Reggie and the NAACP- Part 2- Endings 2

With Nat Burbridge as President and my father as Education Chair, the San Francisco Chapter of the NAACP kept promoting change in the early 1960’s.  Some of it was more political, getting S.F.’s first Black firemen trained and hired, getting the principal at John Muir Elementary School fired after he, in a fit of anger and display of racism, had slapped a Black child, etc. And some was forged through picketing and sit-ins, like shutting down Auto Row on Van Ness on weekends so no sales of cars could be made until they agreed to hire Black sales people, and sitting in at the Sheraton Palace Hotel so guests could not easily get in or out, and many checked out, until Blacks were hired in some white collar positions instead of being relegated to custodial jobs.

 So you all had done the Board of Education work and then you did Auto Row and then you did the Sheraton Palace?

 We had done all of that. We had torn this place up at that stage of the game.  I remember the Auto Row was one when I went crazy. I was sick and Nat said that he had a negotiation to go to and I was the only one he could trust to try and run this thing. I had never run a picket line in my life. And so I said fine. So we came out. There were a bunch of factions dividing us up. I slapped down a bunch of these (white) folks doing things. I don’t want to hear this stuff. You ae all here to work for us.  We made our little deal.   This guy came said he had a bunch of kids coming from Cal, and this other guy said he had a bunch of kids coming from somewhere else and every time I looked up here were a hundred troops ready to join the picket line. By the afternoon we had won. They (the automobile dealerships) were looking at so many people they realized they were in serious trouble. They signed off.

Palace Hotel Lobby

Then we did the Palace.  The Palace that was really pulled together by a sister, Tracy Sims,  I think her name was. (She was only 18 years old at the time) We got his great big picket line going all around. As I walk down the picket line a man with a Swedish accent hits me and then tells me, “If you don’t like this country why don’t you go back where you came from?” With his accent! Well one of the longshoremen was doing security and he got his (the Swede’s) ass out of there.

So folks were sitting in and whatnot. Things were going good. In the meantime a woman had come up from whatever they called themselves COHO federated organizations of the civil rights movement. This woman has been sent up specifically to raise money for a group of civil rights organizations including SNCC. She had a friend who lived in Marin, a cutie pie, but the girl, the most she could have been was 25. Terry Francs got taken with her. And Terry Francois proceeds to sign an agreement with the management of the Palace Hotel which settled the picket lines and in exchange he got a room for the night.

Tracy Sims leading picket line

The manager was kind of miffed when the troops didn’t act the way that Terry said they would and they ended up calling the police and the police were hauling people away all night long. But in the morning we actually did win.

So after that was won they disbanded the NAACP for a time?

 It really showed how bankrupt the organization was and perhaps is. I don’t know.  Julian Bond is a nice dude but he’s an old patrician. Ultimately he’s black upper-class all the way through. Of course I’m approaching it from the position of one who was always much more to the left than the NAACP was. The difference flows mostly from class positions. One of the things that we had done in the cause of our struggle was to bring more of the folks in from the corner. There really wasn’t a lot of interest in their membership.

What had one chapter in San Francisco and I would say in total membership we had maybe 500 people.  We had good cooperation in the Bay Area. Much of it was to do to me. Not me personally but because education was big time. Education Chairman hooked up more than anything else.

The consent decree that we ended up getting through the courts was a result of the work that had been done again by the committee. I can’t say it was me. I did some of the work, but it was the committee. We had the old (Black) Republicans like Granville Jackson who is this old race man. And all of them found themselves locked out.  Even at points where they couldn’t do anything but congratulate us for winning these things. But a lot of them were against it because their point was that picketing was not the NAACP’s way. That’s all. So then this has to be ’63, ‘64?

So then Lyndon Johnson is up for re-election and Lyndon Johnson makes a deal with the top brass in DC that there’s not going to be any demonstrations or anything untoward during this period of time.  They told us and we said, “We don’t know Johnson. We don’t belong to the Democratic Party.” What happened as a result was, and you know San Francisco was a small town, Roy Wilkens himself came out here and dissolved the chapter of the NAACP.

They broke our one chapter into three, one covered Ingleside, one was Hunters Point, and one was downtown. Downtown was the one that counted. That had all the old politicians. They had no troops and no ideas.

And that was the end of my father’s involvement with the NAACP although he and Nat remained close friends until Nat’s death. My father turned and became involved with the SF Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.