By Gerry Scoppettuolo
The AFL-CIO’s top labor bureaucracy has often opposed rank and file labor insurgencies, especially where imperialist foreign policy or racism is brought up. In the 1980’s AFL-CIO head Lane Kirkland’s support of fascist contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador were in lockstep with Henry Kissinger and the Reagan administration.
More recently, current AFL-CIO President Liz Schuler’s attempts to suppress the current Labor for Palestine movement are experiencing significant headwinds from below. Historically, African-American labor leaders have launched similar struggles, the most famous of which being A Philip Randolph’s 1941 March on Washington Movement, the threat of which forced President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8062 to desegregate defense industries at the onset of WWII.
The most valiant and sweeping of these uprisings, and among the least known, was that of the National Negro Labor Council (1950-1955). This effort, announced by the immortal Paul Robeson in 1950, was job-conscious, Afro-centric, liberation-oriented and explicitly anti-imperialist. Of the 1100 attendees at its groundbreaking founding convention in Cincinnati the next year, one third of the delegates were women. All the main speakers were Black, except one, as the white rank and file that attended circulated a petition among other white workers pledging to support and accept the leadership of Black workers in organized labor. It stated:
“In vast areas of the world, the white man is on trial. The colored peoples of the world are demanding freedom and they are making those demands for an end to every manifestation of oppression and discrimination, whether it be in governments, in nations, in communities, in trade unions~ ina ny kind of organization…..In effect~ our Negro brothers are saying to us: ‘Take heed~ brother~ there is something new here! We are asking for your cooperation ~but not your permission!’
This Declaration of Principles was announced by Maurice Travis, Secretary-Treasurer of the Mine, Mill and Smelters union, the only white speaker at the opening conference.
“I didn’t come here to tell the Negro workers of America or their leaders what to do…what I’ve got to say is aimed at the white trade unionists…the white supremacists and their political stooges do not intend that the trigger, the lash and the noose shall be reserved for Negro workers only. The white workers here at this conference…have the job of going back to their homes and campaigning for Negro-white unity – not among the Negro workers but among the white workers”
As late as the 1950’s virtually all railroad and building trades unions were segregated either by constitutional provision or past practice. The Fair Employment Practice Committees established by the federal government in the war years vanished after the war along with Black employment in the defense industries. Additionally, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act forbade access to the National Labor Relations Board to any union whose leaders refused to sign an anti-communist affidavit. Actual Communist Party members who signed the pledge, but were later found out, were charged with criminal perjury and imprisoned. The anti-communist poison pill acted as an open invitation to AFL unions and new rump CIO replacement unions to raid CIO “red” unions. The effect of this political cleansing unavoidably crippled the most anti-racist unions in the CIO and the civil rights movement since it can be argued that the CPUSA was the vanguard of that movement from 1930 – 1947.
Thus, civil rights minded unions had no choice but to pursue a path completely independent from the labor bureaucracy and its affiliated labor councils which were subject to the constitutional provisions of the AFL and the CIO, just as they are today. Consequently, Detroit’s powerful 50,000 strong, Black-led UAW Local 600 (which had won the historic 1941 strike against Ford) led the way in launching the NNLC. That strike greatly benefited from CPUSA-led National Negro Congress which sent its Black leadership to Detroit to convince the NAACP and Black workers to back the strike. As a result, thousands of Black workers at Ford refused to cross the UAW picket lines, guaranteeing a victory establishing the UAW as a racially-conscious union as exemplified by R.J. Thomas, UAW president at the time as described by Phil Foner in Organized Labor and the Black Worker.
In 1941 white workers at the Curtus-Wright aircraft plant in Columbus, Ohio struck when a Negro was promoted to the Tool and Die department. Thomas immediately removed the local union official who had endorsed the strike and ordered the men back to work. This unequivocal action drew praise from the NAACP. (Foner p. 255)
The NNLC’s key demands were hardly revolutionary even by the standards of the time: passage of FEPC-style anti-discrimination clauses in all contracts and elevation of Blacks to International Union executive boards. Nevertheless, these demands were denounced by UAW and CIO President Walter Ruether as “racism in reverse.” In 1951 there was but one African American on the CIO International Executive board, the anti-communist, Willard Townsend of the United Transport Workers of America. Townsend’s union raided the powerful Food and Tobacco Workers CIO Local 22 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1947 after several of its leaders refused to sign anti-communist affidavits recently promulgated by the recently passed Taft-Hartley Act. By the early 1950’s the UAW’s Walter Ruether and his all-white Executive Board, worked hand in glove with the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee to attack Black labor leaders in Detroit, continuing throughout the 1950’s.
Undeterred, the NNLC organized mass support to demand racist employers desegregate and hire Black workers and organized people power pressure to picket and force the issue in several cities, as chronicled in Mindy Thompson’s National Negro Council, a History.
Struggle opened early on the West Coast with a brilliant victory: in California’s East Bay. There, for years, the Key System Transit Lines, the local transport monopoly, had refused to hire Black workers. The NAACP in 1940 had started a campaign in which other organizations joined and which peaked around 1944 with the Bay Area Council Against Discrimination and the Committee for Better Transportation. Delegations and petitions urged immediate hiring of Blacks but met a cold arid firm refusal by the Key System, which claimed it hired solely on the basis of qualifications [yet would soon end its discrimination].
There were other victories at Safeway Stores, Sears Roebuck, and other Chicago-based retail chains: Brothers, Woolworths, Scott and Ben Franklin, Maybrook Clothing Store and Tobias Men’s Wear.
Of the Southern [NNLC] Councils, the Louisville Area Council was outstanding. General Electric was planning to move all its appliance manufacturing to Louisville to a new plant complex called “Appliance Park,” at that time the largest of its kind in the world. It would eventually hire 16,000 workers. Feeling that Black workers should have a fair share of the jobs that would open, the Louisville NNLC sought to prepare the workers.
Their first campaign was a successful struggle with the Board of Education to train Black people for jobs. The classes involved 400 people and lasted from 30 to 90 days. They were taught by Louisville teachers and shop workers, according to specifications which UE gathered from craftsmen around the country in GE shops. From the beginning NNLC involved a broad cross-section of the community, including union and church groups, the NAACP, and the Urban League. This laid the basis for the “Gateway Campaign,” one of the most significant of the NNLC campaigns.
Major leaders of the NNLC included: William Hood (Recording Secretary of UAW Local 600 in Detroit); Octavia Hawkins, (UAW Local 453 in Chicago); Ernest “Big Train” Thompson (National Secretary, United Electrical Workers CIO); Vicky Garvin (Distributive, Processing & Office Workers of America – DPOWA-CIO – later District 65), George Crockett, Union Legal Counsel (later Detroit judge and member of Congress); Coleman A. Young, (Amalgamated Clothing Workers and future Mayor of Detroit); Cleveland Robinson, Distributive Workers of America – later District 65) and Ewart Guinier, (United Public Workers, who would later become director of Harvard’s first African-American Studies department).
Although many left-leaning, current and/or ex- communist union members were among the 1,100 at the founding convention in Cincinnati in 1951, the NNLC was not a mass organization of the CPUSA and not launched by them. In this respect it differed from the CP’s earlier formations: The American Negro Labor Council (ANLC, 1925-1930); the League of Struggle f0r Negro Rights (1931-1936); and the National Negr0 Congress (1936- 1947). Under full attack by the state in 1951, the CPUSA was in no position to realistically organize a mass organization to take on the Eisenhower administration. It was the leftist and/or communist beliefs of those that believed in the NNLC that really threatened the reactionaries and racists in the 1950’s.
Jim Crow segregation in employment and housing, public transportation, the poll tax, lynchings and violence were still prevalent in the early 1950’s and would be for decades in much of the United States. The NNLC sought to carry on the unfinished and half-hearted anti-racist agenda of the early CIO, which truly never got off the ground. In 1946, before the anti-communist curtain fell on it, the CIO launched “Operation Dixie” to ostensibly organize the South on a non-racist basis. However, the drive utterly failed to confront racism even in its own unions south of the Mason-Dixon line. Operation Dixie organizing directors like Van Bittner or outright racists like George Baldanzi and Paul Copeland, forbade any anti-racist leafletting or sentiment by participating leftist unions like the Mine, Mill and Smelters, UE and FTA which, although cut off from official CIO support, actually had success in organizing unions without it.
By 1955 after weeks of HUAC hearings over several years, and facing a legal defense bill of $100,000, the NNLC was forced to dissolve itself. It would be a mistake to consider the NNLC as a failure, however. It mobilized thousands of anti-racist fighters in unions and the broader working class and even more importantly rightfully called for overall independent, liberation- minded Black leadership of the labor movement as a necessary precondition for left organizing – more necessary today than ever.
Sources:
I’m Fighting for My Freedom, Martin Halpern
The Negro National Labor Council, Mindy Thompson
Organized Labor and the Black Worker, Phil Foner
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, Michael Honey
Civil Rights Unionism, Robert Korstad
Author’s Interview with CIO Organizer Ed McRae, Nashville 1990
Paul Robeson, Martin Duberman
Be the first to comment