At Berkeley in the Sixties: The Making of an Activist

19 The Sheraton-Palace

a ticket for it and that unintentionally. Socrates was charged with “corrupting the youth,” a pursuit he not only denied but had no wish to do. He saw himself as a “gad®y to a horse that is large and well-bred but rather sluggish because of its size, so that it needs to be aroused. It seems to me” he said, “that the god has attached me like that to the state, for I am constantly alighting upon you at every point to arouse, persuade, and reproach each of you all day long.” I saw those who courted arrest not as the enemies of social order but as gad®ies who, by sacri¤cing some of their own bene¤t and comfort, made the world a better place for everyone. Like Socrates, I felt it was the highest calling to “go about and persuade you all to give your ¤rst and greatest care to the improvement of your souls, and not till you have done that to think of your bodies or your wealth. Wealth does not bring excellence, but that wealth, and every other good thing which men have, whether in public or in private, comes from excellence.”2 When I went to Northridge during semester break I tried to discuss some of this with Helen. I was moving toward the belief that it was neither good nor bad to deliberately break the law for sel®ess ends. If breaking the law woke people to an injustice that they would otherwise ignore, if it compelled them to treat a festering sore, it was a necessity. She would have none of this. Breaking the law was something one just did not do. Period. 19 The Sheraton-Palace After the arrests at Mel’s, things were quiet for a while. Then CORE took the lead again by organizing a “shop-in” at Lucky’s supermarkets. Lucky’s was an old adversary, having been picketed successfully by CORE 94 l At Berkeley in the Sixties as long ago as 1948. CORE had negotiated another agreement the previous summer, but no additional jobs for Negroes appeared. In February 1964, CORE set up picket lines at several markets. A week later it started the “shop-in.” Although new to us, it was a classic form of nonviolent disruption; all our actions were legal, but they signi¤cantly interfered with the ability of Lucky’s stores to conduct business. Basically, we went shopping, piled our carts with goods, and changed our minds at the check-out counter. Since we looked like ordinary shoppers, the cashiers had no way of knowing that they would be left with ringing cash registers and a counter full of unwanted goods. The managers had no way of separating the real shoppers from the ringers. And the real shoppers didn’t want to stand in lines forever waiting for cash registers to be cleared and goods to be returned to the shelves. After a few days of this, the new mayor of San Francisco, John Shelley, negotiated an agreement; the parent company promised to hire at least sixty Negroes. We left. A few months later our local Lucky’s, on the corner of Haste Street a few blocks from campus, closed forever.1 The week the Lucky’s agreement was announced, a picket line appeared outside the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in San Francisco. This was another Ad Hoc Committee action, but unlike Mel’s, negotiation was tried¤rst. According to co-chair Mike Myerson: In Birmingham hotels, black bartenders and waiters are commonplace , but in San Francisco that year there were none. The city’s hostelries were in a vulnerable position, all of them booked several months in advance to play host to the Republican National Convention . The Sheraton-Palace, soon to be Rockefeller headquarters, employed nineteen blacks, all in menial jobs, of a work staff totaling 550.2 The Urban League and the NAACP had begun negotiations with the hotel industry in March 1960 because so many local Negroes complained that they could not get jobs in San Francisco that they had held in southern cities. These talks sometimes led to promises but rarely to actual performance . After the successful Mel’s action, demonstrations seemed like a quicker route. The most logical targets for action were the three oldest and most elegant hotels in the city: the Sheraton, the Mark Hopkins, and the Fairmont. If one of them agreed to hire more Negroes, the other hotels would follow. Of...