3. A First-Hand Account of the Strike in Corpus Christi
In Corpus Christi, as elsewhere, the strike was contentious. While some sympathetic residents helped feed the striking dock workers, the city council requested assistance for the ship owners from the Texas Rangers.
The city’s picket lines were integrated and included representatives of Black and white unions. However, violence between strikers and strikebreakers was also often racialized, as the ship owners, using a common strike-breaking tactic, recruited replacement workers from among the most economically desperate groups, notably including African Americans.
Below, in excerpts from his memoir, longshoreman Gilbert Mers describes how the striking workers survived the strike, with some help from area residents, as well as the daily violence they faced.
A) Gilbert Mers Describes Solidarity from Area Residents During the Strike
“Joe Simon was a furniture merchant in the city. He was also a city councilman. He had cast a lone vote against asking the governor for the Rangers. He had refused to allow anything that he controlled to be used to accommodate strikebreakers.
‘I have a restaurant type range and some accessories, if you fellows decide to set up a kitchen. The scabs have a kitchen. You strikers may as well have one.’
…Mr. Simon furnished not only the range ‘and some accessories.’ He furnished all the cooking utensils and appurtenances that it took. We used his equipment until the end of the strike. He charged us nary a penny. So, while public opinion generally may have been against us, we had a few heavyweights on our side to even things.
Paul ‘Cowboy’ Schilder, one of our members, owned a shrimp boat. The local furnished fuel and upkeep. ‘Captain’ Schilder and his ‘crew’ supplied us with more shrimp and fish than strikers and their families could eat. All men on picket duty were fed at our kitchen. Single men ate all their meals there, after they ran out of money. A local grocery chain, Biehl Groceries, made us a deal where families with our identification could buy groceries at reduced prices, itemized purchases billed to and paid for by the strike committee. Wives and children were welcome to eat at the strike kitchen, for that matter, but few ever did. A couple of bakeries gave us first call on their day-old bread at two cents a loaf, I seem to remember.”
B) Gilbert Mers Describes Replacement Workers and Violence During the Strike
“Memory is not clear now whether the next group of seamen came from Galveston or Houston. From Galveston, it seems. No matter, our IWW allies telephoned that replacements were being sent, this time by bus. From the departure time given, they would arrive in the evening. We kept highway watches at designated points throughout the strike. Late that evening our watchers called that the bus had passed a checkpoint. We beefed up the picket line with a good showing of pickets, black and white, at the point where the bus would enter port property, just across Water Street from our hiring hall, strike headquarters…
Dusk was merging with darkness when the bus came, swung off Water Street, and stopped at the crossing. I hurried across the street. The idea was to make the ‘theatrical entrance’ on the scene after the pickets had the driver’s and passengers’ attention, don’t you know?
…I broke through the group of pickets on the bus’s right side, who were, indeed, hanging back, to walk up—I don’t know how close, much too close for comfort—right into, it seemed, the business end of what looked like a tommy gun pointed straight at my belly button, held by a man wearing a ten-gallon hat and a pair of cowboy boots. What our highway spotters didn’t know was that two Texas Rangers had boarded the bus up the line somewhere.
‘Stand back, you s*********!’ said the figure holding the weapon, ‘or I’ll cut you in two right across your g****** navel!’ I stood back.
‘We have a legal right to talk to these men here at the picket line and tell our side of the strike. I represent these pickets here.’
‘I got your legal rights right here in my hands, g****** you. These men came here to go to work, and they’re going to work, I’ll shoot the s*** out of all you b*******. Back off!’
About that time the bus moved across the tracks and on toward the dock. I would find out that the Ranger who ‘exercised our legal rights’ was Ranger A.Y. Allee. He stayed on duty in Corpus Christi until the end of the strike.
Later, the bus driver telephoned to tell us that Allee’s partner inside the bus had placed the shooting end of his pistol against the back of his, the driver’s neck, and told him, ‘Move this bus on, you s*********, or you won’t live to drive another one!’”
...Other Ranger performances were reported from the picket line. A favorite stunt was to drive toward a picket post at a high rate of speed, then apply brakes suddenly, throwing the car into a skid. There would usually be two, driver and passenger. As the car slued to a stop, they’d pile out, the passenger with the long-barreled weapon in his hands, the driver with pistol drawn. They would herd the pickets, the usual four blacks and four whites, into a group. Then the driver would single out one, walk him away from the group, and give him a pistol whipping…After the ‘lesson,’ they’d spend a minute or two cursing the pickets, then drive away.”
SOURCE:
From WORKING THE WATERFRONT: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF A REBEL LONGSHOREMAN by Gilbert Mers and Eugene Nelson, 92, 94-95, 98. Copyright ©1988. By permission of the University of Texas Press.