By Lee A. Daniels

No one came to my father’s funeral service in late July, 1993.

Well, not no one. But very few people besides me and my brother, our two sisters, and the six grandchildren. Beyond those of us gathered in sadness at the front of the spacious room of the funeral parlor in Chicago, there were only a few close family friends and aged former colleagues of his. The rest of the room was empty.

And we, the family, took that as heaven’s fitting tribute to Dad.

Lloyd Abbott Daniels, Sr.

A banner, hanging in soft folds from the stanchion beside Dad’s casket, told the tale. Its insignia read ILA-AFL-CIO, Local 19-the designation of the black Chicago local of International Longshoremen’s Association. My father, Lloyd Abbott Daniels, Sr., had been a longshoreman all my life and more than half of his, from the late 1940s to the day he died.

For Dad, being a longshoreman wasn’t just a job, it was his life’s calling. He was a staunch union man, a man who believed that the capitalists waged war against working people, and that unions were working people’s only line of defense against them. On one memorable occasion, when I was deep into my 30s, Dad angrily reminded me to not be blinded by my college degree and seemingly secure position working for a prestigious company. “Don’t confuse yourself with the capitalists,” he said sharply, as we sat having lunch in a midtown Manhattan restaurant. “You wear a white collar, but never forget you don’t own the means of production. You work for the people who own the means of production.”

In the post-World War Two “affluent society” era of American hegemony, trade unionism had made it possible for working men-especially black working men-to support their families in relative comfort. For someone like Dad – smart, well-spoken, a natural leader-it was a great time to be alive, despite the entrenched racist barriers that existed in the North as well as the South. Certainly, the Chicago of that era was fiercely racist. But “space” did exist there, nonetheless, for some portion of Chicago’s vibrant black population to forge lives of achievement and dignity.

Dad, Oklahoma-born and imbued with a frontiersman’s independent-mindedness and can-do spirit, found Chicago a perfect fit. (My mother, on the other hand, did not. Raised in Boston and imbued with Brahmin values, she considered Chicago and most of the people in it “heathens.”) There, one didn’t need a high-school diploma to rise (he had gotten to the 11th grade in Oklahoma before the family lost their ranch in the Teapot Dome Scandal and broke apart). Rise, Dad did. In the mid-to late 1950s, he became president of Local 19.

That meant I, still a child, developed a curious conscious and subconscious view of what my father did for a living.

On the one hand, I knew Dad was a longshoreman and I knew what a longshoreman did. They worked with their hands. They unloaded cargo from big ships. They wore rough clothing in winter-time-wool-knit watch caps, heavy wool trousers and turtleneck sweaters, thick, knobby gloves and brogans or boots. This is how Dad dressed when he went to work on Saturdays and Sundays: longshoremen worked whenever ships came in, and back then, ships were docking in Chicago all the time.

On weekdays, however, because Dad was Local 19’s president and had to meet and negotiate with officials from shipping companies, other unions, the management of the Port of Chicago, and city politicians and bureaucrats, Dad dressed like a banker: a grey fedora, highly-polished black tie shoes, navy blue socks, blue or white Oxford straight-collar shirt, understated tie, and navy blue suit-all accented by a black briefcase.

As a child, I noted the seeming contradiction between Dad’s weekday and weekend work clothes, but I never had any trouble accepting it. I idolized my father.

That day in July, 1993 the funeral parlor was more than three-quarters empty because the day before, two cargo tankers had docked at the Port of Chicago, ending a month-long drought when there had been no work. That’s what several of Dad’s old cronies who were there-men who had worked with him in the 1940s and 1950s and whose friendship had meant so much to him-told us. “”You know longshoremen have to work when the ships come in,” they said. “That’s money to feed their families. But if those ships hadn’t come in, this hall would have been filled to overflowing.”

I told them I liked it better that way, that I could think of the ships’ arrivals as Dad’s parting gift to the entity-Local 19-that had meant so much to him.

And then one of Dad’s friends looked at me and chuckled. “Look at him,” he said to the others. “He’s dressed just like Lloyd.”

It was only then I realized I had dressed that morning in highly-polished black tie shoes, navy blue socks, a blue Oxford straight-collar shirt, an understated tie, and a navy blue suit. All that was missing were the grey fedora and the black briefcase.

Dad’s pals kept on laughing softly, looking at me with the loving memory of a long friendship in their eyes.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline, and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.