Who's Who: Willa Sudduth, A Woman of the Year

Name: Willa Sudduth

Age: “Wise women don’t tell age”

 Occupation: Retired union employee assistance director

Willa Sudduth has been involved in many causes during her lifetime. In March of this year she was named woman of the year for El Cerrito by State Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner's office (District 14). She is a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and the Contra Costa County AIDS/HIV Task Force. As a labor leader, Sudduth led the substance abuse program for the local district of the IAM (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers) and became a tireless HIV advocate. She also serves on El Cerrito's Committee on Aging, the West County Senior Coalition and the League of Women Voters board of directors.

How long have you lived in El Cerrito? I’ve been in El Cerrito about 30 years.

 What brought you here? I lived in Berkeley. My children went to school there. When they got out of the nest, I wanted to downsize, and I had a friend in real estate who said, “I’ll tell you about a nice little city you’ll enjoy.” He was a realtor. He brought me around and showed me different places in El Cerrito, and I liked this little house.

You recently received the Woman of the Year award. What led up to this? You know, it was surprising to me. Nancy Skinner is Assemblywoman for the 14th district. I understand she had been doing this for two or three years now — recognizing women in her district that had done things out of the box that women don’t usually do. I don’t know how many women she interviewed, but I was the one that was chosen for the city of El Cerrito.

Things have changed a lot even in the last thirty years, even for women. When you were growing up, what were some of the challenges you faced as a woman, and also as an African-American women? I could write a book about it. I was originally from Louisiana, which is very racist. I don’t know if you’ve ever been into the South or not. I lived up in the Northern area. My family lived there and that’s where I grew up. I went away to school, because they were free men of color – they could vote, they could buy property. They had an estate and we lived on that estate. When I tell people that, they can’t believe it — that there were some free blacks who were able to purchase their own property.

That was my mother’s side. My father was a cement contractor. He could not get certified there. He moved to Denver and got certified as a contractor, and that’s how we left Denver and moved to California. The first job he got was at Chevron. It was just as racist as Louisiana. He had a difficult time trying to even get jobs in California.

The only job they would give him was the sidewalks. Another job was the curbs, gutters and sidewalks at . He would come home and tell us so many stories, but he was very strong to hang in there. When he needed men to work under him to do the work at El Cerrito High School, and he called out to the union hall in Oakland to send some men to work and they came out and saw that he was the man that would do that job, they wouldn’t work under him.  It was a lot, a lot of racism right here.

 It was freedom when I was at home, because my family grew up with their own property. They had an 80-acre estate, and we were used to our own place. We went to a Rosenwald school in the south. If your family had enough property and assets, the Rosenwald Foundation would match it and build schools in certain areas, in Louisiana, which were equal to white private schools, but they were all black.

 To grow up with so much freedom, and then to come out here and have so much prejudice… I couldn’t believe it, but there was. I guess I was very fortunate, because my father had worked in the trades, and it was in my blood to do that. I got a job and I had some children. When they all got out of the nest, I went back to school and got me a job. I went to Laney.

In the South all girls had to take home economics: that was a must. I wanted to further my skills working in that field. The woman that taught my class at Laney knew people in the places in San Francisco. After she found out that I had finished home economics and had done that in the South, she said, “Oh I can get you a job.”

I had very good positions in the sewing industry in the city for a long time. Then a man came in, and he was an inspector and he said, “You have a lot of skills. Why don’t you go in through the labor field?” To backtrack, I had taken labor and urban studies classes at UC Berkeley, and for that reason I was able to move out into the real world of work. I got a job with the machinists' union as an employee assistance director and did that until I retired.

 You lived the American Dream; you worked your way up. I did. I worked my way up too. And it was in a field you don’t see a lot of women in.

 What changes have you seen during your life? I’ve seen a lot of changes, I really have, and what I see that doesn’t look good to me is how little the next generation knows about who brought them to the spot they’re in now: that’s the piece of the puzzle that is missing. Young people don’t know that history — your race and mine — they don’t know that history. They think everything got here when they got here. They don’t know how that struggle was and how women had to struggle to get a decent-paying job. And I don’t know how they can ever learn if they don’t study it. They don’t teach that in school. Especially our girls: they don’t get to know how hard it was for them to pull up. The only thing they wanted them to do was work in some lone skill position, when you can work your way on up. And I can prove that.

 Is there anything you would want to add for young women today? I would really like to see a bond more between young women and the ladder they’re stepping on with woman in organizations. For example, we always had strong women organizations like the League of Women Voters and the National Council of Negro Women. Those were the ladders that we had to step on to get up there, because you couldn’t get there by yourself. You had to have troops to help you. And younger women are not organization-minded at all. In those organizations, I don’t see where we as women would have made the gains we’ve made. … You have to make time, because what you have now can even be taken away.