An Injury to One: The Politics of Racial Exclusion in the Portland Local of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union
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Date
1992-02
Authors
DeBra, Edward Balloch
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
The 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.
Description
93 pages
Keywords
Portland, OR, Sectarian divides, The "White Shop"