Labor Archives of Washington: Home

The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America (AMC) was a labor union that represented meatpackers and butchers in Chicago. The group was chartered by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1897 by AFL president Samuel Gompers. The AMC is most famous for a strike it held in 1904 where 18,000 workers left their posts on July 12 out of a demand for higher wages. The strike escalated when union members assaulted replacement cattle workers. Police were called to protect the cattle workers, whose involvement spurred a riot involving 4,000 union members. The union members were eventually defeated and signed a contract with meatpacking company president J. Ogden Armour on September 6, 1904. These riots are referenced in Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle. The AMC eventually merged with other unions, such as the International Fur and Leather Workers Union, the National Agriculture Workers Union, and the Packinghouse Workers of America. The group exists now as the United Food and Commerical Workers (UFCW) after a merger with the AMCBW in 1979.

Brown and Bigelow, Co. was established in 1896 by Herbert Bigelow and Hiram Brown. The company earned its fortune selling calenders, most famously of pin-up girls and prints by American painters such as Norman Rockwell and Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. In 1927, Brown and Bigelow began printing playing cards and eventually bought the rights to the Hoyle brand.

Founded in 1992, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), AFL-CIO, is the first and only national organization of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers, primarily union members, and allies advancing worker, immigrant and civil rights. Since its founding, APALA has played an advocacy role around workplace issues of the 660,000 AAPI union members, serving as the bridge between the broader labor movement and the AAPI community. A constituency organization of the the AFL-CIO, APALA has more than 20 chapters and pre-chapters and a national office in Washington, D.C.

Among its activities, APALA promotes political education and voter registration programs among AAPIs, and runs trainings to help empower and recruit AAPIs into leadership roles within the labor movement and APA community. APALA seeks to defend and advocate for the civil and human rights of AAPIs, immigrants, and all people of color, and continues to create ties with international labor organizations, especially in the Asia-Pacific Rim.
less...
Organizational records and ephemera of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial affiliate organization the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance, Seattle Chapter. The collection includes materials relating to the founding and operation of APALA Seattle, as well as T-Shirts, award plaques, posters, and ephemera. Some national level APALA materials are included, and often list local chapter updates and activity reports, including the Seattle chapter. A major activity of the Seattle chapter is its annual fundraising banquet. The Seattle chapter has origins in the Asian American/Pacific Islander labor activist communities of Seattle that predate the founding of the national APALA in 1992.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers was founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 1890, when a group of electrical workers got together and chartered the National Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 5221 under the leadership of its first president, Henry Miller. Local 217 of Seattle, Washington was established in 1901 and ordered defunct in 1908. For six years, dissenting forces within the union caused a split, with each side electing its own officers. The AFL ultimately deemed the McNulty-Collins faction as the legitimate brotherhood. In 1914, the IBEW Local 46 was formed in Seattle with a membership of 250 men of various occupations: inside wiremen, marine wiremen, radio workers and telephone operators that worked in shipyards, industrial areas, uptown Seattle and its vicinity. Over the years the departments of the IBEW grew to include Sound and Communication, Residential, Marine, HVAC, Electronics, Motor Shop, Neon Sign and Maintenance. Current Local 46 jurisdiction includes King, Kitsap, Jefferson and Clallam Counties. Today, Local 46 is composed of over 3,500 members in a variety of craft units.

Historical Note

The first longshore union in Seattle was founded on June 12, 1886 as the Stevedores, Longshoremen and Riggers Union. In 1900, Seattle longshore workers formed the Seattle Longshoremen Mutual Benefit Association which was affiliated with the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and the American Federation of Labor. This local became ILA, Local 163. In 1903, James Madsen organized another union representing Seattle longshoremen, Seattle International Longshoremen, Marine and Transport Workers' Association, Local 486. This union failed to gain substantial members, and veteran longshoremen created another union representing Seattle longshoremen, the ILMTA Local 552. The WCLU and the AFL tried to amalgamate these two unions but the conflict between the parties continued. Between 1904 and 1907, Seattle longshore workers were split into these two competing unions, ILA Local 552 and Local 1 of the Pacific Coast Federation of Longshoremen of the Pacific. The two groups reunited in 1909 as local 38-12 of the ILA. In 1915, the West Coast Employers’ Association established the Federation of Waterfront Employers’ Unions to drive workers away from the ILA. During this time, the ILA also came into competition with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and worked to drive out radicalism from its ranks.

In 1916, members of the ILA went on strike to demand high wages and an end to the open shop system. This was the first coast-wide longshore strike on the West Coast, as thousands of longshore workers from Bellingham to San Diego walked off the job. A tentative agreement was reached that was approved by ILA locals in California but rejected by Seattle and Tacoma. Despite not having coast-wide agreement, longshore workers in San Francisco returned to work, causing the strike to crumble. The 1916 strike became a major defeat for the ILA, as the union lost control of hiring halls and waterfront employers began a campaign to drive out the union’s remaining presence.

In the aftermath of the 1916 strike, Waterfront Employers Association (WEA) under the leadership of Frank Foisie created their own hiring halls, known as “fink halls,” that discriminated against union members and Black workers. The use of Black workers as scabs during the 1916 strike, who were subsequently fired, led ILA 38-12 to become the first integrated longshore local on the Pacific coast. During this time, the IWW grew in popularity on the waterfront and gradually took control of the ILA. The shortage of workers on the waterfront caused by World War I allowed the ILA to retake control of the hiring hall. After the war, workers in local 38-12 took part in the 1919 Seattle General Strike and refused to load weapons to be sent to the Russian White Army against the Bolsheviks. The failure of the Seattle General Strike, however, caused the IWW to decline amidst increased repression, and the WEA was able to reinstitute fink halls after another failed strike in Seattle in 1920. The ILA’s presence on the waterfront entered a decade-long decline, so that by 1929 there were only 24 members left in local 38-12.

As the ILA declined in the 1920’s, the US Communist Party (CPUSA) began an intervention into waterfront labor organizing. CPUSA originally sought to unite all waterfront workers into a “red union,” the Maritime Workers Industrial Union (MWIU) but pivoted in 1933 towards a strategy of rebuilding the ILA. CPUSA and former MWIU members, including Harry Bridges, joined the ILA and formed the Albion Hall Group in San Francisco whose mouthpiece, the Waterfront Worker , called for and publicized labor actions.

Pressure from the Albion Hall Group caused conservative ILA leadership to adopt bolder demands, including control over hiring halls, higher wages, and coast-wide bargaining. After being rejected by employers, ILA members on the West Coast voted to strike in February 1934. The strike was delayed following the creation of a government mediation board by Franklin Roosevelt, but the strike commenced on May 9, 1934. In Seattle, longshore workers were able to win the support of other unions on the waterfront, including the Teamsters, in spite of the opposition from then local 566 president Dave Beck. Violence broke out between striking workers and scabs and their police escorts, who attempted to open the ports by force. In San Francisco, the murder of two longshore workers by police during an attempt to open the port by force became known as “Bloody Thursday.” The strike came to an end after both employers and the ILA agreed to allow government arbitration in contract negotiations. Roosevelt’s mediation board’s main concession gave the union control of hiring halls, ending the fink hall system. Longshore workers returned to work on July 31.

Following the 1934 strike, longshore locals on the west coast became the Pacific Coast District of the ILA and frequently clashed with conservative ILA leadership on the East Coast. Under the leadership of Harry Bridges, who had been elected president of the Pacific Coast District in 1936, the Pacific Coast District broke with the ILA and craft unionist American Federation of Labor (AFL) and became the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in 1937. The new ILWU quickly affiliated with the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO).

Under Bridges’ leadership, the ILWU went on strike again in 1948 following the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act and employer attempts to reestablish the fink hall system. Bridges also negotiated the Mechanization and Modernization Agreement of 1960 that created three classes of longshore workers amidst lowering employment rates due to new technologies at ports. Following Nixon’s announcement of wage freezes, the ILWU went on strike again in 1971, shutting down all 56 West Coast ports from Canada to San Diego for 130 days, the longest strike in the union’s history. This strike was successful in winning higher wages and a lower retirement age.

A major blow to Local 19 came in 1982 when Sea-Land decided not to renew its contract in Seattle and instead signed a contract with the Port of Tacoma. This has been a continued trend, with commerce at the Port of Seattle continuing to decline, while the Port of Tacoma has experienced increased commercial development.

Sources: ILWU Local 19 website https://www.ilwu19.com/history/100years.htm?

Seattle Waterfront Workers History Project https://depts.washington.edu/dock/timeline.shtml

Content Description

This collection contains membership meeting minutes, roll book, correspondence, notes, a scrapbook from 1948 Longshore Strike, materials from Waterfront Employer Association president Frank Foisie, records from the International Longshore Benevolent Association, and a photograph of the casket of Gordon J. Kelly Longshoremen’s Association of Vancouver (ILA Local 38-52).

Streetcar strike scrapbooks, 1917.
Seattle and Tacoma streetcar employees of the Puget Sound Traction, Light and Power Company went out on strike on July 16, 1917. The strike was in protest of the firing of seven Tacoma streetcar workers who were involved with union activities. Striking employees demanded recognition of their union and better working conditions, including an eight-hour working day, the elimination of swing runs and a pay increase. On several occasions, the Puget Sound Traction, Light and Power Company tried to continue running streetcars throughout the strike, however their attempts were not successful. The company brought in drivers from the East, but many of these new drivers, seeing the conditions, decided to also join the strike. Additionally, public support lay behind the streetcar employees; an estimated 80 to 90 percent of citizens supported this strike. Eventually many of the issues between the two parties were solved through an arbitration board. The Puget Sound Traction, Light and Power Company recognized the right of its employees to affiliate with the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees around October 1, 1917.
The streetcar strike scrapbooks contain full editions of three Seattle newspapers, The Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Star, and The Seattle Daily Times from July and August of 1917. The start date of all of the newspapers is July 16, 1917, so it is assumed that they were collected to document the history of the Seattle streetcar strike. In each of these newspapers there are various articles about and photographs of the 1917 strike. Additionally, advertisements created by The Puget Sound Traction, Light and Power Company, which try to portray the striking streetcar employees in a negative light can also be found. Many of these articles, pictures, and advertisements can also be found in the Arthur L. Kempster scrapbooks.

Union records in this collection consist primarily of meeting minutes, membership records, and financial records. The membership records are mainly in the form of dues ledgers, which record members' initiation date and dues payments as well as suspension and reinstatement dates and transfers between local unions. In some cases these ledgers record workers' home addresses and employers.

These records are organized in record subgroups corresponding to the local organization that created them.

Local 8 records in this collection have some overlap with the records of the local unions which merged to form it. Local 8 records include minutes (1974-1979), membership records (1971-1991), financial records (1978-1986), as well as constitutions and bylaws of related local unions (1927-1984).

Records from Seattle-area local unions include those from Cooks and Assistants, Local 33 (membership records, 1908-1977); Waitresses, Local 240 (membership records, 1900-1960; financial records, 1963-1970); Dining Room Employees, Local 3 - a merger of the Waiters Local 239 and Waitresses, Local 240 (membership records, 1950-1970); Bartenders Union, Local 487 (meeting minutes, 1942-1971; membership records, 1918-1967; financial records, 1919-1934); and Hotel, Motel and Club Service Employees, Local 551 (membership records, 1947-1970). Records of the Seattle Joint Executive Board include meeting attendance records (1915-1976), financial records (1903-1974), and collective bargaining records (1957-1975).

Spokane, Local 400 records include collective bargaining records (1943-1979) and legal records (1980-1983).

Tacoma Joint Local Executive Board records include correspondence and legal records (1969-1976). Records from Tacoma, Local 61 include meeting minutes (1902-1979), membership records (1901-1953), financial records (1901-1969) and collective bargaining records (1917-1970). Local 61, together with Bartenders Union, Local 711, merged to form Local 20 in 1979; this organization is represented here by a small group of records. Tacoma Local 61 established the Local 61 Building Corporation to own and manage its union hall in downtown Tacoma, which it purchased in 1945. Records of this corporation include minutes, property and financial records, and correspondence related to the ownership of the building (1945-1976).

Other local union records include those from local unions in Aberdeen (Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders' Union, Local 791), Bellingham (Culinary and Beverage Workers Union, Local 529), Everett (Culinary Workers and Bartenders, Local 451), Bremerton (Cooks and Waiters Culinary Alliance, Local 730), and Renton (Culinary Workers and Bartenders, Local 596).

Washington State Association of U.A Plumbers and Pipefitters (WSA) was founded in 1921 to promote cooperation of all plumber and pipefitters local unions in the State of Washington so they may protect each local union member from "unjust and injurious competition."

In 1995, the WSA established an organizing department funded by all working members of the WSA to address lost market share and union density, and is one of the earliest statewide organizing systems in the United States. The WSA coordinates and funds organizing activities in area U.A. Plumbers & Pipefitters locals and works to prevent the open shop. The WSA has signed nearly 200 contractors since it started and has organized over 1,000 new members. The WSA is active legislatively and politically, coordinating political action of local unions and their members at both the local and national level.

As of 2013, the WSA had 7,324 members belonging to six local unions, all of which are United Association affiliates. The association's affiliates are: UA Local 26- Western Washington Plumbers and Steamfitters; UA Local 32- Seattle Plumbers and Steamfitters; UA Local 44- Spokane Plumbers and Steamfitters; UA Local 598- Pasco Plumbers and Steamfitters; UA Local 669- Road Sprinklerfitters; UA Local 699- Seattle Sprinklerfitters

World War II veteran administering an Army program that provided correspondence courses for overseas personnel, later a creer counselor for veterans at the University of Washington. Called to testify before the Canwell Committee in 1948 on charges that he was a communist, Astley refused to answer any of its questions. Shortly after, Astley was fired from his counseling position at UW. The cause of his dismissal is controversial. The university claimed that there was no correlation between his refusal to cooperate with the committee a month earlier and his dismissal from his job. Astley maintained that his Canwell Committee experience was a direct cause of his firing, along with the fact that he participated in student organizations that were critical of the committee. In 1954 Astley, who was now working as a sawmill "dogger," was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee when hearings were held in Seattle. In 1962, Astley became a teacher, working in education as a secondary level English and social studies in the Seattle area. Having been a union member and supporter ever since he worked for General Motors in Pontiac, Astley was active in various education unions, such as the Washington Education Association and the Seattle Teachers' Association.

Pastor of Grace Methodist Episcopal Church in Seattle (renamed Grace Methodist Church ca. 1939). Attebery was active in civic causes. In 1929 he played an active role in the effort to free Industrial Workers of the World members jailed after the 1919 Armistice Day clash between workers and veterans in Centralia. He was also a vocal advocate of Prohibition and a critic of American isolationism. Attebery joined the Washington National Guard as a chaplain in 1929. He was called to active duty in September 1940, and sent overseas the following year. He died while landing with his division on Biak Island, New Guinea, in May 1944. Scope and Content The E. Raymond Attebery Papers document the Seattle pastor's activities as a civic leader, soldier, and military chaplain. Accession 3176-1 includes correspondence with his family. The bulk of the letters are to his wife, Miriam, written while Attebery was serving as a chaplain during World War II. There are also letters to his children, Eliot, Jerry, Edgar, and Gay. (Edgar also served in World War II and would be killed in action just months after his father's death.) Letters to his mother, Betty, date largely from his time in France during World War I. A scrapbook containing letters and clippings documents Attebery's career from the early 1930s. The Class Notes were made while Attebery was attending Harvard Divinity School. Accession 3176-2 includes additional personal and church-related correspondence. Of note is a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for Attebery's comments on local social conditions. His stance on Prohibition is outlined in the Writing file. The Friends of City Light subgroup includes correspondence and minutes of the organization, which was formed to support municipal ownership of Seattle's electric utility. The Committee on the Centralia Armistice Day Tragedy subgroup documents the efforts of Washington State church groups and individuals to exonerate International Workers of the World members imprisoned after the 1919 confrontation. The committee was established by the Puget Sound Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1929 to investigate the Centralia shootings and was part of a local movement that eventually led to a joint investigation by several national religious organizations. Attebery served as secretary of that special committee. The correspondence files document Attebery's requests to national organizations to join the effort. The report issued by the national groups in 1930 is also found in this subgroup.

Powell S. Barnett was musician, civil rights activist, and African American community leader. Born in Brazil, Indiana in 1883, Barnett's family migrated to Roslyn, Washington, in 1889. His father, an ex-slave, was one of many black miners recruited to work in the coal mines of Washington state. As a teenager, Powell also worked in the Roslyn coal mines and played in the "colored" band. Barnett was a community leader who worked to improve race relations, organizing the Leschi Improvement Council and serving as its first president in 1967, organizing the East Madison YMCA, and acting as its chairman, and chairing the committee that revised the Seattle Urban League. Barnett, a sousaphone player, was the first black member of the once all-white Seattle Musicians Union, Local 76 and was instrumental in the merger between the black and white musicians' locals into the Musician's Association of Seattle 76-493. Tape recorded interview regarding his migration to Roslyn, Washington in 1888 as well as his move to Seattle and subsequent activities there.

Biographical Note

Stephen Richard Blair was born on July 19, 1917, in a sod house built by his father in Swanville, Minnesota. His parents, Louis and Eva (McPhee) Blair, raised a large Catholic family in Minnesota and Saskatchewan, Canada. Blair attended Duluth Central High School and the University of Minnesota in Duluth. In January 1936 Blair entered the U.S. Army and served as a field paramedic. He was discharged for suspicion of homosexuality in October of the same year. He later moved to San Francisco, where he met his partner Frank McCormick. Blair and McCormick's relationship lasted roughly forty-one years, until McCormick died of lung cancer in the 1980s.

When Blair and McCormick met, McCormick was serving as a union officer for the National Union of Marine Cooks and Stewards (NUMCS). He was also on the executive board of the California Congress of Industrial Organizatons (CIO) and was actively involved in the Pacific coast maritime strike of 1936. NUMCS was a small union known for full integration of African American and gay members. NUMCS leaders were blacklisted in the 1950s, and the union was expelled from the CIO in 1955 for communist leadership. Blair became involved in NUMCS while working as a ship's delegate on passenger cruise lines and freighters. He served as a delegate for a union-wide meeting on the S.S. Aleutian . Blair earned top wages waiting tables on luxury liners before being blacklisted in the 1950s by the Merchant Marines. He also held positions as an hospital orderly, a medical assistant for an Arctic oil rig named Kavik , and a studio prop man on Hollywood movie sets.

McCormick and Blair were born twenty years apart but had similar interests in theater and performance. In World War I, McCormick served in a drag troupe called the Pink Stockings. He also sang in the Fighting American Quartet to entertain troops. In World War II, Blair performed in the United Service Organizatons' (USO) theater and entertainment shows. These experiences sparked a continuing interest in theater. Blair played in stock theater shows in Hollywood, San Diego, and Los Angeles, California. After visiting Hawaii with the USO, he decided to stay and work in advertising. He performed under the name "Mickey Blair" in a 1945 Honolulu Community Production of The Petrified Forest by Robert Sherwood.

McCormick and Blair moved to Seattle in the late 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, Blair was involved in Democratic election campaigns. In 1980 Blair sang in the Seattle Men's Chorus, which formed in 1979. Blair was also one of five Seattle gay and lesbian elders who performed their own life stories in the 1992 Alice B. Theatre production, Hidden History: True Stories from Seattle's Gay and Lesbian Elders. The play was directed by Patricia Van Kirk and was based upon interviews completed as part of the Alice B. Theatre Oral History Project. Stephen R. Blair died in April of 1997.

Content Description

Images of Stephen Blair's Hollywood career, service in the Merchant Marines, union activities, interest in alternative health, and involvement in the 1992 Alice B. Theatre production, "Hidden History." Also includes images of Blair's and his partner, Frank McCormick's family, friends, and travels.
Use of the Collection

Jackie Boschok (b. April 24, 1952) was a 30-year member, employee, and officer of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) 751. Boschok was also an officer in the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) Puget Sound chapter as well as a member of the organization's national board. Boschok first became active in the union as soon as she started working at Boeing in 1980, working in a variety of positions and holding a variety of offices including steward and local lodge offices including recording secretary; treasurer; and auditor. Boschok served for seven years on the IAM District Council and worked as a Business Representative beginning in 2001, Union Organizer, and Health and Benefits Representative beginning in 2009.
Boschok also served on the Snohomish County Labor Council from 1993-2010, serving on their Executive Board for 10 years and serving on its Community Services Committee. Boschock was a member and leader of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) beginning in 1979 and in 1991 became a member of the national Executive Board. Boschok also served on the Washington State Labor Council’s Women’s Committee from 1994 to 2008, chaired the District 751 Women’s Committee beginning in 2006, and served on the United Way of Snohomish County Board of Directors for six years.

Carlos Bulosan was a Filipino-American author, poet, and mirgrant laborer. He was born in the Philippines in 1911 and began working as a day laborer at age 11 after only 3 years of formal schooling. He left home to provide for himself at age 13. In 1931, at the age of 17, he came to Seattle, Washington but within 2 days was shanghaied by a local hotel proprietor and sold to an Alaskan fish cannery. At the end of the season he came back to Washington and began work as a migrant farm worker, mostly in Washington and California. During the years 1935-1941, he attempted to organize mirgrant workers into unions and began to write about their conditions, particularly those of Filipino immigrant workers. He had begun to write in 1936 during a two year stay in a Los Angeles hospital for tuberculosis. He published some poetry in 1936, and short stories in 1938. He continued writing until about the mid-1940s, but wrote very little during the last 10 years of his life. He died in 1956.

Castle (1915-2006) was a labor activist, union officer and member. Born in Spokane, Washington, Castle graduated from Broadview High School in Seattle and the University of Washington but worked mainly in blue collar jobs like lumber mills, railroad yards, steelmills, shipyards and longshoring. Castle first became a labor organizer in the 1930s, participating in strikes with the Sawmill and Timber Workers Union and an early farmworkers union. In 1937, as co-chair of the King County Workers Alliance he helped organize a two week occupation of the King County Council chambers by hundreds of the unemployed seeking benefits. In 1942 he was elected secretary of the Shipscaler's Union. After WWII, he organized lumberworkers in Aberdeen. During the Korean War, Del was active in the anti-war movement, as he would be later during the Vietnam War and the Iraq wars. In 1957, Del became a longshoreman, joining ILWU, Local 19. He served on the Executive Board from 1963 until he retired in 1980. He was elected to one term as secretary of Local 19 in 1975. Following his retirement, he served as editor of the Rusty Hook, the newsletter for retired longshore workers, until, at age 89, he felt it was time to step down.

Megan Cornish was born in 1947 into a military family and grew up in various locations around the United States. After graduating from Cornell University in 1969 with a BA in literature, Cornish moved to the Puget Sound region and worked at The Shelter Half, an anti-war GI coffeehouse in Tacoma. In her early years in the Pacific Northwest, Cornish was not a member of a formal group or organization. However, Cornish joined Radical Women after being drawn to the group's intersectional approach and became more interested in labor organizing. She took a job at a nursing home and also briefly worked in an industrial laundry facility.

In 1974, Cornish was recruited by Clara Fraser, a cofounder of Radical Women and education coordinator at Seattle City Light, to apply for a position as an Electrical Trades Trainee (ETT), an all-female affirmative action program designed by Fraser to integrate women into the electrical trades. Cornish was selected to be one of ten women ETT's out of an application pool of over 300. In the first weeks on the job, the sense of solidarity between workers as the result of a walkout that occurred just weeks before caused Cornish and the other female ETT's to be received well. The shared resentment towards City Light Superintendent Gordon Vickery and management created a sense of unity amongst the electrical workers and reduced their hostility towards their new female coworkers. The severed relationship between Fraser and management, however, left the ETT's in a highly vulnerable position as management sought to retaliate against Fraser through damaging the ETT program.

Only a week after starting, the ETT training program was canceled and Fraser was removed from her position as the training coordinator. Trainees were told on a Friday afternoon to report to field work the next week, where they made $1 less per hour than the other electrical helpers. In response, the ETT's filed a complaint with the City of Seattle Office of Women's Rights (OWR) stating that they were being denied the typical amount of training and pay reserved for male employees. After a year of training, Cornish and seven of the other ETT's were laid off, along with Fraser. The ETT's and Fraser saw their terminations as politically motivated and retaliatory, and they added the lay-offs to their OWR complaint.

As their case was being reviewed, the former ETT's engaged in a massive public relations campaign to win the support of the public. Numerous articles about the case were published in the local press, and the case became a central focus of the local women's movement. In July 1976, in a major victory, City Light was ordered to reinstate six of the terminated trainees, including Cornish, as well as to pay a settlement, give them back pay, and make them eligible for apprenticeship programs.

After the victorious court ruling, Cornish applied for a City Light apprenticeship as a lineworker, along with two other Radical Women members Teri Bach and Hildreth (Heidi) Durham. Cornish described this period as the "roughest" time during her career at City Light. Vickery and management, angered by the ruling, placed Cornish and her female colleagues into positions that were designed to be the most difficult to succeed in. Each of the women were placed into divisions that were known to be hostile to them, which ultimately led to Durham falling from a pole and breaking her back in a near fatal accident.

In addition to being antagonized by management, Cornish and the other women apprentices were also met with animosity from the male electrical workers that they worked alongside. In 1975, Local 77 of the IBEW staged a failed strike that led to harsher working conditions. Many male electricians, frustrated and demoralized by their strike's defeat, held resentment towards the former ETT's for winning their discrimination case, and these feelings were exploited by management to increase the sexist hostility of the work environments.

Despite having an affirmative action plan to diversify its workforce, Cornish, Bach, and Durham remained some of the only female electrical workers at City Light for nearly ten years. The three regularly gave public comment at Seattle City Council meetings to demand the hiring of more women and people of color at City Light. In the early 1980's, City Light hired its first new female electrical worker in nearly a decade.

In 1983, Cornish helped establish the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL) to fight workplace harassment and discrimination in response to inaction from management, union leaders, and the City of Seattle Human Rights Department (HRD). CERCL membership grew rapidly in the mid-1980's and pressured the HRD to investigate discrimination cases. In 1991, Cornish and Durham were jointly named Advocate of the Year by the Washington Women in the Trades.

Cornish retired from Seattle City Light in 2004 after 30 years. At the time of her retirement, she held the position of outage dispatcher, the highest position in the utility trades. She credits her adherence to feminism and political radicalism as essential to her successful accomplishments in her organizing at City Light. She remains an active member of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party and continues to write for the Freedom Socialist newspaper.

Adapted from the Megan Cornish article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Cornish

Content Description
This collection contains records collected by Megan Cornish as one of the first female electricians at Seattle City Light between 1970 and 2003. The materials span from her apprenticeship in the Electrical Trades Trainee (ETT) affirmative action program until her retirement from Seattle City Light as a senior power dispatcher. Cornish helped found the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL) to fight race and sex discrimination within the agency. Much of the material is related to a series of discrimination lawsuits filed by Cornish and other members of the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) and Radical Women, including Clara Fraser, Teri Bach, and Hildreth (Heidi) Durham.

There is also material related to Cornish’s involvement and organizing efforts in her union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local 77, and other unions including the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Local 17. These records contain meeting minutes, legal briefings and reports, worker testimonies; materials from other discrimination lawsuits; City of Seattle employee memorandums; correspondence; employee evaluations and documentations; City Light job postings; negotiated union contracts; Cornish’s union cards and dues statements; leaflets; newsletters; and news articles related to Cornish’s activities at City Light. This collection would be of particular interest to those interested in women in the labor movement, labor unions, feminism, socialism, affirmative action, discrimination, sexism, labor law, and organizing in the public sector.

Cindy Domingo, along with her brothers and sisters, played a key role in the Asian American and Filipino youth movements of the 1970s, and has been a community leader in the Seattle area since then. In the 1970s, she helped lead solidarity campaigns on the University of Washington campus against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. She was active in the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), for which she did organizing in Seattle and Oakland. On June 1st, 1981, Cindy's brother Silme Domingo, a KDP organizer and union reform activist in ILWU Local 37, was assassinated along with fellow union leader Gene Viernes. For the next ten years, Cindy served as the National Chair for the Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes. The campaign resulted in the conviction of the former ILWU Local 37 President and family friend Tony Baruso for organizing the assassination, and also proved that the murders had been ordered by the Marcos regime with U.S. government knowledge.
Cindy Domingo was an active member of the Washington State Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s, and served on the boards of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, LELO, and the International Examiner. She has been Board President of the Center for Social Justice and co-chair of U.S. Women & Cuba Collaboration, and currently serves as the Legislative Aide to King County Councilmember Larry Gossett.
Records relating to Cindy's activism and work as an officer in several organizations including Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes, Line of March, and the Union of Democratic Filipinos (In Tagalog: Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino), or KDP.

Robert D. Duggan, known to all as "Bob" was born in Seattle, Washington on September 7, 1932. Bob graduated from Foster High School in 1950 and immediately enrolled at University of Washington summer program. He also started work on the Seattle waterfront in August 1950. His longshore employment paid all the costs of his college education and later a large portion of his law school education. He graduated with a BA in Labor Economics in June of 1954. In December 1954 he was called to active duty with the United States Air Force. In February 1956 he was awarded his "wings" as a jet fighter pilot. In December 1955 he married Martha H." Marty" Duggan (1934-2003), the mother of his 3 children, In September 1958, he entered the University of Washington School of Law, graduating 1961. In September 1961, he began what turned out to be 40 years of law practice, representing longshoremen, harbor workers, seaman and fishermen. He also represented all ILWU locals in Washington over that 40 year span. In 1989-90 while serving as president of the University of Washington Alumni Association, he began to promote the idea of establishing an endowed chair in honor of Harry Bridges. He was instrumental in raising the funds to establish the chair in 1992. Bob married Judith Turner Duggan on December 17, 2006.

Garland Ethel, an English professor at the University of Washington, was best known for his involvement with the state legislature’s Canwell Committee and the University Faculty Committee on Tenure and Academic Freedom during their anti-communist investigations in the late 1940s. During these hearings Ethel admitted to being a former Communist, but because he renounced his beliefs he was allowed to stay at the University and served a two-year probation. These anti-communist hearings set a precedent for other states and the U.S. Congress to follow during the Red Scare of the 1950s. Correspondence, speeches, writings, minutes, conference and convention files, lecture notes, clippings, wire recordings, and photos, relating to Ethel's principal research interest, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; together with unpublished short stories and novel, as well as material relating to his activities concerning the state's Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities and Local 401, American Federation of Teachers.
During his years as a UW student, the Seattle General Strike, the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World, and the amount of poverty that Ethel witnessed in the U.S. led him to embrace Marxist ideology. In the 1930s Ethel became involved with many liberal and radical organizations. He was active in the labor movement, especially through the the American Federation of Teachers, Local 401, and was active in trying to defeat anti-labor candidates and initiatives. One of his major campaigns was fighting Initiative 130 which was an effort to restrict the right to strike. To explore his Marxist beliefs further Ethel traveled to the USSR where he worked as assistant editor of the Moscow News in 1932. During his travels in Europe he was horrified by Fascism and later claimed that he joined the Communist party in the U.S. because it was the only organized group trying to fight the burgeoning right-wing movements in Europe.

The papers of Rosa Millo Eyer consists of a small series of Association of Western Pulp and Paper Workers (AWPPW) records and another of personal papers. The first series is primarily AWPPW Northern Washington-Alaska Area Council records of which Rosa was Secretary-Treasurer, including correspondence, news clippings, notes, and Executive Board reports from Area Representative John R. Swanson as well as a file of correspondence related to Rosa's employment with the union. The series of personal papers consists primarily of letters to and from Rosa and her daughters, Gerry, Josephine, and Caroline; divorce and death records and ephemera from her first marriage with Richard J. Millo; several photographs of family members; and other correspondence to and from Rosa.

Clippings, photographs, and an assortment of textual items and ephemera from her employment by trade unions, most notably the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union in San Francisco. Some items date from her retirement in Western Washington.

Subject files on maritime and labor history and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Correspondence, meeting agendas, and conference programs and minutes of the ILWU's Pacific Coast Pensioners Association from Gundlach's time as an officer and member of the PCPA.
Correspondence and materials from Gundlach's role in the founding and subsequent involvement in the Harry Bridges Chair for Labor Studies at the University of Washington.
Personal correspondence with friends in the labor and left political circles.
Subject files on labor and maritime poetry by poets and writers such as Carlos Bulosan, Al Valenzuela, Gus Rystad, Herb Phillips, and Jerry Tyler.
Correspondence and materials relating to Gundlach's role on the Carlos Bulosan Manuscripts Committee, which sought to assemble and donate poet and author Carlos Bulosan's work to an archives. Eventually the papers became part of the University of Washington's Special Collections.
Biographical materials on Gundlach's brother, Ralph Gundlach, as well as biographical and memorial materials on Roy J. Kennedy.
Materials from Gundlach's role as a member of Office and Professional Employees Union, Local 29 including contract negotiations and a strike.
Two scrapbooks relating to Harry Bridges, the ILWU, and labor history.
Photographs of labor and maritime subject and people, many of which appear to have been originally published or gathered.

Scrapbook created by Jean Gundlach for Harry Bridges on his 70th birthday in 1971. Bridges was the founding and longtime President of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union. Gundlach loaned this scrapbook to Robert Cherny during the writing of his biography of Bridges. The scrapbook contains a mix of materials, including a hand-painted cover, telegrams, letters, greeting cards, photographs, and other ephemera.

Author, anthropologist, folklorist, linguist, and professor of anthropology and linguistics, University of Washington; d. 1971. Correspondence, manuscripts of writings, field notebooks, ethnographic and linguistic notes, recordings, and photos, primarily relating to Jacobs's investigations of Oregon and Washington Indian languages and oral traditions. Jacobs was one of the members of the campus faculty union, American Federation of Teachers Local 401. Because of his political beliefs, Jacobs appeared before the Canwell Committee (Washington Legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities) and by the U.W. Faculty Committee on Tenure and Academic Freedom. T he dismissal of three UW professors for political reasons—the first formally acknowledged faculty firings in the United States for Communist-related activities—set a precedent for the rest of the country to follow in the 1950s. Jacobs retained his job but the incident seriously impeded his career and prospects for tenure at UW. Part of this collection documents his appearance before the Canwell Committee and its aftermath.

International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union Local 19 (Seattle) official. Worked on the Seattle docks as a longshoreman. He joined the longshoremen's union in 1934 and served as one of its officers from 1936 to 1940, and from 1943 until his retirement in 1967. Jenkins details the history of the unions' exclusionary practices in the Puget Sound area and explains the issue of blacks as strikebreakers. He discusses discriminatory hiring policies which limited employment opportunities for black longshoremen in Seattle, the 1921 and 1934 strikes, and the changed employment practices resulting from the latter strike. The structure of the longshoremen's union (ILWU) is discussed, as well as some contract negotiations that occurred during Jenkins' tenure as a union official. Military oversight of the Seattle Port during World War II is mentioned, including the discriminatory recruitment practices used by both the Army and the Navy. Jenkins illustrates the consequences of his union activism during the war and afterwards during the McCarthy era by recounting several episodes in which his port security pass was revoked and subsequently reissued. He chronicles the turbulent post-war history of the longshoremen's union in the Puget Sound area and explains the reason for the union's expulsion from the CIO in 1948.

Jeff Johnson was born in Long Island, New York, in 1951. Johnson earned his B.A. in political science from Georgetown University and his M.A. and A.B.D. in political economy from the New School for Social Research. At Georgetown University he became involved in Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Johnson began his union career in New York, N.Y. as a member of Local 2190 of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in 1979. He worked as a teacher of labor economics and labor studies for members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 3. Johnson also taught classes for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU). Johnson taught classes for the National Congress of Neighborhood Women and worked as faculty at the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies at State University of New York (SUNY) and the The National Labor College.

In 1986, Johnson drove across the country with his wife and began working for the Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) as the Research Director. He also served as the shop steward for the WSLC’s unionized employees in the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), Local 8 from 1988-1993. Early in his career, Johnson was introduced to Tomas Villanueva, the president of the newly formed United Farm Workers (UFW) in Washington. At the time, farmworkers were not protected by minimum wage, pesticide control, or child labor laws, and they were ineligible for unemployment insurance or workers' compensation. Johnson and Villanueva worked together over a five year period to establish child labor and health and safety protections specifically for farmworkers, and they also ran minimum wage and workers' compensation initiatives. In addition, they launched a lawsuit to include farmworkers in unemployment insurance programs. In 1992, Johnson and Villanueva worked with Chicano activist and lawyer Guadalupe Gamboa and his uncle, a professor at the University of Washington, to write a collective bargaining bill for farmworkers in Washington, modeled after the California Labor Relations Act.

In 1993, Johnson became the WSLC’s Lead Lobbyist following changes in WSLC leadership due to the election of Mike Lowry as Washington governor. In 1998, he spearheaded another minimum wage initiative, creating a broad coalition of community organizations to back the campaign. Johnson was also involved in the WSLC's work around immigration reform and efforts to connect with the Latino community, including by affiliating with CASA Latina. Johnson assumed the role of Special Assistant to the President in 2008, while remaining the lead lobbyist.

In 2010, Johnson was elected president of the WSLC and served two terms before retiring in 2018. During his time as president, Johnson was involved in much of the community outreach and coalition building from before. The WSLC, under his leadership, supported the first campaigns to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, first in SeaTac then in Seattle. He also promoted efforts to address issues of racism in labor and worked with state legislators on climate justice initiatives.

Johnson is still active in Puget Sound Advocates for Retirement Action (PSARA), the Board of Labor Network for Sustainability, and other local causes.

Pentecostal Christian socialist, UW student in sociology and campus activist. In 1957, King co-founded and served as Chairman of a socialist student group called The Anvil Club, which sought to sustain social movement activism on the UW campus. King strove to improve social conditions in Seattle throughout his career, holding positions such as Associate Director of the Seattle Urban League; Director of Action Education Centers (AEC) for the Central Area Motivation Program (CAMP); Planner for the Seattle Model City Program (SMCP); Quality Control Supervisor for the Seattle Income Maintenance Experiment; and Affirmative Action Analyst in the City's Human Rights Department & Office for Women's Rights. King was also involved with the Seattle chapter of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). Founder of photography group Camera Left. The collection consists of approximately 55,000 photographic prints, with associated negatives. Labor-related topics in this collection include: ethnic cultural events, local social activism, labor unions and other special events. Social protest event photos include images of protests (at Volunteer Park, Denny Park, Capitol Hill, University of Washington, the Federal Building, and Green Lake); groups such as the National Association For the Advancement of Colored People, Anti-Iraq War, Service Employees International Union and Industrial Workers of the World; performances of singing and dancing by Chinese Americans, Native American, African American, Japanese American, Vietnamese American, Filipino American.

Frank Krasnwosky is a labor, political, and civil rights activist. Krasnowsky was an organizer and health and safety committee officer for the United Steelworkers of America in the Bethlehem Steel plant in Tacoma, Washington. There, he worked with other union activists including Eugene Dennet to make the existing union contract more powerful for the union members at Bethlehem--particulary in regards to health and safety.

At one time, Krasnowsky was married to fellow socialist Clara Fraser. They divorced, and she left the SWP to form the Freedom Socialist Party.

Krasnowsky's mother was a Jewish and Yiddish anarchist and his father, Harry Paxton Howard, was from an old American family and a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. His parents met in Chicago, where his mother was a garment worker and they were part of the same IWW/anarchist circles. When they left the US together in 1917 for Russia to aid the Russian Revolution, and en route Frank took his mother's name--Krasnowsky--rather than his father's to allow them to get back into Russia more easily. Instead of staying in Russia, they lived in Yokahama, Japan for 4 years where Krasnowsky's father worked as an editor of the newspapers Russia Today and New Russia.

Krasnowsky is also a member of he local Jewish American community. He co-chaired the Seattle chapter of the National Yiddish Club and performed as part of the musical duo Chutzpah. He is also the published author of short stories and poems.

Records relating to Phil Lelli’s career as a longshoreman and his activities as an activist, officer, union leader, and president of Local 23 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in Tacoma and a Commissioner of the Port of Tacoma. Other materials are related to the labor history of the Tacoma waterfront. Correspondence, subject files, personal papers, photographs, other materials; 1933-2004. Papers relate to Lelli's career as a longshoreman, union leader, and President of the Local # 23, International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). Include strike and labor action-related materials, Port Commission correspondence, and related material.Correspondence, subject files, personal papers, photographs, other materials; 1933-2004. Papers relate to Lelli's career as a longshoreman, union leader, and President of the Local # 23, International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). Include strike and labor action-related materials, Port Commission correspondence, and related material.

Adolph Major was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and involved in the Slavic community, serving as a member of the executive board of the American Slavic Benevolent Federation of Washington. Joining in 1923, Major was a member of the IWW during the agricultural strikes in Washington in 1933 during his time riding the rails. He was also involved in the lumber strike of 1935. Major eventually became an organizer for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Collection of ephemera and publications including a membership book for the International Labor Defense and the Industrial Workers of the World which include IWW stamps and stickers inside; a letter on behalf of the striking lumber workers on behalf of the American Slavic Benevolent Federation of Washington. A labor calendar and an issue of the Voice of Action documenting the lumber strike of 1935 a transfer notice for the International Workers Order, a sticker from the IWW Railroad Workers Industrial Union Local 520, and a flyer for a 1987 Labor Music and Culture festival comprise the rest of the collection.

Between 1910 and 1930, a wave of Filipino immigrants came to the United States. Instead of better opportunities, many encountered discrimination, poor living conditions, and oppressive labor practices. Chris Delarna Mensalvas (1909-1978) immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in 1927. He became an important figure in the Filipino labor movements of the 1940s and '50s, organizing unions and initiating strikes for just working conditions and fair wages for farm and cannery workers.

Between the years 1949 and 1959, Mensalvas was president of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) Local 37 in Seattle - the Filipino Alaska cannery workers union. He was publicity director of the local from 1948 to 1949, when it was Local 7 of the Cannery Workers' and Farm Laborers' Union. Mensalvas actively opposed the deportation of Filipinos under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. The noted Filipino author and activist Carlos Bulosan and fellow activist Philip Vera Cruz were among his friends. He was an inspiration for later Filipino activists Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, who consulted him about his labor organizing experiences. Mensalvas died in 1978.

An activist, labor leader, and former member of the Communist Party USA, Art Mink was born and raised in rural Fairfield, Idaho. As a young man, he joined the ROTC and planned a career in military service. He was radicalized in the late 1930s by the apparent collapse of capitalism and by the Spanish Civil War, and joined the Communist Party in 1940 while a student at Boise Junior College. Mink moved with his wife to Seattle in 1942 where he served as a member of the executive board of the Northwest District Young Communist League and as a Party organizer in the Boilermaker's Union before being drafted into the Air Force. He was stationed in the Philippines during World War II as a 1st Sergeant in a military hospital. From 1946-1948 Mink attended law school at the University of Washington and was campus organizer for the Communist Party. During this time he was also a member of the Bookbinders Union. He moved briefly to Los Angeles to work as an editor in a small publishing firm and to conduct Party work in southern California.

Back in the Pacific Northwest, Mink began a new career on the waterfront, first as a warehouseman at a Seattle fish plant and ultimately as a longshoreman and a member of ILWU Local 19. He was active in union politics throughout his career. He worked on the Local 19 Stevedore Safety Committee for 5 years and served multiple terms as chairman of the Labor Relations Committee. In the mid 1950s Mink broke with the Communist Party and helped organize the rival Freedom Socialist Party. In 1971 he was elected Vice President of Local 19 and played an instrumental role in the union's historic strike that same year. Mink remained active after retiring from the longshore and was a great friend of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. He died in 2011.

Wayne Moisio, nicknamed Waino, was an amateur boxer and longtime International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 19 member. He participated in the 1934 Pacific Coast Maritime Strike at the "Battle at Smith Cove" that almost completely shut down merchant access in the area. He was known for blocking train access on the Seattle Waterfront during the event and was nicknamed the "Train Stopper" as a result. The strike was in response to the port leadership's failure to comply with the National Industrial Recovery Act and the protection of collective bargaining rights for unions. Moisio was also a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Pacific Coast Pensioner's association and attended many conventions and gatherings hosted by the association.

Lonnie Nelson was born in Seattle Aug. 20, 1932, and named Madelon Sue by her parents Alma Viola Nickerson Nelson and Burt Gale Nelson. Her father was a founding member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and a leader of the Communist Party of Washington State.

In high school in 1948 she organized Young Progressives and was active in the Progressive Party campaign of Henry Wallace. She joined the Communist Party in 1951 at a time when CP members, including her father, were being blacklisted and harassed by the FBI.

She gathered signatures on the Stockholm Peace Appeal in the 1950s when Cold War elements were itching for war against the Soviet Union or China. That commitment to world peace continued in the years of solidarity with Cuba and Vietnam when she helped mobilize peace protests.

She was especially proud of a trip she took to Spain where veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, including her uncle, were honored as fighters against Franco fascism.

Nelson served as chairperson of a petition campaign against the McCarthy-era loyalty oath, which in 1972 presented 10,000 signatures to the state attorney general in Olympia. Later, she served on a committee defending the Black Panther Party.

An admirer of the Native American Indian people, she joined in the campaign to win restoration of the tribes' fishing rights. She befriended many of the Native American Indians in that struggle, working closely with Maiselle Bridges, a leader of the Nisqually tribe. Victory was won when Judge George Boldt handed down his landmark ruling 40 years ago that the tribes were entitled to half the salmon catch.

Her love of the Indian peoples and their struggles led her to join the "Trail of Broken Treaties" to Washington, D.C., in 1972, when the American Indian Movement occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters. She helped raise funds for the legal defense of the occupiers. She knew Hank Adams and other Native American Indian leaders personally and interviewed them for articles in the Daily World during that sit-in.

Lonnie Nelson's first love was always the labor movement. During her working years, she was employed at a day care center at Providence Hospital for nearly six years. She worked to organize the workers into SEIU Local 6. She helped establish the Seattle branch of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), heading up the CLUW Public Works Jobs Committee.

She was arrested three times for civil disobedience: during the Indian fishing rights struggle, against South African apartheid, and in the mid-1990s against Republican Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" Medicare cuts.

(Source: People's World obituary for Lonnie Nelson by Tim Wheeler 02/14/14 http://www.peoplesworld.org/labor-stalwart-lonnie-nelson-dies-at-8/)

Collection of longshore maritime history materials gathered by Norman Parks relating to International Longshore and Warehouse Local 8 (Portland) and its predecessor, International Longshoremen's Association, Local 38-78. Much of the collection relates to the history of the Pacific Coast ILA and ILWU, with an emphasis on Portland and the 1934 Pacific Coast Maritime Strike.

Included are medals minted by the Citizen's Emergency League, based out of Portland, Oregon. The League was a vigilante group started by the Portland Chamber of Commerce to break through picket lines caused by the 1934 maritime strike. According to historian Michael Munk, "CEL members wore the service disks, inscribed 'CEL- for Law and Order' on one side and 'Minute Men, Lexington, Mass., 1776- Portland, Ore., 1934' on the other....they were stamped with the member's number and - together with red, white, and blue armbands bearing the letters C-E-L - were 'to be worn by members in case of being called out as law enforcement officers.'"

The context of the CEL is that many Portland police officers had relatives that were longshoremen and who were a They thought police were coddling longshoremen and passing on intelligence. The employers hired WWI veterans to beat up longshoremen during the strike, housing them on terminal 4. Oral tradition claims that longshoremen would beat the strikebreakers in retaliation for their attacks on strikes and take their coins as mementoes. Other coins in the collection include tokens good for a free meal or trade for strikers at various Portland waterfront bars, restaurants, and businesses including Ericson's Bar, Longshoreman's Social Club, the Portland Seamen's Center, and the Longshoremen's Lunch and Card Room.

Other materials relate to the history of the strike, and an article by on the history and provenance of the vigilante coins and lunch tokens. The collection also includes a roster of post- WWII members kept to document who was registered and entitled to pension.

Interview, correspondence, reports, ephemera, xerox copies of correspondence, and union newspapers. Oral history interview includes discussion of Pritchett's involvement and subsequent election to president of the International Woodworkers of America, and later affiliation with the CIO (Congress of Industrial organizations), 1930s to early 1940s.

Richard "Rick" Rice was born in 1940 and grew up in Huntington Beach, California. Rice attended the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York City and then to Seattle in the early 1970s. Rice was active in the student, anti-war, and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Rice worked as a bus driver for Metro Transit for four years, where he was an active union member and a member of a rank-and-file caucus committe. Rice participated in a Metro Transit strike in 1974. During the 70s and 80s, Rice was an activist in several local organizations such as Committee for Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the Venceremos Brigade, and the Anti-Apartheid movement. Rice participated in weekly protests in front of the South African consulate in Seattle during this period.

His wife, Roselynn Harrell (also known as Rose Woodward) was also a Seattle metro driver and a social and labor activist. Harrell was involved in South Seattle Community College's Women's Employment Network and was a welder. Rice and Harrell worked for two years at a Uniroyal and Firestone tire plant in Long Beach California in an effort to organize it politically as an outgrowth of their activism as members of the socialist organization Line of March. Line of March was a Marxist-Leninist organization that inspired many New Left student activists to become "proletarianized" workers who would find work in industry and radicalize other workers.

During the 1990s, Rice was active in the Seattle area efforts to create a Labor Party and attended conferences on behalf of the effort. Rice's second wife, Kate Thompson is an artist and an activist and many of the prints in this collection are hers. Thompson was a cofounder and coowner of Storefront Press in Seattle. As of 2014, Rice lives in Mexico.

Jonathan Rosenblum Papers, 1993-2006
Jonathan Rosenblum is a political planner and labor organizer for local and regional campaigns. Papers document Rosenblum's involvement as founding organizer with Washington State Jobs With Justice (WSJWJ) including founding and organizational documents, 1993-1997. Rosenblum's role as an organizer for the Union Cities Campaign, King County Labor Council, AFL-CIO, 1996-1997. The formation of WashTech, 1997. Rosenblum's directorship of Seattle Union Now, AFL-CIO, 1997-2001. Rosenblum's role in the World Trade Organization protests, November 1999. As director of SUN, Rosenblum was closely involved in labor’s preparations for the WTO protests during the week of action. The records document his role in helping to create a coalition between SUN and Direct Action Network, environmentalists, international activists and students. Rosenblum's participation in the Florida Recount, November 2000. The WTO Anniversary Protest, November 2000. Rosenblum played a prominent role in the November 30, 2000 WTO anniversary protest as the King County Central Labor Council’s liaison with the city; working to ensure a peaceful demonstration without the level of confrontation of the previous year. Rosenblum's "Pro-Israel" rally arrest and of the subsequent fallout in the Jewish community, 2002. On April 30, 2002 Rosenblum and Rabbi Drorah Setel were arrested at a "pro-Israel" rally in the public plaza outside the federal building in downtown Seattle for holding up signs that called for equal human rights for Israelis and Palestinians.

Tyree Scott Papers, circa 1970-1995
Tyree Scott (1940-2003) was an African American labor leader and activist deeply involved in many minority workers’ and equal opportunity organizations. Scott, an electrician, grew up in Texas, moved to Seattle in 1966 and became a leader in the Central Contractors Association. This organization of minority workers led many peaceful demonstrations against discriminatory hiring practices in Seattle’s construction industry in the summer and fall of 1969. Through the protests, the issue of discriminatory employment was noted by the American Friends Service Committee. After investigating the situation, the American Friends Service Committee approached Scott and the leadership of the Central Contractors Association and proposed a new community-based organization that would organize minority workers to fight discrimination in the unions and in the construction trades. The United Construction Workers Association was founded in 1970 with financial support from the American Friends Service Committee. Tyree Scott was a founding member and worked intensively within the Association, first as a paid staff member and then later as a director.
United Construction Workers Association combined community organization, peaceful demonstrations, and legal action to fight workplace discrimination. The Association saw an early victory in the class action suit United States vs. Ironworkers Local 86 et. al. – in which the United States Department of Justice sued five local unions and apprenticeship and training committees under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1970 Judge William J. Lindberg found that there had indeed been racial discrimination in the practices of all institutions named in this case. He ordered wide-ranging relief programs, including quotas for union membership, hiring, and apprenticeship classes and changes in hiring and dispatching procedures.
In 1973 Michael Woo of the United Construction Workers Association worked among Asian and Alaska Native cannery workers who lived in Seattle but worked summers in the salmon processing plants in Alaska. From this work the Alaska Cannery Workers Association was formed to combat discrimination in worker housing, facilities, pay scales and hire status. The Alaska Cannery Workers Association filed Title VII lawsuits against the world’s largest fish companies, including the New England Fish Company and Wards Cove Packing Company.
In 1973 members of United Construction Workers Association, Alaska Cannery Workers Association, and the Northwest Chapter of United Farm Workers of America came together to found the Labor and Employment Law Office. Labor and Employment Law Office hired lawyers and served workers of color, helping them pursue legal recourse in issues of labor discrimination. Labor and Employment Law Office helped United Construction Workers Association, Alaska Cannery Workers Association, United Farm Workers of America, other worker’s organizations and individual workers win landmark civil rights cases, including Domingo vs. New England Fish Company, Carpenter vs. NEFCO-Fidalgo Packing Company and Yates vs. Local 7 Asbestos Workers, et al.

Tyree Scott (1940-2003) was a labor leader and activist deeply involved in many minority workers’ and equal opportunity organizations.

Scott, an electrician grew up in Texas and served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War. He moved to Seattle in 1966 and became a leader in the Central Contractors Association. In 1970, Scott was a founding member of United Construction Workers Association.. He later served as a director. The United Construction Workers Association combined community organization, peaceful demonstrations, and legal action to fight workplace discrimination.

In 1973, Michael Woo of the United Construction Workers Association worked among Asian and Alaska Native cannery workers who lived in Seattle but worked summers in the salmon processing plants in Alaska. From this work, the Alaska Cannery Workers Association was formed to combat discrimination in worker housing, facilities, pay scales and hire status. The Alaska Cannery Workers Association filed Title VII lawsuits against the world’s largest fish companies, including the New England Fish Company and Ward's Cove Packing Company.

Also in 1973, members of United Construction Workers Association, Alaska Cannery Workers Association, and the Northwest Chapter of United Farm Workers of America came together to found the Labor and Employment Law Office. Labor and Employment Law Office hired lawyers and served workers of color, helping them pursue legal recourse in issues of labor discrimination. From its inception, Tyree Scott served on the board of directors of Labor and Employment Law Office.

While Labor and Employment Law Office had always combined its legal work with participation in community organization, the focus was primarily on court action in the early years of its operation. However, in 1989, the Supreme Court’s decision in the long-contested Antonio vs. Ward’s Cove case constituted a major shift in the pursuit of discrimination cases and in Labor and Employment Law Office’s operations. In the Ward's Cove case, the Court’s decision was that the plaintiffs’ statistical demonstration of racial disparity between classes of workers did not make a prima facie case for violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. This set a new precedent for the burden of proof in Civil Rights cases and vastly increased the difficulty of workers pursuing discrimination charges under Title VII.

Tyree Scott became less involved in the activities of the United Construction Workers Association in the late seventies, and the organization faded out of existence around 1981. Tyree Scott retired from the electrician’s trade and remained active as a board member for the Labor and Employment Law Office until his death in 2003.

After immigrating in the 1920s, Victorio Velasco became a participant and leader in many facets of Filipino-American life over the next half century. Velasco was perhaps best known as a leader of Seattle’s Filipino community. He published and edited the local Filipino Forum and served as the head of numerous Seattle Filipino community organizations. Because of his leadership in the Filipino community, many local and statewide organizations seeking to improve race relations sought him out to serve on their boards and committees. In addition to his leadership among Seattle’s Filipinos, Velasco also participated in the Filipino American labor movement. Like many other Filipinos during his time, Velasco spent most of his summers working in Alaska canneries and participated in the cannery unions’ turbulent internal politics.

Velasco was born in Asingan, Pangasinan, The Philippines, ca. 1903. After graduating from high school he taught in Manila and worked as a reporter for the Manila Times before emigrating to the U.S. in 1924. There he attended five colleges in Washington State before earning his B.A., M.A., and fulfilling some of the requirements for a Ph.D. at the University of Washington. Velasco had begun writing poetry in high school and early on was successful at finding publishers for his work. By the time of his death Velasco’s poetry had appeared in eleven anthologies and various newspapers and magazines.

After coming to the U.S., Velasco spent his summers working in the canneries alongside other Filipinos, who had begun filling most cannery positions after the loss of Japanese immigrants in the 1920s. Cannery work was known for being particularly strenuous and the employers often tried to take advantage of their Asian immigrant laborers, but the Filipinos developed a strong union to engage in collective bargaining with the employers. The Seattle branch of the Cannery Workers’ and Farm Laborers’ Union was organized in 1933 and represented Filipino-American cannery workers. However, the Filipino workers became frustrated with the AFL because of its stand on racial issues and in 1937 affiliated themselves with the CIO’s United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse and Allied Workers of America, Local 7.

With union representation, the cannery workers were able to win concessions and improve wages and working conditions, but Local 7’s internal politics were often bitter. Many of the union elections featured personal insults and redbaiting. Velasco was involved in many of the elections both as a candidate and as a supporter of others running for office, but until the late 1940s, his attempts at winning a union office were unsuccessful. Velasco also was involved in a major split in Local 7 during the immediate postwar period. Many Local 7 members accused officers of corruption, which led to an investigation by its international union, which suspended or expelled three of Local 7’s top officers. These ousted officers formed a rival organization, the Seafood Workers’ Union (SFWU) and conducted a membership drive to try to displace Local 7. Although Velasco was not implicated in the Local 7 investigation, he joined the SFWU and became its secretary. There are a number of possibilities for why he might have joined.

One factor might have been the persistent regionalism within the Filipino-American community. Many of the people who joined the SFWU were from Velasco’s region of the Philippines. Ideology and politics may also have been a factor in Velasco’s decision, as members of the SFWU used anti-Communist rhetoric to attack Local 7. Velasco’s politics were consistently conservative and he saw Communism as a grave threat.

After merging with the AFL Alaska Fish Cannery Workers’ Union, the SFWU was able to enter a NLRB election that would allow cannery workers to determine which union would represent them. Redbaiting became a weapon in the campaign against Local 7, which affiliated with the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). In 1950 the ILWU finally won collective bargaining rights and subsequently became Local 37 of the ILWU. Velasco then joined Local 37 and remained a member for the rest of his life, serving frequently as a delegate and as secretary-treasurer.

Newspaper publishing was also a large component of Velasco’s life. In the early 1920s Velasco worked as editor for the Philippine Seattle Colonist and as the Seattle correspondent for the Philippine Republic . In 1928 he became the founder, editor, and publisher of the Filipino Forum , which served as a newspaper for the Seattle Filipino community. In 1937 Velasco had to suspend publication, but resumed printing the Forum after the outbreak of World War II. During the interim he published or wrote for various other Filipino newspapers, including the Seattle Filipino Outlook , Northwest Forum , Philippine Review , and the Philippine Advocate .

Throughout his life in Seattle Velasco was heavily involved in local civic organizations, mostly within the Filipino community. In 1928 he was part of a group of UW Filipino students who founded the Seattle Filipino Clubhouse Fund. The Fund was intended to raise enough money to build a center for Filipino students at the university, but the plans never materialized. However, Velasco later changed the organization’s name to Filipino Community of Seattle, Inc., and set out to build a center for the entire Seattle Filipino community. Decades later, in 1965, the center was finally completed and was open for social events and recreation. Velasco also was a founder, president, and board member of the UW Filipino Alumni Association after World War II and founded both the Pangasinan Association of the Pacific Northwest and the Asinganian Club, which were comprised of people who came from his region of the Philippines.

Velasco also served other civic organizations that were not targeted specifically at Filipinos. Many of these groups were trying to reach out to the city’s and state’s diverse groups to try to improve race relations. He helped found the Jackson Street Community Council in 1946 and served as its first secretary and then as a board member. Other community organizations that Velasco served include the King County Advisory Council of the Washington State Board Against Discrimination, and the Board of Trustees of the Neighborhood House, which served inner-city youth.

Velasco died in Waterfall Alaska in 1968. He had been working at a cannery there when the bunkhouse caught on fire. After escaping safely, Velasco went back to retrieve his typewriter but was unable to escape a second time.

Born in the Philippines in 1902, Victorio Velasco immigrated to the United States in 1924. He is best known for his leadership in Seattle’s Filipino community. He published and edited the local Filipino Forum and served as the head of numerous Seattle Filipino community organizations. Because of his leadership in the Filipino community, many local and statewide organizations who sought to improve race relations asked him to serve on their boards and committees.

Velasco also participated in the Filipino-American labor movement. Like many other Filipinos during his time, Velasco spent most of his summers working in Alaskan canneries. Velasco worked alongside other Filipinos, who filled most cannery positions after the loss of Japanese immigrants in the 1920s. Cannery work was known for being particularly strenuous and the employers often tried to take advantage of Asian immigrant laborers, but the Filipinos developed a strong union to engage in collective bargaining with the employers. The Seattle branch of the Cannery Workers’ and Farm Laborers’ Union was organized in 1933 and represented Filipino-American cannery workers. However, the Filipino workers became frustrated with the AFL because of its stand on racial issues so, in 1937, they affiliated themselves with the CIO’s United Cannery, Agricultural, Packinghouse and Allied Workers of America, Local 7.

With union representation, the cannery workers were able to win concessions and improve wages and working conditions, but Local 7’s internal politics were often bitter. Velasco also was involved in a major split in Local 7 during the immediate postwar period. Many Local 7 members accused officers of corruption, which led to an investigation by its international union, which suspended or expelled three of Local 7’s top officers. These ousted officers formed a rival organization, the Seafood Workers’ Union (SFWU) and conducted a membership drive to try to displace Local 7. Although Velasco was not implicated in the Local 7 investigation, he joined the SFWU and became its secretary. There are a number of possibilities for why he might have joined. One factor might have been the persistent regionalism within the Filipino-American community. Many of those who joined the SFWU were from Velasco’s region of the Philippines. Ideology and politics may also have been a factor in Velasco’s decision, as members of the SFWU used anti-Communist rhetoric to attack Local 7. Velasco’s politics were consistently conservative and he saw Communism as a grave threat.

After merging with the AFL Alaska Fish Cannery Workers’ Union, the SFWU was able to enter a NLRB election that would allow cannery workers to determine which union would represent them. Redbaiting became a weapon in the campaign against Local 7, which affiliated with the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU). In 1950, the ILWU finally won collective bargaining rights and subsequently became Local 37 of the ILWU. Velasco then joined Local 37 and remained a member for the rest of his life, serving frequently as a delegate and as secretary-treasurer.

Newspaper publishing was also a large component of Velasco’s life. In the early 1920s, Velasco worked as editor for the Philippine Seattle Colonist and as the Seattle correspondent for the Philippine Republic. In 1928, he became the founder, editor, and publisher of the Filipino Forum, which served as a newspaper for the Seattle Filipino community. In 1937, Velasco suspended publication, but resumed printing the Forum after the outbreak of World War II. During the interim, he published or wrote for various other Filipino newspapers, including the Seattle Filipino Outlook, Northwest , Philippine Review, and the Philippine Advocate.

Throughout his life in Seattle Velasco was heavily involved in local civic organizations, mostly within the Filipino community. In 1928, he was part of a group of UW Filipino students who founded the Seattle Filipino Clubhouse Fund. The Fund was intended to raise enough money to build a center for Filipino students at the university, but the plans never materialized. However, Velasco later changed the organization’s name to Filipino Community of Seattle, Inc., and set out to build a center for the entire Seattle Filipino community. Decades later, in 1965, the center was finally completed and was open for social events and recreation. Velasco was a founder, president, and board member of the UW Filipino Alumni Association after World War II and founded both the Pangasinan Association of the Pacific Northwest and the Asinganian Club, which were comprised of people who came from his region of the Philippines.

Velasco also served civic organizations that were not specifically Filipino-related. Many of these groups reached out to diverse groups in the city and state to try to improve race relations. He helped found the Jackson Street Community Council in 1946 and served as its first secretary, and later as a board member. Other community organizations that Velasco served include the King County Advisory Council of the Washington State Board Against Discrimination, and the Board of Trustees of the Neighborhood House, which served inner-city youth.

Velasco died in Waterfall, Alaska in 1968. He had been working at a cannery there when the bunkhouse caught fire. After escaping safely, Velasco went back to retrieve his typewriter but was unable to escape a second time.

The collection contains interviews and research materials created and gathered by Paul Apostolidis which formed the basis for his 2010 book Breaks in the Chain: What Immigrant Workers Can Teach America about Democracy.

Paper-based research materials include print transcriptions, newspaper articles, scholarly papers, materials from courses taught by Apostolidis at Whitman College, legal records, and correspondence with Teamsters, Tyson, and research team members.

Audiovisual material consists primarily of original recordings on audiocassettes and minicassettes of about 40 interviews with immigrant meatpacking workers in Pasco who were members of International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 556 (the local represented workers at the Tyson/IBP beef plant in Wallula, WA just outside Pasco; in 2005, Tyson destroyed the union through company-engineered decertification elections). Other audiovisual materials include VHS tapes, a DVD of news coverage, and depositions of employees.

The Brand Responsibilty Project was a research project by UW Political Science professor Margaret Levi to document the campaign and dispute settlement between Nike Inc. and the Central General de Trabajadores of Honduras (CGT). Following the bankruptcy and closure in January 2009 of two Honduran factories (Hugger and VisionTex) that were part of Nike's supply chain, the CGT of Honduras claimed that Nike bore some of the responsibility for providing terminal compensation, benefits and priority rehiring for 1,800 factory employees. The plight of the Honduran factory workers came to the attention of various fair labor associations and university licensing advisory committees, including The University of Washington's Advisory Committee on Trademarks and Licensing (ACTL) has commenced an oral and digital history project on the recent and historic ACTL. In keeping with its mission, ACTL proceeded to evaluate whether or not Nike had violated the university's code of conduct (that Nike is contractually obligated to uphold) as the basis for its advice whether to renew or terminate the University of Washington's existing contract with Nike to supply university apparel. ACTL was part of a campaign to pressure Nike to ensure the workers received what was owed them under Honduran law. The dispute was resolved successfully when Nike announced on July 29th, 2010, that it had set aside $1.5 million as part of a compensation package for the terminated Hugger and VisionTex employees.

Professor of history, University of Washington from 1958 until 1993. Burke acquired this collection during his research, which often focused on studies of progressive and radical politics in California and the United States during the New Deal as well as the Spanish Civil War. The Washington Commonwealth Federation was created in 1935 from efforts of the Commonwealth Builders. It was a coalition of organized labor, local Democratic Party clubs, advocates of technocracy, and old-age pension supporters. It operated as a left-wing political organization that sought to control the Democratic Party of of Washington state. For most of its history, it focused on drafting, supporting, and endorsing candidates for local, state and federal public offices, and lobbying public officials in pursuit of its own policy agenda. The Federation was often a center of controversy because of the dominant role played by the Communist Party in setting Federation policy, and because many of its members were also members of the Communist Party. Hugh DeLacy, the Federation's president from 1938 to 1945, was elected to Congress from Seattle in 1944. His election was a high point for the organization, but also left it with a leadership crisis. Having achieved some of its goals in effecting Democratic Party unity and change, the WCF dissolved in 1945.

This collection contains Tom Copeland’s research materials on Elmer Smith, attorney for the Industrial Workers of the World involved in the Centralia Tragedy of 1919. These materials were used by Copeland in the writing of his book, The Centralia Tragedy of 1919: Elmer Smith and the Wobblies (1993). Also included are research materials from his 1986 article, "Wesley Everest, IWW Martyr" published in The Pacific Northwest Quarterly . As a part of his research, Copeland conducted a series of oral history interviews with Centralia residents in the 1970s, including members of Smith’s family, IWW members, classmates, and others who knew him.

Collection contents include Copeland’s research notes as well as reproductions and originals gathered by Copeland from family members and archival repositories of news and magazine clippings, pamphlets, correspondence, and other primary sources, including papers and photographs from Elmer and the Smith family. The collection also contains several scholarly papers and manuscripts, including a draft with notes from Virginia Waddell, Smith’s daughter, of her in-progress biography of her father. Other research materials include correspondence between Copeland and people who knew Smith as well as a large series of oral history interview materials, including correspondence between Copeland and interviewees, paper and digital copies of transcriptions of some of the interviews, and analog and digital audio recordings of many of the interviews.

See the Arrangement Note for a full list of series and subseries. More detailed description of each series is also included in the collection inventory, integrating Tom Copeland’s notes on the collection when available.

Biographical Note

Between 1977-1981, Mary Deaton worked as a free-lance writer specializing in labor, labor history and women's issues. In 1979, The Weekly published her piece on the anniversary of The Seattle General Strike of 1919. Mary Deaton had numerous other publications in local newspapers and history and union journals and in 1981 served as project director for the 1981 Labor Film Festival of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association.

Deaton was commissioned in 1979-1980 by International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Local 23, and the Port of Tacoma to write their history under a grant from the Washington Commission for the Humanities to the Working Waterfront Project. Deaton researched and visited the ILWU headquarters in San Francisco and collected oral histories from many of the members and their children. Deaton submitted a manuscript "Hungry Port: A Documented History of Longshoring in Tacoma, WA," to the commissioning board, which they rejected. In the manuscript, Deaton took a pro-Congress of Industrial Organizations position and delved further into the reasons for breaking the strike and the aftermath, going deeper than odd references to communists. The commissioning body then engaged Tacoma longshore historian Ron Magden to complete the work. Deaton's notes and original manuscript comprise this collection.
Content Description

This collection contains research materials and manuscripts about the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), Local 23, for Deaton’s book. Materials include newspaper clippings, International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) and ILWU convention proceedings, waterfront labor contracts, testimonies, and secondary source material.There is also an extensive collection of transcripts of oral history interviews with longshore workers and their relatives conducted by Deaton and Dan Jongeling. Also includes notes, drafts, and index cards for Deaton's manuscript. In addition, this collection contains drafts of Deaton’s book that was rejected by the commission.

Biographical Note

Dana Frank is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Frank used the University of Washington's Special Collections in researching her book Purchasing Power. Frank is also an expert on human rights and U.S. policy in Honduras.


Content Description
Research files including clippings, photocopies, photographs, original materials and ephemera collected and donated by historian Dana Frank. Includes materials related to the history of Seattle labor and women's activism.

Interviews recorded by Gary Greaves in the late-1980s and early-1990s.

The recordings all relate to post-war Seattle history and cover a diverse array of topics -- such as transportation, race relations, housing, city planning and labor -- narrated by an equally diverse group, including well-known politicians such as Cheryl Chow, Martha Choe and Paul Schell; community activists such as Aaron Dixon (founder of the local Black Panthers chapter) and Hazel Wolf (social and environmental activist); and also including everyday people whom Greaves quizzed about the changing face of the neighborhoods. The recordings share the behind-the-scenes and inside stories of issues that have shaped Seattle, reaching beyond the headlines to provide details of subjects such as Seattle’s ongoing challenges with low-income housing, the personal story of a homeless man living on Seattle's streets, relations among different Asian ethnic groups as told by politicians and business leaders, and the planners who have seen roads, bridges and transit plans approved -- and then rescinded.

Ottilie Lou (Kepner) Markholt was a white, female labor unionist, labor historian, and author who spent most of her life in Tacoma, Washington. She was born on February 25, 1916 to parents Alfred Silverthorne Kepner and Clara Reissennweber Kepner in Candle, Alaska. Her family moved first to Chicago in 1919 and then to West Seattle in 1921 where Ottilie spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence. She attended West Seattle High School, working on the school newspaper, and graduated in 1933 as class Valedictorian.

After high school, Ottilie attended the University of Washington from 1933-1935. It was in college that she became active in leftist political organizing, joining the University Unit of the Young Communist League in 1935. Ottilie did not graduate college, leaving, according to the Preface of her book Maritime Solidarity, “to become a full-time revolutionary.” It was through the Young Communist League that she met her first husband, Bob (Robert) Dombroff. They married on December 7, 1935. Bob was also active in leftist organizing and the labor movement when they met. They were both members of the Communist Party but dropped out in 1936.

Bob Dombroff was a sailor and an active member of the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific as well as the Maritime Federation of the Pacific Coast (MFPC), a short-lived organization founded in 1935 to build solidarity amongst the different labor unions representing maritime workers. During this time, Ottilie helped form the Seattle Women’s Maritime Auxiliary of the MFPC, compiled the Union Labels for Union Men booklet in 1937, and helped recruit author and activist Ralph Chaplin, Jr. to work as Editor of the MFPC’s newspaper, the Voice of the Federation. Both Ottilie and Bob were openly critical of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) President, Harry Bridges.

Bob and Ottilie had two sons, Bob and Lee. Bob was born in 1937 and Lee in 1939. After Bob Dombroff and Ottilie divorced in 1941, she relocated to Tacoma with her sons and temporarily worked a unionized waitressing job. She began working for the Tacoma Metal Trades Council in 1943 where she joined the Office Employees International Union Local 20360 which later became the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 23. Ottilie worked for OPEIU Local 23 as Office Secretary beginning in 1949 until her retirement in 1981. She was also actively involved in the union itself, including attending the 1962 international convention as delegate and serving as Secretary-Treasurer in the 1960s.

Ottilie met her second husband, Halvor Markholt through Local 23. He worked as a timekeeper at the shipyards. They married in 1943, and Ottilie as well as her sons assumed the last name of Markholt. The family moved to a farm south of Tacoma in 1945. Ottilie and Halvor divorced in 1953.

Ottilie’s Research & Writing

Ottilie spent many years researching and writing scholarly articles and manuscripts on a variety of topics, primarily related to the labor movement. Her published book Maritime Solidarity: Pacific Coast Unionism 1929-1938 emerged from expanded research beginning with her work on the Sailors' Union of the Pacific manuscript, completed in 1942 and originally credited solely to co-author Peter B. Gill. Ottilie conducted extensive research and worked on multiple drafts of Maritime Solidarity for many decades, including versions detailing earlier time periods. Ralph Chaplin, Jr. was an influence in encouraging her to resume research and writing in the 1950s, and labor historian Archie Green encouraged her to publish it in the early 1990s. After rejection from a number of publishers, the Pacific Coast Maritime History Committee was formed, initially as a part of the Pierce County Central Labor Council and composed of members of the labor community, to coordinate the publishing. Through community donations, including contributions from labor unions, enough money was raised to publish the book in 1998.

In addition to Maritime Solidarity, she researched and wrote several other manuscripts, including The Concern of All: Tacoma Working People and Their Unions, 1883-1895, sponsored by the Pierce County Central Labor Council in the 1980s; a biography of her parents called Alaska Homestead, completed in 1947; Nome, Alaska’s Early Union Movement on early union organizing in Nome; and her autobiography, Against the Current, completed around 2001. She also assisted others in their research, including Ronald (Ron) Magden and A.D. Martinson for their 1982 publication, The working waterfront: the story of Tacoma's ships and men as well as Captain Harold Huycke in the early 2000s in writing a history of ILWU Local 90 in San Francisco, California.

Additionally, Ottilie wrote for a variety of local publications during her lifetime, including the Tacoma Labor Advocate when Ralph Chaplin was Editor in the 1940s. She was also Editor of the Tacoma NAACP newsletter in the early 1960s and the Pierce County Central Labor Council Education Committee’s newsletter, The Labor Educator, which ran from 1985 to 1997.

Activism and Organizational Involvement

Ottilie was active in labor, civil rights, and social justice organizing, participating in a variety of organizations throughout her lifetime. In addition to her involvement in the Communist Party and OPEIU Local 23, she organized against “Right to Work” Initiatives 198 and 202 in Washington State during the 1950s. In 1964, Ottilie traveled to Buffalo, New York for research where she ended up volunteering in the office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). She later joined the Tacoma-Olympia Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1971 and served as Branch Secretary for a number of years.

She was also actively involved in promoting and educating the community on the importance of labor history, including serving as the first Chair of the Pierce County Central Labor Council’s Education Committee and coordinating research and writing for a pictorial history exhibit and the publication of To Live in Dignity as a part of the Washington State centennial celebrations in 1989. Along with her son Bob who was teaching labor studies courses at the Tacoma Community College, Ottilie made efforts to integrate labor history education into community college curriculum in the 1970s and 80s. She was also a founding member of the Pacific Northwest Labor History Association (PNLHA), joining in 1979 and serving as Vice President for several years in the 1990s as well as attending and presenting papers at the organization’s annual meeting.

End of Life

Ottilie passed away on November 25, 2004 in Tacoma, Washington. A memorial was held on January 30, 2005 at the Local 23 hall of the ILWU in Fife, Washington.

The papers of Ottilie Markholt span the years 1888-2005 and document multiple dimensions of her life as a trade unionist, activist, labor historian, writer, mother, and friend.

University of Washington professor of political science, founding chair of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, scholar on urban and labor politics.
David Olson (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) was Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Harry Bridges Endowed Chair Emeritus in Labor Studies. He researched state, urban and labor politics in the United States. He was the co-author or co-editor of Black Politics: The Inevitability of Conflict (Holt, Rinehart and Winston) Theft of the City: Readings in Corruption in Urban America (Indiana), Commission Politics: The Processing of Racial Crisis in America (Trans-Action Books), Governing the United States (McGraw Hill), and To Keep The Republic (McGraw Hill). He also published numerous articles on urban politics, state politics, political violence, seaport politics, congestion pricing, living wage campaigns, term limits, and labor politics. In 2005 he received the S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award and in 2007 was named the inaugural Distinguished Civic Educator Award by the Washington State Senate. In 2006 Olson was knighted by the King of Norway as knight of the first class, order of merit for contributions to US/Norway scholarly exchange relations.

Mr. Stamets was born on April 18, 1949, in Ithaca, N.Y., and grew up in Columbiana, Ohio. Following family tradition, he attended prep school at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. After graduating from Yale University in 1971, he moved to Seattle in the early 1970s to study neurophysiology at the UW.

But he had already acquired the photography bug at Yale, where he had a chance to study with legendary photographer Walker Evans.

“John was a force of nature,” his brother, Paul, said. “He inspired me on my path into the field of mycology, after his travels to Mexico and Colombia in pursuit of magic mushrooms.”

Back in Seattle, Mr. Stamets drove a cab for several years, taking pictures of his passengers. He also was a photographer for the Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly.

He was most famous for capturing the 1987 collapse of Husky Stadium on camera — a photo he then sold as a nine-shot panoramic postcard titled “Gravity 1, UW 0.”

In 1988, he began shooting the construction of large building projects in downtown Seattle as the city underwent one of its periodic building booms. “I realized it was going to be a very significant time in the city’s history,” he told The Seattle Times in 1992, “comparable to the Denny Regrade.” (The bus tunnel, downtown Seattle Art Museum and five skyscrapers were all under construction.)

In 1992, he joined the UW faculty, where he ran the Architecture Photo Lab. He also became involved in a federal program documenting important historical buildings. His collaborator Susan Boyle, of Boyle Wagoner Architects, noted that more than 350 of his photographs are in the Library of Congress’s Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record Collection.

There was little that could stop him from getting the shot he wanted, Boyle said. He even rented the Monorail so he could see into the EMP Museum site during construction, having the driver stop at the best vantage points and open the doors.

A more recent obsession was the Rat City Rollergirls. “In March 2013 I fell down the rabbit hole into modern roller derby,” he said. “I saw it once, and I never left.”

He died the weekend of June 7-8, at age 65, of an apparent heart attack.

Information taken from John Stamets obituary by Michael Upchurch.
Photographs made by John Stamets. Stamets documented architecture around Seattle often making photographs over time that followed the stages of construction of buildings. He also made photographs of historical buidlings for HABS and HAER documentation projects (Historical American Building Survey/Historical American Engineering Record). He also documented Nicaraguan circuses, Fililpino cannery workers, the Rat City Rollergirls roller derby team and other activities.

Asberry was a music teacher who was born Nettie J. Craig on July 15, 1865, in Leavenworth, Kansas. She earned a degree from the Kansas State Conservatory of Music and later earned her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. She moved to Seattle in 1890 and relocated to Tacoma in 1893. Following her marriage to Albert J. Jones, who died three years after their move to Seattle, she married Henry Joseph Asberry. In 1908 Nettie Asberry helped found the Clover Leaf Art Club, one of the first African American Women’s clubs in the state. She became a leader in the Washington State Federation of Colored Women’s Organizations and served as its president. The organization was founded in 1917 and was known by various names, including the Washington State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, the Colored Women’s Federation of Washington and Jurisdiction and, in later years, the Washington State Association of Colored Women (and ... Colored Women's Clubs). Asberry was also a founder of the Tacoma Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a member of the Progressive Mothers' Club of Tacoma and the Tacoma Inter-Racial Council. Nettie J. Asberry died in 1968.

Richard Carbray moved with his family from Canada when he five years old. He was educated in the Catholic school system in Seattle. He graduated from the University of Washington and did graduate work at University College, Dublin. Carbray taught at Lakeside School from 1941-1949 with time out for Army duty. Later he was chairman of the language department of Lake Forest Academy, Illinois, and then taught at Rosary College, River Forest, Illinois. Carbray was an active member of the Catholic social movement and an early opponent of the Vietnam War and has taught courses on dissent at the University of Washington and various Seattle area community colleges. He was chairman of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam (CALCAV) and worked closely with the Berrigans and other individual resisters and protest groups. As personal "peritus" to Archbishop Thomas, D. Roberts, he attended the Vatican II Ecumenical Council in Rome, 1964-1966. Carbray credits two men with having a major influence in his life: one was Gordon Zahn, who established his credentials in the peace movement as a Catholic conscientious objector in World War II; the second was the Most Rev. Thomas Roberts, S.J. former archbishop of Bombay and a persistent voice against war, especially in a nuclear age.

ohn Caughlan was a Seattle attorney and civil rights leader.

John Caughlan was born in Missouri in 1909, the son of a Methodist clergyman. The Caughlan family moved to Eastern Washington in 1911, living chiefly in Ellensburg, and then to Seattle where Caughlan graduated from Ballard High School and earned a B.A. at the University of Washington. In the early 1930s he enrolled briefly in a graduate program in English literature at Yale University but, feeling the discipline to be removed from the issues of the day (the problems of the Great Depression and the proposed solutions of the New Deal), he enrolled instead in Harvard Law School, graduating in 1935.

Caughlan returned to Seattle in 1937 after a short stint in New York. He worked briefly for a law firm but was fired after refusing to withdraw from a case in which he represented the Communist Party in a dispute with the city, which had revoked the Party's lease for the Civic Auditorium. In 1938 Caughlan became a deputy prosecutor for King County, although he took leave from this position to represent the Grays Habor Civil Rights Committee as they investigated the destruction of a public hall in Aberdeen, Washington. He also represented CIO official Dick Law at the inquest into the death of his wife, labor activist Laura Law.

Caughlan returned to the King County Prosecutor's Office in 1940, but was informed that he would only be permitted to resume work there if he would publicly denounce the Soviet Union. He refused to do so, was dismissed, and spent the rest of his career in private practice, having as partners at various times Siegfried Hesse, Leonard Schroeter, C.T. Hatten and Lee A. Holley.

Civil liberties and human rights were the two overarching concerns that informed Caughlan's professional activities. In the 1940s and 1950s he represented labor unions, union activists, the Communist Party, the Washington Pension Union, Henry Huff in the Smith Act case of United States v. Henry Huff et al., foreign-born residents facing deportation because of their political activities, and individuals accused of "subversive" or "un-American" activities in cases related to the Smith Act, the McCarran Act, and the McCarran-Walter Act. Hazel Wolf was one of these, threatened with deportation for Commumist Party membership. He also represented, with his partner C.T. "Barry" Hatten, a number of witnesses before the hearings conducted by the Washington State Legislature's Joint Legislative Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, led by Albert F. Canwell, in 1947-1948. He also represented several individuals before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs (HUAC) at its Seattle hearings in 1954, and handled many cases involving screening of Coast Guard personnel. Caughlan had been charged with perjury in 1948, two years after stating in the course of testifying in an immigration case that he was not a member of the Communist Party. He was acquitted, but was himself called before HUAC in 1954 to face the charge again. In 1961 Caughlan was convicted of failure to pay income tax. He served six months in the federal prison camp on McNeil Island and was suspended from practice for thirty days.

Five of Caughlan's cases went to the United States Supreme Court; the most significant of these were Herbert Schneider vs. Willard Smith, Commandant, United States Coast Guard, 1968, which invalidated Cost Guard screening procedures for personnel on United States merchant marine vessels, and United States vs. Eugene Robel, 1967, which invalidated a section of the Subversive Activities Control Act (McCarran Act) which had prohibited employment at defense facilities of members of Communist-action organizations.

In the 1960s and 1970s Caughlan's focus moved to other issues such as segregation and racial discrimination, and human rights beyond the United States. He travelled to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 with other attorneys to assist in the defense of civil rights activists there; at home in Seattle he was involved in racially charged cases, working with members of the Black Panther Party and protesting inquest procedures (which were later changed) in the inquest into the killing of black activist Larry Ward by Seattle police. Caughlan handled many conscientious objector and Selective Service cases during the Vietnam War.

Human rights abuses by governments supported by the United States were an issue of ongoing concern for Caughlan. In 1977 he went to the Philippines as part of a delegation headed by former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark, on a fact-finding mission to investigate human rights violations by the Marcos regime. During the 1980s he travelled several times to Central America, particularly Nicaragua, participating in a National Lawyers Guild mission in 1984 to observe the Nicaraguan elections, and also represented Central American refugees in their immigratio

Megan Cornish was born in 1947 into a military family and grew up in various locations around the United States. After graduating from Cornell University in 1969 with a BA in literature, Cornish moved to the Puget Sound region and worked at The Shelter Half, an anti-war GI coffeehouse in Tacoma. In her early years in the Pacific Northwest, Cornish was not a member of a formal group or organization. However, Cornish joined Radical Women after being drawn to the group's intersectional approach and became more interested in labor organizing. She took a job at a nursing home and also briefly worked in an industrial laundry facility.

In 1974, Cornish was recruited by Clara Fraser, a cofounder of Radical Women and education coordinator at Seattle City Light, to apply for a position as an Electrical Trades Trainee (ETT), an all-female affirmative action program designed by Fraser to integrate women into the electrical trades. Cornish was selected to be one of ten women ETT's out of an application pool of over 300. In the first weeks on the job, the sense of solidarity between workers as the result of a walkout that occurred just weeks before caused Cornish and the other female ETT's to be received well. The shared resentment towards City Light Superintendent Gordon Vickery and management created a sense of unity amongst the electrical workers and reduced their hostility towards their new female coworkers. The severed relationship between Fraser and management, however, left the ETT's in a highly vulnerable position as management sought to retaliate against Fraser through damaging the ETT program.

Only a week after starting, the ETT training program was canceled and Fraser was removed from her position as the training coordinator. Trainees were told on a Friday afternoon to report to field work the next week, where they made $1 less per hour than the other electrical helpers. In response, the ETT's filed a complaint with the City of Seattle Office of Women's Rights (OWR) stating that they were being denied the typical amount of training and pay reserved for male employees. After a year of training, Cornish and seven of the other ETT's were laid off, along with Fraser. The ETT's and Fraser saw their terminations as politically motivated and retaliatory, and they added the lay-offs to their OWR complaint.

As their case was being reviewed, the former ETT's engaged in a massive public relations campaign to win the support of the public. Numerous articles about the case were published in the local press, and the case became a central focus of the local women's movement. In July 1976, in a major victory, City Light was ordered to reinstate six of the terminated trainees, including Cornish, as well as to pay a settlement, give them back pay, and make them eligible for apprenticeship programs.

After the victorious court ruling, Cornish applied for a City Light apprenticeship as a lineworker, along with two other Radical Women members Teri Bach and Hildreth (Heidi) Durham. Cornish described this period as the "roughest" time during her career at City Light. Vickery and management, angered by the ruling, placed Cornish and her female colleagues into positions that were designed to be the most difficult to succeed in. Each of the women were placed into divisions that were known to be hostile to them, which ultimately led to Durham falling from a pole and breaking her back in a near fatal accident.

In addition to being antagonized by management, Cornish and the other women apprentices were also met with animosity from the male electrical workers that they worked alongside. In 1975, Local 77 of the IBEW staged a failed strike that led to harsher working conditions. Many male electricians, frustrated and demoralized by their strike's defeat, held resentment towards the former ETT's for winning their discrimination case, and these feelings were exploited by management to increase the sexist hostility of the work environments.

Despite having an affirmative action plan to diversify its workforce, Cornish, Bach, and Durham remained some of the only female electrical workers at City Light for nearly ten years. The three regularly gave public comment at Seattle City Council meetings to demand the hiring of more women and people of color at City Light. In the early 1980's, City Light hired its first new female electrical worker in nearly a decade.

In 1983, Cornish helped establish the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL) to fight workplace harassment and discrimination in response to inaction from management, union leaders, and the City of Seattle Human Rights Department (HRD). CERCL membership grew rapidly in the mid-1980's and pressured the HRD to investigate discrimination cases. In 1991, Cornish and Durham were jointly named Advocate of the Year by the Washington Women in the Trades.

Cornish retired from Seattle City Light in 2004 after 30 years. At the time of her retirement, she held the position of outage dispatcher, the highest position in the utility trades. She credits her adherence to feminism and political radicalism as essential to her successful accomplishments in her organizing at City Light. She remains an active member of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party and continues to write for the Freedom Socialist newspaper.

Adapted from the Megan Cornish article on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megan_Cornish

Content Description
This collection contains records collected by Megan Cornish as one of the first female electricians at Seattle City Light between 1970 and 2003. The materials span from her apprenticeship in the Electrical Trades Trainee (ETT) affirmative action program until her retirement from Seattle City Light as a senior power dispatcher. Cornish helped found the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL) to fight race and sex discrimination within the agency. Much of the material is related to a series of discrimination lawsuits filed by Cornish and other members of the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) and Radical Women, including Clara Fraser, Teri Bach, and Hildreth (Heidi) Durham.

There is also material related to Cornish’s involvement and organizing efforts in her union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local 77, and other unions including the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), Local 17. These records contain meeting minutes, legal briefings and reports, worker testimonies; materials from other discrimination lawsuits; City of Seattle employee memorandums; correspondence; employee evaluations and documentations; City Light job postings; negotiated union contracts; Cornish’s union cards and dues statements; leaflets; newsletters; and news articles related to Cornish’s activities at City Light. This collection would be of particular interest to those interested in women in the labor movement, labor unions, feminism, socialism, affirmative action, discrimination, sexism, labor law, and organizing in the public sector.

Richard V. "Dick" Correll (1904-1990), described as "one of the leading masters of printmaking in the West", was best known for his powerful black and white linoleum cuts, etchings and woodblock prints. For most of his life he earned a living as a commercial artist in the book publishing and advertising fields while producing a large body of fine art in his own time. His themes ranged from landscapes, animals and agricultural scenes, harbors and ships, and music and dance to those which reflected his lifelong concern with political and social issues. As one curator wrote, "the maturity of his technique, with its rich textures and dramatic contrasts, combines with a wide range of subject matter to produce a body of work of great warmth, power, and depth". Correll stated that, above all, he was a humanist.

Born in Missouri 1904, Richard Correll spent most of his life in the three West Coast states, spending his early years in small farms or towns in Oregon and California. He absorbed his intellectual thirst -- and the craft of fine woodworking - from his father, a lawyer, school teacher, master carpenter, and voracious reader, and the love of art and music from his mother, a musician trained at Oberlin. A natural artist from early childhood, by the age of four Dick was cutting perfect farm animals out of paper with his mother's sewing scissors. He was largely self-taught: "I combed the library of every place we moved to for reproductions and critical articles on artwork or artists. I’m a constant student." He also became sensitized to the environment early on through working in his family’s small garden plots and farms and caring for the occasional family cow, horse or flock of chickens.

By the later 1920s the family had moved to Los Angeles. Dick's father and uncle began building houses there during the housing boom, with Dick doing the architectural drafting and his younger brother the electrical work. The two young men helped their father and brother with everything from basic construction to fine cabinetry. After the building boom collapsed with the Depression, Dick opened a couple of sign shops and did sign painting and calligraphy. He took a few art classes at what was then Chouinard Art Institute, but never attended as a matriculated student. He continued to sketch and draw on his own.

Dick's political thinking deepened with the Depression and seeing flocks of people uprooted by the Dust Bowl, hungry and homeless, stream into California. He began to see that art could be a vehicle to express ideas.

Correll specialized in printmaking, primarily wood and linoleum block prints, but produced etchings and lithographs as well. In addition, he produced drawings, gouache paintings and two murals. Especially notable from Correll's WPA period is a suite of prints depicting the legendary American folk hero, Paul Bunyan. In one exhibition catalogue these were described to be "as large in spirit as their inspiration."

During the Seattle years, Correll was a founding member of the Washington Artists' Union. He married his wife Alice in 1938. He had several solo shows and exhibited widely in national juried group shows (Print Club of Philadelphia, the California Etcher's Society, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Print Annual.) In 1939 his work was exhibited at the New York World’s Fair. Many of the works from the WPA period are today in the collections of museums, universities, and public buildings and continue to be shown and circulated. His murals of Paul Bunyan remain in a high school in Bremerton, Washington.

Curator and fine print dealer M. Lee Stone writes, "In 1941 Correll and his wife moved to New York City where he remained for 11 years working in the commercial art field. New York's commercial and fine art scenes, however, were not without their difficulties. While commercial work paid decently, Correll always thought it a 'sorry thing' to use one's artistic abilities to sell products. His values were completely opposed to those of Madison Avenue, and this contradiction plagued him throughout his commercial career.

As America entered World War II, Correll, at 36, was too old for the draft. He joined the Civilian Defense Corps as an Air Raid Warden in the Greenwich Village area. He also did artwork for Civil Defense, producing dozens of pro bono flyers, banners, signs and posters for various causes." Daughter Leslie was born in 1944.

After joining the Artists League of America (ALA), an organization of progressive artists and sculptors "devoted to social, cultural, and economic interest of artists", Correll served as Publication Chair of the ALA News from 1943 on, and by 1946 was Editor. Membership in those years included Rockwell Kent, Lynd Ward, Jacob Lawrence and Moses Soyer. He exhibited regularly with ALA, and his linocut, "Air Raid Wardens" was included in the "Artists for Victory"

Civil servant, elected official, moral reformer, surveyor, and engineer, George Fletcher Cotterill helped shape the city of Seattle in the literal as well as the figurative sense.

Cotterill was born in England to Alice and Robert Cotterill on Nov. 18, 1865. In 1872, the Cotterill family immigrated to the United States and settled in Montclair, New Jersey. Cotterill graduated from high school as class valedictorian in 1881, and studied surveying and engineering under the tutelage of a New Jersey county engineer for the next three years. During this time he participated in the platting and construction of Arlington cemetery.

Cotterill migrated to the Pacific Northwest in 1884. For several years he worked as a surveyor on various land, mining, and railroad projects before being hired by surveyor R.H. Thomson. With Thomson, Cotterill surveyed for the city's first sewer system and platted additions to rapidly expanding Seattle. When Thomson was appointed city engineer in 1882, Cotterill became his assistant. Among his responsibilities as assistant city engineer, Cotterill was assigned to the city water department and became instrumental in the development of the Cedar River water supply. The city, needing a fresher and less expensive source of water than the Lake Washington pumping system, approved the Cedar River gravity system in the mid 1890s. At the time, the city was out of funds to pay for the new water system, and Cotterill, a member of the task force responsible for improving Seattle's water supply, proposed the novel revenue bond system for municipal ownership of public utilities. The first of its kind in the United States, this public utilities plan was approved by citizen vote in 1896. Cotterill was also involved in the project to convert the tide flats south of the city into property capable of development.

Cotterill's advocacy of public utilities drew him into the political arena. In 1900 the nonpartisan party, through which he was promoting public utilities, nominated him for mayor. Cotterill accepted the nomination contingent on backing from the Democratic Party, which he received, and he ran as a Democratic candidate. Though Cotterill had grown up a Republican, the recent campaign of William Jennings Bryan had made him a Democrat. Cotterill did not win this election or the next, but in 1906 he ran for the state senate and won. One of his principal accomplishments while in office was the framing of the successful amendment to the Washington State constitution recognizing female suffrage. Because of this amendment, he recalled later with pride, his mother had been able to cast a ballot for the first time at the age of 75. Cotterill received the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in 1908 and again in 1910, but lost both times.

In 1912 Cotterill again ran for mayor, this time on a platform demanding moral reform. In an "open" city where vice had flourished since the Klondike gold rush, his campaign targeted Hiram Gill's legacy of graft in city government as well as rampant prostitution and gambling houses. Cotterill won this election, helped in part by the new ability of women to vote. Cotterill's term was punctuated by conflict and controversy, due to corruption in municipal government and the police department, labor unrest, an unsympathetic Seattle Times, and other causes. He regularly confronted opposition to his moral reform agenda, which was for the most part driven by strong temperance beliefs.

At the center of Cotterill's commitment to moral reform was his life-long crusade on behalf of temperance. His parents had joined the United Kingdom Temperance Alliance in 1865, consequently indoctrinating Cotterill from birth. As a child in England, Cotterill attended the local chapter his mother had formed of the Band of Hope, an organization for children's temperance education. Cotterill attended his first convention of the International Order of Good Templars in 1897 and remained involved in this organization for the rest of his life. He served for a time as Grand Secretary of the Washington State division and later as Chief Templar of the national division. In addition to his work with the Templars, he was a member of the Anti-Saloon League. In 1909, Cotterill was appointed by President Taft as U.S. representative to the International Congress against Alcoholism; in 1913 President Wilson reappointed him.

Cotterill did not seek a second term as mayor; instead he worked as a surveyor and engineer in private practice. From 1916 to 1919 he served as chief engineer of the state Highway Department. He returned to Seattle politics in 1922, running for Seattle port commissioner. He won, and served four consecutive three-year terms, 1922 to 1934.

Following his port commissioner post, Cotterill ran unsuccessfully for at least five various city and state offices between 1932 and 1951. He also ran for governor in 1928

Biographical Note

Clara Fraser was born Clara Doris Goodman in Los Angeles on March 12, 1923 to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Samuel and Emma Goodman. Her father was an anarchist and her mother worked in the garment industry. She grew up in a multi-racial neighborhood, the East Side ghetto of Los Angeles, which Fraser described as a very poor, but highly political environment. While in junior high school in the 1930s, Clara joined the Young People’s Socialist League, prompted by the despair of the Great Depression. In 1939 to 1945, Fraser attended UCLA and graduated with degrees in literature, education, and drama. She then joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1945. After marrying at the age of 18, she and her first husband, Frank Krasnowsky, moved to Chicago. They then moved to Seattle to organize a Socialist Workers Party during the post-war era. Working as an assembly line electrician at Boeing, Fraser participated in the Boeing Strike of 1948. During the 1950s and 1960s, Fraser was very active in labor socialist politics. She worked vigorously to end racial segregation and the Vietnam War. She also supported women’s rights. In 1966 when the Seattle branch of the Socialist Workers Party left the organization, Fraser helped form the Freedom Socialist Party. Fraser and other feminists began a Free University of Seattle class titled "Marx and the Women's Question" which was the beginning of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Washington. Soon after, she joined the original Seattle Opportunities Industrialization Center (SOIC) and CEP, the job training arms of the anti-poverty program. She became a consultant on feminism and race relations for many public agencies. In 1967, Fraser, along with Gloria Martin and the young women of the New Left, founded Radical Women. Radical Women worked with and supported African American anti-poverty programs, Native American fishing rights, and Asian American protests for low-income housing.

After being fired from SOIC, Seattle City Light hired Fraser in 1973 as an education coordinator of the Electrical Trades Trainee Program for women. On July 11, 1975, Seattle City Light fired her, claiming that her dismissal was due to budgetary cuts. The Seattle Department of Human Rights, directed under Vivian L. Caver, a black woman civil rights and political activist, found that Fraser was discriminated because of her public affiliation with the Feminist Coordinating Council, Radical Women, and the Freedom Socialist Party. When the workers of Seattle City Light rose up against Superintendent Gordon Vickery, director of the agency, in 1974, Fraser was the leading critic and spokesperson for the massive employee walkout. She then became involved with a recall campaign against Mayor Wes Uhlman.

A legendary case not only in Seattle but across the nation, Fraser garnered broad support from local and national labor, feminist, gay, and labor unions, women’s groups, the LGBT community, and minority groups including the Black Panther Party chapters in Los Angeles and Seattle, the Native American Rights Advocate, and the Asian Law Association. In 1981, the court ruled in favor of Fraser, upholding protection for employees against sex and political discrimination. Seattle City Light was ordered to award her $135,265.00 in back pay, damages, and interests, reinstatement of her retirement account, social security contributions, and restoration of sick leave, dental and vacation benefits.

Fraser died on February 24, 1998 in Seattle, Washington.



Content Description
Materials include correspondence, newsletters, press releases, and newspaper articles relating to the activities surrounding the lawsuit Clara Fraser vs. City Light, an oral history interview with Fraser by Charlotte McAllister (1970), and records related to her co-founding and leadership in the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women. Also included are pamphlets and booklets regarding radicalism, industrial unionism, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, Marxism, Socialism, feminism, anti-war efforts, and anti-capitalism collected by Fraser (1905-1949). Personal papers include educational records; family memorabilia; calendars and diaries; and correspondence, as well as materials about cultural events that illustrate Fraser's wide range of interests.

Civil rights activists; state official

Gerber's career as an active civil rights worker particularly emphasized the area of housing and vocational opportunities. He worked through a number of different organizations: the Washington State Board Against Discrimination (he was appointed by Governor Rosellini and chaired the State Board from 1957 until his resignation in 1962); the Fair Employment Practices Committee, of which he was treasurer; the Washington State Committee for Human Rights; American Friends Service Committee (regarding Seattle CAMP Program); American Technion Society; National Associaton for the Advancement of Colored People (Housing Committee); National Citizens Political Action Committee; Washington Citizen's Committee for Civil Rights Legislation; Washington Independents for Wallace; and the Washington State Committee for Human Rights. He also established some organizations to deal with the problem of fair housing such as the Fair Housing Listing Service and Harmony Homes.

Sidney Gerber was a champion of civil rights in Seattle, and notably was the founder of the Fair Housing Listing Service, which worked on the issue of minority housing in the Seattle area. He chaired the Washington State Board Against Discrimination. In 1961 he was awarded the Seattle Lodge 503 B'Nai B'rith "Man of the Year" award for his civil rights leadership. He died in 1965 in a plane crash, along with passengers Wing Luke and Kay LaDue.

On November 30, 1999, first day of the ministerial meetings, thousands of largely peaceful protesters blocked delegates’ entrance to the opening plenary session. According to press reports, Seattle police in riot gear responded by releasing volleys of tear gas and pepper spray at 10:00 am and continued to do so throughout the day. The police eased up when the 20,000-member labor march reached the downtown core from the Seattle Center, where a large rally had been held. WTO officials cancelled the opening ceremonies. At a time difficult to verify after the fact, Mayor Paul Schell declared a civil emergency, ordering streets to be cleared by 7:00 pm and imposing a curfew on a large area of downtown, from Yesler Way to Denny Way and from Interstate 5 to Elliott Bay. Word of the curfew reached people on the streets at about 4:00 pm. Some dispersed, but others remained and were herded out of downtown by police firing tear gas and pepper spray. At approximately 10:00 pm the State Patrol reinforced the police. Scattered vandalism and looting of several downtown businesses had occurred during the day.

Early the following day, Wednesday, December 1, Seattle police established a ‘demonstration-free zone’ around the WTO meeting site at the Seattle Convention and Trade Center. They severely restricted access to the area, but protests continued. The ministerial meeting was shut down for five hours that day. Governor Gary Locke sent additional State Patrol troopers and two National Guard units to relieve and assist the Seattle police. Clashes between protesters and police spilled over in the evening to Capitol Hill, east of downtown. By then the focus had shifted somewhat, away from the WTO and towards the police response to the protests. Several hundred protesters were arrested, and other protesters demonstrated outside the King County Jail.

The following day the Mayor’s Office reduced the size of what it called a ‘limited curfew zone’ to the area bounded by Fourth Avenue, Pine Street, Boren Avenue, Seneca Street, and Interstate 5. Some protests were staged on Friday, especially inside the convention center. protesters demonstrated outside the King County jail again on Friday evening. Eventually charges were dropped against most of the over 400 people arrested.
Content Description
Return to Top

Video recordings and logbooks created by filmmakers and activists during the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, Washington. The video recordings from the Independent Media Center (IMC) collection offer a unique perspective into a historic moment that brought together grassroots activists, labor leaders, environmentalists, farmers, anarchists, and artists who made history and shaped social justice movements around the world.

Robert C. Scott was a charter member of Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound (founded 1946) and served on its Board of Directors from 1946-1953. From 1946-1948, he was chairman of the Group Health Cooperative Finance Committee.

Scott's interest in the cooperative movement grew out of his enthusiastic involvement in the Student Cooperative Association (S.C.A.) at the University of Washington during his student years (1931-1937). He was a founder and charter member of the S.C.A. and served four terms as president of its Board.

Often one local cooperative organization spawned others as members defined their needs and evolved cooperative solutions. Such an organization was the Co-op Agency, Inc. of which Scott was a founder and Board member from 1953-1958. The agency was organized as a buyer's club (mostly of food) but soon was providing its cooperators with appliances, loans and other services through a number of subsidiaries and related organizations. In 1954, the Agency had approximately 300 members.

On the national level, Scott served a term (1950-1954) on the Board of Directors of the Cooperative League of the United States, an association linking nearly ten million families through thousands of member cooperative ventures. Its local branch, the Cascade Chapter (founded 1949), fostered the development of many Puget Sound area consumer cooperatives, chief among which was the Consumer Insurance Agency, Inc. Robert Scott was an original board member.

Scott was also a research chemist for Adhesive Products Company, a division of American Marietta.

Emil Skowronek (aka Clark) (1904-1993) . Was born in Poland and immigrated to the United States. Skowronek graduated high school in Tcoma. As a young man, Skowronek was worked as a logger on the Olympic Peninsula for five years to fund his education as Washington State University, where he was a member of the wrestling team. Skowronek married Edna Theodosia Bundry Skowronek in 1935. He was radicalized by Skowronek was a member of the Communist Party USA and served as a left wing labor organizer who helped found the Seattle Ship Scaler's union in 1936. Skowroneck later became a ship rigger in the boilermaker's union and served as a business agent in the union. During World War II, Skowronek served in the merchant marine, where he was involved in the Battle of Okinawa. He lost his seamen's clearance for his political affiliations but was able to regain it.

Edna Theodosia Skowroneck (1903-1976), graduated in 1932 with Bachelor's of Science in nursing from the University of Washington. She worked as a registered nurse.

Theo Nassar (1939-), Emil and Edna's daughter, was born Thesoia Skowronek. Nassar recieved her BA in Sociology from Washington State University and her MS in Teaching/Communications from Gonzaga University, working as a caseworker at Eartrern State mental hospital and a copywriter and journalist in Spokane before moving to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter for ten years.

Felix Skowronek (1935-2006), Emil and Edna's son, played principal flute for the Seattle Symphony from 1956–1957 and 1959–1960. Skowronek also played in the Seventh Army Symphony from 1957–1959, Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra 1960–1966, and St. Louis Symphony 1966–1968, and was a member of the Casals Festival orchestra in Puerto Rico and a founding member of the Soni Ventorum Wind Quintet. He became a member of the faculty of the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, followed by the University of Washington, where he taught for 38 years, and served as president of the National Flute Association and Seattle Flute Society. He was a leading figure in the revival of wooden Boehm-style flutes in the USA and an expert in the use of various hardwoods in flute manufacturing.

Anna Louise Strong was a journalist, world traveler, observer of revolutions and author of over 30 books and countless articles. She was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister, Sydney Strong, who was a pacifist and practitioner of the social gospel. She was educated at Oberlin College, Bryn Mawr and University of Chicago, where she earned a Ph.D. After finishing her education, Strong joined the National Child Labor Committee and organized child welfare exhibits throughout the country from 1910-1912.

Sydney Strong moved to Seattle in 1906 where he lived until his death in 1938. Anna Louise Strong, who seldom lived anywhere for long, joined him there from 1916 to 1921, which was for her a time of radicalizing events, including the Everett massacre and trial, and the Seattle General Strike. In Seattle, she began her journalism career and wrote for the Seattle Union Record. During this time, she was elected to the Seattle School Board and subsequently recalled because of association with the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.). In the wake of these events, Strong went elsewhere in search of socialism in practice. Her quest took her first to the Soviet Union, where she was based from 1921 until 1940. During this period she spent part of the year in the Soviet Union, but would return to the United States for a lecture tour, usually between January and April.

Strong also became one of the earliest journalists to cover the Communist revolution in China. She visited China first in 1925 and returned frequently until 1947. During the course of her visits to China, she met and interviewed the Chinese Communist leaders, including Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung, gaining their respect and trust. In his 1946 interview with her, Mao first used the expression "paper tiger" to describe the United States.

Strong's enthusiasm for the Chinese revolution may have led to her arrest, imprisonment and expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1949. After these events, she was cut off from the Soviet Union, shunned by American Communists and denied a passport by the United States government. She settled for a time in California, where she wrote, lectured and invested in real estate. She was cleared finally of the Soviets' charges against her in 1955. When her passport was restored in 1958, she immediately made her way back to China, where she remained until her death in 1970. During the latter part of her life Anna Louise was honored and revered by the Chinese, one of the few Westerners with entree to China after the revolution and one of the last "Old China Hands" to remain in the good graces of the Chinese through the cultural revolution. The Chinese leaders considered her their unofficial spokesperson to the English speaking world.

Michael Withey is a Seattle-based lawyer who served as a representing attorney in the Domingo v Marcos court case. He is a public interest lawyer who has made a career representing the “little guy” against powerful interests to protect constitutional rights, civil rights, and human rights for the past 42 years. He is the former president of the Public Justice Foundation and received numerous prestigious awards.

Gene Viernes was born in Yakima on August 16, 1951, the eldest of nine children born to Felix and Betty Viernes. Felix had emigrated from the Philippines in the 1920s. He was a fruit picker and also worked in canneries. His son Gene grew up picking fruit before going to school. Gene joined Local 37, ILWU in 1966 at the age of 14, after lying about his age and paying a $50 bribe to a cannery foreman. He spent many summers as an "Alaskero," working in the Alaskan salmon canneries along with his father and brothers. In the 1970s, he met Silme Domingo and they became close friends. Together they formed the Alaska Cannery Workers' Association, a workers' legal advocacy group. Within Local 37, Gene Viernes played a crucial role in the formation of the Rank and File Committee, the group that spearheaded the reform movement in 1977.

Silme Domingo was born in Killeen, Texas, on January 25, 1952. His father had emigrated from the Philippines in the 1920s, and had joined the Army and fought in the Pacific during World War II. Silme was the third of five children born to Nemesio and Adelina Domingo. He grew up in Texas and Germany in accordance with his father's military career, and the family moved to Seattle in 1960. Silme attended Ballard High School and graduated with honors from the University of Washington. Silme, following his parents' social activism, participated in the effort during the 1970s to save Seattle's International District, and joined the work to establish social services for people in the district. In 1974 Silme joined the Union of Democratic Filipino (KDP) and established the Seattle KDP chapter, which organized the first protest in Seattle against the Marcos dictatorship. He was best known for his work in the Alaska Cannery Workers Union. He was survived by two children, Ligaya and Kalayaan.

On June 1, 1981, Seattle-based Filipino American labor activists Gene Viernes (1951-1981) and Silme Domingo (1952-1981) of Local 37 of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union(ILWU) were murdered near Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. They were attempting to reform the union, which they thought was corrupt, and were calling for better working conditions in the canneries.

The murders were originally thought to be an isolated act of violence, but friends and family organized a Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes (CJDV) eventually found links between the murders to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda, who had ordered the murders in retaliation for the victims’ anti-Marcos organizing. In 1989, and a federal jury agreed with the CJDV, finding Marcos guilty of the murders.

Documents, including depositions, court documents, drafts, notes, exhibits, and other material, tapes, video, and photographs relating to Michael Withey's role as a representing attorney in the Doming v. Marcos court case. The case came as a result of the 1981 assassination Seattle labor leaders Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes in a plot involving Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos and a Seattle union leader Tony Baruso. Domingo and Viernes, in addition to serving as cannery union officers, had been organizing as part of a Filipinx diaspora organization to oppose the Marcos Regime. After the murders, a Committee for Justice for Domingo and Viernes was formed and a legal case against Marcos made its way through the US judicial system.

Biographical Note

Harold Wright is an electrical contractor, author, activist, and community leader in Seattle, Washington. Wright was born in New York but grew up in Virginia. After graduating from high school and spending three years in the United States Marine Corps, Wright completed electrical apprenticeship training in New York City. He worked as a journeyman electrician from 1960-1972. Wright moved to Seattle in 1966 and started his own independent electrical contractor firm, Wright, Inc., in 1972. Wright is a co-founder of the Seattle Model City's Economic Task Force, the United Construction Workers Association (UCWA), the Central Contractors Association (CCA), the Community Coalition for Contracts and Jobs (CCCJ), and the Black Builders Association (BBA). In addition, Wright has authored numerous books about his activism and Black history, including Freedom , Reconstruction , Pain Inflicted by a Nation , Light Rail in the Valley , and Radiant .

Adapted from http://www.booksbywright.com/about-harold.html

Content Description

Materials from Harold Wright’s career as an electrical contractor, activist, and community leader. The collections includes research materials from Wright’s books Reconstruction, and Light Rail in the Valley. This collection would be of particular interest to researchers interested in Black-owned small businesses, construction, transportation, public transit, and African Americans in Seattle.

Historical Note

Founded in 1992, the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), AFL-CIO, is the first and only national organization of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) workers, primarily union members, and allies advancing worker, immigrant and civil rights. Since its founding, APALA has played an advocacy role around workplace issues of the 660,000 AAPI union members, serving as the bridge between the broader labor movement and the AAPI community. A constituency organization of the the AFL-CIO, APALA has more than 20 chapters and pre-chapters and a national office in Washington, D.C.

Among its activities, APALA promotes political education and voter registration programs among AAPIs, and runs trainings to help empower and recruit AAPIs into leadership roles within the labor movement and APA community. APALA seeks to defend and advocate for the civil and human rights of AAPIs, immigrants, and all people of color, and continues to create ties with international labor organizations, especially in the Asia-Pacific Rim.

[Information adapted from APALA Seattle website 08/18/2021 https://www.apalanet.org/about1.html]


Content Description

Organizational records and ephemera of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial affiliate organization the Asian Pacific Labor Alliance, Seattle Chapter. The collection includes materials relating to the founding and operation of APALA Seattle, as well as T-Shirts, award plaques, posters, and ephemera. Some national level APALA materials are included, and often list local chapter updates and activity reports, including the Seattle chapter. A major activity of the Seattle chapter is its annual fundraising banquet. The Seattle chapter has origins in the Asian American/Pacific Islander labor activist communities of Seattle that predate the founding of the national APALA in 1992.

Historical Note

In October 1995, Boeing machinists in the International Association of Machinists (IAM) District Lodge 751 went on strike for 69 days in response to layoffs and attempts by Boeing to slash their healthcare benefits. Boeing retirees, some of whom had retired early at the encouragement of the company, also found their promised healthcare and pension benefits slashed. In response, Boeing Retirees on the Line was formed by retirees to support the strike and demand increased benefits for retirees, including cost of living adjustments (COLA) for retirement income. The organizing committee was co-coordinated by Henry Noble, a Boeing retiree and member of the Freedom Socialist Party, and retiree Tom O’Brien.

Content Description

This collection contains materials collected by the Boeing Retirees on the Line during the 1995 Boeing strike and their campaign to win cost of living adjustments (COLA) to retirement income. Materials include articles about the strike and retiree organizing, correspondence, and meeting minutes. There is also a collection of buttons and photographs. This collection would be of particular interest to researchers pursuing topics related to labor organizing at Boeing and retiree organizing.

On November 30, 1999, first day of the ministerial meetings, thousands of largely peaceful protesters blocked delegates’ entrance to the opening plenary session. According to press reports, Seattle police in riot gear responded by releasing volleys of tear gas and pepper spray at 10:00 am and continued to do so throughout the day. The police eased up when the 20,000-member labor march reached the downtown core from the Seattle Center, where a large rally had been held. WTO officials cancelled the opening ceremonies. At a time difficult to verify after the fact, Mayor Paul Schell declared a civil emergency, ordering streets to be cleared by 7:00 pm and imposing a curfew on a large area of downtown, from Yesler Way to Denny Way and from Interstate 5 to Elliott Bay. Word of the curfew reached people on the streets at about 4:00 pm. Some dispersed, but others remained and were herded out of downtown by police firing tear gas and pepper spray. At approximately 10:00 pm the State Patrol reinforced the police. Scattered vandalism and looting of several downtown businesses had occurred during the day.

Early the following day, Wednesday, December 1, Seattle police established a ‘demonstration-free zone’ around the WTO meeting site at the Seattle Convention and Trade Center. They severely restricted access to the area, but protests continued. The ministerial meeting was shut down for five hours that day. Governor Gary Locke sent additional State Patrol troopers and two National Guard units to relieve and assist the Seattle police. Clashes between protesters and police spilled over in the evening to Capitol Hill, east of downtown. By then the focus had shifted somewhat, away from the WTO and towards the police response to the protests. Several hundred protesters were arrested, and other protesters demonstrated outside the King County Jail.

The following day the Mayor’s Office reduced the size of what it called a ‘limited curfew zone’ to the area bounded by Fourth Avenue, Pine Street, Boren Avenue, Seneca Street, and Interstate 5. Some protests were staged on Friday, especially inside the convention center. protesters demonstrated outside the King County jail again on Friday evening. Eventually charges were dropped against most of the over 400 people arrested.
Content Description
Return to Top

Video recordings and logbooks created by filmmakers and activists during the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, Washington. The video recordings from the Independent Media Center (IMC) collection offer a unique perspective into a historic moment that brought together grassroots activists, labor leaders, environmentalists, farmers, anarchists, and artists who made history and shaped social justice movements around the world.

Whatcom County Organizing Committee of Washington State Jobs with Justice is a volunteer-run workers’ rights organization affiliated with Washington State Jobs with Justice. It has organized direct action campaigns to support social services, union organizing, food security, living wages, access to health care, and global justice issues. Campaigns have included both national and international issues such as single-payer health care, welfare reform, and international trade policy as well as state- and local-based issues such as minimum wage and sick-pay laws, siting and expansion of big-box stores. and local food security issues related to closing of a Bellingham chain grocery store. The organization has been a long-term supporter of Washington State farmworker organizations.
Content Description

The Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP) is an organization that emerged in the Filipino American Community in 1973. As an organization the KDP embraced the dual goal of establishing socialism in the US, as well as supporting the National Democratic Movement led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). A central part of the mission of the KDP was fighting the regime of Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who had established marshall law when he seized power and represssed leftists and trade unionists in the Phillippines. Two of the KDP's Seattle members, Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo, were assassinated for their attempts to counter the Marcos regime and reform the Cannery Workers Union is Seattle. Marcos was later found guilty of orchestrating the attacks and found criminally liable in a US court.
Content Description
Records, publications, photographic slides, and research files collected by the KDP in its activities. The collection also contains some materials on the history of the organization and its members. Members include Gregorio (Greg) Santillon, Ermena Vinluan, Alonzo Suson, and Ricardo Ortega, as well as the records of the Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office. The records were collected through the work of KDP and Cindy Domingo. Records of the members and related organizations include personal files, organizational materials, research files, publications, and films.

The Radical Women National Office records (1976-1998) documents the activities of the national office of the organization, based in Seattle, Washington. They were collected and maintained by Clara Fraser, the co-founder and officer of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party. This collection documents the evolution and collective actions of nationally recognized socialist feminist leaders from 1976-1998. The perspectives from leaders of the national office provides context to how RW has worked and grown their organization via the aid and creation of local offices. The records are especially valuable for researchers seeking to understand how radical organizations and movements evolve and shift through decades of adversity and pushback from the mainstream media and an inhospitable political environment.

This collection provides access to communication among the local and national RW organizers as well as materials concerning mass work such as the protection of Roe vs. Wade, the Seattle City Light fight for affirmative action for tradeswomen electrical workers, the collaborative 1997 Feminist Brigade to Cuba, the landmark Freeway Hall Case, and drafts of RW literature such as the Radical Women Manifesto.

Materials include correspondence, articles, newspaper clippings, press release materials, fliers, event programs, edited drafts and speeches, itineraries, legal documents, conference/event planning, and official newsletters. The content of the materials concern the organization’s planned events, recruitment, and opening communication channels that are centered on social activism, intersectional feminism, and providing a platform for feminist speakers.

The collection is arranged into the following series which contain:

SERIES 1: ADMINISTRATIVE MEETINGS, FINANCES, AND CORRESPONDENCE, 1976-1996: RW’s National Executive Committee minutes and papers, correspondence, public relations, membership, and finances.

SERIES 2: CONFERENCES AND CONVENTIONS, 1976-1998: Records documenting RW’s involvement, including statements and positions, press releases, and communication in international and regional conferences and conventions.

SERIES 3: MASS WORK, COALITIONS, AND EVENTS, 1977-1998: Materials concerning RW organized events and activism in civil rights and labor movements.

SERIES 4: PUBLICATIONS, LITERATURE, AND MEDIA, 1979-1997: Position statements, speeches, bulletins, newsletters, media coverage, and political literature related to RW.

SERIES 5: LOCAL CHAPTERS, 1977-1996: Correspondence, finances, and event materials concerning the growth and participation of local RW chapters. Despite being local chapters, they include correspondence with national leaders such as Clara Fraser and Betty Friedan. The records of the Seattle chapter especially overlaps with that of the National Office.

Records of the Seattle office of the socialist feminist worker's organization, the Radical Women Seattle office records (1991-1997) primarily contains memos, correspondence, articles, newspaper clippings, fliers, event programs, notes, edited drafts, and newsletters. The content of the materials are mostly concerning the organization’s planned events that are centered on social activism, intersectional feminism, and providing a platform for speakers. These records were collected and created by Clara Fraser, who was a co-founder and officer of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party. Fraser collected, created, and maintained these records as part of her work for the organization.

The Seattle Urban League (later the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle) is a social service organization created largely for the advocacy, community organization, and development of African Americans, other racial minorities, and the poor, but whose broader mission is to eliminate racial inequality, to create equal opportunity, and to promote self-sufficiency for these populations of Seattle citizens. Seattle Urban League programs for vocational training and employment included direct services to individuals such as training workshops, job placement and referral, and job fairs. In addition to these services, in 1964 the “Equal Opportunity Employers” roster was established, which listed businesses that had pledged an open-door policy in hiring practices and that employed more than 40 persons. Another significant employment program was On-The-Job Training (OJT). OJT was initially developed and administered by the National Urban League in 1966 under a grant from the Department of Labor. Its primary mission was to seek out and develop on-the-job training opportunities for unemployed or underemployed members of minority groups.

The programs initiated by the Workmen's Circle encompassed a host of social, cultural, and political issues deemed important to the Jewish community. In addition to promoting labor rights and the strengthening of trade unions, the organization provided educational and cultural programs that emphasized Jewish heritage through theater, music, literature, summer camps, and Yiddish instruction. The Workmen's Circle also sold war bonds to provide support during both World Wars, and partnered with other Jewish organizations to actively promote and fund the settlement and expansion of Israel during the early years of its existence. After World War II, the organization de-emphasized their socialist leanings in an effort to distance themselves from communist affiliation.

The Seattle, Washington branch of the Workmen's Circle -- Branch 304 -- was organized in 1909, and their first location was a rented store on 14th Avenue and Main Street. In 1920, the members bought a building at 120 21st Avenue that had previously been a blacksmith shop. Property was then purchased for the organization at 1614 East Union Street in 1937, with the grand opening of this location taking place in December 1942. Activities in Seattle included summer picnics, festive observances of Jewish holidays, New Years Eve celebrations, banquets, and lectures. Though Branch 304 eventually closed its doors in 1973, the Workmen's Circle organization continues to operate in several cities across the country

This collection contains photographs, flyers, and posters of the meetings, members, and activities of the Workmen's Circle in Seattle and other cities. It also contains photographs of Ben Stein, an immigrant to Seattle from Minsk, who served as secretary, financial secretary, and president for the Seattle Lodge No. 304.