A generation of white anti-racist activists were formed in their activism by her Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, a training program for organizers which thrived from 1993 through the end of that decade and eventually led to numerous spin-offs. See Facebook posts from Criss Crass and Ingrid Chapman.
Sharon (née Gold) Martinas didn't often talk about her early life. If you knew her well, you knew that either her birth family had disowned her or she had disowned them.
Whatever she'd been born to, she early on chose to become a sometimes isolated foot soldier for human freedom and justice. And she never quit.
Sharon had worked in a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom School in Selma, Alabama, in the summer of 1965. At an event in 2010 looking back on women in the civil rights movement, she was still wondering what lessons from that time offered going forward:
I just finished reading the entire Hands on the Freedom Plow book, a lot of sleepless nights. ... One of the things that impressed me so much, not only the commitment, which I already knew, but the incredible courage in the face of life and death. And I know from my own experience — I was in Selma in a Freedom School in '65, and that was my first experience. I had commitment, but I was scared shitless. And so I guess my question to you is two-part. One, if you could speak a little about where that courage came from and the choices you made to exercise it then, and how your experience of acting on that courage has impacted your activist and organizing work in any particular ways since then.Always the questioner ... and the organizer ...
After Selma, while working as one of the founders of what they called the Experimental College, she organized white students and faculty in support of the Third World Liberation Front Strike at San Francisco State University. The uprisings at UC Berkeley in that era are probably more commonly remembered, but the SFSU strike, which extended for six months from November 1968 to March 1969, may have been more durably influential. The Black Student Union and Asian, Latino and Native students and faculty were a larger fraction of the school population than at Berkeley and formulated achievable demands despite vicious repression. They won a pioneering Ethnic Studies program and commitments to increase enrollment of students of color. Sharon donated her archive of strike papers to an SFSU library in 2004.
In the decade of the 1970s, she served as a legal staff worker at the National Lawyers Guild. Sometime in that era, she acquired the surname "Martinas."
I first knew Sharon when she worked with CISPES -- the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador -- during the 1980s. CISPES mobilized North Americans to support social revolution in that Central American country (which the country still needs). The US government supported violent repression of El Salvador's domestic activists by its oligarchs and generals. Sharon had a particular role in San Francisco. Periodically some Salvadoran citizen would be disappeared and usually tortured by the US-sponsored government. We learned that, sometimes, enough phone calls to the Salvadoran government from the US could save a captive's life and get them released. This was before universal online communications and even mass email. On learning that someone had been snatched up, Sharon would start her phone tree and soon dozens of Spanish speaking volunteers were bombarding authorities in San Salvador. Sometimes captives lived and thrived.
In Mainstreaming Torture my partner Rebecca Gordon describes meeting a Salvadoran woman a decade later whom Sharon had asked her to call on behalf of. She realized we may not understand in the moment the importance of what seem small actions:
Suppose Sharon's little group had failed to make those calls? What if we had been too busy in the days of Gloria's capture to add our voice to those of others demanding her reappearance? ...Sharon, who didn't speak Spanish and never made it to Central America, made this lifesaving work happen.
In 1993, Sharon began the Challenging White Supremacy workshop along with Mickie Ellinger. I participated in early pilot sessions and appreciated what she was trying to do: re-educate and re-acculturate white people for whom resistance to racism was not their daily bread. A heck of a lot of activists and some organizers got their start from that venture. Take a look at Chris and Ingrid's descriptions linked above.
In that decade, I worked predominantly on founding Californians for Justice (CFJ) as an organizing force to combat racist state ballot measures. Right wingers took advantage of the unease California's majority of white voters felt on account of the changing demographic make up of the state to pass the anti-immigrant Prop. 187 in 1994 and then to outlaw affirmative action via Prop. 209 in 1996. Communities of color were outraged and frightened but not yet acculturated to fighting in the electoral arena. In parallel to the conventional electoral campaigns mounted by non-profit civil society groups, CFJ worked to activate young people and the disenfranchised of color.
Sharon helped make CFJ happen. When we were just getting started and were literally unable to make payroll, Sharon passed along part of a windfall inheritance she had received. And though she was instinctively doubtful about election work, she sent over her CWS trainees to join our trainings and voter contact mobilizations. The CWS folks sometimes edged toward using their cultural capital to drown out others from our base in communities of color, but our trainers complained to Sharon and she worked to ease the cultural gulf. She got it. Connections from that configuration persist to this day. (CFJ still thrives as a movement of youth for better public education.)
Much of what I saw of Sharon in her later days was hard. She practiced a monastic-like rigor of self-denial, never buying new clothes or foods she considered fancy. (If you brought treats, she'd eat heartily.) She still bought new books though, ever the compulsive student of human liberation. She had always had bad lungs and kept herself going by marathon daily pool swimming sessions. I remember charging all the way up to Nob Hill from Market Street next to her in some street demonstration (perhaps over the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012?) and wondering if she could keep it up. She got to the top by Grace Cathedral. She was never easy on herself.
Eventually her hips broke down; she recuperated in the same Daly City rehab facility where I spent two weeks this September with a busted leg. More and more her life was at home in her apartment with her cat, corresponding with incarcerated prisoners. Those of us who had been formed by working with her visited (for myself, less frequently than I might have) and discussed events of the day and what (if anything) we were doing about injustice.
Sharon was a complicated person with unexpected quirks. One of her annual pleasures was joining us at Episcopal Church Christmas Eve services -- not because she was religious, though I sometimes thought there might be a hidden belief in Something (not Christian) within her. She just wanted her annual dose of Christmas carols and perhaps eggnog.
Now she sings with the elders ...
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