West Coast longshoremen will shut down shipping ports as part of a campaign to halt the execution of a black man convicted of killing a white police officer. As part of a national demonstration calling for a new trial for Philadelphia death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, longshoremen Saturday will close ports from Bellingham, Wash., to San Diego.
Freedom for Abu-Jamal, a black activist and radio personality found guilty of the 1981 shooting death of 25-year-old Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, has become a rallying cry for his supporters. Celebrities like Ed Asner and Danny Glover have lent their support. Abu-Jamal’s advocates say he was framed and convicted without a fair trial, and his case has garnered international attention.
Called by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose membership includes 10,000 longshoremen, the work stoppage will put the more than $232.8 billion West Coast shipping industry on hold for eight hours. “We have a long history of taking stands for social justice,” said Jack Heyman, executive board member of the ILWU, Local 10 in San Francisco. “They go beyond simple economic demands because we see the struggle of labor against business as being broader than a union contract.”
The ILWU’s role in social-political causes dates as far back as the late 1930s, just before the United States entered World War II, when dock workers refused to unload scrap metal from Japanese ships. In 1981, the union boycotted coffee ships from El Salvador when reports emerged that the Salvadoran military dictatorship was busting unions, imprisoning and sometimes killing union members. And in 1984, to protest apartheid, longshoremen refused to unload cargo from South African ships that docked in San Francisco.
Yet the April 24 action will be a first. Never before has the union organized a West Coast work stoppage for a non-strike-related social cause. Joey Parr, spokeswoman for the Pacific Maritime Association, said the protest was organized about a month ago, giving shipping companies time to plan ahead. Closing the ports, she said, shouldn’t have a devastating effect on shipping. “There may be a couple of ships waiting out there,” Parr said. “But the effect remains to be seen.”
About 219 million tons of cargo pass through West Coast ports annually. Los Angeles and Long Beach handle about 50 percent of it; Oakland and San Francisco receive about 9 percent. “This is not a new position for the ILWU,” said Brenda Cochrane, professor of labor studies at San Francisco State University. “I don’t think they see this as not being union related. They go back to the union tradition of not just working on the problems in the workplace but recognizing that if their members are dealing with issues outside of the workplace, it has an impact on how they do their jobs.”
Cochrane explained that particularly in San Francisco, under the leadership of the late Harry Bridges, ILWU was at the forefront of social-justice issues. “Harry Bridges’ philosophy was inclusive in terms of people of color,” Cochrane said. “Way before anyone was talking about affirmative action, he was strongly supporting giving jobs to African Americans and organizing Asian workers of color in Hawaii. Equity and all these issues surrounding the way our society has dealt with people of color is an integral part of the ILWU.”
Steve Stallone, communications director for the ILWU, called the Abu-Jamal case a “miscarriage of justice, of which this union is familiar.” Referring to Bridges, who fought the U.S. government when it tried to brand him a communist and deport him, Stallone said, “We’re sensitive to the fact that courts don’t always give social justice, and sometimes need a social movement to deal with these issues.”
A jury of 10 whites and two blacks convicted Abu-Jamal of first-degree murder. He was ordered to die by lethal injection. In October, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied Abu-Jamal’s appeal for another trial.
The Pacific seaboard shutdown is part of a bicoastal demonstration endorsed by Amnesty International, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberties Union, Glide Memorial United Methodist Church and Grace Cathedral. April 24 marks not only Abu-Jamal’s birthday but also the day in 1996 when the president signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which limits the appeals process for death sentences. There will be demonstrations that day in Philadelphia and San Francisco.
In The City, protesters will assemble in Dolores Park at 10:30 a.m. and march through the Western Addition to City Hall for a rally at 1:30 p.m. Don Harman, a rally organizer for the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, expects between 15,000 and 20,000 participants. “It’ll be the largest demonstration we’ve had to date in San Francisco,” Harman said. “We need to make this a public case in the eyes of the American public and world public. If this case is only decided in the courts and not in the court of public opinion, the odds are not good.”
The issue clearly has divided passions in Philadelphia, where union support is split between the Abu-Jamal camp and police. Elsewhere, police officials in Greensboro, N.C., were outraged when the local Human Relations Commission passed a resolution supporting a new trial for Abu-Jamal. In San Francisco, the Police Officers Association declined comment. Yet Abu-Jamal’s pool of supporters remains united.
“People are getting fed up with the unfairness of the criminal-justice system,” the ILWU’s Heyman said. “There’s beginning to be an awakening of working people in this country that enough is enough . . . that the economic situation in this country has become so oppressive for so many people with the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. There’s beginning to be a spirit of protest developing again in the U.S., and Mumia Abu-Jamal has become a symbol of that.”
