A Working Class Town Celebrates Its Radical Roots

By David Bacon

Sep 16, 2026

Fort Bragg residents celebrate Labor Day.

 Fort Bragg, a small coastal city about 180 miles north of San Francisco and with a history of labor activism, still uses the Labor Day holiday to celebrate working people when other communities just treat it as a day off work.  

Two parades filed down Franklin Street — one for children and one marking the start of the school year — while elsewhere people showed off their dogs and cars. And of course, demonstrators held sarcastic signs ridiculing Trump in the weekly noontime protest on the corner of Main and Laurel.  

Fort Bragg’s radical tradition is still alive today.  

Labor Day was an opportunity to remember that history’s high point in the years after World War Two, when workers in the biggest industries in the country, from auto plants to farm equipment factories, went out on strike together. The lumber industry, then Fort Bragg’s economic mainstay, was no exception.

From January 1946 to April 1948 the workers at the Union Lumber mill struck over the combination of low wages and huge price increases that came after the war. In addition to fighting the economic pain, their union, the Redwood District Council of Lumber and Sawmill Workers Local 2610, also wanted a closed shop.  

The strike swept through the north coast, shutting down mills from Eureka to Caspar. Union Lumber brought in scabs, and picket lines were filled with hundreds of strikers for 15 months. It was not Fort Bragg’s first strike — the union at the mill was originally organized by leftwing Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) activists in the 1930s.

Among them was Mickey Lima, born the son of a Portuguese fishing family in Usal, a former company town along the Mendocino Coast that is now all but empty. For his activism Lima was jailed during the strike. 

Later, in the years of the McCarthy Red scare, he was put on trial for violating the Smith Act, a 1940 law that criminalized membership in groups deemed a threat. Lima was the head of the Communist Party in northern California. In 1958 the Supreme Court declared the Smith Act unconstitutional — though we hear the same calls for outlawing socialist ideas coming hot and heavy from today’s White House.  

FT BRAGG, CA – 05SEPTEMBER26 – Fort Bragg residents celebrate Labor Day.

Lima, and his wife Helen, a health care unionist, were hardly Mendocino County’s only radicals of an earlier era. Others included red artist Emmy Lou Packard, who is celebrated today as one of the founders of the Mendocino Art Center. 

Lima built a cabin on Route 20, which runs east from the coast eventually connecting Fort Bragg with Ukiah and Lake Mendocino, as an escape from the stress of the Smith Act trial. To warn rambunctious children (like me) against running into its sliding glass door, he taped onto it Packard’s long print of oxen hauling redwood logs through the forest. Today Packard’s artwork hangs in museums and galleries nationwide.

Oscar Erickson made Fort Bragg home after serving years in San Quentin federal penitentiary for organizing Imperial Valley farmworkers in the 1930s. He was a citizen, but other organizers in that same effort were deported after prison, handed over to la migra, much as the sheriffs of counties like Sonoma still do today. Erickson also built a house on Route 20. 

Mexicans and Chicanos in Fort Bragg also have their own history of community resistance.  

After families came from the Yucatan and southern Mexico to shell sea urchins in the Noyo River harbor, they faced the terror of ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Loreto Rojas and Diana Coryat interviewed Lucresha Renteria for their Nuestro Norte, Our North podcast, about her memories of what happened one day in 1988. 

“Kids were coming out of the buses,” Renteria recalled, “going home to empty apartments because their parents had been picked up at the sea urchin plants at the fisheries in Noyo Harbor, both north and south. Still in their rubber boots from work, they weren’t able to change into regular clothes.”  

Police and immigration agents drove around outside a local church while kids in a youth group, including Renteria, hid inside.

Nevertheless, Renteria remembers that the raid produced a big change for both Latino and white families.  

“The white community came out in full support of their neighbors, friends, coworkers, and strangers to just say, this isn’t right. So many things changed after that. One of the most significant was that the police department did go on record, maintained ever since, that they would not assist INS or now ICE in any future raids in the community.”

In the schools things changed as well. Renteria recalls that in the era when her parents were in school, in many communities in the west and southwest, “teachers were relentless about having to speak English in the classroom. They wouldn’t let kids go to the bathroom if they couldn’t ask in English.”  

Today, Fort Bragg’s Latino youth show their culture openly and speak whatever language they choose. Last year they marched in protest, together with community supporters, almost as soon as the incoming Trump administration began its immigration threats.  

Indivisible and activist groups, meanwhile, continue to stand on the corner of Laurel and Main every Friday, condemning raids and genocide with handmade signs full of anger and ridicule. 

This Labor Day wasn’t exactly a political protest, however, although it had its share of placards. In the marching contingents of soccer and football players and cheerleaders, the diversity of Fort Bragg’s students was what was really on display.  

It is a working-class town, and as its history would dictate, a community where respect for that is still a strong common bond.

All photos copyright David Bacon