The recent publication of No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half-Century, 1950-2000, a book about the history of the anti-apartheid movement in the United States, has provoked a larger discussion of that movement’s long and radical history. In the San Francisco Bay Area, leftwing activity in solidarity with the liberation struggle in southern Africa goes back to the 1930s, with especially deep roots in the African American community. National leaders like William L. Patterson and Paul Robeson had deep ties to the members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which had (and has) a very active, radical Black membership. It was natural that this union, together with the Northern California chapter of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, would provide support for the South African Congress of Trade Unions after it was banned in South Africa, and invitations to its leaders to attend conferences, like that held in 1978 in San Francisco.

Robeson, when he was banned from many venues during the cold war, found audiences not only in Oakland’s Black churches, but at the longshore union hall in San Francisco, where he sang about the African freedom struggle. Today’s Vukani Mwethu choir carries on in that tradition.

The labor roots of the South African solidarity movement in the Bay Area, therefore, are deep and go back a long way. In looking at the history of the anti-apartheid movement nationally, the role of the labor movement in general is not well-known, or acknowledged for the important role it played. Especially in the Bay Area, it was an engine that helped push the broader movement forward. It used its power in the workplace to cut the economic links, especially trade, on which the apartheid regime depended. It was a movement that tried to do immediate economic damage.

It also sought to work in close cooperation with the liberation movement. It accepted direction from SACTU, in particular, and tried to build relationships between unions and workers in the U.S. and their banned counterparts struggling in the underground in South Africa. It popularized the thinking and demands of the movement in South Africa, especially the Freedom Charter. It sought to aid the liberation organizations directly. At a time when the ANC was called a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, it was not afraid to send material support to the Umkhonto We Sizwe camps in Tanzania.

The labor contingent of the Bay Area anti-apartheid movement was made up, overwhelmingly, of ordinary workers. They took action at work, often risking their jobs. They raised money, picketed, marched and went to jail many times. They moved the labor movement from below, insisting that their local unions, labor councils, and the state labor federation support those fighting for freedom. They rejected the U.S. government’s policy of “constructive engagement,” even when it was supported by national labor leaders in Washington.

For a decade, the Free South Africa Labor Committee was an important part of that history. I hope that recounting some of its accomplishments will inspire grassroots labor activists around the country to speak publicly about what they did in those years. It is important, not just to describe that history accurately, and give credit where credit is due, but to strengthen the politics of solidarity in the labor movement today. Supporting working class movements opposing colonialism, racist oppression, war and neoliberal economics is as important for unions now as it was during the apartheid years.

Unions in Iraq today are accused of terrorism for trying to stop the privatization of their oil, and calling for U.S. troops to leave their country. They are fighting for the same freedom for which the SACTU fought – the right of the majority to determine the economic and political future of their country. The unions today that support them (including, by no accident, the ILWU) are acting in the same tradition of solidarity that motivated labor’s anti-apartheid campaigners. The accusation of aiding terrorists will not frighten activists today any more than it did then.

This, then, is a little of that history.

In November of 1984, members of ILWU Locals 10 and 34 refused to unload the Nedlloyd Kimberley at Pier 80 in San Francisco for eleven days, because it was carrying South African cargo. That action was organized by a group of people in those locals that included Leo Robinson, Dave Stewart, Larry Wright, Alex Bagwell, Jack Heyman (then IBU), A.J. Mitchell, Tom Lufer and perhaps a dozen others. They had all been involved in one way or another in the 1978 conference on solidarity with the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), and had been talking for some time about taking action.

During those 11 days, there were huge picket lines at Pier 80, as hundreds of people came out to support the action and provide the workers with a reason under their contract for refusing to go to work. The Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) went to Federal court to get an injunction against Local 10 to force it to work the ship. To avoid huge fines and its officers possibly going to prison, the local eventually unloaded the ship. But the people who had been picketing then went across the Bay, and began picketing the Pacific Maritime Association offices on Grand Avenue and Harrison to protest the PMA’s decision to get the injunction.

Daily picket lines went on for a year, and then on a weekly basis for a year after that. The Bay Area Free South Africa Movement (BAFSAM) was born in those demonstrations. It was headed by John George, and had two co-coordinators, Franklin Alexander and Lorenzo Carlisle. Later, two others were added, Natalie Bayton and David Bacon. BAFSAM then began holding regular meetings at the First Universe Baptist Church on International Boulevard in East Oakland. With BAFSAM’s participation, the church set up a homeless shelter to connect the issues of racism and apartheid in South Africa to racism and economic oppression in Oakland. This was the period of big plant closures in Oakland, which were having a devastating impact on Black workers.

BAFSAM lasted as an active organization for about five years, and carried out the fight for the Oakland divestment ordinance, the strongest in the country at the time. It was the pattern for legislation that Congressman Dellums then took to Congress. BAFSAM also organized many marches and demonstrations in Oakland.

The Bay Area Free South Africa Labor Committee (FSALC) began as an outreach committee to get labor support for the longshoremen, and the picket lines at PMA. It then became an autonomous organization. The FSALC was active for about 10 years, from 1984 to 1994.  David Bacon, then an organizer for Molders Union Local 164, was its chair for the first few years, followed by David Shelton, president of the San Francisco school bus drivers. Among its most active members were Kathy Black, Darryl Alexander (she and David met in FSALC meetings and later married), Frank Pottier, Maddie Oden, David Reed, Roland Anolin, Bobby Williams and others. It was a multiracial committee with Black, Asian American and white members. During its lifetime the committee organized many campaigns:

These were exciting times. We met wonderful comrades in South Africa and here at home, many of whom became friends for life. Frank Pottier cooked some extraordinary French meals on the PMA picket lines, and those who ate them will never forget how good they were. We participated in the destruction of apartheid, and when Nelson Mandela came to Oakland and spoke at the Coliseum, he recognized the longshore workers for the role they’d played. FSALC members felt we also had had a role in those earth-changing events.

I will always deeply respect the courage of those who stood up in South Africa during the apartheid years, and those who took up arms outside South Africa to fight at Cuito Cuanavale and the other places where the spread of colonial fascism in Africa was defeated. Those who stood up here in the U.S., especially in the years when anti-apartheid activists were redbaited for doing so, can feel justly proud.

Amandla!

BC commentator, David Bacon, is a California writer and photographer, and former union organizer and factory worker. His new book Illegal! - How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants, is being published by Beacon Press this fall. Click here to contact Mr. Bacon.