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THE 28-YEAR-OLD SEAMAN WAS PUZZLED. LAWRENCE PARKER HAD BEEN forced off his job as a waiter on the S.S. President Cleveland in February 1951 as a "poor security risk," but had not been told why. This was not the first time he had been barred from the waterfront under the federal government's Port Security Program. But with the help of his union, he had appealed his earlier removal and was reinstated. "I just can't understand it at all," Parker told the Coast Guard official who was conducting his hearing. "I would like to have some reason or something definite. . . . I would like to know whether I will be able to work." Unfortunately, as his attorney explained, Parker could not clear his record because "there are no facts which have been alleged anywhere . . . to give him any knowledge of the charges on which the conclusion of a poor security risk is based. Therefore, it is impossible for him to respond adequately to the charges."1 Unemployable since being identified as a security risk, Parker was desperate to clear up his case and go back to sea, but as long as his status was unresolved, he could not even draw unemployment.2
Parker's encounters with the Alice in Wonderland world of the West Coast Port Security Program were not unique. Nearly 3,800 seamen and dockworkers lost their jobs under this little-known program that had been established in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War (Report of the Commission on Government security, 1957: 333). Parker suspected that his vocal support for the left-wing Maritime Cooks and Stewards Union may have triggered his removal, but the vagueness of the charges and the refusal of the authorities to give him any specific information about who had launched them made it impossible for him to rebut them.3 Parker's attorney handled dozens of similar cases: union activists in a number of occupations, many of them African Americans like Parker, deprived of their livelihoods on the basis of secret charges by unknown informers.4 Ultimately, these screened maritime workers were reinstated when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1955 in Parker's favor on the grounds that he should be allowed to see the evidence against him and confront...