, the nation's largest and most powerful labor organization, to explain why he felt unions were essential to civil rights progress.
In 1967, the year before his murder, King visited ILWU Local 10 to see what interracial unionism looked like. King met with these unionists at their hall in a then-thriving, portside neighborhood — now aWhile King knew about this union, ILWU history isn't widely known off the waterfront.from a hiring system compared to a "slave auction.
Originally from Australia, Bridges started working on the San Francisco waterfront in the early 1920s. It was during the Big Strike that he emerged as a leader., the leading black unionist in the Bay Area, and made sure the handful of black dockworkers would not cross picket lines as replacement workers. Bridges promised they would get a fair deal in the new union. One of the union's first moves after the strike was integrating work gangs that previously had been segregated.
Leftist unions like the ILWU embraced black workers because, reflecting their ideology, they contended workers were stronger when united. They also knew that, countless times, employers had broken strikes and destroyed unions by playing workers of different ethnicities, genders, nationalities and races against each other. For instance, when 350,000 workers went out during the mammothSome black dockworkers also were socialists.