Ah Quon McElrath: Hawaii Labor Movement Icon
Ah Quon McElrath, 92, is a woman who is larger than life in her influence on Hawaii past and present. Beginning at a young age, she has worked diligently and intelligently both in and out of the labor movement to bring about a better life for the people of Hawaii, the nation and the world.
She was born in 1915, the child of Chinese immigrants, and grew up in Iwilei, working as a fatherless child laborer in a pineapple cannery there when Hawaii had no child labor laws. It was a hardscrabble life, but she attended and graduated from the University of Hawaii. She was an activist there, along with others, taking up the cause of the anti-fascist side of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.
She was soon working with Jack Hall and the people who brought the ILWU in strength to Hawaii, starting off by volunteering much of her time and eventually working for pay as the social worker for Local 142 for many years. As an integral part of the Territory’s growing labor and political movement herself, she knew the other movers and shakers of those important years when labor unions and the Democratic party grew in strength and numbers. She worked with Jack Hall, John Burns, Koji Ariyoshi and many more. They’ve been gone now for many years, but Ah Quon, grown frail and now seriously ill in the hospital, is a living link to them and those significant years when they worked together on a cause dear to their hearts in the late 1930s, the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and, in Ah Quon’s case, far beyond.
Read the MidWeek cover story on Ah Quon McElrath by Dan Boylan
Link:
Ah Quon’s remembrances [ILWU website]
- Login to post comments