Biography
Louis Yamamoto was a Japanese-American Communist organizing farm workers in California's Central Valley during the agricultural strikes of the early 1930s. He was arrested and held on high bail at the Stockton jail. The International Labor Defense organizer Elaine Black Yoneda recalled that to reach the court and post his bail she and the union leader Pat Chambers had to bluff their way past an armed vigilante roadblock by claiming they were on their way to the Justice of the Peace to be married. In December 1939 he was arrested on a vagrancy charge during the Stockton-area Filipino celery-workers’ strike and boycott. Police Judge E. E. Breitenbucher suspended a 180-day jail sentence on condition that Yamamoto stay out of San Joaquin County for two years. After he returned, the court ordered him jailed. Attorney Herbert Resner challenged the banishment order and the imprisonment; Superior Judge D. M. Young denied habeas corpus in February 1940.
