ILWU indispensible: Brown
The ReUnion: Education-Arts-Heritage documentary recounts the significance of ILWU Northern California leader LeRoy King, a World War II veteran who became one of a group of black labor pioneers after returning from the European front.
"Most people were just interested in finding a job," said Brown, after his regular Friday lunch at the LeCentral restaurant in downtown San Francisco. "ILWU was interested in peace and other global issues in addition. They decided to make freeing Nelson Mandela an issue."
Brown said the union's activism led to the California Assembly becoming the first legislative body to pass a divestment law against the apartheid regime which ruled South Africa in the 1980s.
King was the visible face of the church-labor coalition, said Brown. "The ILWU figured out that to reach the black voter, you had to go through the black church." The veteran elected official said the alliance between local black pastors and the union was the prototype for black political organizations in the 1950s, when blacks in many states were still seeking the right to vote.
Brown's own career got a boost from the coalition. He lost his first race for the state Assembly. "I tried to get help from every labor union, but the only one that would help me was the one's they called Communists, the ILWU. Harry Bridges assigned Revels Cayton, who was the grandson of Hiram K. Revels, the first black Senator during Reconstruction, to work with me every day for the next two years and he was a master of political organizing."
Along with Sen. Diane Feinstein and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Brown discusses the importance of LeRoy King during the documentary, which premieres Wednesday, Nov. 16 at West Bay Conference Center, 1290 Fillmore St. as part of the fifth annual Preserving California Black Heritage conference.
The King Behind King, Bridges, Chavez and Mandela is part of a series of instructional documentaries produced by ReUnion: Education-Arts-Heritage. The series charts the historical analogies of the ongoing movement for freedom from The Civil War through Civil Rights.
ReUnion producers Will Hammons II and John William Templeton have presented an architecture to San Francisco Unified School District board members and administrators to focus the entire district on the distinctive role of African-Americans in San Francisco as a strategy for boosting academic outcomes. Templeton, author of Come to the Water: Sharing the Rich Black Experience in San Francisco, narrates the broader context of San Francisco as the "western sanctuary" which provided fertile soil for freedom fighters like King to support liberation movements across the nation and around the globe. He also authored a research study for the California Council for the Social Studies in 2008 which demonstrated that fewer than one in five of the state's social studies teachers were equipped to provide culturally responsive instruction in history.
