The Legacy of Paul Schrade
HAROLD MEYERSON JUNE 7, 2018
Not just the other guy who was shot in the Ambassador kitchen
Todays New York Times has a story on the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedys murder, featuring interviews with Kennedy staffers and supporters. But the piece misidentifies Paul Schrade, who was also critically wounded when Kennedy was shot, as a campaign aide (in the caption) and doesnt quite get it right in calling him a labor organizer who worked on the campaign in the text of the article.
Its important to get Paul Schrades actual identity right, thoughbecause he was a key figure in California and union history during the pivotal decade of the 60s.
As a young man, Paul had worked as an assistant to United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther, who headed what today has to be viewed as by far the most important progressive union in American history. In the 1950s, Paul headed a UAW local at North American Aviation in Los Angeles, and became the UAWs western regional director in the early 1960s. As such, he became, in 1965, the first established union leader to provide resources and assistance to the fledgling union of farmworkers that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were organizing. That same year, in the aftermath of the Watts Riots, he devoted union resources to establishing the Watts Labor Community Action Council and the East Los Angeles Community Union (TELACU), which became longstanding political powerhouses in LAs black and Latino communities, respectively.
One year later, Paul put Chavez in touch with Robert Kennedy, who came to California to champion the farmworkers cause. Paul also opposed the Vietnam War early onand when Kennedy declared his presidential candidacy in early 1968, Paul became his most prominent labor backer. By so doing, he also became the odd man out on the UAWs national executive committee, on which he was by far the youngest member. Reuther certainly had profound misgivings about the war, and had helped form Negotiations Now, an organization that sought to bring the war to a halt but stopped short of advocating a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops. But Reuther was also an old friend and comrade of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with whom he had founded Americans for Democratic Action in 1948. Humphrey was a solid liberal, but was tethered to Lyndon Johnsons war policy and refused to break with it. Like most labor leaders, Reuther supported Humphreys presidential bid when Johnson announced in late March that he wouldnt seek re-election.
http://prospect.org/article/legacy-paul-schrade