LeRoy King’s battle
against fascism and racism

LeRoy King was drafted into the Army, and like other African-Americans at the time, assigned to a segregated unit. On the trip from California to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, whites and blacks sat and ate together. That changed when they got to Texas.

“When we got to Brownwood they said we could no longer eat together and that the Blacks had to get in the back of the train.” King said in his Oral History. “That was the first time I felt southern segregation.”

At Fort Sill he was put into an ammunition supply unit. “We couldn’t have a gun, we couldn’t have nothing,” he said. “All we could do was handle ammunition.”

His unit shipped out to Le Havre, France, and moved out toward the front lines, furiously loading ammunition in support of fast-moving 101st Airborne Division.

“German planes flew over regularly—we called them ‘Bed Check Charlie,’” King said. “A few bombs came very close, but we didn’t lose anybody.”

After the war King’s unit sailed home to a camp in New Jersey. People were friendly on the ships, but the racism came back at that camp, he said.

“Any time a couple of Blacks would go by some of these white guys’ barracks, those whites would come out and taunt them,” King said. “I’ll never forget one Saturday afternoon when we had so many fights. We had to fight every day.”

Young Blacks left the Army and challenged segregation and racism all across the country. LeRoy King returned to San Francisco and took up the battle.

“We had demonstrations on Fillmore Street and along Auto Row,” he said. “All that was basically led by these young Black soldiers. They felt like me—I served my country, I did everything I could to try to make this a decent place and make sure we got rid of fascism. So when we came back home, we figured there’d be some change.”

King soon joined Local 6, which was actively recruiting Black workers. The members elected him Secretary-Treasurer and he served the ILWU as an International Representative and Regional Director. He currently sits on the San Francisco Redevelopment Commission, a position he has held since 1980. King is the longest serving city commissioner. He has also served the Northern California District Council for more than half a century.

—with help from the Oral History Project

Bill Ward—
from the docks to the Navy

The Second World War began while Bill Ward was still in high school. At the time, high school kids could work on the docks if they could maintain C+ grades. Longshoring was already in his blood. His dad, Fred helped organize and was the first registered member of marine clerks’ Local 63. He helped Bill get a job.

Ward joined the Navy when he was old enough and spent “an interesting three years, packed full of excitement, apprehension, and scared to death quite a bit of the time, although nothing spectacular happened,” he said.

“I was on a couple ships, including the SS Lurline, taking soldiers and marines to the islands,” Ward said.

Ward also helped develop special boats.

“They only drew about six inches of water and 36 feet long with a huge Evinrude motor—and could haul a ton and a half,” he said.

In the Pacific he ran a smoke boat, laying a smoke screen in support of demolition divers who opened the way for U.S. troops to reach Japanese-occupied beaches. Some of his most serious action occurred while he served on the destroyer Douglas H. Fox. The ship performed picket duty between Okinawa and Japan, an area patrolled by Kamikaze suicide planes.

“We were there about six months, and saw some extended action, we always accompanied aircraft carriers,” he said. “We had a Kamikaze attack. I think the pilot chickened out at the last minute, he was aimed at us amidships and he veered off, hitting the forward turret, but it didn’t explode and it crashed about 100 yards away.”

Bill Ward returned and worked as a clerk in Local 63 before transferring to longshoring, serving as a Business Agent in Local 13 and eventually becoming a Coast Committeeman from 1963 to 1983. He remains active in the San Francisco Bay Area Pensioners and Pacific Coast Pensioners Assn.

Richard Negrete: from the Ardennes Forest to Local 13

Richard Negrete was a Private First Class in the Army’s 83rd Division when his unit was sent to fight in the Ardennes Forest during the bitter winter of 1944-45, in what became known as the “Battle of the Bulge.”

Negrete’s division, immortalized in the film, “Band of Brothers,” fought the Nazis in their last, bloody offensive after the Normandy invasion. Repelling the Nazis took a staggering toll with 19,000 American soldiers killed as infantrymen like Negrete led tanks into German-held forests and towns, fighting house-to-house in the bitter cold. Elevated as his unit’s lead scout after others were wounded, Negrete was also wounded in January 1945 when the tank he was leading hit a mine.

Transferred to non-combat duty, Negrete stood guard in Berlin during the famous meeting in Potsdam where Truman, Churchill, and Stalin reached terms on the new borders that defined post-war Europe. After his discharge in 1946, Negrete returned to Wilmington, where he worked lumber and cannery jobs until getting more regular longshore work and his ID in 1948. Negrete earned his A Book with Local 13 in 1953 and spent 30 years as a longshoreman before transferring to Local 63 where he was a Marine Clerk from 1983 until retiring in 1990. Negrete remains active today with the Southern California Pensioners Group.

Hugh Hunter—
torpedoed off the coast

Hugh Hunter was only 15 years old in 1940 when he shipped out from Sydney, Australia with the merchant marine. He spent the first years of World War II on Allied troop transports (including the refurbished RMS Queen Mary) and commercial vessels, carrying goods and war materiel from Sydney, Auckland and Singapore to the British Isles. In 1942, a German submarine torpedoed his ship and the rescued teenager wound up in London as a “distressed British sailor.” The British capitol didn’t warm Hunter’s heart. “Churchill was no hero to me,” said Hunter, because he held the Prime Minister responsible for thousands of Australian and New Zealand troops who died at Gallipoli in World War One.

Hunter left London and shipped out to New York in 1943. Hunter and a shipmate hitchhiked across America. Outside Houston, the two were rounded up by immigration agents. “We told them we were sailors and they said ‘you’re awfully far from the ocean’ and locked us up.” After a short detention, the two made it to San Pedro, where they joined the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific.

Hunter spent the rest of the war and 11 more years in the merchant marine. By 1956, he was married to an American, gave up the sea, and started working on the docks. In 1963, Hunter registered as a longshoreman with Local 13 in what he calls “the happiest day of my life.” He transferred to the marine clerks and retired from Local 63 in 1986. He remains active in the Southern California Pensioners Group and lives with his wife in Wilmington. Hunter says with a smile, “I wouldn’t be here if not for a German torpedo.”

Ray Patricio—from the docks to the war to the docks again

When you spend months, as Ray Patricio did, on the most popular bombing target in the Pacific during WWII, you learn a lot about your comrades in arms. “When I go to reunions, the ones who don’t show up are the officers and the cooks.” Patricio had spent 1942 working the San Pedro docks as a “Nine-Number” (along with pal Lou Loveridge, who then volunteered for the Navy) before being drafted in January 1943. Originally trained in the California desert while Allied forces were finishing off the German Afrika Corps in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, Patricio got shipped instead to the jungles of the South Pacific, where he served in New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies and eventually on the Philippine island of Luzon.

Patricio shared a unit citation from his time as an anti-aircraft gunner firing at incoming Japanese bombers. His unit fought off 89 air raids in three months making it the most heavily bombed island in the Pacific. Patricio earned the Soldiers Medal for saving a man’s life from drowning.

After returning to San Pedro in 1946, Patricio qualified under the GI Bill for reinstatement on the waterfront, but it took him two years before getting his book with Local 13, where he stayed as a longshoreman for 18 years. Patricio transferred to become foreman and retired in 1988 after 22 years with Local 94. Patricio is Vice President of the union’s Southern California Pensioners Group (SCPG) and a delegate to the Southern California District Council.