Reaping the Fruits of Radicals’ Tireless Labors

Ambivalence crept through me last Saturday morning as I parked my Toyota Tercel between two Mercedeses.

“Brentwood Bolsheviks,” I sneered. I had been sent to Occidental College to cover a conference of “progressives” celebrating “struggle,” convened on the 75th anniversary of social crusader Upton Sinclair’s arrest at a longshoremen’s rally on Liberty Hill in San Pedro. In the parking lot, I began to dread hours of tiresome reminiscences of lost causes.

But by day’s end, as I followed the group to the patio to line up for free food and drinks, I was standing in awe. Surrounding me in the twilight on that Eagle Rock hilltop were women and men who changed the world in ways we now take for granted.

I could scan a century of L.A.-inspired progress in the time it took to finish a beer:

Bert Corona, who began organizing Mexican Americans in Los Angeles in the 1930s, stood a few feet away chatting with Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa.

Just past Corona was Frank Wilkinson, whose insistence in the 1940s that L.A.’s public housing be racially integrated cost him his Housing Authority job. A few years later, he landed in prison for refusing to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee--prompting him to start a successful movement to abolish the demagogic HUAC.

Eighty-one-year-old Alice McGrath--sprightly as she must have been in 1942 when she coordinated the defense of 12 Mexican American young men wrongly convicted of murder in the Sleepy Lagoon case--was ringed by admirers.

Harry Hay, who started the Mattachine Society, the nation’s first gay rights group, held court from a wheelchair.

Maulana Karenga, founder of the Kwanzaa holiday, was working the crowd, instantly recognizable with his shaved head and dark glasses.

There they are, I mused after passing those last three in succession: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, all at the same party.

*

It’s easy to dismiss The Left today as left behind. Economists have declared full employment. Unionized longshoremen can earn more than $60,000 a year. Republican mayors here and in New York are broadly popular. The New Republic long ago drifted rightward, and the stalwart leftist the Nation this year is fighting off bankruptcy with a fund-raising cruise to a private island in the Bahamas.

It’s easy, in an age of abundance, to look away from those shut out of today’s prosperity--the people selling oranges on street corners, waiting tables for cash wages, standing on sidewalks hoping for day labor.

It was harder to look away when Augustus F. Hawkins was coming up. Before he became a congressman, Hawkins was the first African American elected to the California Assembly. He told the Occidental audience that when he won his Assembly race in 1934 while backing Sinclair’s controversial anti-poverty campaign for governor, a third of California’s workers were unemployed.

It was harder to see deprivation as someone else’s problem when every third person was without a job. When California’s borders were closed not only to Chinese and Mexicans, but to “Okies” as well, it might have been harder to keep Latino, Asian and white workers from striking together for better wages and working conditions, as they did repeatedly in Depression-era Los Angeles.

Today’s L.A. is more nuanced. Thanks to people like Gus Hawkins, racism in areas such as housing and employment is illegal. Life in our region no longer fits neatly into the old categories of victims and villains, haves and have-nots.

Suburbs are sometimes more integrated than the city. Immigrants are sometimes wealthier than natives. The Times, which backed the World War II internment of Japanese Americans, sends me, an Asian American, to cover a commemoration of Upton Sinclair, whose gubernatorial candidacy was bitterly opposed by the paper in ’34.

One paradox of Los Angeles today is that greater diversity and freedom from past restrictions have made it easier to divide ourselves in new ways. That has made some feel even more helpless.

There was, for example, the frustrated woman at Saturday’s conference who told Corona that many U.S.-born Latinos she knows voted for Proposition 187, the 1994 initiative designed to block most government assistance to illegal immigrants. How, she wondered, would Latinos ever unite?

Corona, 80, seemed to share her frustration, but it was because he felt the question was off the mark.

“Why should we have to be united?” he responded. “Our only hope as a society is for all of us to push for things that benefit all of humanity rather than one group.”

Perhaps in an era in which the lines of race, class and ideology are fluid, Californians can unite around issues that transcend those boundaries. Hawkins, now 91, suggested one such cause. “Education,” he said, “is central to any movement for improvement.”

McGrath offered a prescription to cure social paralysis. “You’ve got to be active--with the hope, but not the expectation, of winning. You have to be active because the alternative is being passive, and who wants that ?”

*

McGrath was the only old-timer to succumb to nostalgia that day.

“I knew these people when we were young and beautiful,” she said of her mostly eightysomething colleagues on a panel.

“Still beautiful,” moderator Warren Olney interjected.

Indeed.