Building Racism

At a City Hall public hearing last month, supervisors were clearly concerned. Carmen Chu nodded in solemn agreement as Jeff West, a carpenter apprentice who lives in one of the AIMCO properties and worked on the site, explained that he wanted to be a role model to men in the area by getting a job. "But to come to work and be a taxpayer and be called a nigger? I deserve everything ... that another man deserves."

Salinas adds that the alleged statements from the warehouse meeting — that the bosses wanted to fire all the blacks and that the Latinos were "at war" with them — hark back to antidiscrimination cases of eras past, before employers knew to hide their racist hand. "To prove this, the jury just has to believe this statement is true, and it's over," he says. "Do you think it takes a trained legal expert to see these things were based on race?" Other evidence is even more explicit. Salinas provided the SF Weekly with a photo he said West had taken of graffiti scrawled in a bathroom on the construction site in January, including the words "fuck all nigger's," "slave," "monkey's," and "AID'S."

Simpson, the attorney for two of the defendants, called the testimonies at the hearing "inflammatory," and said his clients weren't informed of the hearing until it was already in progress. "They are people that are hard-working, honest individuals that are being accused of wrongdoing, and nobody has come up with any evidence substantiating the accusations," he said.

But the carpenters say they've witnessed plenty.

The hiring at the AIMCO site was problematic from the start. According to the lawsuit, not one black worker was hired for the first month of work in May. Black carpenters who inquired were told contractors weren't hiring, or that they were waiting for materials. But black workers noticed that more Latinos were hired. Finally, some carpenters and community activists stopped work at the site with a protest.

After the rally at the end of May, a dozen black carpenters were hired, according to the lawsuit, including 61-year-old carpenter Bob Ivy. Having grown up in the Bayview just blocks away, he considered it his duty to rehabilitate the neighborhood. But once on the job site, Ivy and the other black workers rarely got a full week's work, while the Latinos often worked overtime and weekends. One day, carpenter Roy Edwards complained about always being the first to be sent home; according to the lawsuit, Ernesto Cunningham called him a "motherfucker." The two men got into a yelling match, and it was announced that nobody would work that day, according to Edwards and foreman Randy Keys. But soon after, Keys says he drove by the job site and saw the Latinos still at work.

In his 35 years as a carpenter, Ivy says he's always had to fight to get and keep jobs. But in recent years, he says the color of the competition has shifted. When a black Vietnam vet like Ivy visits construction sites and sees mostly Latinos, some of whom are willing to brush aside a union man's "safety first" creed and don't speak English, it's hard for it not to sting. "I feel bad for them, but they're taking money out of my hands and food out of my mouth," he says. "How do these other ethnic groups come to America and succeed, and the black people still stay stagnated?"

Ivy said at the public hearing that the crews for the company he worked for, Livermore-based Bay Area Construction Framers, were divided by race — his all-black crew was assigned to tearout, while white workers came in for the installation. Joe Powell, the company's attorney, says the job assignments had nothing to do with race. He says it's normal for a company to assign a crew it has worked with before and knows is trained in a certain specialty to one type of work, and then the local hires with whom it has never worked to another.

Other black carpenters in the suit report that the various bosses often told them they were slow, and threatened to dock their pay for stopping work for just a moment. When one carpenter complained about the dangerous conditions the Latinos were working in, the suit claims one foreman retorted, "Scared or something?"