Councilman’s Past Has Him Ready to Lead

Martin Ludlow, a Los Angeles city councilman, could become one of the most powerful local labor leaders in the nation today, when County Federation of Labor delegates are scheduled to decide whether to endorse him as secretary-treasurer.

Ludlow’s path to the union post began when he was just 9 months old and a white couple in Idaho chose to adopt the black child as an expression of their dedication to social justice.

His childhood during the social tumult of the 1960s and ‘70s was spent in protest with his adoptive parents, Willis and Anne Ludlow, and their three other children. They saw injustice all around: impoverished Native Americans, struggling field hands on the Snake River plain, the war in Vietnam, the nuclear arms race.

“I’ll always remember being raised on a picket line,” Ludlow said. “I was raised in a world where you absolutely fight for the underdog.”

Early on, Ludlow also learned how to navigate the racial divide in America as the lone black member of a white family who lived in a state that had just a couple of thousand black residents.

With that background and his experience in social activism, Ludlow was the unanimous recommendation of the federation’s executive board to lead the labor organization at a time when its unions draw their strength largely from immigrant Latinos. “Si se puede” (Yes we can) is now the rallying cry of Los Angeles workers.

“The issue of unity and diversity are not rhetoric with him,” said Myung Soo Seok, a senior deputy council aide. “They’ve come from the life he led.”

Ludlow, who at 40 is just two years into his first term on the City Council, agonized over whether to accept the nomination. He would have to give up his council seat to take the position. But to reject it, he said, would have meant turning his back on everything his family fought for. It is also a chance to follow in the footsteps of Miguel Contreras, who built the federation into a political powerhouse and led it until his unexpected death last month.

Once an aide to Contreras, Ludlow would inherit a labor council that has used its money and clout to back labor-friendly candidates and push for job-producing projects, such as the $11-billion modernization of Los Angeles International Airport.

“The big challenge is to pull everyone back together following the death of our friend,” Ludlow said.

Although the influence of the labor movement has waned nationally, it remains strong in Los Angeles, a traditionally pro-union town. The federation represents 354 unions with more than 825,000 workers. It includes janitors, healthcare workers, bus drivers, hotel maids, utility workers, stagehands, construction workers, schoolteachers and electricians, to name only a few.

Ludlow campaigned hard for his friend Antonio Villaraigosa in the city’s mayoral campaign, and he enjoys solid relationships with much of the council.

However, when it comes to union business, those relationships would have to be severed for a while. City rules dictate that all elected officials who leave office are forbidden to lobby those in city government for one year on most matters of public policy. The Los Angeles City Ethics Commission sent a letter to Ludlow last week explaining that restriction.

LeeAnn Pelham, executive director of the commission, said that Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who will leave office at the end of June because of term limits, was told the same thing, and that Mayor James K. Hahn will be briefed this week. “The law is designed to make sure that public service isn’t being traded for private gain,” Pelham said.

Ludlow said the restriction would not be a problem. “I will work with the commission to ensure that all the ethics rules are satisfied,” he said.

To watch Ludlow in action brings to mind the phrase “fully caffeinated.” Whatever Ludlow lacks in stature -- he’s 5 feet 7 -- he makes up for in vigor. He is also a mellifluous speaker who consciously bases his style on that of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“He is an absolute fountain of energy,” said Councilman Jack Weiss. “He has taken all of life’s stressful classes in the same semester, and it doesn’t seem to stress him.”

Ludlow was born in 1964. He knows little of his natural parents, other than that his father was black and served in the military, and his mother was white. He was placed in a foster home and named Marty.

The Ludlows, who adopted him in 1965, called him Martin, thinking of Martin Luther King and his dream of civil rights.

Ludlow says he had a happy childhood in Idaho Falls and Pocatello as the son of a Methodist minister and a clerical worker.

But there were the occasional racial slurs.

“I remember the first time being spit on and slapped,” Ludlow recalled. “My mom was walking me into a church in Idaho Falls where my father was preaching, and a white woman walked up to my mother and looked down at me and spit on me and slapped my mother and said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ ”

Ludlow’s parents brushed off the insults, and his mother, Anne, now 73, recalls that Martin disarmed bigots with his charm.

“When he was little, frequently people would ask, ‘What nationality is he?’ and I would say ‘American,’ and you could just see the wheels turning,” she said. “But he was always so energetic and gregarious, and people liked him.”

Ludlow said the unpleasant incidents taught him important lessons. “There were moments, and they were tough,” he said, “but all in all I think it sensitized me to reality in America.”

Both parents made sure that he was exposed to black culture, which included a picture of a black Santa Claus on the wall and books by James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Martin spent a lot of time following around his father, known as Willie. An avid reader with an activist bent, the elder Ludlow cited an incident that shaped his future: A girl in his high school was not named valedictorian because she was of Japanese descent.

Willie Ludlow became involved in numerous causes and even ran for Congress in 1972, winning the Democratic nomination but losing the election by a wide margin. He sufficiently angered his employer with his politics that he lost his job in Pocatello -- a pattern that would be repeated.

The family began an odyssey, bouncing from Idaho to Washington, D.C., to Syracuse, N.Y., before landing in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1976.

Martin Ludlow vividly recalls the rallies and picket lines and sitting in church pews with his father, who died in 1998. His own activism, he now realizes, stems largely from the man who adopted him.

“My father did it partly because he was an underdog,” Ludlow said. “He suffered from being an idealist.”

Yet Ludlow’s first love was not politics; it was sports, particularly baseball and football, both of which he excelled in at high school.

After graduation, the 150-pound athlete attended Ohio State University, where he was determined to make the football team.

“Football was physical and nonstop, and I loved the competitiveness of the game,” he said. “I was a small guy, and I loved to defy the odds. I was known as a guy who was a hard hitter. I took pride in that.”

He didn’t make the team, and he flunked out of school, readily admitting now that he was never much of a student.

Ludlow planned to move to California with his sister. When she got a job elsewhere, he moved to Los Angeles anyway.

His entry into politics was an accident. While a student at Santa Monica College, Ludlow spotted an advertisement for internships with Rep. Julian Dixon. Thinking of his parents, he applied on a whim.

Ludlow parlayed that internship into a succession of jobs.

He ran a voter registration drive for U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, worked with at-risk youth in the Los Angeles Conservation Corps and was a field representative for the Service Employees International Union. In 1998, he became deputy chief of staff for then-Assembly Speaker Villaraigosa. In 2001, he became the political director of the county federation under Contreras, and in 2002 went back to the Assembly to work for then-Speaker Herb Wesson.

Ludlow decided to run for City Council in 2003. With financial support from unions, he won handily in a runoff.

After a career as an activist, Ludlow found himself in a job that requires an almost freakish capacity to sit through seemingly endless meetings. One of the distinguishing marks of Ludlow’s tenure has been a sometimes empty chair.

“Everyone has a different style in which they approach their responsibilities,” said Councilman Tony Cardenas. “I know that Martin missed meetings because there were shootings in his district and he wanted to be there and witness how the city is handling it.”

Some of Ludlow’s associates saw him struggle with his new job.

“I think he found the level of bureaucracy and minutiae frustrating,” said Anthony Thigpenn, who trains community activists and has known Ludlow since the late 1980s.

The Times recently reported that Ludlow, a member of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, is the subject of an inquiry into whether he played an improper role in a contract related to construction of a bus yard. The councilman dismissed the charge as “the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

For the most part, constituents give Ludlow passing marks for his short tenure on the council.

“I think his office was just getting up to speed, and it’s unfortunate that he took the other post,” says Patricia Cross, who works on planning issues for the Olympic Park Neighborhood Council.

While building his political career, Ludlow also married into a powerful South Los Angeles family. In 2004, he wed Kimberly Blake, the daughter of Bishop Charles Blake, who heads the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, a congregation of more than 24,000. In January, Kimberly gave birth to Martin Ludlow Jr. Including those from previous relationships, the Ludlows have six children.

Early this year, Ludlow immersed himself in an issue that has always been important to him: keeping kids out of gangs. Ludlow sees gangs as surrogate families for their members, an indictment of a society that has failed to provide what the Ludlows did for their son.

“I had two parents in the household who loved me and had the wherewithal to care for children and provide them with a nurturing environment,” he said. “Seeing Mom and Dad embrace each other and hearing the words ‘I love you,’ being able to go to a park and play baseball, those are what every child in America should have.”

Ludlow put his organizing skills to work, first persuading colleagues to create an ad hoc committee and then bringing scores of experts and ex-gang members to City Hall to testify. The first hearing drew a bigger crowd than most council meetings.

After two months, Ludlow had built the momentum needed to persuade the council to create a new, if small, Department of Gang Violence and Youth Development and to set aside $500,000 to hire a few employees to coordinate anti-gang programs.

In Ludlow’s view, the gang problem has a lot to do with the lack of decent jobs, which he believes the labor movement must help create.

“I know what it’s like to see industry evaporate,” he said. “Industry was the backbone of Midwestern America, and when those jobs left, welfare, alcoholism, family abuse, the meltdown of the family, all those things happened.”

In the new job, Ludlow would face immediate challenges. The AFL-CIO, the parent organization of the county federation, appears close to fracturing in a dispute over its direction. That could split the federation and undercut its political leverage in the county.

It remains to be seen what course Ludlow would pursue to help workers. How hard would he push for wage increases -- risking strikes and lockouts -- when he has close ties to the city’s new mayor and talks about the need to build a more stable local economy?

Carol Schatz, president of the Central Cities Assn. of Los Angeles, which represents business interests in the city, is encouraged by her dealings with Ludlow. “I have a better relationship with him than with Miguel Contreras,” she said. “I think that will continue. We certainly won’t agree on a lot of things, but I think he’ll give us a fair hearing.”

Ludlow, who received the unanimous support of the county federation’s board, still needs to be approved by union delegates today. If other candidates are nominated, Ludlow will face an election in the near future, but union leaders believe that’s unlikely.

Although still on the council, Ludlow joined Villaraigosa earlier this month to intervene in the 14-month-old negotiations between hotels and Unite Here Local 11, which represents hotel workers. An agreement was reached five minutes before a planned lockout.

Politicians, hotel managers and hotel workers celebrated the deal at a rally on the steps of Disney Hall last week.

When Ludlow’s car pulled up, six members of the City Council rushed to greet him as if he were already the county’s labor boss.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Martin Gregory Ludlow

Age: 40

Hometown: Idaho Falls, Idaho

Education: Cal State L.A., bachelor’s degree in criminal justice

Family: wife, Kimberly Blake-Ludlow; six children

On deciding to leave the City Council: “It took a lot of prayer and conversations with my wife and family. I was the least convinced. The best words of wisdom came from my wife. She said, ‘Just have faith and jump.’ I have no doubt it will be the right decision for myself and family.”

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Career highlights

* Western field director, Service Employees International Union

* Deputy director, Los Angeles Conservation Corps

* Deputy chief of staff to then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa

* Los Angeles city councilman

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Los Angeles Times