The elusive promise of interracial solidarity poses an age-old question that is even more urgent now because of the current political climate: Can Black and White workers stick together against their bosses? Can they scale up their solidarity to a multiracial working class movement powerful enough to defy the wealthy and well-connected?
In the sociology of labor and labor movements, the debate turns to a similar question: are American unions exclusionary toward, or protective of, Black workers? Some researchers highlight cases in which White workers and labor leaders have engaged in racist behavior. Others point out that unions have welcomed Black workers into their ranks and numerous unions have elected Black members to positions of leadership.
Although both camps offer important lessons to anyone studying or building social movements, this way of framing the question is problematic for two reasons. First, White people are the main protagonists in these stories. Black people, conversely, are the passive victims or beneficiaries of Whites. Second, most sociologists look for interracial solidarity in unions, even though for much of U.S. labor history, Black people were unable to join unions controlled by White workers. The result is that Black workers show up as minor players in their own history. We know much less about instances of interracial solidarity in which Black people played the leading role.
In my new book, Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity, I urge scholars and labor activists to ask a different question: what conditions within the Black community enabled interracial labor solidarity? Once we look at the encounter from the Black worker’s point of view the story of interracial solidarity looks very different. The historical evidence reveals that while some Whites were key allies in the struggle for a racially unified labor movement, on the whole they were inconsistent in their support and sometimes hostile to that vision. The historical record reveals, too, that Black workers had to continually push for their own inclusion, even in unions that people considered progressive for their time.
The engine that propelled the Freedom Train forward was the conflict and consensus among competing factions in Black civil society. This is what I mean by “Black Politics.” The Centrist faction, led by A. Philip Randolph, worked internally within the bureaucracy of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) to win membership and affiliation for Black workers in international unions. The Left faction, led by successive leaders like Cyril Briggs, Thelma Dale, and Vicki Garvin, were suspicious of what they saw as the AFL’s racism and class collaboration. They favored militant direct action, mass mobilization, and open conflict with capital. This factional struggle in the Black community, while tense and often painful, led to tactical innovations, such as marches in the nation’s capital and the organization of sectors like steel, auto, tobacco, and meatpacking where Black workers were disproportionately concentrated.
These innovations are further proof of Black labor’s central role in desegregating American unions. For example, much of what we think we know about organizing steelworkers into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) is that White visionaries like John L. Lewis, Philip Murray, Van Bittner, and John Brophy made the strategic choice to organize the key choke points of the industrial economy; when CIO members won, they were able to extract deep concessions from capital.
The story that is not often told, and that I tell in the book, is that John P. Davis, the director of the National Negro Congress (NNC) in the 1930s, worked very closely with the CIO and recruited Black workers to organize steel mills in places like Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Gary, and Chicago, where the workforce was disproportionately African-American. Without NNC activists, the struggle to organize steel might have been defeated as it had been in 1919 when the bosses pitted White and Black workers against each other to defeat the great steel strikes of that year.
Consider another example: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Again, what we think we know about that important moment is that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference partnered with Walter Reuther, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and the AFL-CIO to win the desegregation of public spaces.
The story that is largely forgotten, and that I also tell in the book, is that the organizers of the March were the elected leaders and staff of the Negro American Labor Council or NALC. NALC was an independent Black labor organization established in 1959 to integrate the institutionalized labor movement. NALC’s president was none other than A. Philip Randolph, the president of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. His deputy in organizing the March was an old lefty named Bayard Rustin, who would go on to become the first president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, now a constituency group in the AFL-CIO. It was NALC organizers who recruited Dr. King and Mr. Reuther to the executive committee of the March and mobilized 40,000 union members to travel to Washington, DC and demand that President Kennedy outlaw segregation in government, labor, and industry.
So what lessons do we learn about interracial solidarity when we start with the lived experience of Black workers?
One lesson is that those who already benefitted from unions were not the vanguard of that struggle. Though White labor activists like Harry Bridges and Maurice Travis were great champions of interracial class solidarity, White workers as a group were just as likely to oppose integrated unions as they were to support them. Instead, subaltern groups – those whom the labor movement excluded – were the most consistent champions of desegregation.
Moreover, having been shut out of official channels, the organization of Black workers’ into the labor movement did not take place in unions. Like many workers of color today, including immigrant workers, Black workers in the middle of the 20th century used alternative organizational forms to achieve integration. I call groups like the Negro American Labor Council and the National Negro Congress “independent Black labor organizations.” They were independent, because they were not, and could not be, affiliated with official White-dominated unions or labor federations.
Next, Black women played a pivotal role in integrating unions and the workplace. They were key leaders in every major independent Black labor organization of the 20th century and insisted, sometimes against the objection of their male counterparts, that gender equity be an organizational priority. For instance, Black women refused to let Randolph adjourn the Negro American Labor Council’s inaugural meeting until the all-male leadership agreed to appoint two women as vice presidents.
Lastly, the fight for interracial solidarity was not a straightforward story of unified collective struggle. It was instead a messy story of disagreement, intrigue, and marriages of convenience. Nevertheless, it was precisely the conflict and consensus among factions in Black civil society that gave rise to new tactics. These tactics, in turn, led to the organization of key industrial sectors like steel and auto in the 1930s and the desegregation of government, labor, and industry in the 1960s.
Freedom Train: Black Politics and the Story of Interracial Labor Solidarity is available through the University of California Press. To learn more about the book, listen to the author’s interview with Steven Pitts, retired Associate Director of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, co-founder of the National Black Worker Center, and former host of the podcast, “Black Work Talk.”
