Karl Yoneda and the ‘Red Angel,’ Petaluma’s power to the people couple
As if poultry farming wasn’t hard enough, being questioned by the FBI while vaccinating hens in a chicken coop seems an unnecessary strain for most.
But not Penngrove rancher Karl Yoneda.
A longtime political activist, he was used to living under surveillance, including during his military service in World War II, for which he was awarded a Gold Star.
Karl enlisted in the U.S. Army on Dec. 7, 1942, a year to the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was incarcerated along with his wife and three year-old son in Manzanar, one of 10 concentration camps holding 110,000 Japanese Americans during the war. Located in the high desert of Owens Valley close to Mount Whitney, the camp was 200 miles north of Los Angeles, where Karl, the son of Japanese immigrants, was born in 1906.
His family decided to move back to their native village near Hiroshima when he was 7, after his father was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Karl spent his formative years in Japan, during which the country was transitioning into a modern, industrialized colonial empire. By the early 1920s, labor unions and a variety of socialist, communist, and anarchist activists were mounting public demonstrations for economic and democratic reforms, as well as protesting Japan’s rising militarism.
Idealist and headstrong, Karl organized his first strike while still in high school, staging a walkout of Hiroshima’s newspaper delivery boys over low pay. At 16, he made his way to Beijing, where he studied for two months with the blind Ukrainian anarchist and Esperanto teacher, Vasili Eroshenko.
Returning to Japan, he committed himself to a life of fighting social injustice, participating in several major Japanese labor strikes and publishing a journal for impoverished farmers. In 1926, to avoid being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, he boarded a freighter for San Francisco. Upon arriving, immigration officials classified him a kibei-nisei — born in the United States and educated in Japan — and locked him up for two months at the immigration detention center on Angel Island. After his release, he went to Los Angeles, where he found work as a dishwasher and window washer.
As the American Federation of Labor excluded people of color at the time, he joined the Japanese Workers’ Association, serving as their publication director. Changing his first name from Goso to Karl in honor of Karl Marx, he also began working with the communist-affiliated Trade Union Educational League, organizing migrant field workers in the Central Valley and Fresno.
In 1931, while at a Los Angeles demonstration calling for unemployment insurance in the midst of the Depression, Karl was severely beaten and thrown into jail by the police department’s notorious “Red Squad.” Not wanting a corpse on their hands, the police called the International Labor Defense — which billed itself as “the legal department of the working class” — to bail him out.
Elaine Black, a young woman who had started working for the ILD just the day before, paid Karl’s bail and rushed him to the hospital.
Sparks clearly flew during their initial encounter.
A year later, after Elaine was assigned to the ILD offices in San Francisco, Karl showed up at her office, having taken a job in the city as editor of Rodo Shimbun, a Communist Party Japanese-language publication. Defying California’s Anti-Miscegenation Law against mixed race couples, the couple moved in together in the city’s Japantown.
A firebrand who mixed her moral fury at injustice with a sense of fashion, Elaine grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side, the daughter of Jewish immigrants Mollie and Nathan Buchman. Marxist activists, the Buchmans fled their native Russia after Nathan was drafted into the Czar’s army. In 1920, the family relocated from New York to Southern California.
After being accidentally caught up in a brutal sweep by the Red Squad, an outraged Elaine took a job with the IDL and joined the Communist Party, adopting the last name Black, initially as an alias when questioned by police. Conservative newspapers labeled her “The Tiger Woman.” Fellow activists dubbed her “The Red Angel" for her tireless work among striking workers, providing them with food, lodging and bail money.
In 1934, Elaine and Karl became involved in the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, Elaine serving as the only woman on the strike committee, and Karl leading the effort to dissuade Japanese laborers from crossing the picket line. Both were jailed — Elaine four times, including for seditious utterances and vagrancy when she went to court to bail out other activists.
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