Curtis McClain: union officer and civil rights activist, 1946-1982

March 27, 2006

Introduction by Harvey Schwartz

In observance of Black History Month, this issue’s oral history honors Curtis McClain, the union’s International Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus who passed away last November. McClain was the first African American elected business agent of Local 6 (1960), President of that local (1969) and then Secretary-Treasurer of the International (1977). He retired in the latter post in 1991.

The historic intersection of the ILWU and the civil rights movement is dramatically illustrated in McClain’s experience and in his numerous contributions. McClain was a pioneer worker for equal access to jobs in San Francisco and an early advocate for equality of opportunity in Local 6. He was an activist in “the Frontiersmen,” a group of Local 6 African American members who initially sought black advancement, but ultimately achieved better understanding and more unity for all. This oral history emphasizes these aspects of McClain’s long career of service to the ILWU.

During his years in Local 6 McClain worked closely with several of the ILWU’s legendary figures. Among them were LeRoy King, Keith Eickman and Louis Goldblatt, who he followed as International Secretary-Treasurer.

The oral history below is a composite of two interviews with McClain. One is a recorded discussion I had with him in 1982 that dealt mostly with the Frontiersmen and with McClain’s earliest days in Local 6. The other is a more far-ranging interview taped in 1969 that also focused on McClain’s career in Local 6 and on civil rights issues.

The 1969 interview was conducted by Robert Martin of the Civil Rights Documentation Project in Washington, D.C. Many thanks to Joellen ElBashir, Curator of Manuscripts at the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, for providing us with a copy of the transcript of that tape session.

The last three paragraphs in this article are from the 1969 interview. On one level McClain’s parting comments there on social conditions in the U.S. and on American foreign entanglement might seem dated. However, looked at another way, their insight and their clear relevance to current issues is at once quite striking and more than a little troubling.

CURTIS McCLAIN

Edited by Harvey Schwartz

Curator, ILWU Oral History Collection

I was born in Akron, Ohio in 1925. I’m one of 19 children from three combined families. My father worked in the rubber plants in Akron—B.F. Goodrich Co., General Tire, Firestone Rubber. I think it was the rubber industry that was responsible for his early death because of the impurities in the air and the bad conditions in the plants.

My father was one of many who worked in the mills grinding rubber and inhaling dust, dirt and fumes. He was a tire mold man, but he was not permitted to join the mold men’s union. I often used to hear him talk about the good of a union, even though he did not belong to his, so this sort of stayed with me.

During World War II I was drafted into the Navy after I finished high school in Akron. Once we were loading ammunition on a ship in Seattle. We were working alongside ILWU longshoremen who were almost making more in a night than we were in a month. They were earning some $50 a night and I was getting $66 a month as a Seaman First Class. This interested me in joining unions upon my release from the service.

After being discharged from the Navy in San Francisco I became acquainted with a number of longshoremen who were also making pretty good money. This interested me a little more, I would say, because I already knew the importance of the union. I briefly attended the City College of San Francisco, got married when I was 21 and decided I should enter the workforce and provide food for the table. That’s when I found out about the warehousing industry and that Local 6 dispatched people to jobs and color was no barrier. I went down to the Local 6 hall.

This was in 1946, shortly after I’d left the military. I was hired on a temporary basis by Schmidt Lithograph, a multi-union house in San Francisco. They had a crew of 16 or 17 warehousemen, but they had a total workforce of 600. I was the only black person there for nine years. I was sent out from the Local 6 hiring hall to run a freight elevator for three days. The company specified that this was a temporary job because someone was returning from vacation.

When the person who was to return from vacation had an accident, John Munson, the company supervisor, asked me to work steady. He also kind of pissed me off by implying that I would either come late or wouldn’t show up. “Don’t forget,” he said, “we always start at the regular time.”

I went into the paper seasoning department. My job there was also under Local 6. Paper has all this moisture and they had all these racks and things. You had to hang the paper to dry it out or to add moisture before it went into the press room for pressing. The work was heavy, hot and dusty. I needed the job, so I stayed for 14 years.

Charles Cleaver, the working foreman, was white. He was a decent person. Like there’s a way to handle any job, there’s a way to handle paper. You can work the hard way and not accomplish much and hurt yourself. Cleaver took the time to explain things. If you were doing something that was working against you, he would tell you. He wasn’t always on your back, either. Cleaver was a solid union person. In my opinion he did not see color. So my experience in the paper seasoning department with him was good.

On the other hand, I liked working out of doors in the bull gang, which handled freight cars and trucks. The bull gang paid an additional 20 cents an hour and you had the opportunity to work overtime. An additional 20 cents an hour doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it was a lot then. When you’re just out of the service like I was and you’re just getting started, you haven’t got anything but a desire to work and get a couple of bucks. That’s because you figure so much has been removed from your life you’ve got to run like hell just to stay where you are.

But when I asked to be sent to the bull gang I’d be told I was too important to be moved from the paper seasoning department. Someone else would then come in from the hall, would just happen to be white, and would work the bull gang and get the overtime pay. Also, as I acquired seniority in the plant, I tried to get into the higher paid trades as an apprentice. But I was never allowed into the trades.

You can see why long before the sit-ins and the walk-ins were popular in San Francisco I became interested in the welfare of all people, and certainly black people. A handful of neighborhood people and I were forever reading the numbers of the unemployed, and blacks always seemed to head the list.

Housing was very scarce in the city, too, with so many of us just back from the service. We were living in rooming houses with community baths and community kitchens. Many of us did not have jobs. So we decided we should get together, talk and do some demonstrating. We took that page from labor. We just started on our own to try to get jobs for people in the community.

Unfortunately we were not as sophisticated as the young people of the 1960s. We demonstrated in front of theaters, hotels and stores, but this was not a formal thing. There was no real organization behind us and the results were marginal. I think maybe this accounts for the vacuum that developed between 1947, ’48 and the sit-ins of the late ’50s or early ’60s. Still, all of the battles we fought in the mid-1940s might not have produced much then, but I think they helped crack some of the doors that opened later.

Obviously I was interested when a Black Caucus developed in Local 6 in l947. We decided to meet on an informal basis to discuss problems that affected blacks and other minorities in the local. The caucus discussed grievances we thought were not being handled properly. We often heard of people being bypassed for jobs.

There were also certain discharges we felt warranted greater attention from the officers. At least we felt this grievance was not being aired quickly enough. I’m not saying the union did not pursue discharges as such. But not all officers pursued them as they should have. So we wanted to band together so it was not just one person approaching the officers or going to a meeting to deal with a problem.

When I say we, I am referring to other black rank-and-file members of the union. There were no outsiders. All the people who attended these meetings were dues-paying members of Local 6. We started very small. There were five or six of us who met first and exchanged ideas. We expanded to 25 or 30 on the San Francisco side of the bay. We had a close working relationship with white rank-and-file members in the local, but there were no white brothers in the caucus.

We reached 25 rapidly. I think we could have expanded to a much larger number if we had chosen to. The union was changing. There was a large influx of black people coming into the union. World War II was over. The shipyards were closing down. The warehouse industry offered a means of people obtaining employment.

Some of the new people had been stewards or had held leadership positions in other unions. They were not satisfied just coming to membership meetings and playing the role of voting rank and filers without giving input into policies and programs. So we could have expanded the caucus to most any number, but it remained small because we chose to keep it small. It was a group we thought we could work with.

When we formed we had in mind to get organized for political purposes within the union. The term Black Caucus was really a name white trade unionists called us. We were not too upset because they called us a Black Caucus—after all, it was a group of black people coming together to discuss problems.

But we constantly called ourselves the Frontiersmen. This was a club we set up so if we were questioned, there would never be any problem, because we sponsored dances and parties. We tied ourselves in with social activities within the community.

Clearly, though, the purpose of the Frontiersmen was to organize so we could elect an Afro-American to a full-time position and address the grievances taking place. I was the person elected as business agent in l960. But there were appointments—field representatives, organizers—made prior to my being elected when some of the longshoremen joined with us to approach the International.

The first Afro-American organizer appointed was Roland Corley in the Redwood City division of Local 6. Also, the union began to have shop committees push more for promotions by seniority. This had been union policy all along, but in reality it had not necessarily worked out in the past.

At the time we formed the Frontiersmen Club, it was sorely needed within the local. We did a great deal of good, not only for the black union members, but for the union as a whole. We learned some of the fears and concerns of the union people, both black and white. After serving its purpose, there was no need to continue with the Frontiersmen as an organization. It dissolved after l4 years.

It was around the time the Frontiersmen ended that I became a business agent. I was elected in the fall of 1960 and took office in January 1961. After that I received the highest vote in the local each year I ran for reelection. Then, at the end of 1968, Chili Duarte, the president of our local, died in office. I decided to put my hat in the ring as a candidate to fill the vacancy. The membership elected me president in March 1969 by a three to two majority.

When I became president of Local 6 our membership was approximately one-third black and one-third Spanish surname. Most of the rest were white or Caucasian. We were always a progressive local. We’d long been involved in demonstrations to get minorities hired, like those some years ago on “Cadillac Row,” where the car agencies are located on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. Around 1963 the local supported the big sit-in at the city’s Palace Hotel, too.

We picketed and helped blacks get hired in the better jobs where they could be seen and where there had been very few blacks, if any. In the hotels, for instance, before the era of the 1960s demonstrations you would find us in the kitchen, but not in the lobby as better paid bell boys and receptionists. Generally the local worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and ad hoc committees formed for specific projects.

In 1966 Mayor John Shelley appointed me to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. The commission itself was a product of the sits-ins and demonstrations that were going on in the city. It was set up to ease tensions and bridge gaps. In 1969 I was the chairman of the commission.

As a member of the Human Rights Commission I was involved with the 1968-1969 strike at San Francisco State University by the Black Students Union and other groups. We were instructed by Mayor Joseph Alioto to set up teams and visit the campus to make certain that human rights were being observed. When some cop would suddenly hit a student over the head, you’d turn in a report.

A number of times I walked the picket lines with the students, talked to them and tried to find out if there were any grounds for getting the strike settled peacefully. Essentially the Human Rights Commission was supposed to act as a fire department and put out fires. But the commission could not solve deeper problems. It could only listen to people and attempt to mediate between groups. We couldn’t order changes, we could just make suggestions. That was the extent of it.

In the 1960s our union also took a position on the disturbances in Berkeley, where policemen were indiscriminately shooting tear gas. One person was shot and died and many people were beaten and arrested. Our membership instructed the local’s officers to contact the mayor and the Berkeley City Council. We attempted to lend whatever services we could to bring about some peaceful resolution.

As a union we were involved in the legislative field as well. We had a joint legislative committee consisting of members from our Bay Area locals. It met monthly to map out our legislative strategy and to endorse candidates. We supported candidates we felt would initiate legislation that was going to benefit labor in the state of California or in the immediate area in which we lived.

Alternatively, we opposed legislation that provided for things like discriminatory practices in housing. In the late 1960s we successfully worked against AB-14 in California, a law that would have permitted an owner of a housing establishment to refuse to lease or rent to a tenant as he saw fit. So in the legislative field we have been effective.

We also backed the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) idea. FEPC was a law in San Francisco before it became a law in California. We urged candidates we supported for the city’s Board of Supervisors to vote for a local FEPC, and they did. We also endorsed candidates for the state Assembly and the state Senate who favored a state FEPC law. Then we sent delegations to the state capitol in Sacramento to lobby for the California FEPC.

As to the future, I don’t think the sit-ins and the lie-ins of the traditional civil rights movement will play a role in trying to advance the goals of the oppressed in this country any more. Violence and polarization seem likely because black people feel that we haven’t made real progress. A handful of minority people are being placed on certain jobs and we’ve got more black faces in windows than we’ve ever had, but basically, the uneducated black and brown minority has not progressed.

One solution, I think, is that work should be made available for every man and woman in this country. You develop a certain feeling of independence when you have money that you have earned. At that point I think other things would flow into place because with a job a person has a feeling of pride.

I also think we’re going to have to get out of Vietnam. We should have been out of there a long time ago. In fact, I don’t think we belong there. I’d guess the war is going to continue to drag this country down unless we start thinking in terms of building peace and putting all that money into something useful like building our homes and cities.