Gaye LeBaron: Remembering ACLU award’s namesake Jack Green

There was a story in this newspaper several weeks ago about former Black Panther Elbert Howard and his wife, Carole Hyams-Howard, receiving the Jack Green Award from the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The story raised a question - not about Howard or the Panthers but about the name of the award. Who is Jack Green, I am asked, and why is the award named for him?

The simple answer is because the ACLU is persistent in its defense of civil liberties and pursuit of due process. Jack Green, 80 years ago, was the very soul of persistence.

Green’s story was not his alone. He was a part of a Depression-era drama in the annals of Sonoma County that has not been - nor should it be - forgotten. Not so long as we labor to learn the lessons of history.

Green was one of two men - the other was Solomon Nitzberg - who was beaten and, literally, “tarred and feathered” by a band of vigilantes in what historian Carey McWilliams called Sonoma County’s “Saturnalia summer” of 1935.

That is the beginning of the story. But it is the ending that brought Green ACLU honors. It was his determination to bring to justice the men who went out that August night to “purge” the county of radicals.

Two days after the “tar party,” as the newspapers called it, Green went to the District Attorney’s Office and filed a formal complaint against some people he had recognized in the so-called “Army of Peace.” The D.A.’s office refused to take the case. In response, Green compiled a longer list of names, went to Sacramento to the Attorney General’s Office and, finally, 14 months later, there was a trial.

The record of that trial paints a clear picture of the temper of the times. Of the 23 people indicted, only eight came to trial. Two of Santa Rosa’s leading attorneys represented the defendants. They began their summary by presenting the jury with American flags.

The jury (eight of the 12 members were growers or their wives) deliberated just 16 minutes before returning with a “not guilty” verdict. That’s the end of the story. And that’s why the Jack Green Award was established 30 years ago - not because he won, but because he tried.

Silva M.” Jack” Green was a sign painter who worked for Pete Gambini and S.B. “Bob” Testorelli at their studio in the Dougherty-Shea Building in downtown Santa Rosa.

He was a radical. There is no doubt about that. He was actively involved in attempts to unionize the migrant workers who flocked to the county (more than 10,000 of them per harvest season) to pick everything from prunes and apples to hops. He was, as would be affirmed by his own testimony, an avowed Communist.

It was not illegal to be a Communist in the 1930s. In fact, Communist Party candidates routinely appeared on the ballot for state offices here in the 1930s. And many, like Green, were involved in attempts to organize farmworkers.

The harvest laborers, many of them Dust Bowl migrants known in the vernacular of the day as “Okies,” gathered in the season in temporary camps like Handy’s Grove near Graton or one beside the Laguna at the eastern entrance to Sebastopol.

Whole families worked for wages that were barely subsistent. Growers were affected by the economic disaster that followed the market crash of 1929 and very much aware of the strikes and resulting violence. Any attempt to organize their labor force was seen as subversive.

It was a scene right out of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” with all the accompanying tension. Sheriff Harry Patteson had deputized 150 men or more, calling them an “Army of Peace.”

In July, a meeting at Germania Hall on Third Street where workers gathered to hear organizers talk about unionizing, was broken up by a band of men who roughed up speakers and threw them down the stairs.

By the following month, with hops coming ready for harvest and a two-week window in which growers had to complete the harvest or lose the crop, the confrontation reached a crescendo.

To synopsize a story that would fill a book - I have always thought it would make a movie script, but that’s not my line of work - the vigilantes (estimated, probably over-estimated, at 300) gathering at the courthouse in the square. They had a list of five men they considered the agitators.

Green was the first, seized as he left his workplace. Some of the nightriders went off to find three other men, one they pulled from under the bed, where he was hiding, and bring them to a warehouse in west Santa Rosa. Another group took Green to Nitzberg’s Two Rock chicken ranch where he was instructed to knock on the door and get Nitzberg to come out. But Green, instead, dove inside.

Nitzberg, whose wife and two sons were in the house, had a shotgun and managed to hold off his captors until tear gas canisters could be brought - reportedly from the Sheriff’s Office.

Nitzberg and Green were taken to a warehouse in west Santa Rosa where all five of the labor leaders were ordered to kiss an American flag. Three of the men obliged. Green and Nitzberg refused. Green would later tell a reporter he had fought for the United States in World War I and there was no need for a gesture to prove his loyalty. Nitzberg, who was also a soldier in WWI, also refused.

The two were stripped of their shirts, their hair chopped off with shears. News reports say their torsos were covered with tar, although Green would later testify that it was old, used crank case oil that was poured over him. Sacks of chicken feathers were dumped over their heads.

They were taken to the edge of town, told to leave the county and never return. That didn’t happen.

Jack Withington, a son of radical chicken farmers, is one of several Petaluma residents who suggest that the name of the award slights Nitzberg.

And it is true that Nitzberg was more affected than Green by the event, because of the standoff and the tear gas and the lasting effects on his family, particularly his wife.

Nitzberg left the county - and later the state, for a time - at his wife’s insistence. But he returned to testify at the trial in October 1936. He lived the rest of his life in the Petaluma area but steadfastly refused to talk to historians about that night, until 1993 when writer Kenneth Kann published “Comrades and Chicken Ranchers,” a collection of oral histories about the unique Jewish community in Petaluma in the last century. Kann used pseudonyms for the storytellers, but Nitzberg’s tale of that night is unmistakable.

In Kann’s book, Nitzberg, under the name of Ben Hochman, is quoted as saying: “Nothing came of the case. Not guilty.”

But it wasn’t because they didn’t try.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include the correct spelling of Elbert Howard’s given name.