On July 5, 1934, a strike by San Francisco’s International Longshoremen’s Association erupted into the violence of “Bloody Thursday,” leading to the deaths of two longshoremen. The strikers were denounced in the press as “anti-American” agitators, prompting one man who claimed to have killed a striker to publicly declare: “As he was a Communist, I have had no feeling in the matter and I am sorry that I did not get more.”

The massive public funeral procession for the two longshoremen, and the citywide strike that followed, shifted public support from the anti-union employers to the pro-union strikers, who won important concessions in the subsequent settlement. John Langley Howard’s view of the Embarcadero, San Francisco’s commercial waterfront, depicts a chance encounter between a group of longshoremen marching to a protest and an apprehensive businessman with a briefcase walking toward a luxury car, evoking the class tensions underlying the strike.