Anybody ever hear of a Marin County civil rights leader named Joseph James? You’re not alone if you have no idea who he was or what he did.
“No one knows about him at all,” laments Felecia Gaston, a Marin City civic leader and founder of the Performing Stars youth group.
She’d been researching the history of Marin City and the Marinship shipyard in Sausalito for more than 20 years before she discovered James and the World War II legal case he spearheaded that resulted in a California Supreme Court decision outlawing racial discrimination by labor unions.
“We tend to think of the civil rights movement as something that happened in the American South when, in fact, the Bay Area has a robust and colorful civil rights history,” says Reuel Schiller, a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco who has written extensively on the history of labor and employment discrimination law. “There are a number of people who were part of that, and Joe James was certainly one from that period. It’s a shame more people don’t know about him.”
In celebration of the 75th anniversary of Marinship, Gaston and Performing Stars will present a multimedia production about James and the landmark court case he sparked on Oct. 14 at the First Missionary Baptist Church in Marin City.
“Everybody gets hooked in once you read about what a remarkable life he lived,” says Dana Whitson, a Sausalito Historical Society director who worked with Gaston on the Joe James presentation. “It’s incredible that he succeeded with so much in his life.”
James, who died in 2002 at the age of 91, already had a fascinating story as a star of musical theater before he became a welder at Marinship in Sausalito, which turned out 92 oil tankers and cargo vessels, called Liberty Ships, before the shipyard shut down at the end of the war in 1945.
Taste of racism
A professional singer with a rich baritone, James was in the original cast of “Porgy and Bess” on Broadway and appeared in some 15 Broadway shows over his career. Born in Philadelphia and raised by his mother and uncle in New Jersey, he earned a degree from Claflin University, a black college in South Carolina. While touring the country with a black gospel choir, he got his first bitter taste of racism in the segregated South when he was turned away from a whites-only restaurant in Virginia and directed by a black janitor to go around to the back if he wanted something to eat.
“There was a little window in the back or the restaurant, something like the door of a dog house, where they’d throw food at you,” he said in an interview in People’s World Daily. “It kind of took my appetite away, and that’s some kind of trick for an 18-year-old still growing.”
During the Depression, James found steady work acting and singing in the Federal Theatre Project Negro Unit, a branch of a New Deal program that funded live plays and entertainment across the country. He said the theater project gave him “a sense of liberation, a sense of freedom.”
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war, acting jobs, especially for black performers, dried up.
“I had to continue working for a living,” James said in a video interview conducted by the University of Washington toward the end of his life. “I was casting about for something to do.
Acting to welding
The out-of-work actor enrolled in the Samuel Gompers trade school, learned to weld and got a job at Marinship in 1942. Whenever a new ship was finished, the shipyard enlisted him to sing at the launch ceremonies.
Blacks made up nearly 10 percent of the 22,000 workers in the multi-ethnic work force at Marinship. James lived in San Francisco, but many shipyard workers of different races were housed in Marin City. In “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac described Marin City (called Mill City in the novel) “the only community in America where whites and Negroes lived together voluntarily; and that was so, and so wild and joyous place I’ve never seen since.”
After he’d been at Marinship a short time, James was told he’d have to join the Boilermakers Union. The catch was that there was a separate union “auxiliary” for African Americans. Union dues were the same for black and white union members, but blacks were denied voting rights and their benefits were 50 percent less than white workers.
“That was the sort of thing we were at war against,” James said in the University of Washington interview. “So it would be illogical and unconscionable and not even moral to put up with that on the home front while fighting to eliminate it in a foreign land.”
James and other black workers decided that they weren’t going to put up with being forced into a Jim Crow auxiliary.
“It was, essentially, the same thing that Hitler would subject us to, or worse,” he said.
About half of the black workers sided with him, electing him their spokesman and leader. In retaliation, the union ordered the shipyard to begin sending black protesters pink slips, firing them from their jobs. James argued successfully with his co-workers against a strike, which would have slowed shipbuilding for the war effort. Instead, after each shift, they demonstrated at war offices in San Francisco. At one point, a crowd of 800 workers and their supporters gathered at the shipyard’s Gate 3 to protest the layoffs. The San Rafael Daily Independent, a precursor to the Marin IJ, called it “Marin’s greatest labor demonstration and most critical situation to arise since the San Francisco general strike in the summer of 1934.”
James v. Marinship
Eventually, as a result of their insistence on joining the union on equal terms with whites, James and some 200 other African American workers were denied their shipyard clearances to go to their jobs. James filed suit against Marinship in Marin Superior Court, which issued a temporary order suspending the layoffs.
With noted African American lawyer Thurgood Marshall on the legal team arguing on behalf of James and his colleagues, James v. Marinship went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in the black workers’ favor, saying, “Discriminatory practices involved in this case are contrary to the public policy of the United States and this state. The U.S. Constitution has long prohibited governmental action discriminating against persons because of race or color.”
James would go on to become president of the San Francisco NAACP, which said in its newsletter that the case “knocked cock-eyed an elaborate Jim Crow unionism.”
James eventually returned to the East Coast, resuming his performing career, touring internationally with Leontyne Price, William Warfield, Cab Calloway and Maya Angelou in “Porgy and Bess.” But he never abandoned his crusade on behalf of the rights of working men and women, and when his theater career ended, he became an organizer for the Service Employees International Union in the Bronx.
“The Marinship case is about both civil rights and labor rights,” professor Schiller says. “Joe James was deeply committed to the civil rights of African Americans, but he was also deeply committed to the rights of workers of all races.”
