo was charged with robbing a San Juan bank, held as a terrorist on half a million dollars bail, and later sentenced for criminal contempt for refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury. Police disruption and sectarian squabbles ended MOU’s effectiveness.
New organizations united women workers, both union members and others. In 1971, 600 women from twenty-four cities met in Washington, D.C., for the first national conference of domestic workers. They represented local groups formed since the late 1960s, mostly by black women with experience in the civil rights movement. These groups joined in the National Council of Household Employees, which lobbied to extend labor laws to cover domestics. In the early 1970s, clerical workers built more than a dozen citywide associations, such as Women Office Workers in New York, Women Organized for Employment in San Francisco, and Cleveland Women Working. In 1977, several groups formed 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women, with a founding membership of 10,000.
Airline flight attendants, who had unionized in the 1940s and 1950s, formed Stewardesses for Women’s Rights (SFWR) in 1974. It used lawsuits, pickets, and the mass distribution of buttons, bumper stickers, and leaflets to attack what the attendants called “sexploitation.” They targeted company regulations on their hairdos, makeup, and weight, and airline advertising that depicted them as sex objects for male customer satisfaction. When ads for National Airlines invited businessmen to “fly” its attendants, SFWR replied, “Go fly yourself.”
Labor feminism also brought union women together across occupations. In 1971, San Francisco activists founded the Union Women’s Alliance to Gain Equality (Union WAGE), whose mission statement declared that “Women’s liberation must be for the working women, beginning on the job.” Based mainly in California, WAGE had outposts in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and New York City. Members aided drives to unionize women workers, promoted the formation of women’s caucuses, and campaigned to preserve and extend protective labor laws.
In March 1974, more than 3,200 women unionists from across the country met in Chicago to launch the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Led by the labor movement’s highest-ranking female officials, CLUW lobbied for women’s advancement on the job and in unions, for organizing drives aimed at women workers, and for legislation that addressed their needs. In 1980, CLUW president Joyce Miller became the first woman on the AFL-CIO’s executive board.
The antiwar movement also had a labor contingent. The surviving “red” unions—UE and ILWU—always opposed the war; so did some AFLCIO unions with left-wing histories, like Local 1199. In 1966, New York union leaders formed a Trade Union Division in the peace organization Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. In 1967, the Division brought 523 officers from fifty unions to Chicago for a National Labor Assembly for Peace to bring “this savage war to a swift and just conclusion, so that we may devote our wealth and energies to the struggle agains
t poverty, disease, hunger, and bigotry.” During the nationwide October 15 Vietnam Moratorium in 1969, forty unions backed the New York City demonstration, UAW and Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) officers spoke at the Detroit event, and a UAW leader presided over a giant Los Angeles rally. Many union leaders denounced the April 1970 invasion of Cambodia; Victor Gotbaum of AFSCME’s District 37 in New York City headed the Coalition for Peace, which led a mass protest march, and fifty unions joined the sponsors of an emergency peace conference in Cleveland. In 1972, a thousand trade unionists from thirty-five AFL-CIO unions founded Labor for Peace.
Lesbian and gay rights also became labor issues, though on a smaller scale. The American Federation of Teachers first condemned employer reprisals against gay and lesbian teachers in 1970. The Gay Teachers Association (1974) formed a caucus in New York City’s United Federation of Teachers. The Gay Teachers Coalition (1975) allied with San Francisco’s Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL). Other workers took up the cause. The Gay Nurses Alliance started in 1973; both men and women joined chapters across the country. In 1974, the independent Transportation Employees Union in Ann Arbor, Michigan, negotiated the first contract to prohibit discrimination for sexual orientation—one lesbian member recalled, “There was a vision there about how trade unionism can be used to achieve civil rights.” San Francisco saw the closest labor-gay alliance. After he supported a Teamsters boycott of Coors beer, the Laborers Union and the Building and Construction Trades Council joined the Teamsters to endorse gay activist Harvey Milk when he ran for the Board of Supervisors in 1975 and in 1977 (when he won). BAGL’s Labor Committee held a press conference in 1976 with twenty-two union leaders to announce mutual support for negotiating contracts with antidiscrimination clauses and defeating antiunion ballot measures.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 34
