1930s

In 1934, one of the most dramatic labor struggles in the United States took place in San Francisco.  In an attempt to gain union recognition and improve the notoriously bad working conditions on the waterfront, Bay Area longshoremen went on strike.

After vicious police attacks on strikers, culminating in Bloody Thursday when two trade unionists were shot in the back and killed outside the union hall, a general strike was called to support the longshoremen.

California Governor Frank Merriam called in the National Guard.  Law enforcement and vigilante groups attacked union halls, strike kitchens and strikers’ homes with tear gas, bricks and bullets.

The New York-based national ACLU, then 14 years old, sent two Southern California organizers, Ernest Besig and Chester Williams, to help combat the attack on the workers’ civil liberties.

Besig and Williams recruited the first ACLU-NC Board of Directors from local civic leaders. Their initial meeting, on September 21, 1934 in the Bellevue Hotel in San Francisco, drew 60 members.

Labor issues dominated the early years of the ACLU-NC.  When the Holmes-Eureka lumber strike broke out in 1935, three pickets were killed and more than 150 workers arrested.  No attorney in Humboldt County was willing to defend the strikers, so the ACLU-NC offered to provide legal counsel.  Besig planned to be in Eureka for 30 days.  But those 30 days extended to a lifetime of service to the ACLU. He retired as Executive Director of the ACLU-NC in 1971.