Unions and Black Americans

    Throughout the history of organized labor in this country, efforts to achieve the solidarity needed to provide immunity from corporate attacks on our livelihoods hinged on the workers conquering their own racial prejudice.
    However, labor wasn't always open to minority inclusion.   It took the bravery of such people as Martin Luther King Jr, Asa Philip Randolph, John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther and others to ensure that unions would not be undermined by the institution of racism.   Unfortunately, union leaders have, at times, compromised on where to place the racial line instead of demanding that such a division shouldn't even be in the picture.
    But union movements are based on the actions of the workers, communities and churches.   Unions, as the catalysts of more progressive social movements, ultimately rely on the rank and file to ensure that no line of division is woven into the social fabric of America.   When the workers themselves have put aside perceived racial differences, organization efforts have, by and large, been successful in the workplace and contributed to social reforms in American society.
    That first step towards true solidarity in the labor movement was taken in 1869 by Isaac Myers and eight other African-American delegates to the National Labor Union (NLU) covention.   Unfortunately it would be the lone step until the 1880s.

"Slavery, or slave labor, the main cause of the degradation of white labor, is no more.   And it is the proud boast of my life that the slave himself had a large share in the work of striking off the fetters that bound him by the ankle while the other end bound you by the neck." --Isaac Myers 1869

    The NLU was short-lived because of a change in platform and a radical shift in the demographics (from workers to bankers and lawyers) of the union.   Myers went on to form the National Colored Labor Union.
    Despite the short existence of both of these unions, they provided some of the materials that allowed the Knights of Labor to make the preliminary stitches for the new fabric of American culture.
    The Knights of Labor built their union on a foundation of equality.   During a Knights meeting in Richmond, a local of Knights refused to stay at segregated hotels that banned their union brothers who were African American.   Racially mixed parades, picnics and dances were accepted by a majority of the Knights' locals.
    In 1887 internationally known anti-lynching lawyer Ida B. Wells said, "I was fortunate enough to attend a meeting of the Knights of Labor...I noticed that everyone who came was welcomed and every woman from black to white was seated with the courtesy usually extended to white ladies alone in this town.    It was the first assembly of the sort in this town where color was not the criterion to recognition as ladies and gentlemen."
    Then Knights began facing a government backlash as a result of the Haymarket Square riots of May 1886.   During a strike by sugar worker in Louisiana in 1887, the governor of the state called out the militia because of the solidarity of white and black workers in the strike.   "God Almighty has himself drawn the color line," Governor McEnery said.
    Government bullets and lynchings during those strikes and others fully undermined the Knights' foundation of equality.   Instead of strong leadership coming from the top denouncing bigotry in some of the Knights' southern unions, the union showed weakness.   Its unwillingness to address racism ended the union.

"They (segregated and prejudicial unions) deserve themselves the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows." "So long as union labor fights for humanity, its mission is divine." ----W.E.B. Dubois

    The failure of the old AFL and the Knights to keep its locals without racial prejudice helped lead to the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
    The IWW adopted a policy of no discrimination based on race or skill. Again, most importantly, the members of the IWW adopted that policy as well.
    Not only did the IWW attack racism in the deep south here in the States, it led organizing drives throughout the world as well.   A strike in Johannesburg in 1910 saw for the first time in South Africa's history a strike of white and black workers working together for a better lot in life.   The strike was not successful, but the model it offered to change conditions in that country and ours cannot be ignored.
    With its policy of non-exclusion firmly in place, the IWW tackled organizing on the Philadelphia water front.   Black-organizer Benjamin Harrison Fletcher took on the difficult task of organizing workers divided on all kinds of lines.   Fletcher succeeded and won shorter hours, higher wages and union recognition by the companies on the docks.   Fletcher wrote, "Only after many unsuccessful attempts to use scabs, police, gunmen, bribery, race prejudice etc, to break their ranks, the shipping trust was forced to surrender to the solidarity of labor."   IWW locals in Galveston and New Orleans, among other cities, adopted full rights for all members regardless of color or gender.
    The "solidarity of labor" would next be challenged in the lumber mills of the south.    The first institution of Louisiana that the IWW would challenge was that of segregation.   During an IWW meeting, IWW leader William Haywood, pointed out the fact that blacks and whites worked together, chopped down trees together and was thus ludicrous that they couldn't meet together.   With that, for the first time in the history of Alexandria, Louisiana, there was an integrated meeting.
    The subsequent strikes against the lumber companies failed though.   Not because there was a fracturing of solidarity, but because the unions were mere islands of integration in a sea of southern bigotry.   Blacks and whites were evicted, blacklisted, jailed and even murdered while standing side-by-side in their fight for better working conditions.    Community organizations formed by corporate interests, alarmed by the revolutionary IWW and their fight to overturn worker and racial injustice, armed themselves and deported the workers under penalty of death.    The IWW pleaded to Governor Hall of Louisiana but he didn't help citing that the IWW was seeking to destroy the Southern way of life by allowing whites and blacks to meet together.
   Later, federal government persecution dismantled the IWW.   However, the IWW never hedged on its principles that all men and women deserved rights and a fair deal in the workplace.
    With the AFL still struggling with the "race question", the CIO soon took the helm to fight for work rights for all workers.
    The CIO first set out to try and organize the packinghouse workers of Chicago.   The race riots of 1919 and a failed strike served the packing companies well in their efforts to eliminate unions.    The companies initiated programs to help keep the unions out.    Social functions, pensions, company unions and vacation time were given by the "philanthropic" corporations in their efforts to remain nonunion.    But like a majority of company programs of this nature the altruistic behavior eventually came to an end.
    The company began slashing wages and reducing hours.   This time the workers, still with the thoughts of the riots in their minds, put aside their racial differences and organized.

"The society that performs miracles with machinery has the capacity to make some miracles for men if it values men as highly as it values machines.   This is really the crux of the problem.   Are we as concerned for human values and human resources as we are for material and mechanical values?   Automation cannot be permitted to become a blind monster that grinds out more cars and simultaneously snuffs out the hopes and lives of the people by whom the industry was built." --- Martin Luther King, 1961 UAW Convention

    Although some strikes were defeated, the militance of the union members never waned.   Not only did the UPWA take groundbreaking strides to overcome racism within unions, it was on the forefront of the civil rights movement through the 60s.   The union ended segregated meatpacking plants and had clauses put in contracts banning discrimination in the application process.   The UPWA also went into the communities to battle segregation outside the plants as well.
    The UAW was another union who had to break down barriers in order to survive.
    Many of the white workers in the auto plants were from the south, thus many had the segregationist and jim crow mind set ingrained in them.    The UAW, realizing that for the union to be successful needed to overcome the racist thinking of autoworkers, set out to educate black and white workers that none of their livelihoods would be enriched if they insisted on holding on to their their beliefs.
    At one small auto plant, a local was organized by the UAW.   Although the UAW had an article in its constitution advocating equal rights under the union, defiant white workers refused to let black workers (25% of the workforce) join.   In a meeting, the spokesman for the black workers stated that he would recommend joining if equal consideration and full membership status was afforded to the minority workers in the plant.
    The chairman of the local responded, "Anything you want brothers, just get in here and help us win the strike."   With that, the black workers joined and the local stayed interracial throughout and after the strike.
    While victories at GM and Chrysler relied on blacks and whites working together, the ability of the UAW to organize Ford couldn't have been done without the aid of African-American community and workers.   Black community leaders and some clergy urged minority workers to support the efforts of the UAW to organize the Ford River Rouge plant.   Executive secretary of the NAACP Walter White and the local NAACP urged black strikebreakers to leave the plant by defending the UAW-CIO's efforts at erasing the racial division in organizing drives.
    Certainly it was Ford's plan to play on racial tensions by using African-American strikebreakers.   But, on the whole, the new CIO didn't succumb to this old, corporate tactic.   The strikers maintained their non-racist vigilance during the strike and the African American strikebreakers left the Ford plant.
    Together the workers won job security and shorter work hours.
    Throughout the rest of the 30s through the sixties, pockets of bigotry still existed in AFL-CIO locals and fierce debate was conducted between liberal labor leaders and conservative labor leaders as to the autonomy rights of locals to have segregated unions.
    The debate got so heated that when the AFL-CIO stopped short of fully supporting the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom saying that Civil Rights legislation hadn't been passed yet and it could hurt any pending laws (Pretty much the same thing Roosevelt was saying in the 40s).   UAW President Walther Reuther called the support "anemic" and said the UAW would support the march.

"Perhaps few people can so well understand the problems of auto workers and others in labor as Negroes themselves because we built a cotton economy for 300 years as slaves on which the nation grew powerful, and we still lack the most elementary rights of citizens and workers.   We too realize that when human forces are subordinated to blind economic forces, human beings can become human scrap." ---Martin Luther King, 1961 UAW Convention

    After the foundation of modern unions took a beating with the Knights of Labor, the base principles of unions, fair employment, fair pay and equal rights for all workers, continued to solidify within the union movement.   Continually through history, corporate interests used racism to reweave what was called the "fabric of southern culture" when the labor movements unraveled or punched holes in its racist stitching.    And when labor wasn't doing its part in ridding this nation from that ugly cloth by politicizing equality, it was properly called hypocritical and attacked by progressive minded workers and community leaders.
    The IWW early on changed the way labor dealt with racism, and suffered a fierce rebuttal by much of the nation.   Then the mine workers, autoworkers, sleeping car porters and packinghouse workers to name a few worked to change the race concepts of not only their work sites but, equally as important, the communities as well.
    In his address to the UPWA Anti-Discrimination Conference in 1957, Martin Luther King Jr said, "It is certainly true that the forces that are anti-Negro are by and large anti-labor, and with the coming together of the powerful influence of labor and all people of good will in the struggle for freedom and human dignity, I can assure you that we have a powerful instrument."
    Race, borders and oceans are no match for workers who decide not to be divided.    A few years ago when UAW Caterpillar workers were on strike, South African Caterpillar workers staged a symbolic work stoppage in support of the striking UAW workers.
    Certainly, labor has taken missteps in regards to racial relations through the years.   But more times than not, unions and workers exposed the racial wall of division for what it was and is, a corporate mirage keeping us from among other things fair employment and wages.

"We say that we value the principles of democracy.   But the fact of the matter is... the idea of democracy in the economic arena, the idea of democracy in the workplace have long too frequently lagged considerably behind the idea of democracy in our system of government and indeed these two areas have operated independantly of one another.   There has been very little concern with democracy in the workplace. and very little concern with promoting trade unions in our country, where in most instances are a vital link to the realization of democracy in the workplace." --- Bill Gould, First Black Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board 1994-1998.

Bibliography:
Martin Luther King Jr. Address to the 1961 UAW 25 Year Convention.
Roundtable "Rekindling the Labor Movement".  National Urban League (Houston, Texas)
Negro and White, Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90;  Roger Horowitz.
A. Philip Randolph;  Jervis Anderson.
Meatpackers, An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality;  Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz.
Organized Labor and the Black Worker 1619-1973;  Philip S. Foner.
Labor's Untold Story, The Adventure Story of the Battles, Betrayals and Victories of American Working Men and Women;  Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais.

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