10/1 SF ILWU Local 10 Educational "How Labor and the Left Transformed

Hawaii”

"How Labor and the Left Transformed Hawaii”

Saturday, Oct. 1 - 11 am


Speaker Dr. Gerald Horne

ILWU Local 10 Union Hall

400 North Point, San Francisco
-in the rear building, upstairs in the Henry Schmidt room-

Commentator Harvey Schwartz, Curator of the ILWU Oral History Collection
Sponsored by International Longshore and Warehouse Union L.10 Education Committee

Gerald Horne pulls no punches. Do not miss this chance to hear an
exceptional scholar tell a true history of labor in Hawaii, as detailed in
his recently published book Fighting in Paradise. This is a story seldom
heard – a picture of how the people made history!

“Gerald Horne offers readers an eye-opening account explaining how the labor movement and the left
played decisive roles in moving Hawaii from feudal colony to the most progressive state in the union.” - Nelson
Lichtenstein, Director, Center for the Study of Work, Labor, & Democracy, U.C. Santa Barbara.

Dr. Gerald Horne is the author of approximately 30 books and the Moores Chair of History and African American
Studies at the University of Houston. He received his PhD from Columbia University and a J.D. from U.C. Berkeley.

Dr. Horne shows in The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South
Seas After the Civil War (a companion book to Fighting In Paradise) how Confederates left the
U.S. after the Civil War and enslaved Polynesians and Melanesians in Fiji and Australia. When
the Hawaiian Kingdom tried to organize a diplomatic campaign against South Pacific slavery,
it was overthrown by the U.S. in the early 1890's. Hawaii became an apartheid state with
plantations.
In Fighting In Paradise, Horne documents how the ILWU mounted successful
organizing drives among plantation and dock workers in the early 1930's and broke the
apartheid system. Racial and ethnic divides among workers were bridged by the ILWU
through acknowledging differences and embracing them. Horne writes that the ILWU led the
largest progressive movement in the U.S., rescuing Hawaii from apartheid and bringing it into
democracy. Hawaii's extensive social welfare system and the power of unions to shape the
state politically are a direct result of those struggles.