page_title: Harry Bridges
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Harry Bridges / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Bust of Harry Bridges at the University of Washington
context_page_description: Harry Bridges was an Australian-born American union leader, first with the International Longshoremen's Association. In 1937, he led several chapters in forming a new union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, expanding members to workers in warehouses, and led it for the next 40 years. He was prosecuted for his labor organizing and believed subversive status by the U.S. government during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, with the goal of deportation. This was never achieved.
  Bridges became a naturalized citizen in 1945. His conviction by a federal jury for having lied about his Communist Party membership when seeking naturalization was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1953 as having been prosecuted untimely, outside the statute of limitations. His official power was reduced when the ILWU was expelled by the CIO in 1950, but he continued to be re-elected by the California membership and was highly influential until his retirement in 1977.
context_section_description: Bridges divorced his second wife, Nancy Fenton Berdicio Bridges, a onetime professional dancer, after eight years of marriage. They had two children.
  Bridges met Noriko Sawada in San Francisco, when introduced by her employer, Charles Garry, a civil rights lawyer. They were attending a fund-raiser for mine, mill, and smelter workers. The two later became a couple. In 1958, the couple decided to marry in Reno, Nevada. At the county courthouse, the clerk refused the couple a marriage license because Sawada was ethnic Japanese and Nevada had an 1846 statute banning marriage between any white person and "any person of the Ethiopian or black race, Malay or brown race, Mongolian or yellow race, or American Indian, or red race." Bridges and Sawada asked the Federal District Court to order the marriage license be issued. Judge Taylor Wines granted the order and the couple married December 10, 1958. This order prompted the Nevada legislature to repeal the state's anti-miscegenation laws on March 17, 1959.
caption: Bust at the University of Washington
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