Mumia Abu-Jamal Protest

1995

One of the most sensational events of the early 1980s was the murder trial of Black radio journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia over the shooting death of police officer Daniel Faulkner on Dec. 9, 1981, for which he received the death sentence, spending 30 years on Death Row while unsuccessfully appealing his conviction and pleading his innocence. Worldwide protests ensued over the case while the wielders of police power insisted he was guilty. A Federal judge overturned the death sentence on the basis of judicial inconsistencies in the trial procedure and Abu-Jamal was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole where he still sits at age 62, reportedly near death. An Amnesty International report stated that the 1982 trial did not meet international standards. It also indicates that the general social atmosphere in Philadelphia prevented the possibilities of an impartial hearing and fair trial for the accused as well as intense political pressures from the powers that be. (The readers of these Memoirs are urged to check Google or other sources for a fuller story in Mumia’s case.)

In early 1985, a large protest movement organized by Mumia supporters in San Francisco one weekday evening launched a torchlight parade near the Civic Center to march into the Mission District to publicize his plight in Death Row. I met two of my IWW Fellow Workers, Municipal Railway train operator Franklin Devore and Food Not Bombs activist Matt Dodt at the staging area. Franklin had the keys to our Bay Area General Membership Branch office at the nearby Grant Building at 7th and Market, where we maintained a local presence after the General Headquarters was moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan near the end of 1984 when FW Fred Chase was elected General Secretary-Treasurer. I asked Franklin to pick up our handsome IWW parade banner from our office so we can establish our visible presence during the march. Franklin came back with it inside his backpack and the three of us unfurled it and joined the parade of several hundred as we left Civic Center.

Shouting slogans with signs and banners aloft we wound our way around the Mission district figuring there would be support for our cause in these largely Latino and mixed race working class neighborhoods. We passed near the Mission police station with lights blazing inside and shadowy activity stirring within. Some fool threw a flaming torch into a large metal trash barrel and the flames shot upward to illuminate the night sky above us as we plodded along. We paraded down 17th Street to Mission when a Fellow Worker rode by on a bicycle and warned us that he’d seen large formations of riot cops assembling not far from us and feared we’d be trapped and busted. Police around the country were incensed over the Mumia issue as one of their brethren had been shot in Philadelphia and they hated Blank Panther Mumia and hated us for demonstrating on his behalf. Heads could be cracked that night — Ours!

We turned left on Mission Street and marched one block to 16th Street, turned left again for the long trek back to Market and downtown again. As we passed by the numerous cafes on 16th some in our ranks broke off and ducked into some joint for a pee, as an excuse to quit the demo. I felt like it myself and have supper at one of them, but I could not countenance leaving Franklin and Matt alone with our banner as we continued on to face fate. Helicopters were buzzing overhead and we knew something drastic was up.

We marched to the point here 16th Street meets at Market near the Safeway with a phalanx of cops in riot gear blocking our way. We made a sharp right to head toward the Mission down 14th Street but saw another contingent down the hill blocking any further progress in that direction, another right turn onto the one-block street of Anders Street. The 16th Street entrance in that direction was blocked solidly by the gendarmes. We were totally trapped, but good. We rolled up our banner and stuffed it in Franklin’s back pact, to try to deter its confiscation for good as the arrests began. Some of us tried to climb up doorsteps and ring doorbells in case some good Samaritans would give us refuge. Not many were able to attain sanctuary. Meantime, in the alley our besiegers began to slap on plastic restraints on the marchers with their hands tied behind their backs, being roughed up at any sign of resistance. Two Italian anarchists on our stairs kept ringing the doorbell and pounding on the door to seek sanctuary to no avail, as lights were being distinguished in all houses. Soon we were all sitting huddled and miserable on the pavement, feeling miserable. Two other Wobblies were sitting manacled not far from us. Soon the paddy wagons pulled up as we hundreds were muscled into them, prodded and clobbered. Then the trek began toward the jail house near 7th and Bryant.

Our barred vehicles sat in an alley near City Jail for about an hour in our manacles, while the jailers were making room for us in holding. If you were thirsty or needed to piss, that’s just too fucking bad! A female school teacher huddled next to me anxiously pleaded to a jailer about having a class to teach in the morning. “Too bad, lady, you should have thought about that before you joined these malcontents out to free a cop killer!” Finally us men were herded into a large common holding cell. Some of us had already pissed in our pants before we were able to get to a urinal. Rusty water taps finally provided a foul-smelling access to drink and wash.

We sat or stretched out on concrete benches to spend the night without much thought to sleep. There were several hundreds of us of all races, from young to middle age. I was one of the oldest in my late sixties and some of fellow arrestees offered me their jackets as cushion against the cold concrete as it would be a long night. It was impossible to sleep when hurting all over. I talked to a 14-year-old African-American prep school boy in his blazer jacket, scared about what would befall him. Around midnight a guard came and took him away. Apparently the cops had called his parents who were outside waiting to pick him up.

Swill buckets of vile jailhouse food were brought us in the morning with some ghastly wash that was supposed to be coffee. The morning was saved by the trustees (other prisoners who brought in the grub to us). It turned out there was a Food Not Bombs national convention ongoing in San Francisco, and a number of FNB folks had joined us in the Mumia march and were now locked up with us. A number of our “trustees” were street people who had eaten at Food Not Bombs serving lines in the City before being busted themselves. So the word went out in the jail, that the folks who kept them from starving out on the streets before their incarceration on some petty charge or another were FNB volunteers in SF’s mean downtown streets! So within a half hour, these Trustees returned to our cell with boxes of apples and oranges, and other food items, grateful for their benefactors when they were still “outside.” That was the only decent food we had all day.

Some time during the day, we got news about the National Lawyers Guild attorneys outside were diligently working to secure our release and dropping all charges. We had been tagged in a “conspiracy to foment a riot,” — a felony — and “jaywalking” — a silly misdemeanor. It wasn’t too much later that we learned that all charges had been dropped and our civil liberties upheld, and our release process ensued. When we’d picked up our property that had been confiscated, and blinded by the daylight as we emerged from the gaol, we noticed a couple of dozen street people sitting on the building steps welcoming our return to freedom. They had heard about our incarceration and had maintained an all-night vigil in our support on the street until we were sprung. I went up to each of our young supporters and shook their hands in appreciation of them being out there in our support.

This was the last jailing of my life so far and the gendarmes provided souvenirs to us as a reminder of our senseless bust. (We had been loud and boisterous during our Mumia march and urging people to join our protest but hardly fomenting a riot.) Our souvenirs from the jailors were the bright orange wristbands we wore to mark us as jailbirds. On the street a number of us turned these around to their black undersides to proudly show our support for Mumia and all black prisoners. I wore my black wristband for several weeks to illustrate that point everywhere I went. Even to the 1985 Finn-Fest USA held in Portland, Oregon that year.
 

HOUSING PROBLEMS

I had rented my flat at 106 Sanchez Street in SF’s DuBoce Triangle for well over twenty years. City rent controls had kept any rent raises quite negligible. The building had been owned for decades by a wealthy elderly psychiatrist who was sympathetic toward his tenants. Finally, he gave the building to his nephew as a gift. DeWolf Realty which handled the rents apparently talked Mr. Nephew into jacking up the rents appreciably, which we tenants immediately challenged through the Rent Board and won on the larger issues which would have violated Rent Board rules considerably and granted only a modest increase. But the handwriting was on the wall. Mr. Nephew really had no stomach in being a landlord and sold the building for over a million bucks, which was par in the location then, and went off to enjoy the good life in Papeete, Tahiti, or some place. DuBoce Triangle has been gentrified manifold since then with SF’s real estate boom which makes it near impossible for lower and middle income folks to live in San Francisco. Mr. Nephew sold the building to a woman in New York I’ll call Mrs. Gotham for investment purposes. She immediately raised our rents appreciably which rent control law allowed for her to service her debt accrued in the building purchase. It was still well under $500 a month for me which wouldn’t break the bank, so I ponied up the new rate.

But Mrs. Gotham wasn’t satisfied as our rents were still well below market rates in SF, which were steadily increasing, so she used an old landlord ruse to break through the rent ceilings, by having an eviction notice served on one of our tenants to make room “for her son to get the apartment” and was willing to pay Mr. Victim $4000 toward his moving expenses. But Mr. Victim, a San Francisco social worker who had lived in the building longer than me, said: “No!” So through her attorney she raised the moving allowance to $10,000, so badly did she want to break the rent ceiling. Again, Mr. Victim, who also had a lawyer buddy, too, again refused it, saying he loved his apartment which was his home and was not about to leave. So frustrated, Mrs. Gotham added another five grand if he’d leave, which he refused. So her ante went up to $20,000 where again Mr. Victim drew an irrevocable line in the sand. At this point Mrs. Gotham threw up her hands and re-sold the building. Mr. Leech, the new buyer, was able to raise the rents to cover the his own new round of debt servicing so our rents got another new hit. This time my rent went up to way more than five bills which I was unwilling to pay. Other tenants felt the same way and a number of us decided to move.
 

SF SENIOR HOUSING WAIT LISTS CLOSED

As I was eligible, I tried to apply for the low income senior housing as I wanted to stay in my beloved City, but all available units were full everywhere, and the long waiting list for non-existing vacancies was frozen and accepting no new applications. Frustrating! Finally, the senior housing authorities announced a new list one could enter which was a lottery that would be held for people to get on the frozen wait list once it was opened up. Thousands of us applied but when the lottery was held only a limited number were chosen for the privilege of being added to the frozen waiting list. I was not one of the chosen few! Time for me to get out of Dodge!
 

FLORIDA BECKONS!

Lake Worth Public Library

I had a subscription to Amerikan Uutiset (Amerikan News), a Finnish language newspaper published in Lake Worth, Florida. which had a huge Finnish population. There were several Finnish-operated real estate agencies advertising house and condominium listings for sale. I saw ads for two-bedroom condos listed as low as $17,000 then! Nowadays there’s nothing close to that in the Lake Worth-Lantana area! I had no interest in moving to Florida. But what the hell! What have I got to lose? Why not give it a go? I called one of the agencies collect and made a deal to go look at some of the possibilities. I was met at the airport by one of the salesmen after an all-night flight and he took me to a motel as base camp and that very day he drove me around as soon as I’d dropped off my duffel. There was nothing that seemed liveable in the price range advertised in the AU and those which seemed possible through my bleary, sleep deprived eyes were way too high. The salesman whom I’ll call Esko finally took me to a the top floor of a two-story older apartment house in downtown Lake Worth, which was a fully-furnished spacious, airy two-bedroom condo on the block just behind the main street and the public library. The owners were still in Finland but were willing to let the place go for 25 grand with all the furnishings and kitchen appliances thrown into the bargain. It was in ready-to-move-in shape. When I appeared to show a mild interest, Esko said: “Let’s go to the bank and talk deal!” “Wait a minute, Esko! This would be a major step for me. Take me back to the motel and let me get a night’sleep first and I’ll call you tomorrow.” I didn’t need all this high pressure and needed a break.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

After a couple of hours of sorely needed sleep I thought I’d walk downtown to give the center another looksee. As I stepped out of the airconditioned motel room I got the full blast of the still muggy September summer heat. Do I really want to live in this the year round? Downtown Lake Worth had a nice, cozy library and a convenient post office, but Dullsville all the way around otherwise. There was no bus service after 5:30 PM, one lousy movie theatre with no matinees. If I wanted to go to West Palm Beach for the evening there was no way to get there except by car, I had sold my Dodge van back before retirement in 1986, swearing off of car ownership for life! The two Finn Halls were closed for the summer while the Snowbirds were back in the North until the winter season. Besides, even during its winter open season the older Turisti Hall, was the hotbed of the more conservative porvari or bourgeois Finns who years ago had kicked out the labor Finns. To make up for it, Finn Wobblies had built the Kenttä or Field Hall which served the labor Finns of all stripes for over 50 years after which the IWWs sold it to a Finnish nationalist group when their own ranks became too diminished through old age and death to sustain it. The Wobs had still owned it when I visited Lake Worth the first time during the 1991 Finnfest when it had held a 50th anniversary celebration I attended. They still had a Finn chorus in those days that performed a number of Finnish revolutionary songs dating back to the first decades of the 1900s. It was the last of the Finnish IWW halls to function in the United States. By that time the Finnish-American labor movement that I grew up on was pretty much a dead letter. So the Finnish community left in Lake Worth had no incentive for me now to consider living there. After living in the politically and culturally exciting SF Bay Area since 1960, that’s where I belonged. So the next day I called Esko of the Finnish real estate outfit that all deals were off; I’m going back to San Francisco. He didn’t offer to drive me back to the airport.

But I had one more mission to accomplish before I enplaned for San Francisco later in the afternoon. Osmo Tuiskula, an old Finnish socialist stalwart from Worcester, Massachusetts, my birthplace, and his wife were living in retirement in their condo in Lake Worth. I had met this older generation Finn at several FinnFests and talked to him at length. He had known my Uncle August in the days when he owned a Finn bakery in Worcester where Pappa had also worked and knew my maternal uncle Otto Saikkonen when he worked as a union house painter in the city. Osmo was a regular at Finnish Socialist Party events at Belmont Hall and their summer lakeside dance pavilion called Mölylä (or Noisy Place) that the Finnish Socialists of Worcester had once owned. Osmo was now badly crippled and struggled around on leg braces and a wheelchair, trapped in their second floor condo with no elevator. His spouse was in bed dying of cancer during my visit. Osmo said that with my activist life interests still strong, I’d be bored to tears in a quiet bedroom retirement community like Lake Worth which was also the site of the famous Finnish Lepokoti (Rest Home) for which I was far from ready. By that time I pretty much agreed with Osmo and had already checked out of the motel and had brought my baggage with me for my visit from where I would leave for the airport. I knew it with be my last visit with the Tuiskulas but was happy to have touched base with them once more. Osmo called me a cab when I left to fly home. Some short months later their daughter notified me that both parents had passed away, with her father also having cancer that I didn’t know about was not far behind his wife’s terminal condition.
 

STRAWBERRY CREEK LODGE

Returning home, what to do next about housing? Strawberry Creek Lodge in Berkeley may have the same problems as San Francisco on lengthy wait lists, but why not at least give them a try? I’d rather live in SF than in Berkeley, although it wouldn’t prove that much of a commute problem to live there. So I paid an exploratory visit there. The assistant administrator encouraged me to try as waiting periods were running at only about five months. So I did. Three months later I was notified of an opening.
 

1996

So in February of 1996 I began to move my gear to 1320 Addison St, Apt. 106 at SCL, a large fourth floor studio with balcony facing the Bay with a great view of San Francisco and the Marin hills. Strawberry Creek Lodge was built in the early 1960s with about 70 Finnish residents at its opening. It was then the place where I had tried to get my mother to live when she came to Berkeley for four years. But she declined because of the compulsory evening weekday meal program in effect then because of her prejudice toward institutionalized cooking on a regular basis. The moving process took me a month, but in March, just before my 70th birthday, I was ensconced in the apartment in which I live to this day. I celebrated my 70th birthday around March 18 at a picnic my old San Francisco friends gave for me on a Sunday in a Golden Gate Park meadow with its cherry trees in bloom.
 

 ALAMEDA COUNTY CENTRAL LABOR COUNCIL

Shortly after moving to Berkeley, I learned that Bay Area Media Workers 39521 had no Typographical Sector delegates to the Alameda County Central Labor Council although we had still have several union shops under contract in Alameda County. Fellow retirees Leon Olson and Larry Small were then delegates to the San Francisco Council. So I indicated to Sector President Charlie Tobias of my willingness to serve as our Union’s delegate to the Alameda County CLC. Since with the decline of our union,membership everyhere, not many of our members were willing to function in delegate posts such as this. The old days when ITU political parties with sizeable memberships would vigorously contest to serve in all available posts were history. Formerly elective offices became appointive instead with fewer aging members remaining willing to serve in these kinds of posts. We were still entitled to two delegates to the Alameda County CLC so Charlie appointed me as a retiree member and Larry Rau, a younger printer in an East Bay shop, to fill these vacancies. I continued to serve in that post for the following decade into Gloria La Riva’s Union presidency which she still holds at this writing. and Larry dropped out after a year or so because he went to work on a night shift at the SF Chronicle and couldn’t make the CLC’s Monday night meetings in Oakland.

When I first became a delegate, CLC meetings were held every Monday night at the ILWU Warehouse Local 6's hall on Hegenburger Road in Oakland. It was a long commute for me as I had to walk to the North Berkeley BART Station to pick up the train for the long ride to the Coliseum Station, where Larry would pick me up with his car to get to the meeting hall as he could still function as Council Delegate. Ditto for the reverse trip home, which would run late into the evening. Since I was on the evening meal program at our Lodge, I would eat in the early 5 o’clock meal group on Monday nights, so I could make the Council meeting by 7 PM.

A reader may wonder if it’s worth all this hassle for a retired person to subject himself to all this incovenience to attend meetings of this nature when his own life doesn’t depend on it? But for an old labor movement war horse like me the movement for working class betterment is an integral part of who I am. I find this true of so many union brothers and sisters: We’re still an integral part of the family of labor and willing to take on responsibilities on behalf of our class. Since in my retirement I’d done considerable work in films (mostly as a background performer, or “extra,”) as well as the stage, I joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1990 and when my hearing was still tolerable I’d frequently attend monthly SAG meetings in San Francisco, riding the BART train across the Bay. Northern California SAG also had a Background Performer’s Committee which discussed and proposed better working conditions on the movie sets where we worked, in which I was an active participant. These involved regular day time meetings. Of course, I did not neglect my beloved IWW attending branch meetings and marches and demonstrations as a proud Wobbly! For I was now a “Three Carder”: In the IWW, CWA Media Workers retiree member, and SAG which merged recently with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). Since I’m over 70 now and have had SAG membership for more than 20 years, I’m basically a dues-free member of SAG-AFTRA for life, although advanced age and infirmities prevent me from doing further film or TV work. But in 1996 I was still doing considerable movie work, but more on that later.
 

1996 FINN-FEST IN MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN

Now that I was pretty much a FinnFest regular, I attended the 1996 celebration in the Upper Peninsula city of Marquette on the campus of Northern Michigan University. I few from San Francisco to the Twin Cities and rented a car at the airport on drove on to through Wisconsin and the UP through old Finn country where there were probably more wild deer than human residents. I stayed in the dorms at NMU with Niilo Koponen of Alaska as my room mate. Met up with old friends like Finnish-American Reporter editor Lynn Laitala and Raivaaja’s Maritta Cauthen, author and translator Professor Richard Impola and his wife Helvi from New Paltz, NY, and Mayme Sevander who was selling her books on the Russian Karelia experiment. We went to various lectures around politics and danced every night to the Midwestern Finn Hall Band. One fascinating performance band was a Finnish group from nearby Ishpeming called “Conga Se Menee.” Their speciality was the Conga, Finnush style. Their name derived from the Finnish “Kuinka se Menee?” (How’s it going?) I had planned to visit the Duluth-Superior area on the return home, and gave Mayme Sevander a lift home to Superior where she lived in senior housing when teaching Russian at St. Scholastica college in Duluth. She alternated her year between Duluth and Petrzavodsk where she had access to the valuable KGB files for her continued research on the Karelian Exodus on which she wrote several books, the final one in the Finnish Language for Finnish readers. I stayed several days with her at her Superior apartment before returning home. I even attended a meeting of the IWW Duluth General Membership Branch since I still had the rental car available.
 

1996 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

During his initial term in office Democratic President Bill Clinton had lost control of both houses of Congress to a Republican majority in the 1994 midterm election in a lacklustre administration which saw the rise of Newt Gingrich, to the forefront of the House of Representatives, a particularly obnoxious virulent conservative. Clinton had signed a GOP majority welfare bill with sizeable cuts and giveaways on benefits to mothers with dependent children bill to further diminish further the legacy of the New Deal. It’s true that Clinton did not put any “boots on the ground” in wars, but in the case of Kosovo he bombed the hell out of Serbia with Serbian workers standing on the rooftops of their factories to prevent their destruction and the Danube waters were contaminated by the bombing residue. Clinton represented the corporate wing of the Democratic Party in his politics and was considered “Republican-Light,” by many. He did nothing substantial for the benefit of the labor movement which backed his initial election campaign. When someone pointed out to the Arkansas AFL-CIO head that it was good to have a “friend of labor” in the White House again, his response was: “Yes, he’s some friend of labor. He slaps you on the back with one hand and pisses down your leg both at the same time.” Yet, he and VP Gore easily won reelection over his elderly reactionary GOP opponent Senator Bob Dole and Rep. Jack Kemp in the 1996 elections. The 1932 Glass-Steagall Act, an early New Deal piece of legislation which was designed to prevent banks from engaging in stock market speculation, was so gutted with loopholes over the years that when Congress finally ended it by large majorities during Clinton’s second term, its demise was ratified by a flourish of the President’s pen on Nov. 12, 1999. My own vote in 1996 was for Ralph Nader and his Native American running mate Winona La Duke who comprised the Green Party ticket, with only 0.97% of the popular vote. Reform Party maverick millionaire Ross Perot ran third with 8.40%, only about a half of his 1992 vote for top spot.
 

ELECTED TENANTS ASSOCIATION REPRESENTATIVE

My move to Strawberry Creek Lodge completed in March 1996 saw me getting involved in its Tenants Association politics sooner than I thought. Initially, I had thought of abstaining from such engagements as I had planned just to focus on my writing while a resident here. An old New York liberal newspaperman Fred Borden and a WWII army captain, was President of the SCL Tenants Association and Helen Lima, a long time Communist Party activist, was vice president when I moved in. Helen was the widow of Mickey Lima, a former chairman of the CP of Northern California. Helen had left the CP after the 1989 split with Gus Hall and became part of the democratic reform group Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) in which she was a leading member. She was something of a powerhouse in the SCL Tenants Association and encouraged me to become involved in it by running for office as one of its candidates. So I agreed to run for TA Representative to the SCL Board of Trustees which was the de facto legal owner of our residence. Association elections were to be held in November for the 1997 term. Fred declined to run for re-election as President so Helen was nominated as the sole candidate to succeed him. Knowing about my socialist and labor union background, I believe she was grooming for me to succeed her after her one term was up, but that I needed a term as Trustees Rep for purposes of seasoning in TA politics. I had one major opponent for Trustees rep, a man considered by Association activists as being too pro-management. So this old “labor skate” got the post by a good majority. Saeeda Khan, originally from India, was reelected Association Treasurer. The new terms would begin in January, 1997.

End of Installment 34