The Jewish ‘Red Angel’ Who Withstood Incarceration for Workers’ Rights

For Elaine Black Yoneda, it wasn’t a choice. When authorities informed her that her three-year-old son Tommy would be imprisoned in a concentration camp for the crime of being half-Japanese, Yoneda — a white Jewish woman — insisted on going with him. Her Japanese American husband Karl was already being detained at Manzanar, a camp in the desert beneath the Sierra Nevada mountains. Now, just as the Yonedas had adjusted to the idea of a long period of separation, they would live as a family once more — albeit behind barbed wire.

“It was so ironic,” Yoneda later told People’s World journalist Tim Wheeler. “Only a few weeks earlier, I had been delivering soapbox speeches denouncing Nazi Germany for imprisoning Jews in Dachau. Here I was, a month later, demanding that I, a Jewish woman, be placed in a concentration camp.”

It was not the first time in her life that Yoneda had found herself incarcerated. Her irrepressible activities on behalf of the Communist Party and unions had landed her behind bars more than once in the 1930s — most notably for her activities during the notorious General Strike that took place in San Francisco in 1934. At the time, Yoneda was the only woman serving on the West Coast Longshoremen’s strike committee. It was a period that she would later call “a reign of terror” by “the so-called Red Squad, the Intelligence Bureau.”

That year, Yoneda was arrested on charges of vagrancy and disturbing the peace at a Communist Party meeting of several hundred people at San Francisco’s Jefferson Square. At the time, she was acting as an official for the International Labor Defense and as secretary of the Marine Workers’ Industrial Union. Yoneda made a point to attend such meetings and demonstrations with copies of the Bill of Rights on her person. (“I could quote [them] verse and chapter,” she later revealed.) After the meeting was raided, she was taken into custody for refusing to obey police orders to move on.

Within one week of her arrest and incarceration, Yoneda was on hunger strike alongside Margaret Marshall, the lone other woman arrested that day. An image printed by the San Francisco Examiner on Aug. 6, 1934 showed the women sitting side by side, facing each other and pointedly away from food that had been placed on a table in front of them. A caption noted that “each [woman] has [a] different view on proper methods of showing their contempt.”

(The newspaper also reported that rumors of “a bath-strike” had been denied. One jail attendant was quoted as saying ‘They ain’t on a bath-strike. They’re no dirtier than normal.”)

Yoneda’s activities in support of workers’ rights were well-established by that point. Born in New York City in 1906, Yoneda’s parents, Mollie and Nathan Buchman, were Russian Jewish immigrants who had fled Mazyr to escape anti-Jewish pogroms and conscription in the czar’s army. The Buchmans had met while working as children in a match factory. Yoneda was raised with resistance in mind, something that prompted her to move to Los Angeles and join the Communist Party in 1931.

By 1933, Yoneda was in San Francisco, a city well-known for its unionization efforts. Yoneda quickly earned the nickname “The Red Angel,” for her work regularly bailing out trade unionists and Communist Party members from jail. (She met her husband Karl while getting him released after his arrest and beating at a labor demonstration in Los Angeles.) By 1939, Yoneda was campaigning to be elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors — a bid that was ultimately unsuccessful. Over the course of that decade though, Yoneda had become a powerful public speaker, “out of necessity.”

In 1977, while recording an oral history of her life with Lucille Kendall, she said:

Perhaps I had a natural way with words. I don’t know, I can talk to this day — talk too much perhaps. … And to this day, I hate a loudspeaker. Because I’ve got this loud voice. I’d probably shatter everybody’s ears if I did talk into a loud speaker. … And usually my speaking was based around the fight for civil rights and constitutional rights and the right to organize and to preserve the Constitution and to enhance it where it needed enhancing.

After two trials related to her high-profile 1934 arrest, the charges against Yoneda were finally dismissed. “They are not vagrants. They are Communists,” the appellate court judge ruled. Yoneda was identified as such on the first day of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Un-American Activities hearings in 1953. By then, the Yonedas were operating a farm in Cotati, but her political activities never ceased.

From the late 1950s until her retirement in 1973, Yoneda worked as a clerk for the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union Pacific Maritime Association pension fund. Yoneda remained a powerful union figurehead until her death in 1988. The week of her fatal heart attack, Yoneda had attended a union rally for then-presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Despite a life spent utterly entrenched in the often dramatic struggle for workers’ rights, Yoneda always spoke about her activism in a manner that was simple and matter-of-fact. That stoicism ultimately helped her keep a level head under any of the circumstances life threw at her, something thoroughly demonstrated in her oral history recordings.

While talking about what it was like to be a prominent member of the Communist Party during a period when sexism was rampant, she explained:

The party’s principles and everything was against the domination of male chauvinism, as the terms of equality. And you found women in various posts, not only in the district offices, but in the national office and on the newspapers. … But there was male chauvinism in the ranks and even in some of the leaders because it was too new a concept for some of them. … I would point out: ‘Now, look, first of all, I am a comrade. … You know you are committing a crime against your own constitution, your own principles. You’re committing an act of male chauvinism.’

Though Yoneda is often remembered for her bravery as one of the few non-Japanese spouses imprisoned at an American concentration camp in World War II, she later spoke about the eight-and-a-half month experience with some regret.

“Although I knew [Japanese internment] was a violation of basic human rights, I didn’t speak out against it,” she said. “I didn’t raise my voice in protest. And in fact, I even thought for a period that they weren’t really concentration camps, because to me, a concentration camp is the ovens. … Once we were in camp, we did ask for some sort of hearings so that those who wanted to fight the actions would be given that opportunity to actively fight it.”

Yoneda and her son were ultimately released after her husband Karl enlisted in the U.S. military’s intelligence service as a Japanese language specialist, first serving in Burma. In fact, Karl spent his own incarceration trying repeatedly to prove his faithfulness to anti-fascist efforts. He even helped to build the Manzanar concentration camp his family was subsequently imprisoned in. For years after the war, the Yonedas campaigned for Japanese reparations, traveling regularly to the Manzanar site to raise awareness.

Throughout her life, even while under pressure to cease her political activities, Yoneda shared her husband’s dedication to the United States. At one of her 1934 court dates, it was reported that Yoneda “saluted the America flag ‘on condition that it be deemed to stand for the rights of workers.’” In the end, that is her true legacy.

“We believe in minority parties,” she once said. “If you let the big shots run the country, what will happen to us?”

To learn about other Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, visit the Rebel Girls homepage.