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TI: So what was the feeling by you and the others as this is going on? I mean, how are you feeling about --

BS: It was very exciting times. We saw that, when the politics of the street, when we started hitting the streets, changes were being made. Little by little more blacks were being hired in these construction teams. There was a lot of, the port was building the garage at SeaTac. A lot of federal money was going there, so Tyree gathers everybody up at St. Peter Claver Center and said, "We're bringing our folks out to SeaTac." And they worked with the Central Contractors Association and a lot of other civil rights groups. The United Farm Worker -- the grape boycott was going on at that time -- they sent their people up to Seattle. Lot of Asians, again, Dolores Sibonga and her husband, and all these Catholic priests and nuns were, we all went out to SeaTac. And what we did is we went from one concourse -- we're still, we're not allowed to go outside, but we went from one concourse to the other. The sheriffs were out there at, on the tarmac and they'd be monitoring us, and when we'd move down the concourse to another end of the airport they had to run twice as far to get around to the other end where we ended up. So finally we filtered our way down to the tarmac and we were singin' like, [sings] "We shall overcome," and airplanes were goin' over and all hell was breaking loose. The sheriff's department had to call in all the police departments from Federal Way and Renton and Fife and Kent and every, and it became like an armed camp. And we were running the sheriff's department people crazy. In the meantime, Jim Takasaki and a Central Area Contractors Association, they were lining up for tickets at the ticket counters, and there would be a bunch of them, right, so that the regular people that wanted to buy tickets to go on flights, they were at the end of the line. And Jim and them guys would take out their credit cards, they said, no, I think, no, I don't want to use this one, I'll use this one. They were just, just messing up the whole flight schedule of the whole terminal that day, doing these little side kind of things. It's legal. It wasn't illegal to stand in line to get a ticket, but to disrupt the process was very helpful.

Finally the announcement came, "If you don't leave the concourse you'll be arrested," and so, boom, people sat down, decided to sit down. And it was the same day that Uhlman had just won his election for mayor, and he was on his way to Hawaii on vacation and he came through, and everybody wanted him to make a statement about this civil rights movement. He supported it, of course, then he flew off. Then the cops came in and started hauling people off to jail, and two of the people were Dolores Sibonga and her husband Marty Sibonga, and a guy named Mike Holland, who was the parish priest at St. Mary's. Now, with us were Phil Hayasaka, director of the Human Rights Commission, Harvey McIntyre, Father McIntyre from, who was president of the Human Rights Commission, and me. I was vice, chair of the Human Rights Commission. And as the cops were hauling Mike Holland, the priest, out to the paddy wagon, Harvey runs up to the cops, says, "You can't arrest him. You got to arrest me. I'm the civil rights priest." He was all pissed off 'cause Mike had been arrested before Harvey and it was this internal kind of thing, and funnier than hell. So a lot of changes were made through the courts because of the disruption at Seattle, SeaTac Airport. One of the judges became very supportive of opening up the unions and the construction industry for workers, especially black workers, and we started to win some of these court cases through the ensuing years.

TI: So all this activism was really paying off. I mean, it was, changes were being made.

BS: Oh yeah. It was really paying off. See, Tyree was, Tyree was a strategist. He was very bright, and he, and some of his activities were being paid for by the Quaker group.

TI: Oh, the Friends?

BS: Friends, American Friends Service Committee. They were actually funding a lot of the activities for the United Construction Workers.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.