What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Los Angeles is at a turning point. We are living in a defining moment. What happens next is up to us. Over the past few years, problems and challenges have shaken this city -- and tremendous opportunities for change have presented themselves. How do we rise to this moment and emerge a better place to live? What will it take to create a more just and a more equitable community? Working together, how are we going to create a stronger, forward-thinking Los Angeles? Mike Bonin, writer, teacher, progressive activist and former City Councilmember, looks at the issues and problems facing Los Angeles, examines ideas, and talks with the people who will lead us to a brighter future.
Produced in partnership with LA Forward.
What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Jackie Goldberg: Lessons from a Life on the Frontlines
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On the eve of her retirement after six decades of public service, Jackie Goldberg reflects on the history she made as an organizer and an elected official, and offers insights an advice to a new generation of activists.
Goldberg is ending a career that stints on the Los Angeles school board, the Los Angeles City Council and the California State Assembly. She has been a trailblazing LGBT official and a key progressive leader. In a wide ranging interview with Mike, Jackie shares a history rich with lessons about persistence, collaboration, and staying true to your values.
Mike and Jackie sat down to talk on November 18, her 80th birthday. The next day, she led the LAUSD board to pass emergency resolutions protecting immigrants and members of the LGBTQ+ community from the incoming Trump administration.
What's Next, Los Angeles? is produced and hosted by Mike Bonin, in partnership with LA Forward.
In her 60 years of public service, Jackie Goldberg has been a progressive champion and an LGBT icon. As she retires, what is her message for the next generation of change makers? That's what she and I talk about on this episode of What's Next, Los Angeles. Hi everyone and welcome. It's Mike Vaughn and thank you so much for joining me. We are entering an era of MAGA ascendancy. Values that we care about are being threatened. Progress that we've made is at risk. The fights ahead are massive and numerous. We have so much hard work ahead. But we can't really move forward unless we know where we've been and how we got where we are. And that's why I'm honored to devote this episode of What's Next Los Angeles to Jackie Goldberg, an extraordinary and influential public figure who is retiring this week after being in public service for more than six decades. The battles that she has fought and the achievements that she has made offer us a rich history of progressive and LGBT politics in Los Angeles and California. And as we enter this time of tremendous tumult and trouble, Jackie's example and Jackie's experiences are a valuable touchstone, an instruction manual for how to get things done, and a reminder to never surrender. Before we get to my interview with her, let me tell you a little of Jackie's history in case you're not familiar with it and its long arc. Since the 1960s, Jackie Goldberg has been on the front lines of the fights for social change, fighting for students, for workers, and for equality. She got her start as a student activist and became one of the leaders of the Berkeley free speech movement. She later became a public school teacher in Compton. And then in 1983, Jackie ran and won election to the Los Angeles Unified School District Board, championing the needs of students and teachers, and eventually becoming board president. In 1993, she got elected to the Los Angeles City Council, becoming the first publicly gay elected official in LA City history. On the council, she fought for and won passage of landmark legislation guaranteeing a living wage and benefits to all employees working directly or indirectly for the city of Los Angeles. Her legacy on the council also includes the economic revitalization of Hollywood, the recognition of domestic partnerships, and the creation of after-school programs. In the year 2000, Jackie was elected to her first of three terms in the California State Assembly, where, as chair of the Assembly Education Committee, she oversaw state education budgets and she authored two state education bonds that gave funding for LAUSD to build new schools and to relieve overcrowding. During her years in the state assembly, Jackie also authored historic legislation to give LGBT couples in California nearly all of the rights of marriage that they got through domestic partnerships. When she left the legislature, Jackie became a faculty advisor at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. And she did that for an additional three years, preparing graduate students to teach middle school and high school in underserved communities. She also served as chair of Mayor Eric Garcetti's City Targeted Local Hire Working Group. That meant she secured entry-level city jobs for local vets, for disabled workers, for transgender individuals, and for the formerly homeless and formerly incarcerated, and for people living in high poverty zip codes. She also served on the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners. And then in 2019, well into her 70s, she ran again for the Board of Education. And she won. And she became Board President again. Twice. Among the many things she did this second time on the board was to lead a spirited defense of the LGBTQ community after ugly right-wing anti-trans protests at Satakoy Elementary School. I've had the pleasure of knowing Jackie since the 1990s when I was a young staffer at City Hall, and it was a privilege to sit down and speak with her last week on her 80th birthday. We discussed her days as a student activist and the fight for LGBT rights, and her work on the city's landmark living wage ordinance. And the nature of activism and when to get arrested, and a lot more. Here's that interview. Jackie Goldberg, welcome to What's Next
Becoming an Activist
SPEAKER_00Los Angeles. It is very good to have you here. And I should note we're recording on November 18th, so happy birthday to you. Thank you very much.
SPEAKER_0380 years old today.
SPEAKER_0080 years old today. And you have been at this since uh for about 60 years. It was 1964.
SPEAKER_031961, actually.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_03I did uh I did uh Women's Strike for Peace in downtown Los Angeles. I was at a I was in a uh program at USC that had 19 students in it that were all high school seniors, and so I had to live on campus. And when I came back from going to that demonstration, my right-wing uh Orange County uh roommate knocked me out of my uh our room because I was a communist. So uh but that was an important beginning for me because Women's Strike for Peace was talking about strontium 90 and milk from the testing of nuclear testing that was going on in above ground and out in the open air in Nevada. But we were beginning to get reports that it was showing up in milk all over the country, but particularly in places west of Nevada because of how the winds were blowing. And so Women's Strike for Peace was called for a one-day strike to say we don't want above-ground testing. Actually, we don't want any testing, but for sure we don't want above-ground testing because it's killing our children.
SPEAKER_00There's uh a lot of folks today who think back on the the 60s as this uh era of of wild, robust politics, protests everywhere. But we're talking right now about 1961, which was just a a few years out of the McCarthy era.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00What was the the climate like? How intimidating was it to get into activism at that at that time?
SPEAKER_03Well, at SC, we were all the freshmen, and I was a freshman at the time, we're all required to see a movie uh uh about Operation Abolition. And it was uh done by the uh people who were HUAC people to tell us how terrible these people were who were protesting, being called uh uh to testify. So I was very, very aware of the McCarthy era. Uh we were all, you know, and our parents all told us when we went away to college, be very careful because what you do now may haunt you for the rest of your lives. Turned out to be true, of course. Uh but we didn't but we didn't pay any attention to it. And uh and so um I would say it was a it was a time in which you were aware that that things uh could come back to bother you, but it really wasn't until I was in Berkeley several years where I began to believe that. Uh because we were being followed regularly, our phones were being tapped regularly, and they did it in a way that we knew they were doing it, because the point was intimidation, because we really weren't doing anything illegal yet. Not yet.
SPEAKER_00Not yet. Not yet. Uh and then uh you went to
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement
SPEAKER_00Berkeley.
SPEAKER_03I went to Berkeley, and uh my first arrest was in 1963 at the Sheraton Palace Hotel. Uh eighty-three people were arrested, but only uh I think six or eight of us were women, because it was just the beginning of the time when women began to be thinking of ourselves as activists, not just helping the men. And it was sort of the beginning twinges of sort of uh feminism for leftists who were thinking, well, now how come we don't share the meetings? And how come, I don't know, we we seem to be making a lot of Kool-Aid and sandwiches for the demonstrations and not speaking at them and so forth. But it wasn't quite conscious yet, it was just on the twinges of it. Uh but it was quite clear, and the woman who was in charge of that big demonstration that got us all arrested at the Sheraton Palace was a black woman named Tracy Sims. And the committee she ran was called the Ad hoc committee to end discrimination. And uh I was lucky because with only six or eight of us and the women, we were all in the same cell with Tracy, and I got a real political education from her, and we became connected to each other the whole time I was in Berkeley. Um but that was my first arrest, very scary, very scary. Uh and I've and and it was the beginning of me understanding the court system, because um we had uh uh been divided into groups of ten sort of randomly, since 80 or 85 people, I think, were arrested. And if you got a particular uh judge, and by the way, no joke, his name was lawless, you got a conviction in every trial. If you had the judge I had, you got hung juries. And if you had a different judge, you got acquittals. And so we all did the same thing, we all did it at the same time, and we had three different outcomes, all dependent on the judge, not on the case, but on the judge, since all the facts were the same for all of us. And it was my first real meeting of the fact that this can't be a justice system if you all do the same thing, and then just by chance who you get for a judge, the outcome is different. Something's seriously wrong here. I had not known that. I knew about racism before I went to Berkeley because I was Jewish in Englewood, and that was as close as you could get to being a other, uh, except for the few Catholics. They were also others. Um But uh I didn't know anything about the fact I I I kind of still had a kind of a fundamental belief that the court system was pretty much okay. I mean, of course, I know that probably people of color didn't do well because I understood the beginnings of racism, but I had no idea that all of us could, and then of course the guy who arrested me, the first time you arrested, you remember the person who arrested you. I can still see his face. But the guy who identified me on the stand as having arrested me was not the guy who arrested me because they didn't bother taking pictures of us with the arresting officers. That comes later. So they just went through the pictures of them and everybody picked ones to say they arrested. I had no idea that they would get on the stand, put their right hand up in full uniform and lie about me. So I was getting an education from this very much that surprised me. First of all, I will no longer be terrified of being arrested again. I mean, I just wasn't ever going to be terrified of it again. And secondly, I began to see the problems that in in the part of the system that I thought might actually be working. Because on the same night I was arrested in the Sheraton Palace Hotel trying to get integration of their hiring, uh the kids who went to uh Champaign Urbana University of Illinois, they won a big football game, and they went to a Sheraton hotel in Chicago and tore it apart. There were no arrests. There were no arrests. Everybody said boys will be boys. I think they probably ended up their families maybe having to pay for it, I don't know. But nobody got into trouble, nobody was in difficulty with their university. And here we were doing something serious, destroyed nothing. We were picking up after ourselves, you know, keeping it clean so that it was not going to be accused of anything, and we're all going to jail now. So it was an educational experience.
SPEAKER_00And how many times do you do have you counted? How many times have you been arrested over the years?
SPEAKER_03Uh no, I really haven't. I I know for sure one, two, three, four, five, six for sure. But there may have been others because uh not then, in the early 60s, the arrests meant something. You went to trial, you got convicted, you went to jail, or you paid fines. Later on, the courts decided they really didn't want to bother with it. So we'd get arrested, we'd get booked, we'd get bailed out, and then they dropped the charges. Uh so I only went to court three times, I think, for arrests.
SPEAKER_00And one of them, I don't know which one, uh, prevented you from getting a job at LAUSD, right?
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh, actually, all of them, actually. But it I think it was the Berkeley one, the uh the FSM free speech movement. Um and and and I actually was injured in that one. Uh a lot of people were. That was the that was different than the Sheraton Palace because everybody was watching in the Sheraton Palace. In this one, uh they kicked out all of the uh religious observers when they were going to start arresting, and they put newspapers over all the windows so that nobody could see. And there were about uh 900 or a thousand of us who had taken over the administration building, which we thought we were winding down, but at the last minute they decided to throw four people out of school for the previous issues. My brother, me, Mario Savio, and Brian Turner. I have no idea how they picked the four of us, but Mario I know, but art probably two, but less me. Because I was the first spokesperson before there was a free speech movement because I was in a f a social sorority and wore dresses. So the right wing said I couldn't be all bad. So I I because this was a real coalition from really right to left. I mean, it really was. Um so in that arrest, uh we went limp. And uh we made very bad law. They made bad law because up till then that was not considered a uh a crime, but it was now a crime. We were all arrested for other things, but for sure we were arrested for resisting arrest. And uh I was still going limp. All of the Goldbergs had been pulled out. They don't didn't know which Goldbergs they were after. Um so uh we were all pulled out into the basement, and then they decided to just not to try to continue bothering. And they pulled me up a flight of stairs by my hair, and the base of my back bounced against each step. And so I was pretty seriously hurt for a while. Uh but eventually it healed. I mean, eventually I had surgery over it, actually, about 40 years later.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I remember when you were on the console you're having back problems.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, that was all related to that first thing. I, you know. Um so so um, you know, that was that was quite an experience too, because uh I I began to see what was happening with the right wing, because a lot of the players from the Oakland police department were connected with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. And so the Red Squad, that's what they called it, uh, was after all of us. And they followed us to school and they tapped our phones and they made sure we knew that they were watching us. Uh, and until we sat in the building, we didn't do anything wrong, so they were just being intimidating.
Anti-War Protests
SPEAKER_00When you were participating in leading the the protests back in in in Berkeley, what sort of world were you imagining and trying to create? And how much do you think actually came to fruition? Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
SPEAKER_03Well, we were trying to say that you don't lose your right as a citizen as soon as you step onto a campus, because what the that had been true, what started the free speech movement was taking it away. We had already had rights, okay. Now, they were right in front of the school at Telegraph and where Teleg Bancroft meets Telegraph, but we thought we were on campus, it was right there, and everybody well, people on the north side didn't come in there, but we had tables on the north side, but not as many came from the north side. Most came in from the south side. And so we would hand out leaflets, we'd argue with each other because it was left, right, and center at the tables. We'd collect money, we'd pursue our events. Uh, it's where we organized the demonstrations in San Francisco when the Sheraton Palace Hotel was from there. Uh at least the Berkeley participation in it, because San Francisco State was heavily involved as well. Um, and so I would say that what we uh what we were doing was we were trying to build a coalition that said, left, right, and center, you don't stop being able to talk about politics and organizing demonstrations when you step on campus. And we won that. We won that. I mean, we really did win it. Except for time, place, and manner, you could do it. Uh and that kicked off demonstrations around the country uh for the same thing. Columbia and I can't remember, there were about five or six universities that all started doing that. And that was kind of important because a little bit later we were gonna do the anti-Vietnam stuff, and we'd all begun figuring out how to organize our student colleagues uh while we were there. Um so that that that was for us pretty much pretty much okay. Uh, and and and I think I think today still, even though they're trying to shut everybody up about the Palestinian demonstrations, uh, they didn't learn very much. Particularly, I was really angry at UCLA. UCLA stupidly handled this. They could have done this much better. And and all they had to do is to look what happened when you start arresting people in Berkeley, all that did is make everybody join us. We expanded to twice our size overnight. Why they didn't get that? Yeah. Why somebody hadn't told them, hey, guess what? Negotiate with them. Don't, you know, don't do that, don't arrest them, and certainly don't let people beat the crap out of them while you're watching, while you're watching, you know. I mean, I I could not believe how badly UCLA did not learn anything from Berkeley in the 60s. I really, I mean, I was shocked. I was shocked. Uh so I guess people have to learn anew every year, I don't know. Uh, but so so it was it was somewhat similar at the time, and then of course, Vietnam. Now I found out a bit about Vietnam about a year before most of my left student friends at Berkeley, because I went, remember, I was at Women's Strike for Peace? Well, I stayed in that group and I had a campus Women for Peace, where we did a wonderful fallout shelter pack-in, which was very funny, and we got even the civil defense people to join in it, think them thinking we were doing it seriously. Uh, and we couldn't find the food or the water. We and we wouldn't let them back in after we sent them out to look for it because now they were going to contaminate us. Uh, and and the numbers on the wall that it said it would hold was about twice and a half, two and a half times what it would actually hold. And so it would get hotter and hotter. People started feigning, we had to call it off, and we said, of course, the only shelter is peace. Uh but out of those kinds of things, I got selected as one of the women, the young women, that went to the World Congress of Women in Moscow in 1963, which changed my life forever, forever, forever, forever. Because I went met women from all over the world, but I met American women. At the time there was a newspaper which we dearly miss, The Guardian, the National Guardian, boy, I wish it were back now, we could use it more than ever. And IF Stones Weekly, and that's how we got our news, a lot of us on the left, were those two publications. Well, the editor of The Guardian was one of the women on the uh World Congress of Women delegation from the United States. And so after all of the convention meetings that we would go to, that were, you know, uh workshops, yeah, I would come back and say, Is this really true? I mean, is the United States the enemy of everybody that's trying to get freedom? Or are we because I knew we weren't perfect. I had no frigging idea that there were countries I'd never heard of that were inter interfering on the wrong side.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03It just it blew me, and I couldn't I couldn't tell whether I could believe it or not. And of course, these were wonderful women. They told me that they wouldn't tell me whether to believe it or not. They would tell me how to figure it out for myself, which was really an important difference than just saying yes or no. Uh but when I came back, then I'd already met with the Vietnamese women, and I knew there was a war going on. Not us, just what did they call it? They had a name for it that wasn't a war. Anyway, but it was like, oh, I know, we were advisors. We were advising the Vietnamese. No, we had troops actually fighting in 1963. So when I came back to Berkeley, so this is before the free speech movement, but I come back to Berkeley and I'm telling everybody that we're in a war in Vietnam and they're telling me not yet, we think it's gonna happen, but not yet. I said, no, no, no, no, no. I met with the Vietnamese women, it's going on right now. Which led to the beginning of the Vietnam Day Committee, which happened after the free speech movement, in which we had two days and three nights of speakers literally from all over the world who came and talked about uh not just Vietnam, but American foreign policy. And uh it was blew me away. I mean, just blew me away. People whose books I were reading came and spoke, you know. I mean, really, for God's sake.
Spider Magazine
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And I did Spider Magazine while I was there, too, which is sex politics, international communism, drugs and extremism, and rock and roll, S P I D E R. I had not heard of that. Yeah. Well, we did it. We did it because. Because there were eight of us who were doing it. And we did it because uh Du Bois Club, which was the sort of uh Communist Party youth group, had this flashy eight and a half by eleven fancy thing they they were handing out. And it was boring and dull, and who would read it? I mean, the information was accurate, but I mean, really so boring. So ours was not that. Ours was, you know, we I did one of my columns was Saturday night at the nudies, where I went into Oakland with another one of us, and we would literally review nude movies. Uh, you know, so but we did books, uh, we did uh books and brief, which we did uh little tiny pieces, but on a lot of books that people might want to know about. We did puzzles, and we always had an interview, and the interview was always with somebody really good, somebody very important. And so so we all got into all of that. We learned how to uh type on a machine that that put sides on it because you didn't have we didn't have computers. Yeah, this was all done with typewriters.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03Um but ours sold out so fast, I mean it was unbelievable. Everybody wanted our magazine and not the boys, because ours was cute and funny, but it had serious stuff. And then we always had a poster on the back of some evil thing that somebody was trying to do. Um but that so that was that was Berkeley, and um, you know, and then that there was all this stuff about how we were the dropouts and the fallouts, but we had a whole table from the free speech movement at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner. So no, that wasn't true. It didn't turn out to be true that we were the dropouts.
SPEAKER_00Young activists today
How to Respond to Repression
SPEAKER_00um they're they're facing some of the same repression on campuses. Uh they uh certainly are very fearful that the Trump administration will bring an era of repression like the Hoover administration. They're afraid of uh militarized responses, something like can't state. You live through a time that was very difficult uh and challenging with a lot of uh frightening government overreach. What advice do you give the generation coming of age now about how to navigate what's coming?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think uh two things are very important that you expand your base, not narrow it. So you may have to give up a couple of things that are your demands that just nobody else wants. But if you insist on it, you'll have a very small demonstration. Now I'm not saying it it it's the beginning of a lifelong decision making of what is a value and principle and what is just something you believe strongly and could you could go either way on. And that's a very important part of young people's life, because if you think everything is equally important, you're gonna have a very hard time. Uh, but how do you pick what's the most important? Was it really Vietnam or was it really school desegregation that we should be fighting over? But are there enough of us to do both at the same time? Because you it's a pretty hard thing. So that's the first thing is to always see that what you're trying to do is to expand your base, not beyond what your values are, but beyond where you're comfortable.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Okay? So that's very important because a lot of people end up narrowing their base and they end up fighting over slogans. We had some of that, we really did, but a lot of us pushed it away. A lot of us didn't. I mean, what one of the columns that we had was we had a uh in the in the Spider magazine, is we had a table and we had all of the left and right and center groups around them, and we asked them as a puzzle to put them in order from the furthest left of the furthest right. Was that hysterical? That was the funniest thing I've ever seen. I can imagine. Yeah, because everybody had a different view of what the furthest left was the furthest right. It was very funny. Uh, you know, because we had Trotsky. I mean, we had every branch of the left at the time. Um, but that was a problem because, but not in the free speech movement. In the free speech movement, we did not put a slogan out until we had consensus, not a vote, but a consensus. That's very important if you really are going to sustain a movement. If you've got a one-shot demonstration, not as much. But if you are going to be saying we're going to take on this fight with Trump, and we're going to take on his fight to try to stop us from demonstrating its campuses about any issues we want and get rid of free speech and so forth. And then you have to decide when you're going to take the risk of real repression and when you're not. So for we started in September, and September and October and November, we did nothing to get everybody arrested. It was December by the time we had a real base, and we had been meeting a long time. And of course, you always depend on the university to be inept.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And they were. Every time we were stuck, they did something stupid. Uh my brother used to call it the um, he had a name for it. It was like the the inept uh way to get a movement moving, is to fight against an inept uh uh opponent so that when you when you can't figure out how to go next, they do something to make it okay.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_03And that was the that's the big sideum came after we thought we had lost. We really thought we had lost, because they had agreed to do some of the things and not all of the things, and we were beginning to see people thinking about going home for the holidays and so forth. And then they decided to to throw out Mario, Art, me, and Brian Turner out of school. And everybody said, No, you're not gonna do that. And you know, and Holly Near is singing and we're we're entering the building, you know. Um so so um I think I think the key is to know that it's sh uh long term, that it's difficult, that if you think you're in the leadership, that you never ask anyone to do anything in organizing that you're not willing to do yourself. Because that's where you lose people, is when somebody becomes the boss and everybody else or the tools, you know. Uh and that you're continuously thinking of ways to broaden your base, not beyond your values, but to broaden your base. And you can do it. I mean, this the young people today are very sharp. They knew more about things than we did at their age by a lot. By a lot. Uh so I'm just saying you don't want to first do something that provokes arrests because then you're gonna lose everybody who isn't if interested in getting arrested. Right. So that is your ace in the hole. Your ace in the hole is to do something illegal and create a stir. Other than that, we demonstrated, we picketed, we went into offices, we sat in offices, we sat at Sayther Gate and said, come get me, and you know, we had the police car where they brought it. Here's a good example of stupid, okay? At 1205, almost the entire campus empties toward the south of campus where all the eating areas are. So there's probably a minimum at 1205 of six or seven thousand students walking toward, and so they chose that moment to arrest a graduate student, put him in a police car in the center, not a ways away, in the center of the plaza that everybody was spilling into. And everybody just started shouting, sit down. And for some reason that nobody to this day knows, everybody sat down around that car. And I'm not talking about the people we were already with. We had a whole bunch of people, we didn't know who the hell these people were. Okay. But you know what I'm saying? So we didn't know how to go from where we were, and then they they decide not just to arrest somebody, but a graduate student, and in and his organization was around civil rights. So he was in a civil rights organization. Oh my god, that most popular thing on the Berkeley campus at the time. And they they park him in the middle of the campus on in the middle of lunch. I mean, so at that point, we surrounded the police car and we held it for two days and two nights. Um and uh I get bounced
Nature of Leadership
SPEAKER_03out of the leadership because I negotiate a settlement which we're not gonna get killed by the Oakland police, who had brought in a phalanx like an uh arrow pointed at us with these uh folks in full riot gear and m motorcycles. And it was clear they were just gonna ride over us. They weren't gonna interested pretty much in arresting us, they were interested in just running over us and beating us up. And so I was able to negotiate that uh the person in the police car would be taken, but no charges would be followed up on, and that they would begin meeting with us regularly. We were now the free speech movement, they would begin meeting with us regularly. Well, I got called a sellout and so forth by Mario and a few others, and I'm now kicked off of the uh steering committee. Now I'm just on the regular committee. It's okay with me, it's okay with me. Um but but I'm saying so so you you have to say what's most important. So here's a good example of that for me. I had a great deal of followers on that steering committee. I could have, and my brother was on the steering committee, we could have pulled Slate out, and that really would have been the end of the free speech movement. Uh but I said, no, no, no, we're not gonna protect me. Who am I? I'm just one person. I can go back and just be in the regular group. I don't have to be on the steering committee. Here again, you have to not run with your ego inferrant. Right. Okay? You have to say, who cares if they think you're a sellout? I mean, sure it hurt my feelings. Yes, it hurt my feelings. Uh, and there are people still to this very day who think I did. Uh but there's nothing you can do about it. It would have wrecked things to make that the issue. The issue was the university. Right. So you have to be you have to be willing to give and get and give and get and always, always, as much as possible. I mean, our meetings uh with the whole group, which is a representative from every living group and a representative from every political or social organization. So that was the big group from which there was a steering committee. And that group, our meetings would run sometime from three o'clock in the afternoon till two o'clock in the morning, because we were trying to reach consensus. And of course, those of us who were in living groups, the women had to go home because we had lockout.
SPEAKER_01Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_03Something they don't even know about today. Right. But at 10 o'clock, almost all the living groups on campus locked women out if they weren't in their in their places to live. Um so some of the times we kind of thought that there that some of the folks who had different views than us were trying to make this meeting go beyond 10 o'clock in order for us to not be there. Okay. I don't know if that's true or not. Maybe we were being paranoid. What can I tell you? But a few times I really did believe that. And some of us did just stay out, and I'd find a friend and I'd stay at their place overnight and go back in the morning. Um but but it was all-encompassing, and yet people did not want to quit school. They were still trying to go to classes, they were still trying to do school.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh it was my senior year. Um, and it was quite a year, to say the very least, to say the very least.
SPEAKER_00Uh I I want to spend some time talking about LGBTQ issues. Um, you and uh your wife Sharon have been together for how many years now? Forty five years. Forty-five
Coming Out
SPEAKER_00years. Um you uh raised a son, uh, had uh a couple foster children as well over the years, right? Over the years, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And we have two grandchildren.
SPEAKER_00Oh, congratulations. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations.
SPEAKER_0314 and 12.
SPEAKER_00Uh things have changed so dramatically uh over that time. You were teaching in the Compton School District in, I guess it was 1978, when the the Briggs initiative was on the ballot, which would have uh made it a firable offense to be gay or lesbian, or I guess even to voice support for gay rights. What was that like and how did you navigate that?
SPEAKER_03Well, I I had a decision to make. I think that some people on the fed well, I wasn't hiding who I was. I didn't talk about a mythical husband or boyfriend, but I wasn't out, out. I certainly hadn't run around and told people I'm gay.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_03Uh and and uh Sharon and I talked about it, and I decided uh well actually, did I know Sharon yet? 1978. Yeah, I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. I did. Yeah, absolutely. We were together already. Okay. And Brian had already been born, so yeah. Um so uh we talked about it, and I said, you know, I'm gonna have to tell my faculty, because I know there are some people on the faculty who'll probably vote for the damn thing. Uh so I came out to my faculty, and it was surprising because a couple of people said, Oh, I knew. And a couple other people said, Me too, that I didn't know, uh, which was interesting. But I was afraid. I was afraid I could lose my job if it passed, because now I'm out. They would know who I was. Uh but we did it, and I think it was the beginning of come out, come out wherever you are.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh, and that was a very important decision to make. More important than I thought. More important than I thought at the time. Because whole bunches of people, of course, had gay members of their family, gay members of the workforce that they work right next to, gay members of the people that they've voted for office, gay members that are all around them that they didn't know were gay. And I think the coming out, coming out, coming out, although I still say to kids today, if it puts you in danger, do not come out until you are in a place where you would not be in danger. I'm not saying don't come out. I'm saying if you're not in danger, come out, come out. You'll it'll make your life so much easier than trying to figure out what lie you told the last time.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_03And uh so so that was that was for me a difficult moment to come out to my faculty. You know, and I'm sure there were people on my faculty who for whom that was a not a good thing to know. Uh but but I think that a lot of us who were teaching at the time did this all over the state, and I think that really helped to get to be defeated, really.
SPEAKER_00And ultimately Briggs was defeated fairly soundly.
SPEAKER_03Soundly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Soundly. Yeah. But I think it was because a whole lot of people like me who really hadn't been out, I mean, we weren't really hiding, but we really weren't out. We're now out. And people said, Oh my god, I didn't know I I know all these people, or my Aunt Susie, that's why she never got married. Or, you know. It was the beginning of a of a movement that that uh I think really did change a lot of the outcomes for LGBTQ people.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And then I guess the issue wasn't too too much on the surface when you were your first time on the school board. But when you ran for city council.
SPEAKER_03Well, it was a little bit. Was it a little bit? I did pass a motion while I was on the school board about how we were uh protecting everybody, that all students had a right to be who and what they were. And we listed uh lesbian and gay. We didn't have the LGBTQ yet now. We listed lesbian and gay. Right. We didn't do bisexual or any of that. In fact, one of the motions I'm doing is adding everybody into that motion that I did in the early 1980s that we left out because we didn't know to say non-binary. We didn't know to say trans yet.
SPEAKER_00So but your identity wasn't really an issue until the city council race, right?
SPEAKER_03Right. And and and actually my son was a senior in high school and on the basketball team, and I had intended not to come out until he graduated high school because you know our kids are captive. You see, everybody says, Oh, come out, come out, but none of the people they were telling to come out had any children that were in public schools.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And it was very nice for them to say, come out, come out. Not nobody's gonna be bothered there.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03And unfortunately, a couple of the gay people that were running outed me, and it was in the newspaper right before my son's first game of the season. And I said to him, Are you nervous about this? He says, Oh, mom, athletes don't read the newspaper. He says, I doubt that anybody knows. So he was better about it than I was. I was trying to protect him, and he I don't I don't really need it. But I was I remember him saying exactly, Oh Mom, athletes don't read the newspaper.
SPEAKER_00Well, and you and Sharon had been going to the game, so I imagine they they they knew you all.
SPEAKER_03I don't know. I don't know, you know, because we didn't always just go eat with each other. We always maybe came with other parents and so forth. So I don't know. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00So that was ninety-three?
SPEAKER_03Uh no, in the 91, I think.
SPEAKER_0091. So 91. Uh and and and that caused a bit of a stir, got some headlines and stuff like that. Now, years later, we've got LGBT officials at the city level, the state level, we've got U.S. senators, we've got governors, uh, with Pete Buttigieg, we had a credible presidential candidate. Did you ever imagine that from where we were then that in
Fighting for LGBT Rights
SPEAKER_00your lifetime we'd get to where we got to?
SPEAKER_03No, I didn't. Uh particularly with respect to marriage.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Particularly with respect to marriage. I thought that was the last thing we'd get. Turned out we got that ahead of housing discrimination and job discrimination, which is still legal in many states in America, which many people do not know. Um so you can get married and then you can be discriminated against in both your apartment uh and and in your ability to keep your job.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So a lot of people in those states are not getting married. Uh so that's that's a real problem. Um but uh I started really first trying to change laws when I was on city council. Uh there's not too much we could do on school board except to say that we're not gonna hire, you know, pursue people. I did make one thing uh change in the school board in 1983-91, the first time I was on the board, and that was I got the s general counsel not to take seriously arrests that were done in bars of gay men because I said they're all and I brought in a couple of experts who were the people, the lawyers defending them, and I brought them to a closed session of the of the school board to say the these people did not do what they were said to do. They were entrapped for the purposes of getting them arrested, and we are not going to disqualify them from teaching uh in our district. And while we never made a quote policy, it did become the policy not to do that. But the big change was when I went on city council, um I decided to take it a step at a time. And so the first step was to get a registry. And that was pretty easy.
SPEAKER_00Domestic partner registry.
SPEAKER_03Domestic partner registry. That was pretty easy. That was actually pretty easy. And hardly anybody signed up because you didn't get anything for it.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03So the second step was to say if you signed up, you would get all the benefits of a married couple. Well, I thought, boy, the that's gonna unfold millions of people. No, because almost everybody who was gay had figured out already how to get health care for their partner, either their partner had it or whatever.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03And so it was like a tiny, a tiny change. I expected a flood of people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh but it became clear that a lot of people who lived in the county, not in the city, so I got the county to open a registry, and then the county got the state to open a registry. So that was the beginning of people beginning to say, yeah, I want I want benefits like a married couple. I want benefit. They weren't asking for marriage. Right. They really weren't.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03But I want the benefits of a married couple if I sign up on one of these registries, and that's under penalty of perjury, that we are a couple. Um so that did begin to happen, and we were able to get the city to do um all the benefits. And it was interesting because I called the personnel department and said, Can you get me some information if all of the people who signed up for registry, how much more it would cost the city to provide them with benefits? It was like nothing. And it was like nothing because A, most people were still not going to sign up because they weren't sure who in the department would find out and maybe hold it against them without saying anything. And B, a lot of them had already found out a way from their partners to get them health benefits that they or other benefits that they would have not gotten as a married person. Um, but so it turned out to be a minuscule amount of money. Then the gay folks at uh Disney called me up and said, uh, we'd like you to come and meet with the uh the studio uh management about getting uh us to have uh uh the same uh benefits as married couples if we sign the county or the city's registry. And I went over there and I did that. And uh I brought the guy from personnel who, by the way, said, I've had this material for you for years. I've just been waiting for someone to ask. Uh you know, but nobody asked, which is another reason you say to people, it is important to be there, not just to have allies. They all could have gotten this done. I didn't need to be there to do this. And Joel Wax, who was gay and everybody knew it, though he never said it out loud, any one of them could have done this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But when I called personnel to say, do you have any information on what this would cost? He said, I'll be right there. And he came in with a folder and he says, I've been have been waiting for someone to ask. So I think I think um it taught me that it you do need to have someone there, actually, who's in our community, because a lot of people will vote for it. It was practically unanimous. I think it was unanimous, actually. Uh, but then they weren't gonna bring it. Right. They weren't gonna bring it. It wasn't gonna have their name on it. Right. Okay. Uh so uh that was very big. That was very big. When we finally got everybody to get the same benefits, and then then I got and then Disney, well, you know, it turned out, guess what? Lion King, all done by gay people.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03Every single one of them gay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So I said to them, some studio is going to do this. All of these people will go to that studio. Yeah. You want them to stay here, you'd be the first. And they did. They did. So Disney was the first one to give gay couples who registered somewhere the same benefit as married people. So it was that way. It was things that would lead to something else, which would lead to something else. It's why Lion King was held in Hollywood and not in West Los Angeles. Ah really? Yes, because all those people, I helped get their benefits. And they were the ones putting it on.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_03And they said, no, no, we're going to the Hollywood. We're going to do this in Hollywood.
SPEAKER_00So the City Council, they they approved that, you said unanimously.
SPEAKER_03I think so.
SPEAKER_00When you got to Sacramento, you pursued some similar stuff. You did uh uh legislation for domestic partner benefits, uh, and and you and a few others were pushing for an anti-bullying law for that was Sheila Kehl's thing.
SPEAKER_03Sheila was really onto that. And uh we had a hard time getting a lot of this passed. Yeah, I I I remember we were not we were only barely in the majority when I was there from 2000 to 2006. It's not like now we have two-thirds. We were barely in the majority. And if any Democrats were squeamish about any of this, we couldn't get it passed.
SPEAKER_00Right. I I I often recommend to people the documentary Political Animals about you and and Sheila, Carol Migden, and Christine Keough. There are some really hard-to-watch scenes in that movie of the legislative debate and the things that your colleagues were saying.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_00What was it like to to have to endure that and then sit next to them and talk to them in a committee meeting the next day?
SPEAKER_03Well, it was okay. And I'll tell you why, because about 85 percent of them only said it because they felt they had to for their constituencies. They were afraid to be better than they were. Uh but 15 percent were really just disgusting. In fact, I've chaired Assembly Ed, and one of those disgusting people brought in one that said that that uh uh gay uh nothing gay should ever be taught in schools because we're all uh uh um sexual perverts and uh I mean all kinds of really disgusting remarks. Oh bestiality, yeah, bestiality. I will say, by the time that motion got to my committee, even the Republicans on the committee would not second it. It died without a second. And that's because when you're out there pushing, pushing, pushing, people move a little.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03They don't move a lot, they weren't about to embrace all what we were doing, but they found even the bestiality and all that stuff as not appropriate. And they didn't I I was shocked. I thought we'd have to kill it in committee, but I I just didn't think that it wouldn't even get a second. So people change. People change. I remember when I did my first transgender motion, and at the hearing I had two transgender uh attorneys, both of looking very male, and they kept referring the Republicans kept asking him a question. Can I ask him a question? Yes, of course. And on and on and on. And it was at the end of the at the end of the hearing that both of them said, Of course, now you've met your first two uh uh trans uh trans people. And and everybody just went like, uh you could see them just saying, uh, oh my God, I I had no idea. I didn't I I thought that was a man. And then it's not a man, well, yes, it is a man. He is a man now. Yeah. Confusion. It was really, it was actually laughable and very funny. A lot of us had a good laugh over that. But we started the uh LGBT caucus, and we've added more members since then. Um I would say, um, I would say the marriage bill was probably the big one that that I did. Um and I think if you ever can get a hold of the debate on that bill in the in the assembly, it will you'll find it very, very, very, very interesting. Uh the thing that was the most interesting was that some of the Democrats who had not been, we had not been sure about what they were going to do. We didn't think they'd vote no, but if you if you abstain, it's as good as voting no, because you need yes votes to pass it. And we felt we were about three to five votes, maybe really seriously in trouble during the debate, and we had people running around talking to different people. And then at least a couple of those five or six that we were worried about talked about a relative in their family. We didn't know that they had a gay relative, and they knew it was a gay relative, and that they said, you know, I saw what happened to Auntie or uncle or brother or cousin, and so I'm gonna vote for this. I'm gonna vote for this. They should have every right, you know. So it was a it was an emotional debate. And the pigs all were piggy.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03Uh, you know, it but but it passed. It passed on the first first try. Not not by a lot, not by a lot. And one of the people who really was a hero was uh uh Dimele. He had been one of the people who we knew he was gonna vote for it, but he brought a couple of other people along with him, a couple of other Democrats along with him. And uh I I think I think we might have made it anyway, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Merv Dimeley was definitely helping, as were a couple of others who I didn't know vote at the time and didn't expect at the time. Uh so it w but but that a little bit of it is in i is in the uh the uh political animals. But the but uh the group in Sacramento, whose name I'm not having an easy time with, the gay and lesbian group in Sacramento California, they have a tape of the actual uh debate.
SPEAKER_00Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Uh and I would say I'd ask them to send it to you.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I'd love to see that.
SPEAKER_03It's it's it's quite an amazing event. It really is. There was not just politics in that room, there was a lot of emotion. People felt strongly about a relative, a friend, somebody they knew. You know, it was like they were doing it for them. I mean, it was it was I'll never forget that night that we did that. It was really quite something. It was really quite something. So it reminds me of the night we passed the living wage. I mean, there are moments. I want to get to that moments that you remember because they were just mind-boggling moments.
SPEAKER_00Right. Uh since then, voters passed Prop 8 and put anti-gay marriage language in the Constitution. They just took it out with Prop three in the last election. Unbelievable reversal in just a a decade or so. But we're seeing this whole new wave of anti-gay hate. Uh there's talk by some members of the Supreme Court of repealing uh the decisions that have allowed marriage nationwide. Glendale, Sattiquoy Elementary, we've seen some horrible treatment of of trans students.
SPEAKER_03Um I was a trans teacher at Satakoy.
SPEAKER_00Wow. Yeah. What what what do you say to trans faculty, trans kids about how to get through this?
SPEAKER_03Know that the district's on your side. That we're gonna defend you every way we know how to. Every way we know how to. Uh if you don't want to be transferred when you've been found out and they're attacking you, we won't transfer to you. If you want out, we'll move you to someplace else. Um we have events. We have a calendar called the LGBT year-long calendar, so that on any day of any month you can click on it and find something you might want to include in your lesson about it. We do a big, big June Pride Month business.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um we do whatever we can, like having board members go out to a school that's being picketed and talk to the parents out there and to coming to a board meeting and reading the book out loud. I was totally shocked when I found out that the book had one sentence. And it wasn't even a really strong sentence. It was fathers come in all types and families come in all types. Some are have two moms and two dads, and one mom and one dad, or four moms and four dads, you know, all kinds of combination. That was the only line in the whole book.
SPEAKER_00And you went viral reading it, too.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yes, oh yeah. But I be uh I was surprised because I thought we do have books that are more explicit than that. They that that talk more. And the thing about it was when I did read it actually in the classroom for the kids who did come to school, a little boy came up and said, I have two moms. I mean, he was just fine in saying so. Yeah. And he was fine in saying so because we read the book and because all of these kids that are around him and the teachers were around him thought it was perfectly okay.
SPEAKER_00Your your generation of activists really, I think, modeled solidarity and coalition building. Uh I I see some of that at risk now. So many Democratic politicians are basically throwing the trans community under the bus now. I've heard lots of of gay men say, why are we concerned about this? This is not about us uh trying to sort of separate themselves. Why is it important for the rest of the gay community to stand up for the transgender community?
SPEAKER_03Well, because they're a part of our community. Uh our community is the other.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03In any way, shape, or form, sexually, the other. They're the other, other, other. And uh if we don't stand up for them, then they'll come for us. You know, I mean, if you want to be bold about it, just worry about yourself.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But if you don't want to just worry about yourself, these are human beings.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_03And uh they uh get more physical abuse than any other member of our community, our broad community, and they get more harassment. Uh when I was on the city council, I worked with uh some folks in West Hollywood that were uh trans, and they had a fairly good-sized community, and they were suddenly being thrown out of their apartments. And I went to some of the owners of those apartments and told them that that was illegal and that I was going to try to get the city attorney to sue them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And uh we worked really closely with them, and the city attorney did say that he would sue them. Not that there was actually anything illegal about kicking them out. That's the problem. There really wasn't anything illegal about kicking them out. But uh, you know, I I figured that if we told them we were gonna sue them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And I don't think we solved the problem, but we got a lot of people housed that were not gonna be housed. Uh we found places where, you know, they said, well, yeah, sure, I don't care. They pay their rent. I'm I'm I'm happy. Right. Uh the employment's a lot harder.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03The employment's a lot harder because it's one person usually in a small group of people, and I don't know that we made a lot of progress in that. I really don't. It's still a big, big, big, big, big issue.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I also like to remind those folks that one of the lawyers who successfully argued for us in the Supreme Court over marriage, Shannon Minter, transgender.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think now we have our first transgender United States Senator, I believe.
SPEAKER_00Representative, I think. Representative, was it representative? Yeah, and a few state legislators. Oh, yes.
SPEAKER_03So it's and again, it's like come out, come out, unless you're not safe. Now, with trans people, I definitely say that because a lot of them are not safe. They are not safe. Uh I think that trans kids get less problem in this district than trans employees. Right. Um, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So many uh communities have mechanisms with which to share and pass down their history. The Passover Seder, uh uh family reunions in the African American community, uh a big tradition. Because gays and lesbians don't by ourselves produce the next generation of gays and lesbians, we don't sort of have the same mechanisms to pass down our history.
SPEAKER_03Well, I don't know. The LGB Center is doing some of that. It certainly has groups for parents who are now having kids so that they can share experiences. Um, it I think we have some institutions that do actually help us do that. But I think it's really truly that a lot of us are still not out of the closet in the sense that we live our lives openly in every way, shape, and form. And so that means you're more likely to not be in places where somebody will surprise you. I remember when I was first coming out and I was living on Vendome Street, and a bunch of us were living on Vendome Street that had gone to Berkeley together. And I went to a bar for a drink, and I saw someone from my block who saw me, and we looked at each other, we looked at each other, we looked at each other, and we became famous friends after that. But but it's things like that that neither of us were gonna tell each other about it. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Well, and we don't even do bars anymore. Now it's all grinder and stuff, right? Um what what would you want uh uh twenty-something LGBTQ folks or even teenagers to know about gay lesbian history?
SPEAKER_03Aaron Ross Powell Well, I'd like them to know that people have been struggling about this for a long time, that maybe a lot of it didn't come to be known well because so few people were out. Uh but it wasn't like the struggle wasn't going on.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03It wasn't like people weren't fighting already. It's just that they didn't have a lot of allies yet, and they didn't even have all the allies in our own community who were saying, Shh, we're better off quiet. Don't there were a lot there were a lot of anti-coming out folks at the very beginning because they were afraid it would bring down the world on them and they weren't about to come out. And they and they knew why they weren't about to come out. I mean, I'm not what you know, they would get fired, or they wouldn't get promoted, or that it's there would be negative consequences of coming out. So they weren't real thrilled when we were all running around saying, come out, come out wherever you are. Uh, on the other hand, none of the things that we've accomplished, I do not believe would have happened without a whole bunch of people in this country realizing that they were connected to our community and didn't know it. You know, I really, really, really, really mean that. Um, I remember when I came out to my parents, was also during Briggs, and of course, my uncle said I knew it all along. Uh, and my father was pretty sure too. My mother was surprised.
SPEAKER_00Opposite for me. Yeah. Uh I want to switch and I want to talk about the the living wage,
LA's Living Wage
SPEAKER_00which you mentioned, uh, which for me was a very transformative thing to witness. I uh I was a young, I think my first year as a ledge staffer for Ruth Galanter, staffing her on the floor. And I get to see uh you and Sharon Delugic on your staff and and others, a huge coalition like. And Lane. And the yep and Lane, first time I met uh uh Maria Elena and and and so many from Lane pull off this this this uh this this legislative coup. It wasn't easy, the mayor was opposed to it. And it's been sort of the the precursor to the minimum wage increase in Los Angeles, the Olympic wage they're discussing now. Um how big did it seem at the time?
SPEAKER_03Oh, huge. Huge. Because Reardon was dead set against it. I mean, he was really dead set against it. He funded all these Mickey Mouse groups saying that they were the uh Latino Small Business Association was against it, the uh African American Small Business Association was against it. I mean, there were about 10 groups, but what we did was strategic. Uh we took about nine or ten months of hearing it in committee. We did that because I didn't want anybody when we came to taking a vote saying, I don't know enough about this. And we made changes.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_03We made lots of changes. Here again, what I'm talking about. You don't go beyond your values, but if there are things that are, yeah, okay, I could live without that. Okay. And we took our time and we listened to the Republican. There were four Republican members of our group then. Um and uh we listened to them too. Uh and then we had tremendous help. We had tremendous help. We had uh, I don't remember the actor's name, but he came at Christmas uh dressed as the Christmas past, you know, sang rear done, and he dragged a chain down the whole hallway of the uh the center aisle of the of the council office. Rear dun, rear done. And we had every religious person, every council member that had any religious person in their life, a rabbi, a shaman, a a priest, uh uh uh visit them and tell them about what their values were and what they said when they thought they were in their congregation. And I mean it was really a massive, massive campaign, largely led by, I don't know if they called themselves Lane yet, but what became Lane.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And we got a break. And here was the break. Um Staples? No. Yes, Staples Center. That was the break. Uh we had been having real troubles with Joel Wax. He wasn't sure what he was going to do. Um and he was a fiscal conservative and he was worried about how much this might cost and so forth. And um then they passed this huge, huge, huge subsidy to these rich people doing the Staples Center. And that pissed him off.
SPEAKER_01I remember.
SPEAKER_03That pissed him off. So we went into the vote where we needed eight votes to pass it in two weeks, two meetings, or ten and no no votes to pass it that day. We counted for sure six. We thought we could weasel maybe two more, and then he spoke. And he said, I'm sorry. If we can give rich people gazillions and gazillions and gazillions of dollars, we can give poor workers at the airport a living goddamn wage.
SPEAKER_00Changed everything. I remember that.
SPEAKER_03It changed everything.
SPEAKER_00It's rare when you can be in a room and and have sort of a the legislative equivalent of a Perry Mason moment.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah, oh yeah, no, no, it changed everything. It changed everything. So much so that the four people who were not gonna vote for it left the room so that we could get 10 votes to pass it on the first time. Wow. Uh which shocked me. I mean, I knew at that point we were gonna win, yeah, but I had no idea that they would get up and leave the room when the vote started so that they would be counted as not present.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And then, of course, he vetoed it, and we had overrode his veto easily. So I think it was it was we took our time, we took everybody's point of view into consideration, we made non-value principle changes. We asked everybody, we had committee meeting after committee meeting after committee meeting after committee meeting after committee meeting. Um, and when we were ready, we were still not sure, but we were ready. We were as ready as we were going to be, we were going to take the vote. And then, of course, uh three weeks or four weeks earlier, they had passed this great subsidy for these rich guys, and uh it pissed him off. And as soon as he finished speaking, I looked around and everybody was ready to vote yes. Yeah. Even the ones that walked out of the room were thinking about voting yes.
SPEAKER_00And he did it in a very popular style that he was known for. No, it was it was a moment.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh do you have an appreciation yourself of how big and foundational that moment was in the case?
SPEAKER_03Because we borrowed uh Baltimore did a little tiny one, and that's where we got the idea. But we figured it out that if you have the mayor of the city spending money month after month after month to kill this, he knew it would spread. And he was trying to protect everybody else. So yes, we had we didn't have as big an idea of it, but we had some idea of it. But actually, now here's the uh ironic thing. Before we did this, we passed the worker retention law. Turned out for the people we were working for, turned out to be more important to them than the living wage.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Because here's why. If you were an airport worker for 10 years and you had moved up in their system and you were getting that whatever their top salary was going to be, still not enough, but whatever it was, if your contractor lost the bid, even if you were kept on, you started at step one again. And mostly they didn't. They laid them all off so they didn't have to worry about union organizing. They laid everybody off, and then they would pick and choose amongst the non union oriented people to hire back on. So the motion on them was if you are a new contractor, you must keep all of the old contractors people for 60 days. Unless they commit egregious acts like not showing. Up or stealing, or I mean things that you would just fire anybody over. Then you had to do an evaluation, and even if they had an excellent evaluation, you could still fire them. Yeah. But you had to do an evaluation. They fought us and fought us and fought us. About three or four years later, almost all of those contractors thanked me. Because now they weren't spending a fortune training anybody. They were already trained. Right. They already knew what they were going to do. And that's how we realized that, and it turned out that none of those contract employees could get a loan to buy a car. Because they were contract employees, they had no guarantee of employment.
SPEAKER_00No job security. Right.
SPEAKER_03No job. So as soon as we passed the worker retention, they all started getting me letters saying I can finally get a loan to buy a car. Never occurred to me.
SPEAKER_00So often the stuff that is less sexy that is more impactful.
SPEAKER_03I'm telling you, it turned out because worker retention meant that they didn't get dropped down to the bottom again either.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yep.
SPEAKER_03Okay. And and some were nasty, and as soon as the 60 days were up, they fired everybody. But not too many.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And a few years later, literally, some of those guys said to me, you know, it turned out we fought it, we fought it, we fought it was the best thing that ever happened because it reduced our our training and time and getting up to speed uh magnif magnificently. That was mostly the food workers, right? Not so much the people in the uh airport uh parking.
SPEAKER_00But there was really a year or two of a real muscle flex of the labor left in Los Angeles that sort of then became a dominant thing. Right.
SPEAKER_03Well it started with all the picketing around the here, H E R E and the hotels downtown. Oh, yes, he says I've got to go soon.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_03Okay. Uh yeah. I I think the thing I would say to young people is uh do it.
Lessons for Young Activists
SPEAKER_03Find out how it works by doing it.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_03Uh ask people who've done it, but don't rely on that. We didn't have anybody to ask. I mean, the older people did that from the old Communist Party and Socialist Party did come onto campus while we were doing stuff. But mostly we were making it up as we were going along. And and that's what they should do. Just remember the key principles, which is leadership needs to be important. It's very important. I uh the one thing I really most disagreed with SDS at the time was this no-leader business. Crap. Organizations need leaders, but the leaders can't be princes princes and princesses. They have to be getting in and doing the work and modeling what the work is and not ever saying somebody else make the lemonade and the and the sandwiches, you make them too. Right. And when the meeting's over, you help put the chairs away. You don't go home and say the the serfs will take care of it. So that's the first first rule of organizing. And the second rule of organizing is to know that you're going to have to plan and plan and plan and plan and it'll turn out that you had the wrong strategy. And then you don't give up. See? That's what Trump's w betting on. He's betting on that we're going to be depressed and feel it's hopeless. No, it is not. Nothing is ever hopeless unless you give up. And if you don't give up, while we can't stop everything he's going to do, we're going to he'll know he was in a fight for every single thing he's going to try. He'll know if he's in a fight. If all of these young people that you're talking with decide that they're going to be in this fight.
SPEAKER_00Amen. Last question. How
Legacy
SPEAKER_00would you like your 60 years of public service to be remembered?
SPEAKER_03Um that I did good trouble. That I got into good trouble. And that that uh that I that that a lot of it was a learning experience, each one teaching me for the next one I was in. And each one teaching me for the next one I was in. Um you know, I I I learned about the McCarthy era when I was at the University of Chicago, and I couldn't get hired to be a teacher, and the program I was in would not give me a master's degree unless I taught at least three-fifths time, and nobody would hire me. Right. Nobody. I mean, I was traveling up and down Illinois on the bus and on the train, finding any place. Uh the people at the Chicago public schools told me that they loved all the things I knew and they loved me very much, but they would not hire me until I had had three years somewhere else where it didn't blow up.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_03Okay. Uh and a lot of them didn't even bother. And of course, as a woman, there was no Title IX, so a couple of them just told me we don't hire women in the social studies department. That's how they took care of it. But for the first time I realized what it was when I was asked to speak at a big, big anti-Vietnam demonstration in downtown Chicago, and I was still trying to get a job. And I thought, oh, oh, maybe I'll skip this one. And then I thought, no, that's the point. That's the point. They want me to skip this one. So I'm not going to skip this one, and I'm just going to hope for the best. And what turned out to be that was in down in Harvey, Illinois, on the first day of school, a social studies teacher didn't show up and I got hired on the spot. Because the hiring when I got back to California was the same. The FBI was telling everybody not to hire me because they'd wait for a transcript and they'd know I was being looked at, so they'd go and tell them not to hire me. Well, if you're standing in the office and you're hired on the spot and you sign the contract before the FBI comes, you got a job. And that's how I got a job teaching at Thornton Township High School in Harvey, Illinois. So again, no. If they tell you no, you cannot say I'm going to not do it. As soon as you do that, they win. Whoever they is that's oppressing people, they win when you give up, when you say them, oh, I'm gonna worry about me. No. That was the most courageous thing I ever did, was that speech. Not getting arrested, not all that other stuff. Making that speech when it might actually mean I would not get my master's degree because I had to teach at least some of a year.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03And that the scariest moment of my life was that. I understood the McCarthy era in a way that only intellectually I had understood it before. Uh, because now my name was in the paper again, and everybody would know. So fortunately, I was standing in the office in Harvey, Illinois. Got the job.
SPEAKER_00Man. Jackie Goldberg, thank you so much for this interview, but thank you for your years of service and for fighting for us.
SPEAKER_03Thank you for interviewing me.
SPEAKER_00Jackie Goldberg's last day in public office will be December 8th. Thank you for your service and for your enduring example, Jackie. And that is it for this episode of What's Next, Los Angeles. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to Marta Ivery for editing, and my thanks to LA Forward for partnering with me and for sponsoring this podcast. Please be sure to subscribe or follow this show and leave a positive review. And please do not forget to listen to our sister podcast, LA Podcast, which you can find wherever you listen to your podcasts. I guarantee you'll enjoy it. Until next time, take care and peace.