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CHARLESTON “The First Major Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century” The first sign of trouble ahead was the swelling crowd of police at the entrance of the Columbus Street Terminal off Morrison Drive. It was 5 P.M., Wednesday, January 19, 2000, still the dawn of the new millennium in Charleston, South Carolina. Hundreds of battle-ready, black-clad police and highway patrol officers stood in formation, armed with riot helmets, wooden clubs, and plastic shields. A handful rode horses. They carried weapons able to shoot rubber pellets and buckshot. Canine units stood ready with attack dogs. The officers on the ground, summoned from across the state, formed a solid, impregnable phalanx. Parked nearby were mobilized armored vehicles as well as the platoon of buses that had brought them to the terminal gate. Before the night was over, the force would reach six hundred troops on the ground, a virtual infantry, plus the police equivalent of an air force and navy. Patrol boats trolled the waters of Charleston harbor while helicopters circled over Morrison Drive. Charleston hadn’t seen such a show of military might since the fire-eating secessionist editor Edmund Ruffin fired the first cannonball of the Civil War against the federal troops at Fort Sumter in 1861. At 6 P.M., members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 1422 gathered at their union hall on Morrison Drive. They joked and tried to remain light-hearted yet still grumbled at the military force gathering at the terminal entrance. They talked about seeing maneuver-like training sessions, organized lunges into imaginary crowds, clubs and plastic shields raised against the imaginary enemy, which they knew to be themselves. “My Lord, what are they preparing for?” Local 1422 president Ken Riley recalled thinking in a later interview with the Nation magazine writer JoAnn Wypijewski.1 Chapter 10 176 177 Charleston: “Labor Battle of the Twenty-first Century” “Be patient,” one ILA member told a reporter with Charleston’s Post and Courier at the scene that night, “you’ll get your story.”2 The union hall, described as a “fortress” in the Charleston press, was a safe haven for the longshoremen. Out on the docks, tension had been building since late 1999 when the Danish Nordana Shipping Line broke a twenty-two-year-old relationship with the local by hiring nonunion workers with “waterfront figure” Perry Collins’s Winyah Stevedoring, Inc., of neighboring Georgetown. Why pay union workers $16.50 to $25 an hour when nonunion workers will do the job for $8 an hour?3 Protests had followed that decision, intensifying every time another Nordana ship pulled into Charleston Port. Peaceful pickets eventually turned loud and ugly with honking horns, blocked traffic, vandalism— slashed tires, damaged air hoses—and claims by Winyah workers that they’d been assaulted by ILA members. No charges were ever filed, however . The police held back. Ken Riley met with Nordana to offer concessions . Nordana turned him down. “You can’t take that night [January 19–20] without understanding the buildup,” says Tony Bartelme, a reporter who covered the story from start to finish.4 Bartelme works for Charleston’s major newspaper, the Post and Courier . Founded in 1803, it bills itself as “the South’s oldest daily newspaper .” Owned by the Manigault family and various others, the newspaper was a pioneer in congressional coverage in the early 1800s. Its correspondent Felix Gregory de Fontaine, using the penname “Personne,” wrote some of the most acclaimed dispatches of the Civil War. After World War II, the newspaper’s editorials stood strong and true for Strom Thurmond and segregation. Now they simply reflect the political conservatism that dominates much of the region. Nordana was a small line that accounted for only two ships per month in what is the nation’s fourth-largest container port, a port that handles $80 million worth of cargo per day. Nine of the world’s ten biggest shipping lines operate here. This is South Carolina’s window to the world, a key component in the industrialization that has brought BMW, Michelin, General Electric, and other mega-corporations to the state. The port’s regional clout has earned its status as the “lynchpin of the South’s global economy.”5 The longshoremen who work its docks—the ILA local includes around one thousand members—are very proud of what they do. Most of them are black, descendants of a long tradition of labor activism in the city. Free black chimneysweepers...

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