DeBra, Edward Balloch2024-02-072024-02-071992-02https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2925193 pagesThe work is divided into four parts. The first deals with both the genesis of the ILWU and its ideology, and more specifically the Portland waterfront leading up to the watershed strike of 1934. The second part is a brief encapsulation of two strong vectors in Oregon's history which met in opposition in the Local 8 conflict. Of these, the first is the history of acute racism/nativism in the region and the passage of legislation in the mid-nineteenth century excluding blacks from the state. The second is the tradition of labor radicalism in the Pacific Northwest, which presented with particular force in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World, a group which held up equality among all workers as a strong tradition. The third part is, strictly speaking, a history of the controversy over the exclusion of blacks in Local 8; stitching together material from the available literature and from interviews, I have assembled the most accurate chronology possible of what happened in Portland (with a few details of the racial aspects of the waterfronts of the Bay Area and Seattle, both before and after the advent of the ILWU.) Included in this is a discussion of the highly controversial anti-discrimination litigation against the local engaged in by a group of black longshoremen in the late sixties, which has not appeared in any accounts thus far. I conclude with an explanation of the factors which insured that Portland's road to integration was a crooked one, due to the history of race relations (or rather nonrelations) in the city and state, as well as social and economic factors. My primary concern here is to address the paradoxical failure of the "radical heritage" of the IWW in Portland to have created a climate in which racial exclusion would have been unthinkable.enCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USPortland, ORSectarian dividesThe "White Shop"Thesis / Dissertation