UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ PRECARIOUS CITY: MARGINAL WORKERS, THE STATE, AND WORKING-CLASS ACTIVISM IN POST-INDUSTRIAL SAN FRANCISCO, 1964-1979 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by Laura Renata Martin March 2014 The dissertation of Laura Renata Martin is approved: ------------------------------------------------------- Professor Dana Frank, chair ------------------------------------------------------- Professor David Brundage ------------------------------------------------------- Professor Alice Yang ------------------------------------------------------- Professor Eileen Boris ------------------------------------------------------- Tyrus Miller, Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Table of Contents Introduction. 1 Chapter One. The War Over the War on Poverty: Civil Rights Groups, the War on Poverty, and the “Democratization” of the Great Society 53 Chapter Two. Crisis of Social Reproduction: Organizing Around Public Housing and Welfare Rights 107 Chapter Three. Policing and Black Power: The Hunters Point Riot, The San Francisco Police Department, and The Black Panther Party 171 Chapter Four. Labor Against the Working Class: The International Longshore Workers’ Union, Organized Labor, and Downtown Redevelopment 236 Chapter Five. Contesting Sexual Labor in the Post-Industrial City: Prostitution, Policing, and Sex Worker Organizing in the Tenderloin 296 Conclusion. 364 Bibliography. 372 iii Abstract Precarious City: Marginal Workers, the State, and Working-Class Activism in Post- Industrial San Francisco, 1964-1979 Laura Renata Martin This project investigates the effects of San Francisco’s transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy on the city’s social movements between 1964 and 1979. I re-contextualize the city’s Black freedom, feminist, and gay and transgender liberation movements as struggles over the changing nature of urban working-class life and labor in the postwar period. I argue that as San Francisco was increasingly emptied of its white ethnic industrial work force, working-class life became more economically and socially precarious. People of color and poor women, queer, and transgender people continued to live and work in the city throughout the 1960s and 70s, but their relationship to the formal economy was rendered unstable by lack of steady access to waged labor. Unemployment, non-unionized informal and illegal employment, and unwaged work increasingly came to define the experience of being working class in San Francisco. An analysis that centers precarious forms of labor must not expect labor struggles to look like those of the unionized industrial sector. In post-industrial San Francisco, labor struggles often took the form of conflicts not with employers but with state agencies and institutions that regulated the uses of urban space and access to resources such as social services and public housing. I explore these themes in a number of case studies, each of which examines points of contention between iv precarious working-class groups and state institutions. I discuss the struggle of working-class women to secure access to welfare funds and public housing as compensation for their reproductive labor; the efforts of civil rights groups to win job training and employment for African Americans through city War on Poverty agencies; the organization of gay and transgender sex workers to fight heightened police harassment tied to the growth of the tourism sector; the effects of redevelopment on retired industrial workers; and the escalation of conflict between police officers and unemployed African American youth during the second half of the 1960s. Finally, I locate the increasing precariousness of urban working-class life during this period within the framework of a new post-industrial spatial regime. The uses of urban space that were necessary for working-class survival came into conflict with the needs of government officials and a rising group of business elites, who sought to redevelop the urban environment in ways compatible with new economic growth sectors. Poorer sectors of the working class increasingly came into conflict with a whole web of state institutions and agencies being mobilized to transform urban land use patterns. v Acknowledgments It is difficult to know where to begin when thanking all of the people who helped me finish this project. I am full of gratitude for the friends, family, acquaintances, and sometimes even strangers who provided me with material, emotional, and intellectual support. I would like to acknowledge, in no particular order: the office administrators in the History Department, especially Stephanie Hinkle and Cindy Morris, for their patience with my frequent last-minute scrambling to meet deadlines; Katy, Oki, Wendy, Francesca, Will, Chris, Jack, Marlo, Gemma, Brigitte, and so many others for study dates and for helping me unwind; David Brundage, Eileen Boris, and Alice Yang for taking the time to read multiple drafts and always making me feel supported and encouraged; and my advisor Dana Frank, who pushed me to improve my writing and research skills over the years, was incredibly generous with her time, and most of all made me feel like I had something valuable to say. Finally I would like to thank my brother Paul, my mother Brenda, and my stepfather Gislin for always believing in me. Brenda and Gislin in particular have always been there ready to troubleshoot any problems that have come up over the years, full of advice and eager to see me succeed. I could never have finished this project without their love and support. vi Introduction On July 3, 1967, one hundred and fifty African American young people from the Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco congregated at Fremont Elementary School, where staff from the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) Summer Youth Work program were gathered at the end of the day.1 Declaring themselves to be “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” the teenagers demanded to be hired by the work program when school let out for the summer. Less than a year after Hunters Point had gone up in flames in response to the police killing of a Black youth, they defiantly drew upon the specter of urban unrest to press for work, threatening “jobs or gasoline,” and promising to burn every factory in the area if they did not receive employment. Refusing to leave until a city official responded to their demand, the group met with a judge and eventually with Mayor Jack Shelley, who promised to produce sixty jobs for Hunters Point youth.2 Nearly two years later, on May 10, 1969, three hundred people gathered in San Francisco’s Union Square to protest proposed cuts to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the federal program that supplied welfare payments to working-class single mothers. Española Jackson, one of the leaders of the recently formed San Francisco Welfare Rights Council, spoke to the crowd, reminding them of the hard work that single mothers performed every day to care for their children. 1 “Hunters Point” is not spelled with an apostrophe. 2 George Murray, “Hunters Point Brothers Sock it to the Mayor of S.F.,” The Black Panther, July 20, 1967, 14. 1 She also pointed out that a lack of access to formal employment was a large part of the reason why poor women were forced onto the welfare rolls in the first place: “We’re not on welfare because we want to be, but because there are no jobs for us.”3 Almost exactly eight years later, on May 9, 1977, sex workers and their supporters gathered on the steps of City Hall as part of an international day of action to protest police harassment of prostitutes. They enacted a mock trial of the political establishment, calling their case “Women v. Board of Supervisors, Police Chief Gain, Governor Brown, President Carter, General Motors and John Does 1-50.”4 The activists read a statement that accused city leaders of profiting off of women’s sexual labor and of using criminalization to prevent prostitutes from organizing for better wages and working conditions: The Supervisors have no intention of abolishing an important source of income for the city….Forced to lead an underground life, prostitutes are also prevented from demanding money and services from the government–social security, disability, unemployment insurance, childcare.5 The sex worker activists also linked the criminalization of prostitution to the increasing prominence of the tourism and white-collar services sectors in San Francisco’s post-industrial economy, pointing out that “the work of prostitutes is a crucial service for the visiting businessmen and tourists who bring money into San 3“Union Square Rally Protests Welfare Fund Squeeze,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle, May 11, 1969. 4“Mock Trial of Business and Government: Sentence: Lifetime of Housework,” Oakland Tribune, May 10, 1977. 5 San Francisco Wages for Housework and the Los Angeles Wages for Housework Committee, “Statement to the Board of Supervisors,” February 15, 1977, folder 541, COYOTE Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.). 2 Francisco.”6 Finding the defendants guilty of “pimping off prostitute women,” they revealed the sentence: a lifetime of housework.7 These three incidents, spanning nearly a decade and located in different parts of the city, do not immediately evoke the familiar tropes of working-class labor struggles. Labor unions are nowhere in sight. The protagonists are not seeking justice from