African-American longshore leader Len Greer helped build the ILWU’s culture of solidarity
The ILWU was founded in 1937, but its roots lie in the West Coast waterfront strike of 1934. That strike forever changed labor relations on the docks and planted the seeds of a union vigorously opposed to the divide-and-conquer tactics
commonly wielded by employers. The San Francisco Bay Area was the heart of the strike in no small part because the region’s longshore workers built a strong culture of solidarity across racial lines.
Len Greer (1883-1975) of Bay Area Local 10 played a crucial part in those efforts. In the years that followed, Greer helped make the ILWU a persistent opponent of racial discrimination and a militant champion of all working people. His life shows how the bold actions and daring visions of ILWU members gave meaning to the union’s powerful slogan: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
Len Greer was born in Monroe County, Georgia in 1883. Less than one generation removed from the abolition of slavery, he grew up at a time when legal segregation and racist violence were taking hold across the South. Like many African Americans resisting these conditions, Greer chose to leave his childhood home in search of a better future. He began longshoring at the age of 18, finding work on the waterfronts of Jacksonville, New Orleans, and Galveston. But it was in the timber industry that Greer first encountered a union whose commitment to solidarity would later influence the ILWU.
In 1910, Greer moved with his wife and daughter to rural East Texas to work for an outfit logging pine trees. There, he joined the newly formed Brotherhood of
Timber Workers (BTW). The BTW was a trailblazer of racial integration, gender equality, and industrial organizing within the labor movement, a record all the more impressive given the union’s location in the Deep South at the height of the Jim Crow era. The BTW found a kindred spirit in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which likewise rejected racial divisions and craft distinctions. It was only natural, then, that two unions decided to merge.
Two decades later, the IWW’s legacy of steadfast solidarity would inspire the ILWU, and the IWW mantra, “An injury to one is an injury to all,” would eventually become its own. After several years in the forests and docks of Texas and a short stint in the military during World War I, Greer hit the road again. He arrived in San Francisco in 1919 just as a massive waterfront strike was coming to an end. Greer’s prior experience in a militant, multiracial union made the strike’s outcome unsettling.
There are few photos of Len Greer. This is a rare image of him (right) with ILWU Vice President Bill Chester that was published in the Dispatcher.
Shipping companies used the walkout as a pretext to crush the Riggers and Stevedores Union (R&S), which had been active on the San Francisco docks since the 1850s. One of their union-busting tactics was the recruitment of African American strikebreakers. The tactic was only possible because the R&S, like most San Francisco unions at the time, had limited its membership to white men. Len Greer absorbed this lesson in the importance of solidarity and would later apply it as an organizer in the 1934 waterfront strike.
But in the meantime, he needed work, and among the few jobs available to Black men in San Francisco was moving cargo in a segregated longshore gang. The work was brutal and degrading. Stevedore bosses frequently pitted Black and white waterfront gangs against each other, demanded bribes in exchange for
employment, and often refused to hire African Americans altogether. Out of roughly 4,000 dockworkers employed in San Francisco before 1934, the number of Black men never exceeded several dozen. As Greer recalled of his early years longshoring in the city, “We learned then—as the saying goes, it was welded into us—that it was the natural way of American life that we were last hired and first fired. They just took us when they really had to use us.”
Earning poverty wages on the San Francisco waterfront, Greer learned firsthand how the economic status quo tended to chew up and spit out people like him. After the economy crashed in 1929, Greer joined forces with other working people to demand something better. The Unemployed Councils (UC) offered a vehicle for
advancing economic justice. Founded in 1930 by the Communist Party, whose dedication to racial equality, civil rights, and multiracial leadership attracted many African Americans during the Great Depression, the UC brought Greer once again into a diverse world of working-class struggle. As a member, he participated in acts of civil disobedience such as returning furniture into the home of a recently evicted family.
Greer’s organizing background proved vital when Bay Area dockworkers walked off the job in 1934. The strike quickly spread to seaports up and down the West Coast, making it difficult for shippers to reroute their cargo to avoid the picket. San Francisco remained the strike’s center, with Local 38-79 of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)—the predecessor of ILWU Local 10—taking the lead. Facing enormous losses of revenue, employers resorted to their old playbook of hiring African American strikebreakers. But this time, the tactic largely failed. Harry Bridges, the future founding president of the ILWU, who was then a leader in ILA Local 38-79, encountered little pushback when he spoke at Black churches about honoring the picket line and joining the union. He was not the only one doing this outreach. Though small in number, Black dockworkers like Len Greer played a crucial role in earning support for the strike among African Americans. “I remember the time of the strike,” recalled Greer, “I walked the streets day and night, trying to convince the Negro people: this is the time to join the union in order to make a better future for yourself.” Greer’s efforts paid off. Despite suffering violent repression—an experience still commemorated in the ILWU’s annual “Bloody Thursday” work stoppage—the strikers claimed victory. Their win paved the way for a growing number of African American members in the union.
None of the strike’s victories proved more essential to the future success of the ILWU than securing the right to a union-controlled hiring hall. In promoting the fair distribution of waterfront work, the newly won hiring hall became a cornerstone of the union’s culture of solidarity and rank-and-file democracy. Len Greer took a keen interest in the hiring process. He recognized its potential to shift workers of color from the margins to the center of waterfront labor.
The first step in that direction was opening up the union’s membership to people previously excluded from its ranks. Here too, Greer played a critical role. In 1935, he became the first African American on the Bay Area Local’s investigating committee, giving him a say in vetting new applicants for membership in the union. The following year, he made history again as one of two African Americans elected to the local’s executive board. As an officer, Greer helped make sure that the union delivered expanding job opportunities for working-class communities of color. The result was a membership that better reflected the region’s population.
Greer’s onboarding of Karl Yoneda, the union’s first Asian-American member, illustrates his outside-the-box approach to diversifying the rank and file. In 1936, Greer introduced Yoneda to the other members of the investigating committee, all of whom were white. In his presentation, Greer emphasized Yoneda’s contribution to the 1934 strike, highlighting his role in persuading Japanese sailors to not take up struck work. But the committee members appeared unconvinced, so Greer tried a different tack. According to Yoneda, Greer told the committee that since “our union has a tradition of issuing a work permit or book to the son of a member, I adopt Karl right here and now as my son!” The ploy worked, and the next day Yoneda reported to the hiring hall for his permit.
Greer’s friendship with Yoneda stemmed from their connection to Communist-aligned groups. Such political activity provoked endless government harassment during the anti-Communist hysteria that gripped the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. In this climate, Greer became a target of surveillance. Between 1940 and his death in 1975, the Federal Bureau of Investigation secretly tracked his movements and labeled him a threat to “domestic security.” Even more damaging was the Coast Guard’s decision in the early 1950s to deny Greer—along with hundreds of other ILWU members suspected of left-wing sympathies—the clearance to work piers hosting military cargo. Greer denounced the so-called “Port Security Program” for threatening his livelihood and blasted the screening process as “another form of discrimination.” For Greer and other union members opposed to the program, it was no accident that African Americans made up the vast majority of workers rejected by the Coast Guard. The fight to end waterfront screening ultimately succeeded. In the process, the ILWU’s foundational commitment to interracial unity gained new strength.
Greer’s contributions to the union did not stop even after retirement. He remained active in ILWU pensioner organizing, and in the early 1950s he traveled as a delegate to Washington, D.C. to advocate for the union’s groundbreaking pension plan. Greer recalled encountering frequent discrimination during the trip “in the capital of the country that claims to be the greatest democracy in the world.” When he was barred from lodging in the same hotels as the white members of the delegation, ILWU president Harry Bridges decided to stay with Greer in his lesser accommodations. The act of solidarity left an impression, prompting Greer to “reflect upon the difference between the leadership of our union and some others in the country.” In Greer’s eyes, the ILWU’s culture of solidarity set the union apart.
Though his name is not nearly as known as Harry Bridges’, Len Greer played an important role in building the union’s culture. His legacy endures in the steadfast commitment of ILWU members to fighting injustice wherever it appears.
-Andrew Klein