Phil Wilayto – Southern Changes

Battle of Newport News

Phil Wilayto — Fri, 01 Jun 1979 04:00:05 +0000

Battle of Newport News

By Phil Wilayto

Vol. 1, No. 9, 1979, pp. 9-13, 23

The Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company stretches along the northern bank of the James River like a long, narrow industrial city. For over two miles, this largest workplace in Virginia occupies the shore with its docks and piers, warehouses and worksheds, cranes and trucks and roads and parking lots, dominating the landscape and the minds and bodies of its 22,000 employees. The noise is constant, the hustle and bustle never ceases, as military and commercial ships are designed, constructed, and repaired by the largest privately-owned shipyard in the world.

But for 11 weeks this past winter and early spring, the yard was silent. Not a crane moved, not a ship was being built, as some 14,000 members of the United Steelworkers of America fought to win recognition for their union.

“We need a union,” electrician Ronnie Webs, Jr., said during the first days of the strike. “There’s a lot of safety hazards in that yard. The scaffolding we work on is dangerous. There’s no ventilation in the paint areas. We need a grievance procedure.”

“We’re fighting for more benefits,” said Kay Hale, welder and one of the three to four hundred female bluecollar workers in the yard. “We need a decent pension and a retirement plan. I’m a coal miner’s daughter and I believe in unions.”

“The discrimination’s real bad,” said John Devane, a Black crane hook-up man who is classified as a clerk, a lower-paying job title. Close to 40 percent of the yard’s work force is Black. “All the Blacks in my department work outside and all the Whites work inside. The company made one Black guy train a White guy to be his supervisor. I think the Steelworkers will make a difference.”

“It’s time for people to stand up for justice on the job,” added Charles Hawkins, a rigger for eight years. “We need to stand up in Virginia and do what’s necessary to improve ourselves and our community.”

And the Newport News shipyard needs a great deal of improvement. Founded over 50 years ago as a local family concern, it has grown into a giant behemoth that has left all consideration of health and safety far behind. The stories on the picketline tell it all: the broken bones, burnt

Page 10

hands, welding flashes, the sometimes fatal falls from unsafe scaffolding – not to mention the company violations of safety procedures in handling asbestos, violations that have resulted in scores of law-suits demanding disability compensation.

For 40 years, workers at the yard had been “represented” by a classic company union called the Penninsula Shipbuilders Association, the PSA. Essentially a rehash of the old governmentsponsored Employee Representation Plan councils, the PSA held no membership meetings, no election of shop stewards, had no safety clause in its “contract” and offered no real representation at all. And yet, backed by the might of the company and the influence of local politicians, the PSA had been able three times to turn back organizing challenges by bona-fide unions.

The sixties brought a number of changes to the yard, some of them good, some not so good. On the plus side, in 1965 a group of Black workers filed a civil rights suit against the company charging discrimination in hiring, firing, promotions, work assignments, and on-the-job discipline. The suit, which was opposed by the White members of the PSA’s governing board, resulted in promotions for over 3,000 Black employees and openings in the apprenticeship training program.

While the immediate gains were important, probably the suit’s greatest significance was the basis it laid for racial unity in the yard, a unity that showed itself a short to years later when the yard’s only pre-1979 strike erupted.

But while the workers’ potential strength was growing, so was the company’s. In 1969 the yard was bought out by the Tenneco Corporation, a multi-national giant based in Houston, Texas. The 19th largest company in America,with holdings all over the world, including South Africa, Tenneco’s empire is based in chemicals, agriculture, and machinery.

As with other U.S. corporations, Tenneco’s profits have been soaring, with 1978 being the single most profitable year in the company’s history. Undaunted by the hatred it has earned from farmworkers in the Southwest or by its recent convictions on charges of widespread corporate bribery, the Tenneco executives, directors, and stockbrokers have looked to the Newport News shipyard with its many defense-industry-related contracts as a stable source of profits. The largest, single, unorganized work force in the country, located in a “right-towork” Southern state with a brazonly pro-big business governor, the shipyard has been seen as an investment in high profits, low wages, and human degradation.

Tenneco only miscalculated in one area: the desire of these Southern workers to be organized.

In late 1976, a small group of shipyard workers, led by some of the Black leaders of the 1965 civil rights suit, asked the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) to start an organizing campaign at the yard.

In many ways, the choice was a good one. With 1,400,000 members and a $127 million strike fund, the USWA is the largest single union in the AFL-CIO, securely concentrated in basic steel, aluminum, copper, containers, steel fabricating – and shipbuilding. Its history of militant struggle runs deep, going back to the days when volunteer organizers from John L. Lewis’ United Mine Workers first began organizing in the steel, auto, and rubber industries, organizing campaigns that grew to become the historic battles of the 30s and resulted in the establishment of true industrial unions.

But in the years since the last great strikes of the late 40s, practically the entire leadership of the U.S. labor movement has grown soft and conservative, and it’s only been in the last few years that an awakening rank-and-file militancy has been able to break through an encrusted bureaucracy, flexing its muscles in struggles like the 197778 miners strike, the ’78 postal workers strike, and the ’78 Norfolk and Western railroad strike.

In Newport News, Virginia, the same economic and social pressures bear down on shipyard workers as affect every other group of workers in the country – daily worsening inflation, the lack of any long-term financial security, unsafe working conditions racial and sexual discrimination, and, above all, the lack of a sense of simple human dignity. By the late 70s, the shipyard workers were ready for a change. Eventually, some 14,000 workers signed up with Local 8888, making it the largest local in the Steelworkers union.

In December of 1978, in the largest single union local meeting in the history of the U.S. Labor movement, the members of Local 8888 voted almost unanimously to authorize a strike. On January 31, a year to the day after the original election victory, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. was shut down tight. Local 8888 was out on strike against Tenneco’s unfair labor practice of refusing to abide by the decision of the Labor Board.

The morning of January 31 was a cold, overcast day, the day of the winter’s first snowfall. As the hour of dawn approached outside the yard’s 50th St. gate on Washington Avenue, hundreds of picketing Steelworkers kept up a series of noisy, spirited chants:

“88 – Shut the Gate!”

“What time is it?”

STEELWORKER TIME!”

Across the street, an equal number of undecided workers massed on the sidewalk, lunch buckets in hand, sizing up the situation. Punch-in time was fast approaching and decision had to he made soon. All along

Page 11

the shipyard, outside the 17 gates of the yard, the scene was the same, as the legendary “individualistic Southern worker” weighed the alternatives – reliance on the cold paternalism of a corporate giant, or union solidarity.

And in between the two sides were the cops. Besides the company’s barbed wire, water cannons, and special SWAT-style guard team, the union was facing the armed might of the state: the shipyard area detachment of the Newport News police department had been beefed up: Virginia governor Dalton had promised to send in the State Police. The National Guard was on a six-hour alert. Everywhere you looked were riot helmets, the long four-foot batons, growling, snapping dogs, and police cars. And behind this physical power was the legal weight of the so-called “right-to-work” laws. Like 19 other states, most of them in the South, Virginia law forbids the closed union shop, allowing workers to receive the benefits of being represented by a union without having to join and support that union. Before the strike was to end, this “right-to-scab” law was to earn as much hatred as the state police, a group alternately known as the “Gestapo” and “Dalton’s Dogs”.

Outside the gates on that first morning of the strike, the two sides of workers squared off, the taunts and pleas were exchanged, and Tenneco held its breath until one side finally wavered, hesitated, and then broke altogether, as hundreds of cheering yard workers surged across Washington Street to join the picket lines.

The battle was on.

Those first days of the strike were glorious ones. The solidarity was complete, the pride in being a union member as-up-front and on display as the blue and white Steelworker caps all the strikers wore. Black and white, men and women, old and young, these sons and daughters of Virginian and Carolinian farming families were standing together against their own special giant.

“We are together,” a middle-aged Black man declared one evening outside the 50th St. gate. “The first time one of these state police touches one of our people, be they Black or White, that’s when you’re going to see trouble.”

“My parents could have prevented us having to go through this moment here today,” an older White man said quietly, “but they failed, as their parents failed before them, and so on back through the line. But today, for once, the White and the Black are out here together. It’s a new beginning, and it’s going to spread from Newport News down throughout the South. But first we have to win it here.”

“You see that yard down there?” a young Black worker asked. “You can’t hear nothing. Nothing’s moving. We did that. Now I know what power is – you can’t build ships with a pencil.”

The significance of the strike wasn’t lost on the High Priests of Big Business. From the local press to the national media like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the refrain was the same: “A test case for labor” “A challenge to Southern industry”: “a fight to unionize the South”.

And not only the mouth-pieces of the corporate empire-builders recognized this fact. From the shops and factories in the surrounding Tidewater area, right across the country and up into the lofty citadels of the labor bureaucracy, every union member in the country could see that this struggle was, as one of the local daily papers put it, “the biggest test of labor since World War II”. It was a challenge to open up the largely unorganized South, a challenge to the run-away shops from the North, a challenge to the “right-to-work” laws – and a challenge to the national offensive by Big Business against all of labor.

In the first weeks of the strike, the yard was 85 to 90 percent shut down, with most of the skilled trades departments solidly out. Although the local press had been predicting mass violence on the picket lines, the union’s leadership’s strategy was to avoid any open fighting with the scabs. However, this didn’t stop scores and eventually hundreds of individual, off-theline incidents of tire slashings, sugar-in-the-gas-tank, and anti-scab fisticuffs, as union members fought to protect their jobs and their union.

Nor did it stop the police from harassing the picket lines.

From the very first days of the strike, the arrests started piling up, most of them for alleged violations of the “right-to-work” laws. One striker was busted for pointing his finger at a scab. Another was taken in for throwing a cigarette near a scab’s car. Local 8888’s president Wayne Crosby was arrested for the simple act of walking past one of the gates with a picket sign.

The issue of police involvement in the strike was to become a major issue in the battle. The AFLCIO Central Labor Councils in the area passed resolutions demanding that local police departments forbid their members to moon-light as security guards for the yard. State AFLCIO president Julian Carper demanded that governor John Dalton pull his state police out of the area. And all along the picket lines, the strikers themselves got a concrete lesson in the role of the police in labor disputes.

“I grew up here in Newport News,” 8888 treasurer Kelly Coleman said, “I fought in Vietnam and had an uncle on the police force. I used to really respect the cops, but no more. After seeing the way they’ve been treating our people, I just don’t give a damn for them anymore.”

On February 24, the union made an attempt to broaden the base of support for the strike. The call went out to all Virginia labor unions to come to Newport News

Page 12

for a solidarity march.

And they came. They came from Tidewater, Richmond, Lynchburg, the Southside, Arlington, Roanoke, and Waynesboro. Plumbers, carpenters, mill workers, teachers, nurses, boilermakers, shipyard workers, factory hands, merchant marine sailors, telephone workers, retail store clerks, all came with signs identifying their unions and declaring their solidarity with the Newport News strikers. Some 5,000 trade unionists and their supporters stretched over 20 blocks along Washington Street, marching past the shipyard’s fortified gates, chanting, “88 – Shut the Gate!” Many of the marchers wore bright yellow buttons distributed by the Center for United Labor Action that read, “Stop Union-Busting in the South”. Walking along the line of march, the power of labor could he almost physically felt, as picketing Steelworkers reached out to shake hands with their comrades in the labor movement.

And then it was back to the picket lines. Slowly but inevitably the days and nights passed, in cold, in rain and snow, the occasional arrest, the taunts and jeers at the scabs. Standing around the fire barrels and Salamanders, holding cups of coffee and sandwiches brought by the union’s mobile canteen, the conversation moved easily between the banal and the sublime, the passing and the historic. Bull sessions about the company turned into debates on the value of keeping alive parasites like the Rockefellers and the Gettys. Comparisons, were made between the strike and the mass uprisings taking place in the streets of Iran. Consciousness of taking part in an historic strike led to talks of other strikes, of the 30s, of the great labor battles of 100 years ago. The strike became a social classroom and the strikers were wrenching their lessons directly from the concrete reality around them.

As the time for the Circuit Court decision on Tenneco’s legal objections approached, the union leadership made a new appeal for labor support. This time there was to he a National Day of Solidarity in which trade unionists from around the country would come to Newport News to declare their support for the Steelworker struggle. The date was set, Hampton Coliseum was rented, and the call went out.

But there were some problems. USWA president Lloyd McBride had just made a statement at a Miami press conference that the union might have made a “tactical blunder” in agreeing that the strike was part of a struggle to organize the South, that this might have helped galvanize Southern corporations against the Steelworkers and encouraged them to support Tenneco. The National Day of Solidarity came off, but it was held on a Friday afternoon, when most workers are still at work.

Half-way through the rally, the court decision came down. McBride announced the results from the coliseum stage: the trial judge had thrown out all but one of the company’s objections, all but the question of “chainvoting,” an obscure and antiquated means of rigging elections in which one person controls a succession of votes by having a single blank ballot snuck out of the voting booth, marking it, and passing it along to the next voter. That voter deposits the marked ballot in the booth and sneaks out another blank ballot to be marked by the leader, who passes it along to a third voter, and so on down the “chain”. It’s a throw-back to the days of illiterate Southern sharecroppers and foreign-language Northern immigrants, people who wouldn’t know how the ballots were being marked. In today’s literate work force, the scheme has no relevance, but this was the single issue that the courts sent back to the NLRB for review.

And so it went, as the days dragged on, as strike benefits ate into the union’s treasury, as the number of workers crossing the picket lines gradually increased 10 percent to IS percent; 20 percent to 25 percent. The skilled trades held solid, but the prospect of further court delays stretched out to the horizon like a lonesome, corporation-owned railroad track.

And Tenneco had help. Besides the la the cops and

Page 13

courts, the governor, and the media, the giant from Houston had other allies as well. The single largest customer of Newport News Shipyard is the U.S. Navy. Submarines, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, service vessels of every kind – new construction, rehaul jobs, in every way Newport News is essential to the Navy, and the Navy knows it.

Throughout the course of the strike, the Navy paid the shipyard a total of $302 million, in the form of cost overrun settlements, timing the payments to come at critical moments in the strike. And these outright grants to the company’s strike fund weren’t the only means of help. Navy officials sat down with the yard executives and drew up priority lists for military work, which contracts had to he taken care of right away and which could be put off for awhile. Then there were the continuing lease payments for yard property use, and the physical and psychological presence of Navy ships and personnel remaining in the yards during the course of the strike.

And yet nowhere was this federal support for Tenneco mentioned by the union. As the Navy, the Labor Board, and the weight of Carter’s “wage guidelines” decrees all lined up on the company’s side, the center of the company’s opposition shifted to Washington, but the center of the union’s resistance remained in Newport News.

The workers became restless, and the picketline strategies changed. With 30 to 40 percent of the yard’s work force now crossing the lines, Local 8888 began to beef up its presence at the gates. A Women’s Auxiliary was formed and wives, daughters, and friends of strikers began marching as a group. On April 2, some 300 Steelworkers gathered outside the North Yard’s 68th St. gate, standing five to six solid in rows on either side of the gate. As the procession of scabs approached, flying bottles joined the taunts and jeers that were thrown at the strikebreakers. The cops were obviously tense and apprehensive as the crowd turned its attention to them as well as to the scabs. But the day passed without serious incident.

Finally, the Steelworkers’ Pittsburgh headquarters made a decision: the strike would be “suspended” until the legal delays were over. Immediately, Tenneco made an announcement. Returning strikers would be made to sign a waiver of all their rights to their former jobs, to seniority, and to any possible claims for back pay from the company. They would also be made to report to the personnel office, sign in, and wait to be called back, an obvious attempt to weed out the most active union supporters.

The workers balked. On April 13, over 6,000 Steelworkers attended a mass meeting at the coliseum at which staff organizer Jack Hower attempted to explain the Pittsburgh decision, It didn’t go over.

“We couldn’t go back under the company’s conditions,” one rank-and-file activist said. “If we were going back, it had to be together, with our heads up high. There was a lot of dissension at the meeting until this one guy, a Black guy, got up and made a motion that the union send a telegram to Tenneco saying they had to drop the conditions or we wouldn’t go back. Everybody went for that idea and the motion passed unamimously.”

And so the telegram was sent. Half of Tenneco’s reply came the following Monday morning, April 16, when company officials announced there would be no change in policy. The other half of the answer came a few hours later.

About 10:00 a.m., over a hundred state and local police gathered on Washington Avenue, formed themselves into a phalanx block, and began sweeping down the street. They pushed and clubbed and beat picketers away from the gates, broke into restaurants and drove customers and owners alike into the streets, and chased individual strikers down alleys and across parking lots.

“It was incredible,” one man told this reporter. “It was like that show the Holocaust’, with the Gestapo

Page 13

rounding up the Jews. I never thought it could happen in America.”

The attack didn’t stop there. Twice the strikers tried to regroup and march back down to Washington Street, twice they were repulsed. Finally, the cops approached the union’s strike headquarters itself. Scores of strikers were milling around outside the building as the police came up, yelling at the Steelworkers to get off the street. Then, as the strikers were attempting to get inside their building, the cops attacked again.

Clubbing their way inside, the police broke one man’s arm, threw another through a window and then beat him as he lay in the broken glass, and beat up the 14-year-old daughter of a striker. After clearing out the downstairs lobby, the cops then tried to storm up the stairs to reach the union offices on the third floor, but they were met in the narrow staircase by a solid mass of Steelworkers. With chairs and fire extinguishers, the union members, Black and White, men and women, prevented the cops from taking their headquarters and eventually drove them from the building.

In all, over 60 Steelworkers were injured, some 40 of them requiring hospitalization, and over 70 were arrested, including organizer Jack Hower.

Even the news media could not ignore this one. The local papers carried bloody pictures of crowds of cops beating individual strikers. The TV crews filmed a young Black woman being taken out of strike headquarters on a stretcher. The NAACP announced it would handle court suits for the strikers charging police brutality. Local 8888 began a petition campaign demanding the removal of the Newport News Chief of Police.

Two days later, Tenneco backed down, saying that strikers would not have to sign a waiver of their rights in order to return to work. USWA District Director Bruce Thrasher refused to accept this reversal until it was communicated directly to the union, and a few days later the company reportedly contacted the local’s lawyers.

On April 22, a small crowd of strikers held a “last hurrah” at one of the shipyard gates, the picket lines were disbanded, and the historic strike of Local 8888 was “suspended.”

A few days later, the labor board judge made his decision: the company’s charge of chain-voting was “without merit,” the Steelworker election victory and certification were valid, and the labor board’s order to Tenneco to sit down and bargain was reaffirmed.

The company announced it would file “exceptions” to this finding to the full board in Washington. Meanwhile, the yard had already announced that it was suspending all strikers who had been arrested in connection with the strike, a total of close to 200 union members, including Local 8888’s president Wayne Crosby and treasurer Kelly Coleman. The union has since promised that it would fight all such suspensions and would continue to financially support the suspended workers.

Estimates for a full labor board decision on the company’s new “exceptions” vary from a few months on up, and union spokesperson Bill Edwards has said that a company decision to appeal the full Board’s decision to Richmond might well result in the strike being activated again.

Meanwhile, the union is continuing to function. A new lease has been signed for the strike headquarters, more volunteer organizers are being recruited, and steward training sessions are being organized.

“No, we didn’t win recognition for the union,” one rank-and-filer said as he prepared to head back to work,”and we didn’t win a contract. Not yet, anyway. But we showed the company that we would stand up for our rights, that we were ready to fight. We didn’t win what we went out for, but we aren’t broken, either. We’re regrouping, we’ll be back, and we’ll get our union.”

A union shop steward and newspaper reporter in the Tidewater, Virginia, area, Phil Wilayto is a member of the Center for United Labor Action which was active in building support for the Steelworker strike in Newport News. He is the author of the song “Organize the South,” used in the Steelworkers strike movie and played at the statewide and national solidarity rallies.

Fighting the Klan in the Military

Phil Wilayto — Tue, 01 Jan 1980 05:00:04 +0000

Fighting the Klan in the Military

By Phil Wilayto

Vol. 2, No. 4, 1980, pp. 8-11

An aircraft carrier is really a small city. When it’s out to sea with a full crew and a complement of marines, it’s 5,000 people, almost all of them young men, enclosed in a small place for months at a time. In case of trouble, mechanical or social, there’s no place to go.

On February 9, 1979, a small one-foot wooden cross, covered with some kind of flammable fabric, was found burning in the enlisted dining area of the carrier USS America. In late January, a group of White sailors attacked a group of Blacks on the USS Concord, a 400-man supply ship estimated to have 20 Klan members aboard. The Navy has admitted that it is investigating Klan activity on at least one other East Coast ship, this one based in Charleston, S.C.

And the trouble wasn’t only on ships. Within the past year there have been crosses burned outside Ft. Eustis in nearby Hampton, in rural Chesapeake, there have been incidents of spraypainting of the letters “KKK” on Black people’s property in Norfolk and in Virginia Beach.

It was in this atmosphere of increasing racist incidents in the Tidewater area of Virginia that Bill Wilkinson’, Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, announced that he would hold a “recruiting rally” aimed at the military in Virginia Beach on October 5.

Since the 50s, the KKK has been splitting into a number of different factions and organizations. Wilkinson’s group, one of the newer ones, has established for itself a reputation as being one of the most rabidly violent of the Klan groups. This was the gang that held an armed march from Selma to Montgomery last summer, that shot into a crowd of Black demonstrators in Decatur, Alabama earlier this year, and that a few months ago was accused of whipping a White woman said to have committed the crime of eating lunch with some of her Birmingham, Alabama Black co-workers.

When Wilkinson announced his plans for the October 5 rally, a number of organizations in the Tidewater area began to make plans for a counter-demonstration. Two weeks prior to the 5th, a coalition of labor, community, civil rights, gay, and political organizations was formed to sponsor the demonstration. The coalition, called “People United for Human Justice” (PUHJ), grew to include 20 organizations and individuals, including officials from the longshoremen’s ‘union, the Teamsters, Carpenters and Joiners, Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, the NAACP, Black Vanguard Resource Center; Unitarian-Universalist Gay Alliance, Palestine Solidarity Committee, Norfolk Coalition for Human Rights, and Workers World Party.

As both the Klan and the anti-racist coalition moved forward with their organizing, a number of other forces began to make themselves felt. One of these was the Navy.

Originally, Navy officials took the position that, while of course they deplored the racism of the Klan, they couldn’t legally forbid military personnel from attending the KKK rally. Several laws on the Navy books could apply. In particular a Defense Department directive suggests

Page 9

that military personnel can be banned from unlawful gatherings and where there is a likelihood of violence.

The coalition contended that this directive applied since the Klan rally did not have a permit, and in Virginia it is against the law to appear in public with a mask or hood. Also, the Klan has a history of violence and given the community’s feeling about the Klan recruiting there was a likelihood of violence. B’nai Brith filed a formal complaint with the Navy noting that membership in the Klan is not compatible with the Navy’s stated goal of equal opportunity and affirmative action.

Besides, the military has never felt hamstrung in outlawing participation in Black or Latin organizations, anti-war groups, or other political organizations. What the Navy’s position really did was to give the go-ahead to racist Whites to attend the rally and get “recruited”. This stand was to change later on in form but not in essence.

The local city governments took a similar approach of back-handed – and sometimes direct – support for the Klan. When the PUHJ spokesperson appeared at a session of the Virginia Beach city council and asked to make a statement, he was refused permission by unanimous vote of the council. Mayor Patrick Standing’s comment was that, “It’d be better to say nothing at all.” However, when the Klan finally announced the site for its rally, where should it be but an oceanfront vacant lot owned by the mayor’s family! The few Black council members in other Tidewater cities all went on record as opposing the Klan’s local organizing efforts, but their White counterparts all refused to follow suit, a development that the Imperial Wizard said he found “encouraging”.

The press, too, played a strong role in the development. Every throat-clearing and pronouncement by Wilkinson was treated with the seriousness and respect given a visiting dignitary, while coalition spokespersons were seldom quoted directly, if at all. And while the coalition members had never mentioned intentions of violence at their

Page 10

demonstration, it was that subject that seemed to most fascinate the city’s editors and TV news managers, so that by the time October 5 arrived an atmosphere of real tension had developed.

It was partially this tension that gave the Navy, which was under mounting local pressure to change its position on the Klan rally, an excuse to put the rally off-limits to military personnel. However, it also put the anti-Klan demonstrations off-limits. The Navy went even further and announced it would not have investigative agents at the KKK rally while giving the impression that investigative agents would be at the anti-Klan rally. Coalition members charged that the Navy’s new position was in fact trying to discourage anti-Klan activities while assuring racists that they would not be detected if they did go to the Klan rally. Even so, a number of sailors from the surrounding bases did turn out to protest against the Klan.

Wilkinson had set his rally for 7:30 in the evening next to the Virginia Beach Ramada Inn. At 5:30 pm, PUHJ set up a spirited picket line outside the Virginia Beach Civic Center, about a mile down the road. Under the watchful eyes of about 20 riot-equipped state police, the demonstrators carried their banners and signs and chanted, “Ku Klux Klan, Scum of the Land” and “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, the KKK has got to go”. The numbers gradually grew with new arrivals until well over a hundred people – Black, White, gay, civilian, military, students, and union members were all declaring their opposition to racism and racists.

About dusk, the group gathered for a rally, hearing representatives from the NAACP, Longshoremen, the Black Vanguard Resource Center, the Unitarian-Universalist Gay Alliance, and Workers World Party.

At 7:00 pm the demonstrators moved out to the Klan rally. CB reports from coalition members stationed at the rally site indicated the Klan was preparing to assemble and that some 200 state and local police had gathered around the rally site. Another group of about 40 anti-Klan demonstrators had also arrived and had set up a picket line across the street.

The police had previously announced that they would forbid anything but a small picket line. But the march proceeded anyway, behind the lead PUHJ banner reading “Organize to Defeat the

Page 11

Klan”, and the chants resounded off the walls of the resort motels, bars, and cafes.

By the time the marchers reached the Ramada Inn, their numbers had grown to over 200, far more than the dozen or so robed racists and the 40 or so sympathizers they had attracted. The police, however, were another factor. Initially positioned between the Klan rally and the demonstrators, they soon removed themselves to a phalanx position behind the coalition, sandwiching the picket line in between themselves and the screaming, taunting racists. If a fight had broken out – and there was more than one demonstrator who would gladly have thrown the sheeted bigots into the sea – the picket line would have been caught between two groups that had far more in common with each other than with the picketers.

Even so, the coalition members maintained the unity of the line and the volume of their chants until Wilkinson was under the protection of the police.

But as the line proceeded back down the march route toward the Civic Center, it soon became obvious that the night was not yet over. A mob of 40 to 50 White youth tagged along the side of the marchers, screaming racist insults and taunting the picketers. The police, meanwhile, were walking along behind the racists, trying to push them up into the line of march. Again, their actions could have easily provoked a fight and an attack on the picket line.

The line, however, never broke. Coalition members assigned to security formed a defense line along the outside of the marchers, turning back the attempts of the racists to split up the picketers. Finally, about a block from the end of the march, the demonstrators held a final rally, pledging to “continue to organize and build our movement till we can raise an army to wipe out racism and racists like the Klan once and for all, forever!”

Wilkinson left the area soon afterward, and while there has been no visible Klan organizing in Tidewater since then, the atmosphere of racist hatred which he tried to encourage bore some bitter fruit. A few days after the Klan rally, there was a cross-burning in a Virginia Beach trailor park. A week later, a 4 5-year-old Black youth was shot in the face with a shotgun by a group of White teenagers who had been taunting him with racial insults. In mid-November, two White Tidewater men were charged with shooting into a carload of Black students from Chowan College in North Carolina. And recently the local “patriots” have been busy trying to whip up a chauvinist hysteria against Iranians, an hysteria that bears a striking resemblence to the screaming mob at the October 5 Klan rally.

Nica Gobs, a spokesperson for the Workers World Party one of the organizations that played a leading role in building the local anti-Klan demonstration, offered her assessment: “The main thing I think we all learned was that you can’t rely on the government to stop the Klan. The City of Virginia Beach could have stopped the Klan rally, since it required a city permit and one was never issued. The mayor could have refused to allow the Klan to use his family’s property. The White city councilmen in the area could have condemned the rally. The Navy could have banned Klan recruitment and organizing in its ranks. And the cops could have spent their time harassing the racists instead of the anti-racists. But none of that was done. Instead, they all allowed and even encouraged the Klan to be public, visible, and active, and as a result the racist attacks and violence in the area have increased.

“That’s why from the beginning we encouraged the development of a broad-based coalition of labor and community groups to oppose the Klan. We have to rely on ourselves, on poor and working people, because we’re the ones with a real stake in destroying the cancer of racism.”

Phil Wilayto is a shop steward and writer in the Tidewater area.