The Love Story of Two Penngrove Social Justice Activists
By John Patrick Sheehy and Jack Withington
As if poultry farming wasn’t hard enough, being questioned by the FBI while vaccinating hens in a chicken coop seems an unnecessary strain for most.
But not Penngrove rancher Karl Yoneda.
A longtime political activist, he was used to living under surveillance, including during his military service in World War II, for which he was awarded a Gold Star.
Karl enlisted in the U.S. Army on December 7, 1942, a year to the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, he was incarcerated along with his wife and three-year-old son in Manzanar, one of ten concentration camps holding 110,000 Japanese Americans during the war. Located in the high desert of Owens Valley close to Mount Whitney, the camp was 200 miles north of Los Angeles, where Karl, the son of Japanese immigrants, was born in 1906.
When he was seven, his family decided to move back to their native village near Hiroshima after his father was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Karl spent his formative years in Japan, during which the country was transitioning into a modern, industrialized colonial empire. By the early 1920s, labor unions and a variety of socialist, communist, and anarchist activists, were mounting public demonstrations for economic and democratic reforms, as well as protesting Japan’s rising militarism.
Idealistic and headstrong, Karl organized his first strike while still in high school, staging a walkout of Hiroshima’s newspaper delivery boys over low pay. At 16, he made his way to Beijing, where he studied for two months with the blind Ukrainian anarchist and Esperanto teacher, Vasili Eroshenko.
Returning to Japan, he committed himself to a life of fighting social injustice, participating in several major Japanese labor strikes and publishing a journal for impoverished farmers.
In 1926, to avoid being drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, he boarded a freighter for San Francisco. Upon arriving, immigration officials classified him a kibei-nisei—born in the United States and educated in Japan—and locked him up at the Immigration Detention Center on Angel Island for two months. After his release, he went to Los Angeles, where he found work as a dishwasher and window washer.
As the American Federation of Labor (AFL) excluded people of color at the time, he joined the Japanese Workers’ Association, serving as their publication director. Changing his first name from Goso to Karl in honor of Karl Marx, he also began working with the communist-affiliated Trade Union Educational League, organizing migrant field workers in the Central Valley and Fresno.
In 1931, while at a Los Angeles demonstration calling for unemployment insurance in the midst of the Depression, Karl was severely beaten and thrown into jail by the police department’s notorious “Red Squad.”
Not wanting a dead corpse on their hands, the police called the International Labor Defense—which billed itself as “the legal department of the working class”—to bail him out.
Elaine Black, a young woman who had started working for the ILD just the day before, paid Karl’s bail and rushed him to the hospital. Sparks clearly flew during their initial encounter. A year later, after Elaine was assigned to the ILD offices in San Francisco, Karl showed up at her office, having taken a job in the city as editor of Rodo Shimbun, a Communist Party Japanese-language publication. Defying California’s “Anti-Miscegenation Law” against mixed race couples, the couple moved in together in the city’s Japantown.
A firebrand who mixed her moral fury at injustice with a sense of fashion, Elaine grew up on New York City’s Lower East Side, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, Mollie and Nathan Buchman. Marxist activists, the Buchmans fled their native Russia after Nathan was drafted into the Czar’s army. In 1920, the family relocated from New York to Southern California.
After being accidently caught up in a brutal sweep by the Red Squad, an outraged Elaine took a job with the ILD and joined the Communist Party, adopting the last name Black, initially as an alias when questioned by police. Conservative newspapers labeled her “The Tiger Woman.” Fellow activists dubbed her “The Red Angel” for her tireless work among striking workers, providing them with food, lodging, and bail money.
In 1934, Elaine and Karl became involved in the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike, with Elaine serving as the only woman on the strike committee, and Karl leading the effort to dissuade Japanese laborers from crossing the picket line. Both were jailed—Elaine four times, including for seditious utterances and vagrancy when she went to court to bail out other activists. The strike ultimately resulted in the unionization of all of the ports on the West Coast.
In the fall of 1934, Karl made California history as the first Japanese American to campaign for the state Assembly, running unsuccessfully on a platform of racial equality, unemployment insurance, and a living wage. Shortly before election day, the Red Squad arrested him during a campaign speech, charging him with vagrancy and making sure the newspapers highlighted his immoral living arrangement with the Tiger Woman.
In 1935, concerned their “shacking up” together was a political liability, Karl and Elaine boarded a train for Seattle, where they could be legally wed. To avoid being charged with violating the Mann Act, which criminalized transporting someone across state lines for immoral behavior, they rode in separate train cars.
For the remainder of the 1930s, Karl and Elaine pursued their political activism, with Karl forming a union for cannery workers in Alaska, and the two of them picketing Japanese cargo ships on the San Francisco docks that were being loaded with scrap iron for making Japanese military armaments.
In need of a steady income during the Depression, Karl became a longshoreman. In 1939, Elaine gave birth to their son Tom. A few months later, she made an unsuccessful run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, calling for low-cost housing, free childcare for working women, and civil rights.
Then came Pearl Harbor. Two months after the attack, President Roosevelt, bowing to xenophobia, racism, and baseless fears of spies, signed Executive Order 9066, leading to the incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent, both American citizens and immigrants, living on the west coast.
Surprisingly, Karl and Elaine initially joined others—many of them Japanese Americans—in publicly supporting Roosevelt’s order. As Communists, they felt that the need to fight fascism outweighed other concerns.
Karl and his two year-old son Tommy were sent to the camp at Manzanar. Elaine had to fight her way in, becoming one of only seven Caucasians interned there. Karl initiated a petition at the camp to permit young Nisei—men born in the U.S. to immigrant parents—to volunteer for military service. After eight months at Manzanar—during which they received regular death threats from a small group of pro-Japan fascists known as the Black Dragons—Karl was accepted into the army, and Elaine and Tommy were allowed to return to San Francisco.
Karl was assigned with other Nisei to the psychological warfare team of Military Intelligence Service, whose motto was “Go For Broke.” Deployed to India, Burma, and China, he drafted and edited propaganda to be scattered among Japanese troops and transmitted over radios, often deep behind enemy lines. Karl was usually accompanied by Caucasian soldiers, not only to ensure his protection, but also to keep him from falling into enemy hands by shooting him if necessary.
At the war’s end, Karl reunited with Elaine and Tommy, and returned briefly to working on the San Francisco docks before a health issue put him out of work. A group of Jewish chicken ranchers in Petaluma, who knew Karl and Elaine from their socialist circles, urged them to try raising poultry. With financial help from Elaine’s family and a GI loan, the couple were able to buy a six-acre ranch on the Petaluma Hill Road in Penngrove. Elaine’s parents soon joined them from Los Angeles.
Devoting themselves to the hard work of raising meat birds, Karl and Elaine also found time to become engaged in the local community, with Karl joining the board of the Petaluma Cooperative Hatchery, and Elaine serving as county president of the Civil Rights Congress. During the Red Scare of the McCarthy Era, they were routinely kept under observation by the FBI, who even found it necessary to question Karl while he was vaccinating his chickens.
Their son Tom graduated from Petaluma High in 1957. A straight-A student, he lettered in basketball, football, and track, and was elected student body president, winning the Petaluma B’nai B’rith Frankel-Rosenbaum Award for outstanding scholarship, and an academic scholarship to Stanford.
By 1960, Petaluma’s role as the Egg Basket of the World was in serious decline due to the rise of factory farms elsewhere. Karl and Elaine sold their chicken ranch and moved back to San Francisco, where Karl returned to working as a casual longshoreman, and Elaine went to work in the office of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
They remained engaged activists, traveling to Tokyo as delegates at a nuclear disarmament conference, participating in numerous anti-Vietnam protests, and writing articles and lecturing on labor history. In recognition of their 50th anniversary together in 1983, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors saluted them for dedicating their lives to fighting for the betterment of other people’s lives.
Elaine died in 1988, a day after taking part in a San Francisco demonstration for peace in Nicaragua with Jesse Jackson. Karl died eleven years later.
In 2011, members of Karl’s all-Japanese Military Intelligence Service unit were honored with the nation’s highest civilian award, the Congressional Gold Medal.
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C0-author Jack Withington is the author of Historical Buildings of Sonoma County. A version of this story appeared in the Petaluma Argus-Courier.
SOURCES:
Books, Journals, Websites
Displaced: Manzanar 1942-1945, edited by Evan Backes (T. Adler Books, 2018).
Vivian McGuckin Raineri, The Red Angel: The Life and Times of Elaine Black Yoneda, 1906-1988 (New York: International Publishers, 1991).
Rachel Schreiber, Elaine Black Yoneda (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2022).
Tim Wheeler, “Karl Yoneda and Elaine Black—star-crossed lovers in a class war,” People’s World, November 19, 2020; https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/karl-yoneda-and-elaine-black-star-crossed-lovers-in-a-class-war/
Bill Yenne, Rising Sons: The Japanese American GIs Who Fought for the United States in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 2007).
Karl G. Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (University of California Los Angeles, Asian American, Studies Center, 1983).
“Military Intelligence, Densho Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Military%20Intelligence%20Service/
“Congressional Gold Medal Presented to Nisei Soldiers of World War II,” United States Mint, November 2, 2011. https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/20111102-congressional-gold-medal-presented-to-nisei-soldiers-of-world-war-ii
“Japanese American Soldiers Will Receive Congressional Gold Medal,” Army.mil, November 4, 2011.https://www.army.mil/article/66904/japanese_american_soldiers_will_receive_congressional_gold_medal
Newspapers
Los Angeles Times: “Riots Mark Nationwide Red Demonstrations,” February 11, 1931; “Elaine Black Yoneda, 81; ‘The Red Angel’ of the 1930s,” May 29, 1988.
San Francisco Examiner: “Couple Battled the Prejudices of Politics and Race,” August 2, 1978; “Friends Salute Labor Activist,” May 21, 1988; “Labor and Socialist Activist Yoneda,” May 14, 1999.
The Los Angeles Mirror: Les Wagner, “The Mirror Daily” column, August 21, 1950.
The Miami Herald (AP): “‘War Forces’ Hit by Leftists,” August 3, 1960.
Oral Histories
“Oral History with Karl Yoneda,” CSU Fullerton Center for Oral and Public History, March 3, 1974;