Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University

Margy Wilkinson We are sad to share the news that Bay Area activist Margy Wilkinson passed away unexpectedly this weekend. Margy spent her life fighting for social justice, growing up in a family of activists (her father was prosecuted under the Smith Act, see an earlier post on the history of the Act). She was involved in the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s and then came back many years later and helped organize her fellow clerical workers, forming the Coalition of University Employees (CUE). Margy donated her papers related to CUE to the Labor Archives and facilitated donations from several other CUE leaders. We are proud to preserve her legacy.

Juneteenth - ILWU is shutting down the West Coast ports today. This article explores the union's long history of using its economic power in the fight for social justice.

Smith Act On this day in 1940 the Smith Act (Alien Registration Act) was signed into law by President Roosevelt. The law initially targeted the Socialist Workers Party but after WWII was used against leaders of the Communist Party. The vague language of the Smith Act, which ostensibly made it illegal to advocate the destruction of the government by force or to be a member of any group that did so, was challenged in a two Supreme Court cases on the basis of free speech: Denni...s v. United States and Yates v. United States. The latter case strictly limited the prohibition of advocacy to actual acts of violence rather than abstract political concepts and no further prosecutions under the Act occurred after 1957. The Labor Archives has extensive materials on the Yates case in the Norman Leonard Papers (guide available in the Online Archive of California). Leonard was part of the Gladstein Andersen Leonard law firm which represented Oleta Yates and his collection contains the legal case files from the trial. You can also learn more directly from Leonard, who was interviewed about the Smith Act in 1987 at the Labor Archives. The audio recordings are here: https://archive.org/details/csfst_000033

Pride at Work The Labor Archives is pleased to announce that our San Francisco Pride at Work collection has been processed and the finding aid is available online here: https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8gt5v9d/... San Francisco Pride at Work (also known as HAVOQ - Horizontal Alliance of Very Organized Queers) was a membership-based organization of queers for economic and social justice in San Francisco. The SF chapter of the National Pride at Work organization was revitalized in the mid-2000s with the Queer Youth Organizing Project and campaigns that brought together housing rights, immigrants rights and labor issues under an umbrella of LGBTQ+ activism.

Juneteenth - ILWU is shutting down the West Coast ports today. This article explores the union's long history of using its economic power in the fight for social justice.

Bay Area labor has a long history of fighting for racial justice, from refusing to unload ships from South Africa in the struggle against apartheid, to organizing the Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride in 2003, to winning some of the strongest contracts in the country for service workers who are predominantly people of color. Read the current call to action re racial justice from the Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, and San Mateo Labor Councils here: https://medium.com//a-call-to-action-unions-must-help-lead

Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Labor Landmark: Chinese Telephone Exchange Building 743 Washington Street When still a branch of the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, this site was the only completely Chinese Telephone Exchange outside of China. By the 1920s, it had become a tourist attraction because of its architectural ornamentation (constructed in a faux-Chinese style during post-earthquake reconstruction) and operators who had to dress Chinese.... Since few Chinese women could find work outside of Chinatown because of discriminatory hiring practices, the Telephone Exchange represented a desirable job. The operators were required to be fully bilingual and speak five Chinese dialects. Further, since Exchange customers used names instead of numbers, they also had to memorize around 2,200 phone numbers. They handled more than thirteen thousand calls a day. One of the night operators, Tye Leung, was among the first Chinese American women to vote after California women won that right in 1911. A local news article called her the first Chinese woman in the history of the world to exercise the electoral franchise. In 1943, workers at the Exchange applied for union representation with the Telephone Traffic Employees Organization (TTEO), Local 120, American Communications Association, CIO. TTEO representative Marie De Martini headed the organizing drive for the thirty women employed as operators. An investigation by De Martini exposed irregularities in conditions at the Exchange that included seven-day-a-week work schedules. The union filed a complaint with the War Labor Board, winning back pay awards of up to $5,000 for several of the employees, as well as basic workers’ rights such as overtime pay and vacation time.

Phiz Mezey (1925-2020) It is with great sadness that we share news of Phiz Mezey's passing. Phiz was an amazing photographer whose work documented critical social justice struggles, from the razing of the Fillmore during redevelopment in the late 1950s, to civil rights sit-ins in San Francisco in the early sixties, to the 1968-1969 San Francisco State Strike - images from the latter conflict recently on display for the 50th anniversary of the strike and subject of a solo exhi...bition for the 45th anniversary. The Labor Archives and SF Public Library also featured Phiz's work in Occupation! Economic Justice as a Civil Right in San Francisco 1963-1964, an exhibition about the sit-ins curated by Nancy Arms Simon. You can learn more about Phiz's extraordinary life (among other things, she was blacklisted for refusing to sign the Loyalty Oath in 1950) and her work in the article below. https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/SFGate/obituary.aspx

Feeling stressed? Take your mind off of things by coloring some of the images from the Labor Archive’s digital collections! https://libguides.sfsu.edu/color

Today is Workers Memorial Day -- a day where we honor and remember fallen workers and a day to continue our fight to protect all workers on the job. This year Workers Memorial Day takes on special meaning and urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Image from the Labor Archives and Research Center collection of over 1,000 historic union and social movement posters.

Congratulations: LARC's 2019 annual program guest speaker Eduardo Contreras has won the prestigious Organization of American Historians David Montgomery Prize. Eduardo conducted extensive research at the Labor Archives for his groundbreaking work on the history of Latinos in San Francisco. From the press release: Eduardo Contreras, Hunter College, City University of New York. "Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco" (University of Pennsylvania... Press) is a searching political history of community building in San Francisco that analyzes union organizing, political campaigns, neighborhood transformations, and the rise of queer urban cultures from the 1930s to the 1980s. Contreras’s conceptually ambitious account of race and race-making shows how diverse people from across Central and South America developed a coherent sense of themselves as Latinoslatinidadas they pursued and sought to expand the promises of American liberalism in this liberal city par excellence. By showing how ordinary people constructed a coherent and durable collective identity in a time of vibrant social and economic possibility, this work offers an important counterpoint to contemporary claims about identity politics, fragmentation, and the limits of liberalism. This book also explores the conventional markers of labor and working-class history from fresh vantage points, especially by documenting dynamic relationships between Latinos and queer migrants who developed a fresh street culture. As Contreras shows, those relationships yielded new organizing priorities that challenged the stolid political clubs and helped defeat Proposition 6, a hostile and punitive state law that would have LGBT school workers and their advocates fired.

AC Transit - from private to public transportation Jordan Patty's in-depth look at how the east bay's private Key System Transit Lines became a public system in 1960 in large part due to the tireless efforts of ATU Local 192 president Fred V. Stambaugh. Patty made extensive use of the Labor Archives' ATU Local 192 collection for his research.

Cesar Chavez Day Cesar Chavez fighting for farm workers in the Coachella fields during the summer of 1973. Images are from the Labor Archives and Research Center Rick Tejada-Flores photograph collection, which contains over 1,600 UFW images. You can search our digital collections here: http://digital-collections.library.sfsu.edu//c/p16737coll1

In response to the COVID-19 closure of the J. Paul Leonard Library at SFSU, and corresponding social distancing recommendations, the Labor Archives and Research Center will be providing virtual assistance only from March 17th onward until further notice. Please contact us via [email protected] or leave a message at (415) 405-5571. Stay well.

Golden Gate Bridge historic anniversary Today marks the 90th anniversary of the February 17, 1937 accident that plunged twelve Golden Gate Bridge workers into the water, killing ten. The video below tells the story of this terrible tragedy through oral histories of bridge workers and photographs from the Fred Brusati Collection and Fred Dummatzen scrapbook (Dummatzen was one of the ten men killed in the accident).