By John Showalter 

Ted Frazier is active in ILWU Local 10 where he helps the membership with public relations projects when he isn’t working on the docks. But Frazier is also an Archbishop in the Voice of Pentecostal Church in San Francisco where he’s been active for nearly 30 years.

“Being involved in both the union and church gives me two outlets for my passion about social justice,” said Frazier, who is 64 but looks a little younger.

Frazier came of age during the 50’s and 60’s and can recall the City’s once-vibrant Fillmore neighborhood with famous jazz clubs. But within a decade, redevelopment projects demolished that neighborhood and displaced thousands of residents—while government spending against poverty was cut to a trickle. As the gap between rich and poor began to widen, Frazier could see the changes taking place on the street.

“Crime started spiraling out of control,” he said. “We had drug-dealing in neighborhoods like Hayes Valley that included street corner gunfights between gangs.”
Frazier decided to get active in the church and worked in his community to help young people who were caught up in lives of crime and violence.

“We knew something had to be done to save our community that didn’t involve more police,” said Frazier, who explained that when he was young, the San Francisco police department had few African American officers and frequently roughed-up the residents in his neighborhood.

Fed up watching gangs and drug dealers take over, “I walked down to the street corner one day with some members of my church and told those drug dealers that we were gonna sing some spirituals. Once we started, they stopped selling drugs, and some of them even joined us.”

Frazier knew that the permanent solution to poverty had to include better jobs, and he eventually served as chairman of the downtown San Francisco Yerba Buena rehabilitation project where he gained coalition experience working for better jobs with unions, churches, community groups, contractors, and elected officials.

 His work with the building trade unions was especially challenging, but he was able to recruit young people into union apprenticeships in electrical work, masonry and other trades—despite resistance from some unions and contractors who didn’t want to share their good-paying jobs with women and minorities.

Frazier also started a program in his church to help young people in San Francisco’s poorest communities get a chance to see the woods and experience nature. Working with then-Speaker of the California State Assembly Willie Brown, local merchants, and the Marines, Frazier helped send 300 troubled teens each summer to Camp Mather, a city-owned property near Yosemite national park.

During the past 25 years, Frazier and his church members have reached out to communities from Sacramento to San Francisco, trying to address unemployment, domestic violence, drug abuse and gun violence—all symptoms of social injustice and what he calls the “need for a spiritual presence.”

Since 2000, Frazier has chaired a group in the Bay Area called the Faith-Based Coalition, which brings together different religious leaders to attack community problems —including support for labor union organizing struggles. The group holds most of their meetings in a conference room at the ILWU International offices.

Activists like Frazier, who combine their church and union concerns can be found among the ILWU ranks in other towns, including Tacoma where Local 98 yard foreman and Reverend Greg Black has been active in his community and local union since 1980.

Through his church, the non-denominational Celebrations Church, and a local, interfaith group, called the Ministers’ Alliance, Black helps people recovering from drug and alcohol abuse, counsels couples who are experiencing marital stress, and conducts workshops to connect recent high school grads with good jobs at local employers.

“The local and the church walk the same path,” Black said, “but the church simply delves more deeply into the human spirit. The union is about participating in people’s lives at the social and economic levels. Both have been a blessing to me and to our community.”