by Mary Ratcliff
SF Bay View Publisher Dr. Willie Ratcliff proudly turns 94 this month during the golden anniversary of his beloved newspaper. A legend not only in the Bay Area but in Alaska, where he lived for over 30 years, he is still honored by Alaska’s Black community every year as an Alaska pioneer.
Now, in the runup to the November elections, the question of whether Trump will lose control of the U.S. Senate is a major issue. At the top of the list of candidates to watch, according to Forbes and Newsweek, is Alaska Native and former Congresswoman Mary Peltola of Alaska, who just beat Trump-supported incumbent Dan Sullivan by five points in the Aug. 18 primary. Dr. Ratcliff’s eldest living son, Pastor Glenn Ratcliff and other Black leaders in Alaska have strongly supported Peltola since she began running for statewide office.
Pastor Glenn Ratcliff observes: “As a Black pastor, I see in Mary Peltola a spirit that resonates deeply with our own history of resilience and fighting for justice. Just as our community has long stood for the dignity of the marginalized, Mary, as a Native woman, carries the wisdom of her ancestors and a profound understanding of what it means to protect the land and the people. She doesn’t just talk about representation; she lives it, bringing a perspective to the table that prioritizes the health and future of all our families. I support her because she understands that when we lift up the most vulnerable among us, we all rise together.”
In the 1970s, Willie Ratcliff was known as the second most powerful man in Alaska next to the governor, just as Willie Brown was known as the second most powerful man in California next to the governor. Both came to San Francisco from Texas.
In 1950, Ratcliff, still in his teens, brought his little family – a wife and newborn baby girl – from Houston to San Francisco, the city he’d dreamed of ever since he saw a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge when he was 6. They stayed in the Fillmore, “Harlem of the West.” Singer Etta James lived down the hall.
He shined shoes until he found a job at the Hunters Point Shipyard that paid both Blacks and whites $1 an hour, which seemed pretty good until he heard he could earn $3 an hour in Alaska. Fresh off the plane in Fairbanks, he was greeted by the dispatcher with a snarl: “No Blacks!” “You want me to break your leg?” young Ratcliff shot back, and he went to work the next day.
He settled in Fairbanks, the state’s second largest city, and built by himself a five-bedroom house for his growing family and earned a reputation for solving problems that stumped other builders there near the Arctic Circle, where temperatures drop from the 80s in the summer to 80 below zero in the winter. Soon national construction companies were putting him in charge of their biggest, toughest projects in Alaska. He could have been a rich man but for his motto, “I never let the door close behind me.”
By the early 1970s, the big house Ratcliff built in Fairbanks resounded with the exuberance of children and teens. Located only a few blocks from the high school, the Ratcliffs’ house was where every kid in Fairbanks wanted to be after school. Willie Ratcliff had grown up in a Black school built by his Black community when the county refused. He’d been taught real Black history by a principal and teachers with PhD degrees who’d traveled the world. He demanded no less for his children.
Ratcliff leaped into politics to make his demands, forming the South Side Voters League in his early 20s, persuading community leaders who were unbought and unbossed to run for office and electing them. He would say, looking back, “When I came to Fairbanks, Black teachers were barred from public schools; when I left, we had a Black schools superintendent.”
Until the world’s largest oil companies built the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline and tried to colonize Alaska as an oil fiefdom, Alaska was one of the most progressive states in the U.S. In 1963, a year before passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Alaska Legislature created the Alaska State Commission for Human Rights. After Gov. Bill Egan appointed Willie Ratcliff to the commission in 1971, the commissioners elected him chair, and by the mid-1970s, Alaska’s HRC was recognized as the most aggressive human rights commission in the country.
Alaska’s Human Rights Commission was a “quasi-judicial” agency, meaning Ratcliff and his fellow commissioners acted literally as judges whose decisions could be appealed to the courts. HRC’s staff of tough attorneys investigated each case so rigorously that the commission’s decisions were rarely reversed. Any Alaskan, especially people of color claiming discrimination that put them in danger, had simply to call the HRC, and an investigator would be dispatched, within 24 hours if possible, by plane if necessary, to open a case if justified and warn the perpetrator to cease and desist.
The cultural genocide of Indigenous people by forcing their children to leave their villages to attend government-funded boarding schools and assimilate into Euro-American society as an underclass undeserving of human rights has come to light in recent years in Canada and northern U.S. states. But few Americans outside Alaska are aware that the genocide was entrenched in Alaska until the 1970s. Complaints brought from villages around the state to the Alaska Commission for Human Rights were consolidated into a major court case settled in 1976. “There is not one Alaskan Native alive today who has not been directly or indirectly affected by this history. It still walks with us,” observes Native researcher Benjamin Jacuk.
Willie Ratcliff was furious when he heard the testimony. Native children beaten for speaking their language, sexually abused, even hired out as slave labor – it sounded like Black history. He pulled a solution out of his own childhood: a high school built and run by local Alaska Natives in every village.
His demand made front page news. Most whites, amazed at his audacity, were adamantly opposed. High schools in white logging or mining camps had long been the standard, but for Natives, NO! Ratcliff’s HRC and the lawsuit brought by Native students won. High schools were built in more than 100 Native villages.
Ratcliff and the Black-Native alliance formed through the boarding school struggle changed the nation when, through construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, Blacks and Natives won over $80 million in construction contracts – nearly $700 million in today’s dollars – the most successful affirmative action project in history.
To force their participation, Ratcliff and Congressman Parren Mitchell of Maryland, who had just founded the Congressional Black Caucus, traveled the country holding hearings to demand that in exchange for crossing federal land, the pipeline would be required to contract 10% of its $8 billion cost to contractors of color. Congress complied.
Next, Ratcliff convinced Alaska’s Black contractors to bid together as prime contractors, not subcontractors, and to partner with Alaska Native corporations formed by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The workforce that built the pipeline was 19% people of color, nearly all Black and Native.
While these victories created pride and wealth among many Blacks and Natives, the oil companies found ways to lock “trouble-maker” Ratcliff out of the economy. Turning to political organizing, he ran for Alaska Senate in 1982 and 1984, winning large majorities of Blacks and Natives and working class whites but losing to a wealthy career politician. In 1987, he returned to San Francisco and in 1991 became publisher of the SF Bay View National Black Newspaper, now celebrating its 50th anniversary this September, as Dr. Willie Ratcliff turns 94.
The Ratcliff influence still thrives in Alaska through Dr. Ratcliff’s two eldest living sons, Pastor Glenn Ratcliff and Stanley Ratcliff, a teacher, who shepherds his large family with his Alaska Native wife Elsie in Palmer, Alaska. Long live the Black-Native alliance!
Mary Ratcliff and her husband, Dr. Willie Ratcliff, publish the SF Bay View and can be reached at mary@sfbayview.com.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY WILLIE!
- The SF Bay View