October 5, 2002

I delivered a version of this paper as a public lecture at Lycoming College in April, 2001.  During the summer, I revised it and submitted it as a contribution to Labor's Heritage.  Over the next few months, it was sent to an outside reviewer, revised in light of her or his comments, and accepted for publication.  I was informed that it would appear in the fall or winter issue of 2001.  The events of September 11, however, caused a rescheduling, since those in charge of the magazine decided to produce a special issue on labor's role during periods of national emergency.  I was told to expect publication in the first issue after that special issue had appeared, presumably in the spring of 2002.  In May, 2002, however, I was informed by the new director of the George Meany Memorial Archives, which has responsibility for publishing Labor's Heritage, that my essay was no longer deemed suitable for publication in the magazine.  Since, as the introduction to the arrticle indicates, I wrote and submitted it as a positive contribution to an understanding of organized labor's role in racial matters, both within the labor movement and in the larger society, I wanted to make it available, despite Labor's Heritage's belated decision.  Bob Zieger
 
 

Robert H. Zieger

University of Florida

August 15, 2001
 

In the spring of 1999 when what I thought was an invitation to address a group of labor activists at the Meany Center came, I quickly jumped at the opportunity. At last, I thought, an opportunity to share my historical knowledge with folks on the firing line. The topic-Race and Labor-could not have been more important, and the venue-a Meany Center course for organizers, officers, and activists-was ideal. Imagine then my disappointment when it turned out that other arrangements had been made, that I was no longer on the docket.

The reading and thinking I had put into the non-existent session would, of course, not be wasted. I'd certainly recycle my phantom "Race and Labor in Twentieth-Century America" lecture. An opportunity to give a public lecture in Pennsylvania provided one opportunity. Weaving the material in my "talk" at the Meany Center into my regular course in the History of American Labor at the University of Florida offered another. Indeed, an invitation to teach in The Netherlands yielded an enthusiastic response to my proposal to conduct an entire course on race and labor. Still, disappointment lingered-disappointment at not being able to test my academic understanding of this crucial theme with the men and women who would soon be out on the hustings, building the black-labor coalition as the 2000 election cycle approached.

Initially, when it appeared that I would in fact be presenting a lecture at the Center, I considered various rhetorical strategies. I wanted to convey my own complicated and conflicted understanding of the subject while also providing those in my audience with a useful point of departure. Too unrelenting a focus on the themes of union discrimination and white working-class racism, while surely reflective of much recent scholarship, would be a dispiriting one for people attempting to sustain a black-labor coalition. On the other hand, a glib glossing over of unpleasantness in the service of laborite unity would invite distortion and complacency. The problem, I found myself thinking, was that when it came to race and labor, there was both bad news and good news. And in the end that was the trope that I settled on, for labor's troubled racial past needed frank acknowledgment while at the same time that "margin of hope" that stands at the core of progressive politics also demanded a hearing.Even if this is a talk that will never actually be given, perhaps this same theme of good news and bad news will remain appropriate for the readership of Labor's Heritage.
 
 

First, the bad news, and there's plenty of it. During this turbulent half-century, the American working class was being transformed. In the fifteen years before the outbreak of World War I, about 12,000,000 Europeans, most of them from Catholic and Jewish areas of Europe, entered the country. The curtailment of immigration and the labor shortages brought on by the war helped to stimulate mass migration of African Americans from the South into the mines and mills of the United States. Technology, innovation, and managerial restructuring transformed workplaces and job content. What did these remarkable demographic, economic, and technological changes mean for an American labor movement struggling for recognition and even survival in the early years of the 20^th century?

On the whole, people associated with the labor movement of this era answered this questions in a racially exclusive way. Taken in all, down to the 1930s the American labor movement was essentially a white man's club through which relatively privileged "white" workers could attempt to gain maximum benefit from the expanding industrial order while gaining both the material and psychological benefits that exclusion of racial "inferiors" afforded them. Key unions in the dominant labor organization of the day, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), struggling against steep odds to gain a foothold in American economic and political life, tragically sidestepped their theoretical commitment to human equality and resorted to racial exclusivism as a means of regulating the labor supply.

Thus, in important respects, the origins of the modern American labor movement are embedded in racialist ideology and practice. With important exceptions, the trade unions that formed the core of the AFL (founded in 1886) were established to defend the status and standards of white workers. Some, such as the main railroad unions and the International Association of Machinists, were overtly racist, excluding black workers entirely. Thus, for example, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen required that "Any applicant for membership had to be 'white born, of good moral character. . . and able to read and write. . . .'"⁽¹⁾ The Flint Glass Workers Union barred blacks "universally on the ground that the pipe on which the glass is blown passes from mouth to mouth and no one would use it after a Negro had."⁽²⁾ In San Francisco, a powerful local labor movement dominated by Irish-American building tradesmen built its power on hostility to Asian workers, often resorting to physical assaults on Chinese workers to maintain white dominance. Other unions relied on licensing requirements or induction rituals as indirect means of excluding people of color.

Moreover, white workers used their unions to oust blacks from trades that had earlier plied. In the 1860s and 1870s, for example, whites had driven blacks out of the ship caulking trade in Baltimore. Throughout the South after Reconstruction, black participation in the building trades, widespread during slavery times, shrank under white competition. As one journalist noted in 1898, "wherever the union develops effective strength the black workmen must put down the trowel and take up the tray,"⁽³⁾ i.e., leave a skilled trade such as bricklaying and settle for being a waiter or servant. In the textile industry that emerged in the South around the turn of the century, blacks were excluded from all but the most menial jobs. Indeed, at the demand of white textile workers, South Carolina in 1915 passed a law making it illegal for anyone "engaged in the business of cotton textile manufacturing. . . to allow. . . . operatives of different races to labor. . . . together within the same room," legislation that remained on the books until 1960 and that effectively excluded blacks from the South's one major industry for three-quarters of a century.⁽⁴⁾

Among white workers, the barring or intimidation of blacks (and other racial minorities) was more than simple prejudice or an effort to limit job competition. Take the railroad workers. Their's was a skilled, prestigious, and dangerous occupation, requiring a good deal of interpersonal trust and reliability. Their unions-called, ironically, "brotherhoods"-rigidly excluded blacks. White railroaders saw themselves as beleaguered defenders of workers' rights; employers, they believed, were all too eager to undermine worker solidarity by introducing "inferior" workers who would accept low wages and substandard conditions. Greedy employers, one unionist declared in 1898, would "willingly take up with a nigger for the purpose of enslaving a white wage earner. . . ."⁽⁵⁾ A delegate to the 1905 convention of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen declared that "god. . . made the Negro but he never made him to be a car worker. I do not believe the time will ever come when he should come into a union along with carmen. . . .

when the time does come that I must sit down in social equality with the Negro. . . .I want to be carried to the nearest insane asylum."⁽⁶⁾

Savage racial violence stippled these turn-of-the-century decades. During the 1890s, for example, over 150 black people were lynched each year. Major race riots in Wilmington, NC; Atlanta; Springfield, IL; East St. Louis; Chicago; Washington claimed hundreds of lives, most of them African American. In the wake of World War I, a revitalized KKK and other race hate groups conducted bloody pogroms against blacks. In the fall of 1919, hundreds of African American farm workers were killed in brutal racial attacks in eastern Arkansas. Three years later, a week-long orgy of racial violence obliterated the Negro section of Tulsa, Oklahoma and left as many as 250 black citizens dead. In Rosewood, Florida, aroused whites killed dozens of blacks in the swamps and pine barrens as a mob destroyed a once-thriving community. At no time did officials of the American Federation of Labor call attention to these outrages or join in public condemnation. Indeed, the Federation's annual conventions in the 1910s repeatedly rejected resolutions offered by black delegates to affirm civil rights and to denounce race-based violence against minorities.

In theory, it was true, the American Federation of Labor disapproved of racial exclusion. In theory, holding to a class analysis of social conditions-an analysis, that is, that would seem to require solidarity across racial and ethnic lines-, the AFL leadership accepted into their ranks unions such as the Electrical Workers, Machinists, and Railway Clerks that excluded black members. As a result of the racist practices of many unions and of the AFL's lack of responsiveness to the concerns of black workers, in the 1920s, only about 50,000 African American workers belonged to trade unions, representing only about 1.6% of union membership. Many black workers and leaders in the African American community regarded organized labor as an enemy of racial justice. Declared W. E. B. DuBois, one of the most progressive and insightful social thinkers of this era, "Colored labor has no common ground with white labor. . . . white labor. . . deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses, and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination. . . . [Indeed], The lowest and most fatal degree of [black workers'] suffering comes not from capitalists but from fellow white workers."⁽⁷⁾ Thus, when employers imported black workers as a means of defeating white workers' strikes, they found many black workers and their religious and political leaders receptive.

That's the bad news. It is true, however, even during this dismal period in the history of race relations and in the story of labor and race that there was some good news. For one thing, the AFL never quite abandoned its theoretical claim to speak for all workers. AFL conventions provided black workers with a forum for expressing their grievances and the AFL constitution provided a basis for claims of equal rights. Moreover, some white unionists urged a more inclusive program of labor activism. Some labor organizations of this era-ones not affiliated with the AFL, notably the Knights of Labor in the 1880s and the radical Industrial Workers of the World, founded in 1905-actively recruited black workers and proclaimed doctrines of equality across racial lines. Even some unions affiliated with the AFL, notably the United Mine Workers (which during the World War I era was the single largest AFL affiliate) organized on a biracial basis even in southern states such as Alabama and even during times, such as the 1890s, otherwise notable for racial violence and subordination. A UMW official appearing in 1898 before a federal investigating body outlined the union's position. "As far as we are concerned as miners, the colored men are with us in the mines. . . . They are members of our organization; [and] can receive as much consideration from the officials of the organization as any other members. . . . We treat them that way."⁽⁸⁾

At times, longshoremen, timber and wood products workers, and teachers created biracial unions. Thus, for example, in darkest Louisiana in the fall of 1919, black and white wood products workers organized, demonstrated, and battled company guards and local police, with several white unionists paying with their lives in efforts to protect a charismatic black organizer. Chicago packinghouse workers created biracial unions of remarkable solidarity and effectiveness during and just after World War I. Sometimes, white workers realized that only through bi-racial unionism could they protect the standards they had struggled to achieve. Thus, in the Alabama coal mines of the 1890s and on the New Orleans docks early in the century, though white miners and longshoremen, white unionists, without abandoning their racial prejudices, cooperated with black laborites in struggles against mine operators and shipping companies.

It is also true that black workers, even when ignored or rejected by the mainstream labor movement, turned to organization and insisted on claiming the right to equality. In Atlanta, for example, African American maids, child care workers, and other domestic servants forged effective, networks that achieved at least minimal standards of employment in this notoriously exploitative occupation. Black railroad workers, most notably the sleeping car porters, created vigorous unions that, especially during World War I, were able to gain concessions from employers and to gain at least temporary support from federal officials of their claims to equal treatment. In the AFL itself, declares historian Eric Arnesen, "African American members. . . repeatedly contested that organization's racial practices at the level of the local union, the city central, and the federation itself."⁽⁹⁾

Despite intriguing and sometimes heroic examples of inter-racial cooperation, however, the overall record of the labor movement in the arena of race during this period is a dismal one indeed. Exclusion, discrimination, and indifference characterize labor's relationship to black workers. Voices of equality and fairness were few and weak.

Still, the era of the Great War set in motion social and economic changes that were transforming the American racial arena. Thousands of African Americans surged into northern industries and began assuming critical roles in the production processes. Now they and their families came increasingly to form an influential voting bloc in the cities. And now at least some labor activists began to doubt that a viable labor movement could survive on the basis of racial exclusiveness. Back in 1892, AFL founder Samuel Gompers had warned that "If we fail to organize and recognize the colored wage-workers we cannot blame them if they accept our challenge of enmity and do all they can to frustrate our purposes. If we fail to make friends of them, the employing class won't be so shortsighted. . . .Thus if common humanity will not prompt us to have their cooperation, an enlightened self-interest should."⁽¹⁰⁾ Gompers and other AFL leaders had, of course, reneged on this insight, but it remained a potent challenge as organized labor marked the first half-century of its modern existence during the heyday of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

During our second period, again there is bad news and good news. This time, though, let's start with the good news. In the wake of the Great Depression and in connection with the New Deal and World War II, a spectacular wave of union organization occurred. By 1945, union membership, had quintupled as compared with 1933. In the decade after World War II, unions represented one-third of the labor force and for over 75% in basic industry, transport, construction, and mining. And crucial to this expansion were the hundreds of thousands of African American workers.

The labor movement that exploded in the 1930s and 1940s, as embodied in a new labor organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was free of many of the racial hang-ups that had bedeviled the railroad unions and the AFL. The new CIO targeted the central core industries that had hitherto operated on a non-union basis, notably steel, autos, meatpacking, electrical appliances, and similar sectors. In these industries, African American workers had come to play critical roles in the production processes. In meat packing, for example, the process of turning steers-on-the-hoof into t-bone steaks, hamburger, and cold cuts, began on the kill floor, a brutal, dangerous, and unsanitary work site but one crucial to the whole production process. And guess who worked on the kill floors of the great meatpacking facilities of Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, and Fort Worth? You guessed it: African American workers. If you wanted to create an effective union among hard-working, underpaid packinghouse workers, you had to organize the blacks, because they alone could bring the production process to a halt. Similar conditions prevailed in key sectors of metal working, iron and steel, foundry work, pulp and paper, and the automobile industry.

In addition, many of the men and women associated with the CIO were political radicals and old IWW hands, who believed in worker solidarity across racial lines. The main leaders of the early CIO were coal miners, veterans of the one important AFL affiliate that had practiced biracial unionism in the early days. Despite initial skepticism on the part of black workers and community leaders, African Americans soon acknowledged the genuineness of CIO pledges of racial justice. As unions with substantial black membership grew, union activists began joining such organizations as NAACP chapters, turning them increasingly into allies of organized labor. Challenged now by a rival labor organization, the AFL grew more responsive to the concerns of black workers.

During World War II, the importance of black workers in the labor movement expanded. The surge of African Americans into industrial centers, north and south, intensified, as black women and men flocked to Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Gulf Coast shipbuilding centers, and other sites of military production. By 1945, over 300,000 black workers were enrolled in the CIO and probably double that number in the AFL. Total black union membership stood at around one million, a twenty-fold increase since 1930 and around 10% of all union membership. It was partly as a result of this development that the average wage of black workers between 1939 and 1955 went from about 39% of that of their white counterparts to nearly 60%, the most substantial gain in American history.

CIO unions in particular were outspoken advocates of civil rights legislation. Shortly before US entry into the Second World War, African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph had threatened the government with a mass march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the booming defense build up. In response, President Roosevelt created the first federal agency since Reconstruction to advance civil rights, the Fair Employment Practices Committee. CIO leaders eagerly testified in behalf of black workers at its hearings. They exposed discriminatory hiring practices and on-the-job mistreatment. During the war and afterwards, labor leaders, both white and black, served on a number of government bodies that advanced a strong civil rights agenda, both with respect to American society in general and within the Democratic party. As the proportion of black membership in unions grew, the political alliance between organized labor and African American civil rights groups expanded, forming the backbone of the liberal wing of the Democratic party. This alliance was evidenced by the growing support in the Democratic party for civil rights legislation, despite the continuing presence of segregationist southern elements. In 1948, for example, it was organized labor that at the Democratic national convention that nominated Harry Truman forced adoption of a strong civil rights plank, putting a political party on record on a wide range of anti-discrimination measures for the first time since Reconstruction.

The black-labor alliance paid off for the unions as well. Thus, in the 1950s African American voters proved critical in organized labor's efforts in a number of states to defeat anti-union referenda. Unions such as the United Packinghouse Workers, the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters, and the United Electrical Workers donated money and organizers in behalf of civil rights efforts, registering voters and providing legislative clout to help in the passage of the civil rights legislation of 1964, 1965, and 1968.

Well, that's the good news. But during this period of labor and civil rights activism and black-union alliance there was also a lot of bad news, so let's turn to it as well. In the first place, a number of unions affiliated with the AFL (and, after 1955 the merged AFL-CIO) continued to bar or marginalize black membership, as did the railroad brotherhoods. Every year at AFL and AFL-CIO conventions, Philip Randolph, the courageous head of the Sleeping Car Porters, would rise to denounce this segregation, only to be fobbed off with excuses and double-talk. In the building trades, discrimination and outright refusal to admit blacks continued unabated, as such powerful unions as the Carpenters, Electrical Workers, Sheet Metal Workers, and Bricklayers used de facto racial discrimination to keep African Americans out of apprenticeship programs.

Even in the CIO, racist practices festered. Indeed, one prominent black scholar, an early enthusiast for the bi-racial unionism of the early CIO, declared in 1955 that "In retrospect, the history of Negro workers and the CIO is a history of exaggerated hopes and broken promises. . . .At the beginning they needed us to help build their unions, but once they became strong and powerful the old racism reasserted itself." ⁽¹¹⁾

Take the Auto Workers, for example-by all odds, one of the most progressive and pro-civil rights unions-or organization of any kind-in the country in the 1950s and 1960s. Its officers, led by nationally prominent Walter Reuther, were outspoken advocates of civil rights, donating money and organizers to civil rights groups, entering into alliances with the NAACP and other organizations, lobbying and politicking tirelessly in behalf of federal and state civil rights laws.

But what about within the union itself? By around 1960, perhaps 20% of the UAW's membership was African American, closer to 40% in the key Southeastern Michigan (Detroit) region. These men and women surely benefitted from UAW contracts that provided high wages, work site protections, and fringe benefits. However, the UAW's Skilled Trades Department-in which worked the industry's highest paid and most secure workers-continued to have but a handful of black workers. White craftsmen jealously guarded entry into these favored jobs, reserving scarce slots in training programs for family members, lodge brothers, and members of the same churches and ethnic community. According to a leading critic, "in Detroit in 1960, black workers during that period constituted a mere seven-tenths of 1 percent of the skilled labor force in . . . auto plants," although they constituted at least a third of all auto workers.⁽¹²⁾ Reuther might denounce segregation, march with civil rights leaders, speak at rallies, but he provided little leadership for black workers' largely unsuccessful efforts to crack the white skilled trades monopoly. Similar situations prevailed in other industrial unions, such as the Steelworkers, also strong supporters of civil rights legislation.

Moreover, among the thousands of black auto workers in aging inner city plants (I speak here primarily of Detroit), the union often seemed remote and bureaucratic. In the late 1960s, fueled by the increasing militancy of the civil rights movement and by the generally dissident atmosphere prevailing during the Vietnam war, young black workers in Detroit, Chicago, and elsewhere formed so-called "revolutionary union" councils. Dodge workers thus created DRUM, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, and workers from a number of plants joined together to form the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. These activists reserved some of their bitterest hostility to their own union. During World War II, white UAW leaders had intervened forcefully when some white union members conducted wildcat strikes to protest the hiring or upgrading of black workers. Now, however, UAW officers smashed picket lines thrown up by these black activists. Black dissidents, declared one long-time UAW leader, were "a handful of fanatics who are nothing but black fascists, using the same tactics of coercion and intimidation that Hitler . . . used." In response, League members denounced the UAW: "I finally got the news," ran a slogan that dramatized their grievances, "how my dues was bein' used."⁽¹³⁾

Union-black relations in the political and legislative arenas were also strained. Organized labor had supported the inclusion of Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination in hiring. But some unions, notably in the building trades, kept the racial barriers high through arcane written tests and other discriminatory devices. Responding to ongoing protests of black leaders about the lack of minority representation at construction sites, the EEOC and the Nixon Administration developed programs of what soon were called "affirmative action," which led to friction between black job-seekers and entrenched union practices.

During these years too the industrial economy was changing in ways that disadvantaged black workers. After a generation of expanding black participation in the relatively high-paid, stable, union-protected core industrial economy, inner city black employment began to shrink. Major employers began abandoning older industrial sectors in the large cities, now relocating in greenfield sites in rural and distant suburban areas. Still faced with rigid housing segregation and transportation difficulties, black workers, even if they had the seniority to qualify them for jobs at the new sites, often could not follow the work outward. The wages of black workers remained stuck at about 60% of those of white workers and black unemployment, always higher than that of whites, shot up to several times that of whites, especially among the young.

Even employed black workers too often found that union contracts, while providing good wages and valued benefits, sometimes operated against their interests. Seniority provisions, for example, were often written in such a way as to ghettoize blacks into certain departments, often those now affected by technological change and subject to layoffs. Black workers often found their union leaders more concerned about the interests of the white majority than about eliminating these inequities. The very character of some affirmative action plans insured that white and black workers, members of the same union, would see each other as competitors rather than as brothers and sisters. In litigation to rectify these conditions, black workers sometimes had to name their own unions as defendants in their efforts to secure fair treatment.

At the same time, many white workers grew increasingly critical of the progressive public stance on racial matters of the AFL-CIO and its affiliates. In the South, throughout the 1950s and 1960s rank-and-file movements of white workers denounced their national leaders' support of civil rights and racial integration. Thus, reported a UAW staff member on a fact-finding trip to Dixie in 1956, hundreds of white unionists had joined the KKK and the White Citizens' Councils. Infuriated that Reuther and other national leaders were "cramming [civil rights] down our throats," local unionists in Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South threatened decertification and the creation of racist dual unions.⁽¹⁴⁾

Nor were northern white workers immune to the appeal of racism. In Detroit, white UAW members in the 1950s and 1960s helped lead the fight in the community against desegregation of housing. The racially charged presidential candidacies of Alabama governor George C. Wallace in 1964 and 1968 appealed powerfully to thousands of white ethnic union members in cities such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Indianapolis, resentful at what they perceived as the lawlessness of blacks and the willingness of white elites-including their own union leaders-to kowtow to it.

Despite plenty of bad news, however, the period 1936-1969 was one of significant strides in the project of bringing African American workers into the labor movement and in the labor movement's progress toward inclusiveness. The political alliance between organized labor and the African American community remained strong. Black workers, while hardly uncritical of the AFL-CIO and its member unions, became increasingly union-minded. In 1963, the words of A. Philip Randolph captured the hopeful, but still uneasy, reality of the African American-organized labor relationship: It was not enough, he told the AFL-CIO convention that year, "to measure how far we have come. . . We must measure our achievements against the . . . demands of our democratic creed. . . .The Negro looks to the labor movement to lead the struggle. . ." for economic justice. . .," but "the Negro will become [ever] more critical of labor precisely because he has learned to expect more from labor." Randolph pledged unrelenting criticism of the unions' racial compromises and evasions, but he also pledged that "when labor's rights are threatened, you will see an outpouring of black Americans into the streets in defense of their own rights," which were inextricably bound up with those of working people generally.⁽¹⁵⁾
 
 

The good news and the bad news with regard to African Americans and labor has been so inextricably entangled over the past several decades that it isn't possible to separate them so neatly as is the case for the more distant past.

For example, let's look at the overall experience of black workers in recent decades. In the 1940s and 1950s, African American workers improved their relative status in the economy quite significantly. Civil rights legislation of the 1960s reinforced these trends. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in particular has had a real impact in opening up jobs hitherto closed to blacks or difficult to obtain. Moreover, we have seen a substantial expansion of the black middle class and an increasing proportion of African Americans moving into the upper income brackets. This is all certainly good news.

But it is bound up with bad news for thousands. Changes in the broader economy helped to offset these gains. While the black middle class has been growing, there has been little permanent improvement in the relative earnings of black workers overall, in good part because, just as in the economy overall, the income disparity between the educated, well-employed, and professional groups, on the one hand, and the mass of wage-earners, on the other, has been widening dramatically.

Devastating to the standards of working-class blacks has been the relative decline of, and widespread relocation of, traditional blue collar industry. Meat packing provides a dramatic example. The actual slaughtering and packing of meat products has moved out of the great, centralized stockyards of Kansas City, Omaha, and Chicago, back into feedlots scattered throughout Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. Thousands of well-paid union jobs, disproportionately held by minorities, disappeared, to be replaced by employment with lower wages and often unusually harsh working conditions in the small towns and feedlots of Iowa and nearby states where few African Americans live.

This story was repeated throughout the industrial heartland. Drive through northern Indiana along I-94 and see the huge, sprawling, rusting hulk that was once the thriving Gary works of U.S. Steel, or head out along the Mon Valley in Western Pennsylvania. From my office at Wayne State University in Detroit I looked out toward Ford's giant River Rouge complex, which during World War II employed 100,000 workers and for two generations served as the source of high-wage, union-secured jobs for thousands of black (and thousands more white) workers. By the time I left Wayne in 1986, the Rouge had all but shut down, as Ford decentralized, locating new facilities in the South and entering into production partnerships with international suppliers. Just as African American workers were moving into the senior ranks of stable, blue collar employment, that employment began to dry up.

This was particularly noticeable in the South. Through the 1940s and 1950s, in the Birmingham, Alabama, steel mills, pipe shops, and foundries, black workers struggled to break out of the low-skill, undesirable job ghettoes to which prejudice in hiring, tradition, poor education, and certain features of union contracts had consigned them. Aided by Title VII, black workers won a series of rulings that abrogated questionable seniority provisions and opened up new job lines-just as US Steel and other employers were abandoning the city once known as the "Pittsburgh of the South."

In southern textiles if anything the story was even more poignant. Shut out of the industry for generations, black workers, often working through and with the Textile Workers union, began moving into the cotton mills in the 1960s and soon became the spearhead of a new, and promising, effort to build a union presence in an industry that had long been the graveyard of organized labor's hopes in the South. After widespread desegregation of the southern mills in the 1970s, however, a new wave of international competition, industry mergers and plant closures, and bankruptcies drove employment down and claimed thousands of newly won black workers' jobs.

But just as there has been bad news bound up with the good news, so there is some good news embedded within the bad. The increase in service employment, in which minorities are heavily represented, has offered new challenges and opportunities for organized labor. Nursing homes, entertainment complexes, hotels and restaurants, hospitals, and other non-mobile institutions and enterprises provide opportunities for a labor movement that has been suffering three decades of numerical decline. A new generation of organizers, many coming out of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, have brought a much more engaged understanding of the importance of race, ethnicity, and gender to organized labor. Unions representing service workers-janitors, home care givers, hospital employees, food service workers-have been expanding, often on the basis of appealing to the distinctive experiences and needs of minority and female employees. Thus today the largest unions in the AFL-CIO are the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and the Service Employees International Union, both organizations with significant black membership and representation in leadership positions. Today African Americans join unions at a rate about one-third higher than that of their white counterparts, and fully 22% of black wage workers are union members (in comparison with the overall rate of union of under 14%.) Today, organized labor, once the bastion of white male privilege, is among the most consistent supporters of affirmative action programs.

In the building trades also the good news and the bad new are hopelessly entangled. Over the past twenty years, the building and construction unions, once king pins, have suffered staggering losses. Thus, while African Americans at last began to achieve a real foothold in this important sector of the labor movement, the proportion of construction work done under union contract was falling off dizzyingly. In the new economic environment they often found themselves in competition with white fellow workers for scarce union referrals. Indeed, it may be true that union devastation in construction has actually increased minority employment, though generally at inferior wage scales and often under hazardous and undesirable working conditions.

In the 1990s, an embattled labor movement with shrinking membership increasingly featured its ties to civil rights movements and its embrace of racial and ethnic minorities and female workers. Blacks moved into leadership positions in increasing numbers, both in the AFL-CIO and in the various unions. The labor movement now has become one of affirmative action's most reliable supporters. Weakened in organizing and collective bargaining, organized labor remains a potent political force. Powerful evidence to the strength and effectiveness of the labor-civil rights coalition was seen in the last election when in many areas, including Florida, civil rights groups and organized labor virtually merged their campaign efforts to generate a massive union and black turnout that did in fact produce a majority for Democratic candidate Al Gore.

Not that all is sweetness and light. Investigators have found considerable evidence of disconnect between the official positions of union leaders, on the one hand, and the attitudes and day-to-day practices of local unionists and local unions on the other. "White male workers capture the upper tiers of the union hierarchy" and consciously "discriminate against women [and blacks] to construct and preserve . . . [white] male privilege," argue scholars in a recent study of one large bi-racial union of service employees.⁽¹⁶⁾ In Philadelphia, blacks gained entry into the previously lily-white Iron Workers Local only to be shunted via job referrals to the least desirable and secure assignments. Entrenched labor officials regularly resort to arcane legal procedures to quash efforts of black union members to advance race-specific issues within the unions' deliberations. Indeed, critics such as former NAACP Labor Secretary Herbert Hill remain unconvinced that organized labor's recent "discovery" of racial justice is sincere. Despite the patina of racial inclusiveness it now exhibits, declares Hill, the labor movement is not now, nor has it ever been, at "the forefront of the struggle for racial justice."⁽¹⁷⁾

I, however, remain hopeful, perhaps exhibiting once again the triumph of wishful thinking over experience. Rather than see the history of organized labor vis-a-vis race as one of grudging accommodation of a selfish interest group to changing demographic and economic realities, I continue to take seriously the labor movement's ancient proclamations of equality and inclusiveness, however battered these ideals may have been throughout the twentieth-century. I do believe that our attention should stay focused for a while on the political front, as the triumphant Republicans move aggressively to further marginalize the one cohesive and well-funded roadblock to its ongoing efforts to reinvent public discourse in the 21^st century United States. Organized labor, in close association with the African American community, did a remarkable job of mobilizing voters in the 2000 election, nowhere more so than in my state of Florida. There are in fact plans afoot to challenge the Sunshine State's Right-to-Work constitutional provision in a forthcoming state referendum. If such a campaign does materialize, and if it is well-funded and aggressively conduced, it will even further mesh minority and labor groups. While critics such as Herbert Hill are more than justified in their skeptical reading of the historical record, it may be as the new century dawns that we are witnessing a labor movement that is at last reconciling its material interests with its long-proclaimed, but til now infrequently observed, ideals. "The arc of the universe," Dr. King once told us, "bends long. But it bends toward justice."
 
 

1. Quoted in Eric Arnesen, "'Like Banquo's Ghost, It Will Not Down': The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880-1920," AHR 99: 5 (Dec. 1994): 1609.

2. Quoted in Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker: the Negro and the Labor Movement (New York: Atheneum, 1972; originally published, 1931), 58.

3. Quoted in Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York: Norton, 1998), 326.

4. Timothy J. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 12.

5. Quoted in Arnesen, "'Like Banquo's Ghost,'" 1617.

6. Quoted in Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 66.

7. Quoted in David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 309.

8. W. C. Pearce quoted in Herbert G. Gutman, "The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America," The Negro and the American Labor Movement, ed. Julius Jacobson (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1968), 51.

9. Eric Arnesen, "Following the Color Line of Labor: Black Workers and the Labor Movement before 1930," Radical History Review 55 (1993): 75.

10. Quoted in John H. M. Laslett, "Samuel Gompers and the Rise of American Business Unionism," Labor Leaders in America, ed. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 76.

11. Horace Cayton, quoted in Herbert Hill, Reviews in American History, June 1996, 199.

12. Ibid., 196.

13. Quoted in Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions (2d ed.; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 180.

14. Quoted in Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 126.

15. Quoted in Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Harvest Books, 1973), 311.

16. Rhonda M. Williams and Peggie R. Smith, "What Else Do Unions Do?: Race and Gender in Local 35," Review of Black Political Economy 18: 3 (Winter 1990): 60-61.

17. Hill review of Letwin, ILIR, 4/99, 492.