Historical Marker · No. 1021
Liberty Hill Site
San Pedro, Los Angeles County · California
Erected by State Department of Parks and Recreation; San Pedro Bay Historical Society; and the American Labor Movement, 1998
In 1923 the Marine Transport Workers of the IWW struck the waterfront and stopped ninety ships, protesting wages, conditions, and the jailing of organizers under the state's criminal syndicalism law. Barred from public ground, strikers met on a private rise they named Liberty Hill. On May 15 Upton Sinclair stood up there and began reading the Bill of Rights aloud. Police arrested him before he finished and held him four days incommunicado. The strike was broken; the organizing it seeded came back in the 1930s.
What the plaque says
In 1923 the Marine Transport Industrial Workers Union 510, a branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), called a strike that immobilized 90 ships here in San Pedro. The Union protested low wages, bad working conditions, and imprisonment of union activists under California's criminal syndicalism law. Denied access to public property, strikers and supporters rallied here at this site they called "Liberty Hill." Writer Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading from the Bill of Rights to a large gathering. The strike failed but laid a foundation for success in the 1930s. The syndicalism law was ruled unconstitutional in 1968.
Where it stands
33.74065, -118.28055 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- The Port of Los Angeles — steps awayThe busiest container port in the country, sitting on ground that was dredged into existence: marsh, then landfill, then Pier 400.
- Terminal Island and Furusato — 1.0 miThree thousand Japanese Americans built a village here they called Furusato, and in February 1942 were given forty-eight hours to leave it.
- Korean Friendship Bell — 2.3 miSeventeen tons of bronze given by Korea for the American bicentennial, on the bluff above the harbor its troops shipped out from.
- Point Fermin Lighthouse — 2.5 miThe first light into San Pedro Bay, lit in 1874 by two sisters, dark since Pearl Harbor, on a bluff that is still sliding.
More markers nearby
- S.S. Catalina — 0.7 mi
- Timms' Point and Landing — 0.9 mi
- Site of Home of Diego Sepúlveda — 1.1 mi
- Casa de San Pedro — 1.4 mi