This is an edited transcript from a YouTube video posted in 2017
I got started doing political, social, commentary documentary photography in around 1970. A friend of mine, who was editor of Surfing Magazine in San Diego at the time, wrote and told me surfers were becoming interested in environmental issues because California surfers were losing surf site such as Dana Point. The magazine was interested in Save our Surf. They asked me to look into it and let them know what was going on with that organization.
Save Our Surf
So as it turned out the next day, I was at a camera store in Waikiki, Laurence Hataʻs, and there was a Save our Surf poster. I called the number and it was the Kelly household.
I went to a meeting they were having and it was mostly teenage kids learning about legislative process. They were going to lobby the legislature for a sewage plant, which later did get built on Sand Island.
When I visited their meeting at the Kelly house at Black Point, they were planning this demonstration which you see below here. This is a picture taken from a March 31st, 1971 demo. By the time they got the demonstration and protest going, Kalama Valley had started.
Kalama Valley
Kalama Valley was mostly at the time undeveloped. There was a pig farm there, owned by George Santos, who had refused to move. So there was a protest movement generated over the evictions at Kalama Valley. The land owner was Bishop Estate; they claimed they needed to get more income out of their land holdings so they could educate more children at Kamehameha Schools.
At any event, this picture was taken from the first floor balcony at the state capitol. Iʻm not a good judge of my own work… I didn’t see anything particularly unusual about this picture but a lot of people have since then. So I regularly show it in showings and it’s been in a few books and articles about the beginning of the Movement.
Save Our Surf merged for this demonstration, they merged with Kokua Hawaiʻi, which was the name the protestors at Kalama Valley gave themselves during their eviction protest movement in the early 1970s.
Ed Greevy
Honolulu, Hawaiʻi