The civil rights movement comes to Alaska canneries

摘要

"You have some guy coming in and ordering our fathers and uncles around, calling them 'boy.' We had never seen that kind of overt stuff before," stated Gene Viernes, a Filipino-American from Wapato, Washington, who first went to work in an Alaska cannery in 1967.He was 15 at the time; his father paid a bribe so the Cannery Workers and Farm Laborers Union Local 37 dispatcher in Seattle would ignore his age. The dispatcher assigned him to the Wards Cove cannery in Southeast Alaska.