In Charleston liberals and the black community back the workers against the police and prosecution, but it's an indication of the challenges facing organized labor here that even supporters can be heard complaining about union control of the docks. "Why should the union prevent a brother from working for $8 to feed his family?" a journalist with the city's black paper, The Chronicle, asked. His question might just as easily have been phrased, Why shouldn't every worker be threatened with replacement by someone who will work for less until everyone is working for less and every job is a low-wage job? But he didn't see it that way, and he is not alone. This is the colonizing power of "right to work" ideology, the cunning force of a law that seems to be about individual choice, since on paper it simply provides that no one can be forced either to join or not to join a union. In practice, it functions to intimidate workers from organizing and to sow division by allowing those in shops that have unions to reap the benefits of a contract but to opt out of paying dues. And the state not only tacitly condones employer threats and promotes itself as a good place to do business on the basis of its unorganized work force; it has exempted itself from the law.

For state workers there is no free choice on the matter of unionization. Since last year, more than 140 state employees who operate the cranes on the docks signed cards to join Local 1422. They were sick of working ninety-hour weeks, as the number of containers passing through the port increased by 10 percent between 1999 and 2000. The State Ports Authority told them to drop dead; it does not recognize or negotiate with unions. At about the same time anti-union hacks in the state legislature advanced a bill prohibiting anyone from serving on the Ports Authority board "who is or becomes a member, associate, representative, or employee of a labor union if the principal activities of the union are ports-related." Colloquially known as "the Ken Riley bill," this was promoted after the Democratic governor, Jim Hodges, named Riley to the board but then retreated under pressure from the state Chamber of Commerce.

No one I met thinks this case is just, or even mainly, about class, though. In South Carolina workers make about $5,000 less than the typical US wage worker. The legislature aims to keep it that way, passing a bill that would prohibit any locality from raising its minimum wage. This would disproportionately affect blacks, whose average income here falls below the national average, while white income exceeds it. Over the past twenty-five years Charleston has remade itself into a white city--"historic Charleston," with blacks pushed into the kitchens, the hotel maids' uniforms and the occasional local-color spot, weaving baskets outside the old market, "just to show the tourists we have some happy, smiling black folks," said community activist Jerome Smalls. Black churches appear as islands in a sea of white, relics of a time before politicians used federal urban development money to drive blacks to the fringes of downtown and beyond. The same type of colonial houses that look so fresh in the gentrified quarters are falling down in the ghetto. The city is finally putting some money into restoration there, but whereas its priority for white folks is housing and business development, for blacks it's law enforcement. "Fuck CPD," someone wrote near the corner of South and American Streets, where the Charleston Police Department has been conducting mass drug raids.

At the 1422 hall, a longshoreman named Dwight Collins was wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the word "Endangered" over images of an eagle, an elephant and a black man. Racial profiling, police abuse, unpunished killings of blacks at the hands of police--"we're being shot down everywhere," Collins said. And yet there's been no mass action, no unified resistance, just "apathy and fear," according to Smalls. Out of this suffocating atmosphere burst the dockworkers' defiance. As Kevin Gray, who heads the ACLU in South Carolina, puts it: "The issue is, will the state allow one of the last powerful black institutions here to survive? The NAACP is all but dead or ineffective, black leadership is underground, black churches are doing nothing but 'Give it up to Jesus.' This is one of the last strong black organizations organizing on significant things, period. Period. And that's why they're slammin' on those brothers." On the street, the issue is also whether the union can put it together with the community and do the necessary coalition-building for a long fight.

The opening date of the trial of the Charleston Five has not been announced, but on that day longshore workers in sixteen countries and along the Pacific Coast have pledged to silence the ports. Solidarity is something new for the ILA, whose International apparatus is more commonly associated with corruption, complacency, concessions and anticommunism. At the June 9 rally ILA president John Bowers could only squawk about his supplications to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao ("If you can use your influence, you're gonna find that our people are gonna vote for people like you") while in the crowd dockers from as far away as Denmark chanted, "Shut the ports down! Shut the ports down!" Although every ILA convention for the past twenty years has featured complaints about nonunion incursions into the union's jurisdictions on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, Bowers did nothing to discourage other ILA locals from working Nordana ships while Charleston was out picketing. Immediately after the police brawl, ILA headquarters declined offers of help from the AFL-CIO. The federation ultimately pulled together the Campaign for Workers' Rights and sponsored the march and rally in Columbia, though AFL intervention in a local struggle is always a delicate matter when an International leadership is less than fully committed. In nineteen months Bowers hasn't visited his embattled members in Charleston. The union treasury can't be used to defend the Five or the twenty-five in the civil suit, but he didn't set up a defense fund until he was shamed into it by more than a year of rank-and-file efforts, and Charleston workers have yet to see a penny of it. No matter; Bowers belongs to the past.

Today dockworkers are together as never before, not only white and black at the Port of Charleston, but East Coast and West, as rank-and-file workers have toppled the wall separating them since 1937, when the West Coast dockers walked out of the ILA to form the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union and were branded subversive reds. While the ILA bosses dithered, the ILWU raised more than $150,000 for the workers' defense. Its paper, The Dispatcher, has become the main source from which ILA members get news on maritime labor issues and even on the Charleston Five. ILWU members have organized fundraisers and voted to assess themselves monthly contributions. Riley and other Charleston leaders have been traveling the country and the world as part of a grassroots campaign that has animated the Black Radical Congress, the South Carolina Progressive Network, the International Dockworkers Council and numerous labor groups. (Contributions can be made to the Dockworkers Defense Fund, c/o ILA Local 1422, 910 Morrison Drive, Charleston, SC 29403, attn. Robert Ford. To join or start a solidarity group, call the state AFL-CIO at 803-798-8300.)

Internally, the culture and spirit of the ILA is getting a shake-up, as efforts on behalf of the Five are strengthening a reform movement, the Longshore Workers Coalition, which demands accountability, regional and racial equity, one person/one vote. Open to all, it was spearheaded by black dockers in the South Atlantic, and that is where the energy is in the ILA. In 1999 Riley, the coalition's co-chair, stunned the ILA convention by calling the International's decision-making procedures "a mockery of democracy." The weekend of the rally, Local 1422's hall was electric with talk of reform among ILA men from Philadelphia to Houston: Why aren't members allowed to talk at so many local meetings? Why are there the black slots and then the white club that runs everything? Why does management sit in on International conventions, and why has the leadership negotiated us into a situation where we're fighting for our lives? Why all the corruption and deception, all the intimidation and fear? Bowers has tried to slander and suppress the coalition, but the genie is out of the bottle. "The Charleston workers, they stepped to the front line, baby; they stood up for everyone in the ILA," said Royce Adams, a trustee with Local 1291 out of Philadelphia. "And we're not going back: not with Charlie Condon and this whole establishment in South Carolina, not with scab companies, not with our own International. We're moving forward."

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