University of Virginia Library

Climbing Jacob's Ladder:
The Gulf Boycott Coalition

In early July 1971, the Gulf-Angola Committee sponsored a workshop for representatives of several national groups to work on a statement of goals and strategy. Members of the American Committee on Africa, the United Church of Christ Council on Christian Action, and CORUNA, the United Nations student organization, attended the workshop, coming from such scattered places as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Indianapolis. At the workshop the Gulf-Angola Committee changed its name to the Gulf Boycott Coalition. Although the name may seem to imply a coalition of organizations, in reality it represents only a coalition of individuals. The base of the Coalition was and has remained

solely the Congregation for Reconciliation, although its boycott has received endorsements from many organizations and prominent individuals.

The meeting was concluded with a celebration (worship service) outside a downtown Gulf service station on the fourth of July. To mark the official birth of the Coalition, they released a large helium-filled orange balloon proclaiming the message "Boycott Gulf." Small grants from members of the United Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ symbolically established the initial funding of the organization.

The first action of the newly formed Coalition took place on the Congregation's home turf. Dayton had a contract with Gulf to provide gasoline for city vehicles, renewable every six months on a low-bid basis. The Gulf Boycott Coalition (GBC) began laying a strategy to undermine the Gulf bid. Their research had uncovered that Gulf had only a 4 percent minority work force in its Ohio region; the second lowest bidder (only $150 higher) had a 12 percent nonwhite work force. Since the city government had taken a public stand against minority job discrimination, the GBC began politicking with city commissioners to line up opposition to .

accepting Gulf's low bid. When the issue came to a vote, Gulf lost its contract.

Rejecting the Gulf bid on December 8 cost the city $150; it cost Gulf more than $55,000. More importantly, the Gulf Boycott Coalition catapulted into brief national prominence. The Wall Street Journal carried the story, and such visibility bolstered the Coalition's credibility before other protest groups and served notice of their seriousness on Gulf. Success at the local level where social action processes were well understood served as a springboard to the unfamiliar waters of national action, for they had been noticed.

As a result of demonstrated clout in depriving Gulf of a city contract, the Coalition was invited to participate in the National Conference on Southern Africa in Washington, D.C., several months later. Several national church bodies and a loose coalition of Afro-American organizations sponsored the conference. The GBC participated with the specific purpose of seeking out support for the boycott and cultivating the media. Unexpectedly their involvement also earned them the bonus of an advisory board of

prominent individuals who lent their names to the support of the boycott. The national conference, in addition, resolved to support the boycott.

Climbing to national prominence was a progression of happy surprises. Righter, then a Dayton representative for Americans for Democratic Action, lobbied at its national convention for adoption of a strong boycott resolution as presented by the Ohio ADA. The resolution passed and the boycott received further publicity through the ADA newsletter. Further, Allard Lowenstein, president of ADA, whose interest in southern Africa dates back to the 1950s, added his name to the advisory board of the boycott, as did Leon Shull, executive director of ADA, Dolores Mitchell, executive committee chairperson of ADA, and John Kenneth Galbraith.

The ADA endorsement not only gave the Coalition broader visibility than before but, perhaps more important, leaders of the organization opened to the GBC an extensive file of individuals across the country who they felt would be willing to become involved in local boycott activity. Mailings to these persons reaped an expanded list of friends and acquaintances for the Coalition's file.

When the 1972 Gulf stockholders' meeting convened in April, the Gulf Boycott Coalition stood ready. They sponsored a liberation celebration outside the meeting hall in Pittsburgh as stockholders were gathering. Several persons, including an Angola missionary, spoke, and a model of the Statue of Liberty, battered by a Gulf sign, provided photogenic novelty for the press. The celebration ended with the release of dozens of orange "Boycott Gulf' balloons to rise above Pittsburgh, the home base of the international oil corporation.

The Coalition leaders, in collaboration with the Church Project on U.S. Investments in Southern Africa, then attempted to bring resolutions to the floor of the stockholders' meeting. Although the resolutions were allowed, discussion from the floor was tightly controlled. Microphones were turned off at mention of Angola. This experience convinced Coalition leadership that their time was better spent elsewhere.

Many boycott sympathizers on the mailing list of the Coalition were assumed to be timid about the use of confrontation tactics. In order to provide for social-action appeal to the broadest audience of supporters, the Coalition developed techniques of

"nonconfrontation tactics." After a feasibility study, the first of these tactics was activated between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1972.

During this period shopping centers are filled with Christmas shoppers. Gulf had recently distributed bumper decals with seals of the various states through their dealers. Automobiles showing such decals on their bumpers were assumed to belong to Gulf customers. Volunteers flocked into parking lots and leafleted decaled cars in several scattered areas of the nation. No direct confrontation between the customer and the volunteer occurred. The message in the leaflets was designed for middle America, making appeals primarily to patriotism in their request to boycott Gulf products.

In January 1973 the Gulf Boycott Coalition received its first substantial grant. The $8,300 stipend came from the DJB Foundation in New York which funds social-action organizations they consider capable and responsible.

During the first half of 1973 Coalition leaders fanned out across the country, organizing local boycott groups. In these encounters they taught crash courses on research, education, media utilization, and action skills. St. Louis, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Birmingham were areas of concentration. In their efforts, they met with a black militant group based in Massachusetts, independently organizing groups in several black communities and preparing to launch a Gulf boycott media campaign in a number of black news magazines. A statewide organization in Maryland operating through campus, political, and church groups and gathering its own endorsements from prominent political and activist leaders was established.

In March, the Coalition was surprised by a call from Congressman Charles C. Diggs, Jr., asking if representatives of the Coalition would testify before the House Subcommittee on Africa which was holding hearings on U.S. corporate investments in Southern Africa. Congressman Charles W. Whalen, a member of the Coalition's advisory board, introduced its representative at the hearing. Whalen's Republican status lent the GBC a degree of credibility it would otherwise have lacked. A free-lance journalist who had followed the subcommittee's hearings told Coalition leaders afterward that one of the subcommittee members who had

attempted to discredit previous witnesses from social-action organizations as Communist sympathizers refrained from attacking the Gulf Boycott Coalition in the face of Whalen's strong endorsement.

Additionally, the testimony before the House Subcommittee on Africa led to Congressman Diggs's agreeing to serve as an advisory board member. Congressmen Ronald Dellums and Charles Whalen had also previously agreed to serve in this capacity.

In the spring a staff reporter from the Pittsburgh desk of Business Week discovered that no proxy resolutions were to be presented at the 1973 Gulf stockholders' meeting-for the first time in three years. After several calls and encouragement from national leaders in the southern Africa protest movement, the GBC decided the stockholders did indeed need a reminder of the Angola issue. Ignoring the normal routine of advanced planning, they managed a protest at the gathering. In this instance, without a push from the media the meeting would have proceeded without dissension.

In 1972 the GBC introduced and distributed gummed miniposters which read, "Boycott Gulf, Help Angola-Gulf Boycott Coalition." By the summer of 1973, they decided that dealers made aware of the boycott would become concerned and contact those higher up the chain of command. This would serve both as an annoyance and perhaps a small scare to company officials. To assure dealer complaints from scattered parts of the nation, the Coalition sent out "Vacation Idea Kits" to action volunteers. These kits contained the mini-posters and other boycott materials and invited volunteers to stop at Gulf stations and place the labels in conspicuous places in the station rest rooms. Since the volunteer came and went unnoticed, this was another nonconfrontation action. Purposely, no address of the GBC appeared on the sticker. Dealers had to turn to someone higher in the Gulf organization for an explanation. Boycott stickers have since been placed in Gulf rest rooms crisscrossing the nation.

Gulf ships much of its Angolan oil to Canada for refining. Since the Angola Committee of the Netherlands has successfully pressured Gulf to stop imports to Holland from the Portuguese colonies, the Gulf Boycott Coalition has seriously considered the strategy of organizing activist groups in Canada to campaign

against the importation of oil from Angola. On several international policy matters Canada has shown itself a step ahead of the United States. With this in mind, GBC strategists considered the Canadian government more likely to pass legislation banning Angolan oil, given enough attention to the issue in the media. In May of 1973 organizers went to Canada to begin building a Boycott Gulf network.

During the Canada trip, one GBC leader joined a Toronto Gulf action group to call upon the chairman of the board of Gulf Canada to inform him of the issues and to prevent future distortion of the cause. A primary purpose of this visit, however, was the nonconfrontation of Gulf Oil Corporation executives in Pittsburgh, since they assumed word would be passed by the Canadian board chairman. The message, of course, said that the small group of activists, once considered a localized group, was now organizing in Canada as well as the United States.

During our last field contact with the Gulf Boycott Coalition they were circulating a $100,000 grant proposal among several funding agencies, talking of a national media campaign, and discussing research on half a dozen institutional contracts which, with careful planning, could be snatched from Gulf bidders. In addition, three national organizations with large mailing lists have a Gulf boycott endorsement now under consideration.

Grumbling among members of the Congregation for Reconciliation about squandering resources on quixotic national protests is no longer heard. Few would have believed in March of 1971 that a thirty-member congregation could launch a viable national movement. But it did. [4]