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Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.: Retirees reflect on civil rights movement
Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., retiree Roberta Zadow reminisces about her civil rights movement activism. "It was a great feeling doing something important and good...making a difference."In January we celebrate the birthday of civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King championed the rights of workers and saw their unions as crucial in the fight for a better world.
Speaking to the 1961 AFL-CIO Convention about the civil rights movement, King said, “Our needs are identical with labor’s needs: Decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community.”
Labor and civil rights movements must work hand-in-hand
He believed that the labor and civil rights movements needed to work hand-in-hand because they needed each other, that minorities needed the organized strength of labor unions to gain equal rights, and that equality was essential for the labor movement to be alive and vital. In 1968, King was killed in Memphis when he went to support and try to secure rights for striking sanitation workers.California teachers were in the forefront of the struggle for racial equality. The state’s first civil rights law, passed early in the sixties, was a measure to create a commission within the State Department of Education to deal with discrimination in teacher hiring. The California Federation of Teachers (CFT) initiated this measure while Maurice Englander, English teacher at Lowell High School was president of the CFT.
1968 strike changed face of San Francisco’s teaching ranks forever
Marjorie Stern was secretary of the San Francisco Federation of Teachers (SFFT) and on the union’s bargaining team in 1968 when a major demand for which teachers struck was that the district end employment discrimination, adding people of color to the teaching ranks. “Administration said they didn’t know where to find black teachers,” Stern recalls. “We suggested they go out of the city…to Mississippi and Georgia. They did and minorities were hired as a result of this recruitment. The face of San Francisco’s teaching ranks changed forever because of our strike. Class size went down and teacher diversity increased because of what we fought for.”An African-American in the district from 1959-1993, Dorothy Lathan recalls how difficult it was for blacks to get teaching jobs in the city. She says that at first, many blacks could only get hired as long-term substitutes. “When I was interviewed, I was put through drills and a much more rigorous process that my white counterparts hadn’t had to go through.”
Anti-discrimination protests led to minority hiring by businesses
In the early sixties, civil rights activists protested discrimination throughout the Bay Area and picketed businesses that refused to hire black employees. Lathan, an elementary teacher at the time, demonstrated for increased minority hiring by car dealers on San Francisco’s Auto Row and at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel. She recalls demonstrating at Auto Row every day after school.“NAACP leader Thomas Burbridge, who was in charge of the picketing couldn’t get off work until 5:30,” she explains. “So since I got out of school at 3:00, he put me in charge of bringing picket signs and holding the fort until he could get there.” At the Sheraton Palace, she says, “I was walking with my three kids, one was in a stroller, the others seven and ten years old.”
The police arrested protesters at the Sheraton-Palace and Auto Row. But finally a deal was reached and the companies agreed to hire more minorities. “People thought I was crazy,” says Lathan, “risking my job…I’d be on the TV news. I made no attempt to hide who I was and that I was working with the NAACP and the union.
“When you are really committed to a principle, you don’t let the fear of the moment interfere with the higher goal. It was more important to than to protect my job,” asserts Lathan. “I felt empowered as I was a part of a national movement.”
Many started their teaching careers in San Francisco after becoming active in the civil rights movement. While a student at San Francisco State, Roberta Zadow who started working for the district in 1965, went to Mississippi to register voters in the summer of ’64. She recalls driving her car which had California license plates and being “chased by rednecks into a ditch. It was pretty scary,” she says. “But to be young and involved in activities with lots of people…It was a great feeling of doing something important and good... It was about making a difference.”
When you are really committed to a principle, you don't let the fear of themoment interfere with the higher goal. –Dorothy LathanPicketing and sit-ins marked the sixties
When the 1960 sit-ins at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina ignited national attention, Zadow picketed outside San Francisco’s Woolworth’s on Market and Powell. “One day there must have been about a 100 of us. I was among 20 who the police carted away in a paddy wagon. Luckily, they just brought us to the station and let us go without booking us.”In the sixties, before becoming a union activist, Joan Marie Shelley who started teaching at Lincoln High in 1955 and became SFFT president in 1984, was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) campaigns to end housing discrimination in San Francisco. She recalls how she and Bertram Brauer, a French teacher at Lowell, surveyed apartment vacancies.
They would follow a black couple who had asked about apartments, but had been told they were no longer available. Pretending to be a married white couple, they would ask if the same apartments were available. According to Shelley, they usually were.
Before joining the district in 1969, Hene Kelly, while a student at the University of Chicago helped lead demonstrations to end the university’s segregated housing policy. She participated in the 1963 March on Washington where King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. In 1965, when she was a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, she fought against segregation of city schools.
The superintendent of schools had refused to integrate Chicago’s campuses, explains Kelly. Nonetheless, his contract was renewed. The black community was enraged and demonstrations erupted.According to Kelly, Chicago schoolteacher, Al Raby, founded the Teachers for Quality Education and led the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO). He invited King to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement. King accepted, came to Chicago for a summer, and helped organize demonstrations throughout the city.
Teachers were valuable role models in the civil rights movement
Kelly, who was the only white teacher at an all black school, Englewood High, recounts a conversation she had with King at a meeting of the CCCO. She told him that she wanted to leave teaching and work for the civil rights movement. “But,” Kelly says, “King said I should stay right where I was because it was extremely valuable to be a role model...to show the kids that a white person could care about them, their history, their culture and the civil rights movement.”Asked about the lessons from the civil rights movement that teachers today should imart to their students, Kelly says, “The main lessons are expressed in the old union song, “Pass It On!”
“ Freedom doesn’t come like a bird on the wing…Freedom…is a hard won thing…You’ve got to …fight for it…and every generation’s got to win it again. Pass it on to your children, pass it on!”
