Part IV

THE NEGRO-LABOR ALLIANCE

The revolutionary black workers placed a severe strain on the alliance between blacks and organized labor, but ultimately their actions strengthened that relationship and helped to elevate it to a higher plain. Moderate black unionists also sought to increase the power of black workers in the unions, but by integration, not separatism. Their goals were more readily achievable, and stood as a confirmation, rather than a refutation, of organized labor.

The struggle against racism in the labor movement for a long time concentrated on opening membership to blacks. Since the rise of the CIO, however, the battle against racism increasingly became one against discriminatory practices in hiring and promotion, and for greater black participation in union leadership. Since the promise held out to blacks by the AFL-CIO merger remained largely unfulfilled, black caucuses within the various unions sought to achieve a “fair share” of the benefits of membership for blacks. This concern for more “black power” in the unions was not just a matter of racial pride. In the late sixties only about a dozen unions had so much as one Negro on their governing boards, even though approximately 2 million of the 14 million union members in the AFL-CIO were black. Since Afro-Americans were so under-represented in union officialdom, their grievances were frequently neglected, and may have been co-participants in the discrimination.

One of the most prominent of the black caucuses seeking black power through integration was the Negro American Labor Council. Founded in May 1960, the NALC made it clear at the outset that it was a black organization, although whites were not barred, whose goals were to increase union membership among black workers, to increase their chances for promotion on the job, and to integrate them into the executive and staff levels of the union administrations. The delegates elected A. Philip Randolph president, and Cleveland Robinson of District 65 vice president. It was on behalf of the NALC that Randolph presented charges of racial discrimination to the AFL-CIO Executive Council, an action which ultimately led to his censure in 1961. In addition to its efforts on behalf of black workers, NALC played an important role in the civil rights movement, for it was under the leadership of this group that the historic 1963 March on Washington was planned. Even though the AFL-CIO Executive Council condemned the demonstration, the March represented a high point in the history of the Negro-labor alliance up to that time. The federation’s Industrial Union Department defied the Council and strongly endorsed the demonstration, and over 40,000 unionists were mobilized for the event. Two key union leaders, Randolph and Reuther, were on the March’s leadership committee.

By the early 1970s many blacks were convinced that despite the good work peformed by the black caucuses, the elimination of racism on the job and in the unions would require a unified effort by black unionists on a national scale. The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists succeeded the NALC and assumed this mission at a 1972 conference of 1,200 black union members and officials. From its inception the new organization made it clear that it intended to deal specifically with the concerns of black workers, and would “insist that black union officials become full partners in the leadership and decision-making of the American labor movement.”

BLACK POWER AND THE NEGRO-LABOR ALLIANCE

NEGRO LABOR ASSEMBLY

1. MINUTES OF THE NEGRO LABOR ASSEMBLY OCTOBER 14, 1959

Harlem Labor Center - 312 W. 125 St.

THE MEETING of the Negro Labor Assembly was called to order at 7:30 p.m. with Brother Richard Parrish, presiding.

Present were:

EXCUSES: Elizabeth Knight, Frame & Novelty, Local 111; Winifred Gittens, Negro Labor Committee; Mabel Fuller, Priscilla Timpson, and Martin Forrester, Undergarment and Negligee Workers, Local 62.

BRO. PARRISH welcomed the delegates at the first meeting for the Fall, and said, “that he hopes they have returned with renewed vigor to work and plan together for a very constructive year, in which the Negro Labor Committee will continue to work tirelessly in bringing more workers into the trade union movement. . . .”

COMMUNICATIONS:

FROM THE City of Hope, honoring Peter Ottley for his dedication to the labor movement and to his race. Bro. Ottley is Sec’y-Treas. of the Hotel & Allied Service Union, Local 144. Bro. Parrish reported that to date the affair was moving very slowly - and urged that the labor movement should pay more homage to a man who has given many years of service to the cause of labor. BRO. CROSSWAITH then suggested that because of the low finance of our Committee, it was impossible for us to participate, but a telegram be sent on the date of the dinner. The delegates adopted the suggestion.

FROM THE American Committee on Africa; the National Sharecroppers Fund, and many others asking for donations. Again because of our low finances we are unable to make a contribution at this time.

FROM THE Federation of Negro Civil Service Organizations, sponsoring a rally on Oct. 29th, the proceeds of which will be donated to the NAACP, and the Southern Leadership Conference. The delegates were urged to attend and get their friends to do likewise.

FROM THE Trade Union Salute, a celebration of the NAACP 50th anniversary, to be held Dec. 5th, 1959. The Committee recognizes the assistance given to the NAACP but will not be able to participate because of low finances. It was suggested that a letter be sent to these organizations expressing our regrets, and wishing them continued success.

THE FOLLOWING telegrams were sent to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the AFL-CIO, conventions, respectively.

To A. Philip Randolph President

Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Convention.

“The Negro Labor Committee sends you fraternal greetings and best wishes for a successful convention.

May your deliberations and decisions in this convention bring us closer to that day when human exploitation and racial and religious prejudices will be no more.

Signed: Frank R. Crosswaith, Chairman

To George Meany, President

AFL-CIO Convention.

“On behalf of the Negro Labor Committee, we send you fraternal and personal greetings for a constructively successful convention.

In the struggle between the forces of dictatorship and democracy, the labor movement must remain united and insure the triumph of democracy for the workers of the world, regardless of craft, creed or color.

Signed: Frank R. Crosswaith, Chairman and Richard Parrish, Exec-Sec’y.”

THE DEATH of Bro. Isidore Nagler, Vice President of the ILGWU, and Gen’l Manager of the Cloak Jt. Board, was brought to the delegates attention by Bro. Crosswaith who sent a letter of condolence to the family. The letter was read, and the Assembly stood for a two minutes silence to honor the memory of the deceased.

IN REFERENCE to the recent flare-up at the AFL-CIO convention between Bros. George Meany and A. Philip Randolph, the following letter was sent to the press.

Dear Editor:

“Mr. Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, recently asked profanely what right A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters had to represent the Negroes of America, when Mr. Randolph was pressing him to start ending racial segregation and discrimination in those unions—luckily a minority where it still exists. This kind of attack will do organize labor no good. For it will tend to make some Negroes anti-labor at a time when organized labor needs all the friends it can get. Mr. Randolph was only asking that the AFL-CIO carry out the pledges against racial discrimination which it had repeatedly made, by trying to get the two unions affiliated with it which still bar Negroes from membership by constitutional provision, to change their constitution—to try to get other unions some of whose locals still discriminate against Negroes to stop that practice and to eliminate segregated locals altogether.

Organized labor has done much for Negro workers. In those states in the North and West where civil rights legislation like fair employment practice laws, fair educational practice laws, or legislation against racial discrimination in housing have been enacted, organized labor has given substantial help in getting the laws passed. And such Negro organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has in turn helped substantially in labor’s campaign to defeat anti-labor legislation. Yet the labor department of the NAACP has well documented instances where cases of racial discrimination against Negro workers have been called to the attention of unions, yet nothing has been done. Organizations working for the rights of racial minorities need the help of organized labor, and organized labor needs the help of Negro workers. It will be a great pity if any permanent rift between them should develop.

Signed: Frank R. Crosswaith, Chairman The Negro Labor Committee.”

THE DELEGATES voted their opinion and regretted the incident. Bro. Crosswaith then said, “nothing would hurt the Negro more than an attempt to withdraw from the labor movement. This is a time to strive for greater unity. . . .” The delegates also agreed that this is the time for greater unity and action among Negro trade unionists in bringing the thousands of unorganized workers into the labor movement.

BRO. PARRISH then reported that, “Bro. Randolph is going ahead with the formation of a national Negro Labor Committee, in which all Negro trade unionists will be asked to become members. This organization will concentrate on helping to erase discriminatory practice within organized labor. It will not lessen the work performed by each member in the local unions, but will help to step up their activities. We can no longer sit back and let the chips fall where they will, but must be united in a democratic fashion and be dependent on each other for leadership and guidance. . . .”

BRO. JACKSON then asked what significance will this new organization have on our present Negro Labor Committee.

BRO. PARRISH replied, “this new organization will in no way deprive or weaken the present Negro Labor Committee who is dependent on the unions for its support, and has enough of its own work to do. The new organization will be independent of the influence of these unions whose discriminatory practices prevents the full participation of Negroes in their activities. The members will be charged yearly dues which will help to defray the expenses of the organization. . . .”

ON SEPTEMBER 22nd Bro. Joseph Fox, President of the Cafeteria Employees, Local 302, requested Bro. Crosswaith to send an appeal to the Horn and Hardart workers who were holding an election on Sept. 30th for union recognition. The message was read to the delegates and approved.

BRO. WALKER of Local 302, reported that the Local lost the election by a margin of 3 to 1 votes against the union. The Negro Labor Committee then pledged continued support of Local 302 until victory is achieved.

FINANCIAL STATEMENT for September was read: - Receipts $580.00; Disbursements $585.62.

DELEGATES REPORT:

BRO. PARRISH reported that he attended the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Convention, and “that during the deliberations the delegates adopted the resolution to work together for greater unity and the abolition of racial discrimination and segregation within the labor movement.” He also attended the United Automobile Workers, Convention.

BRO. CROSSWAITH reported that “despite the fact that he is no longer with the New York City Housing Authority, many persons come daily to the office to seek his advice and aid on how to get into the projects—also many come seeking jobs or the possibility of getting into a union of their trade. . . .” HE ALSO reported that Sister Gittens was still at home recuperating from her recent automobile accident which occurred last July. It was suggested that the Negro Labor Committee write to her officially expressing our regrets and wishing her a speedy recovery.

BRO. PARRISH then reported on the “Frank R. Crosswaith Scholarship Awards” which were given last June to four students of Junior High Schools 136, 139, 120 and 188; amounting to $100.00 each. One of the students John Pressley who is attending Fashion Institute has requested financial aid to help him purchase equipments for school. An allotment of $20.00 was drawn from his account with the Carver Bank.

BRO. JACKSON then suggested that delegates who are delinquents in attending the Assembly meetings should be brought to the attention of their Local Manager after missing three consecutive meetings. This suggestion was agreed upon. HE ALSO suggested that the delegates and their friends regardless of Party affiliations should vote for Samuel Pierce for Judgeship in the Nov. election. As “he is a very capable lawyer and is worthy of our support.”

BRO. PARRISH then commented that “never before in the history of this city were Negroes so ill-informed about the benefits derived from the trade union movement. In this community there are still one-half of the Negroes who know nothing of the Negro Labor Committee and the work it is doing. It is important that we establish an educational program to bring these facts to the people, and bring more community workers into our organization. Laws on the books will not solve our problems. This is a question of color prejudice and Negroes will have to solve them by becoming more alert and more united on social, political and economic goals.”

HE THEN suggested that in the near future we will call a special meeting of the delegates to make arrangements for an affair to raise funds for the Negro Labor Committee.

AFTER MUCH discussions under “Good and Welfare” the meeting adjourned at 9 p.m. The next Assembly meeting will be held on November 11th, 1959.

Respectfully submitted,

THE NEGRO LABOR COMMITTEE

Negro Labor Committee Record Group, 1925–1969, Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library.

2. MINUTES NEGRO LABOR ASSEMBLY held on September 30, 1965 at HARLEM LABOR CENTER

The meeting of the Negro Labor Assembly was called to order by the Chairman, Allan Jackson, at 7:15 p.m. Members present were: Helen Boyd, Local 23–25; A. C. Bell, Local 302; Christine Scott, Local 23–25; Estella West, Local 23–25; Richard Banks, Local 91; Edward Fagan, Local 99; Hazel Allen, Local 22; A. C. Jolly, Local 302; Allan Jackson, Local 60–601; L. Joseph Overton, Local 338.

The Chairman read the proposed program policy as set forth in the letters sent to the members. The proposed program is:

1. A drive to enroll at least 100,000 new registered voters prior to the coming election.

2. A conference on community activities and the rebuilding of better relations.

3. To urge the Department of Sanitation for a ten day clean up program of all Harlem streets and the enforcement of Sanitation Codes prohibiting the placing of garbage in the streets by commercial establishments.

4. To discuss ways and means of how we can assist the public schools in our area diminish attacks on teachers by students.

5. Report of the action taken to date by the Executive Director in connection with our proposed Housing Project (Frank R. Crosswaith).

The Chair stated he wanted this organization to be recognized City and Statewide. The organization should stand for unions, better race relations and as a guiding light to the labor movement and the entire community and must be recognized City, State and Nationwide.

L. Joseph Overton, Executive Director, reported on several meetings and conferences he had held with Chairman H. Evans of the Redevelopment Board and Chairman Leo Brown of Marine & Aviation and also correspondence was read between he, architects, coordinator and others pertaining to the Frank R. Crosswaith Housing Development. Mr. Overton reported that Herbert Evans stated the Negro Labor Committee would probably receive approval. Commissioner Leo Brown of the Marine and Aviation said there are certain things which must be included. They want to have the property developed with a boat marina and amusement pier. Under this condition we can have a lease for the land. The project has also been approved by the Housing Commission. The organization is now in a bottleneck between Housing and Marine Aviation over which will have jurisdiction of the project after it has been developed.

The Housing Authority wants figures showing the project will rent for not more than $27.50 per room. This had been reported to them by our architects indicating the feasibility of this being done as they are more interested in rentals than cooperatives because people have to borrow the down-payment. However, they have not said we could build a combination of both.

The Body extended commendations to L. Joseph Overton for his work on the project.

Mr. Overton then continued to read correspondence between himself and contractors, builders, etc., involved in the housing project, also further correspondence was read by the secretary.

MOTIONED by Mr. Banks that the correspondence presented here by Mr. Overton along with all actions taken to date be approved and accepted by the Body. Same was

SECONDED by Mrs. Boyd and unanimously approved by the Body.

Mr. Overton stated he would like to have brochures sent out to all Locals about the Housing Project. We would allegate equal amounts of the projects to all affiliates to sell or rent as they choose. If an affiliate cannot dispose of their allocation it should revert back to the organization for redistribution among those that can. We are trying to get 100% financial backing from the Federal Government and if, by an unfortunate occurrence, our proposed plans do not materialize, the Negro Labor Committee Treasury will not have been affected for the risk money which is being spent now and is coming from the contractors and engineers who wish to have a part in building the project. When the apartments are available the monies needed for security and advance rent will be determined by F.H.A. Specifications not by the Negro Labor Committee.

The members of this organization were asked at one time to keep the housing project as quiet as possible. This is no longer necessary and may be discussed with whomever you desire since we are the only sponsors applying for this location and the danger of others applying for the same location has now been resolved. The affiliates who have only been advised through our minutes should definitely be given a detailed report of our actions and position. There has been considerable publication already by newspapers, etc. The Honorable Paul Screvane and Borough President Constance Motley have already given their approval.

Mr. Overton believes approval from all agencies will be forthcoming within the next two weeks. This is the reason he would like to set up brochures so you may take it to your locals with all procedures and actions in it.

The capacity of the project will be a minimum of 2,553 units, a 32-story house with four different structures, from efficiency apartments to three bedrooms.

The Chairman stated that we should try to do things to bring glory to the N.L.C. We must move ahead with the times and fight. Rededicate ourselves to programs going on today as we did when we first started—to further Negro labor causes.

Mr. Overton said “What needs to be done by the Negro Labor Committee is to preach the gospel about trade unions if you can’t do anything else. We need the job done now more than ever. It is not that we have no leadership—it’s that the leaders are not organized—they don’t know when a riot occurs if those people participating are members of their own unions or not.

I was able to pull people out of the street during the riots because I was a labor leader. The people know and trust me. Some people are against laborers. Everyone wants to associate with those with degrees. We must stop this. People must know who we are and if it wasn’t for labor they would not be able to exist without labor paying for it. We must tell them every-time we get a chance that the toothbrush they use every morning came from labor. Every service, every device they use comes through a laborers hands first.

Some girls want to work in stores while going to school and we give them jobs. When I ask them where their mother works they tell me in a factory. When I ask what union they belong to they can’t tell me. They will say they don’t belong to a union. However, I know there aren’t that many non-union shops. This shows me that not even the parents are telling their sons and daughters about unions and their importance.

We then have to show them the importance and involve them so they will want to become a part. When they see union men making $2.00 an hour and they can only receive $1.25 an hour they begin to realize what a union is.

Unions are for workers. Black men are workers and they must be a part. We have a big job to do if we take the time and responsibility. We must get to the people and tell them. The unions are ready now.

We must have unity. We must get mileage in the community by participating in anything that comes up—the Negro Labor Committee must be a part of it. The members of the Negro Labor Committee must support their leaders regardless of who they may be. The Negro Labor Committee does not have money in their treasury to pay a full time executive secretary to run their projects. There are jobs the members and committees can do themselves. When you report back to your locals have something to report that the members can do. Be present and take part in community affairs and learn to do some of the work yourselves. One operation could be to have a center for people so when they go out looking for a job they will know how much they are worth. Learn to organize the unorganized people. Stop looking for excuses. There is plenty to do if we only do it.

We’re going to clean up Harlem in the name of the Negro Labor Committee. Bring people up to 312 even for social hours, with refreshments in the name of N.L.C. The first time you may only have 35 people, the next time it may be 50, etc. The work we do is for the organization and organizations affiliated with the N.L.C. and not just for individuals who may be participating in the program. I want glory for N.L.C. not for any individual.”

Mr. Banks said “We haven’t met for a long time and we don’t know what’s happening. Why don’t we charter a way of how to do things and plan for it and then do it. I propose: 1. An election for the N.L.C. 2. Each officer elected told, in a meeting his duties and responsibilities. 3. This is to be taken care of as soon as possible.”

Mr. Jackson remarked “When voting a person into office you must go by the guidelines of the duties outlined for the particular office so you can determine who you want for that office by the person’s capabilities and qualifications. Also, a person cannot take away another persons duties if they are spelled out.

We should establish a group of permanent committees—duties outlined—when this is done then you are ready for an election regardless of present personalities. We should compare the structure of International Unions Constitutions and take out what we need for the constitution.”

Mr. Bell: I have asked about duties of elected officers many times. I suggest the Chair appoint a committee to draft the constitution.

MOTION: Mr. Banks—“I move 1. N.L.C. has an election. 2. Each officer elected told, in a meeting, his duties and responsibilities. 3. This is to be taken care of as soon as possible.”

AMENDMENT by Mr. Overton: “The drafting of by-laws outlining the specific functions and duties of all officers be implemented with all due haste.”

SECONDED by Christine Scott and motion unanimously approved.

Mrs. Scott said the N.L.C. should take a big part in voter registration. Let’s make a concentrated effort to get everyone out to vote.

The Chairman then reread the proposed program for N.L.C.

After a lengthy discussion it was moved by Mr. Jolly and seconded by Mr. Bell that we approve the program as read. Motion was unanimously accepted.

Mr. Jackson, Chairman: Summary—Tonight we endeavored to set down policies to strengthen N.L.C. Our road won’t be smooth. But if we can be united as N.L.C. WE SHALL OVERCOME.

Mr. Overton: Mr. Chairman, I suggest you appoint a committee tonight for the purpose of taking inventory of all the Negro Labor Committee’s assets and liabilities. The Chair should appoint a committee for the purpose of restoring Frank Crosswaith’s office, now used as a storeroom and set it up properly as an office we may use for business. An organization should have a place for the Head to use for business and have meetings.

The Body agreed the establishment of committees should be postponed until the next meeting.

Mr. Johnson read condolences sent by the Negro Labor Committee to Mr. Overton upon the passing of his Mother and Sol Green.

It was motioned by Mr. Bell and seconded by Mr. Banks that the meeting be adjourned.

Mr. Johnson stated the next meeting would be the second Wednesday in October.

The meeting was adjourned at 10:15 P.M.

Respectfully submitted,

PATRICIA BELL

Acting Secretary

Negro Labor Committee Record Group, 1925–1969, Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library.

NEGRO AMERICAN LABOR COUNCIL

3. KEYNOTE ADDRESS TO THE SECOND ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE NEGRO AMERICAN LABOR COUNCIL, NOVEMBER 10, 1961

By A. Philip Randolph

In the mid-twentieth century black labor is one hundred years behind white labor. Black labor is behind white labor in the skilled crafts. They are behind in trade union organization. They are behind in workers’ education. They are behind in employment opportunities.

Why? The answer is not because white labor is racially superior to black labor. Not because white labor is more productive than black labor.

In the race between black and white labor in American industry, black labor never had a chance. How could it be otherwise when Negro workers began as slaves while white workers began as free men, or virtually as free men?

In addition to a quarter of a thousand years of captivity in the labor system of chattel slavery, black labor, even after emancipation, has been a prisoner for a hundred years of a moneyless system of peonage, sharecropper-plantation-farm laborism, and a helpless and hopeless city-slum proletariat.

No greater tragedy has befallen the working class anywhere in the modern world than that which plagues the working class in the South. Both white and black workers turned against their own class, to subject them to sharper and sharper exploitation and oppression.

Verily, black and white workers did not fight each other because they hated each other, but they hated each other because they fought each other. They fought each other because they did not know each other. They did not know each other because they had no contact or communication with each other. They had no contact or communication with each other because they were afraid of each other. They were afraid of each other because each was propagandized into believing that each was seeking to take the jobs of the other.

By poisonous preachments by the press, pulpit and politician, the wages of both black and white workers were kept low and working conditions bad, since trade union organization was practically non-existent. And, even today, the South is virtually a “no man’s land” for union labor.

There is no remedy for this plight of the South’s labor forces except the unity of the black and white working class.

It is a matter of common knowledge that union organization campaigns, whether under the auspices of the old American Federation of Labor, or the younger Congress of Industrial Organizations, or the AFL-CIO, have wound up as miserable failures.

The reason is not only because the southern working class is divided upon a basis of race, but also because the AFL, the CIO, and the AFL-CIO never took cognizance of this fact. They never built their organization drives upon the principle of the solidarity of the working class. On the contrary, they accepted and proceeded to perpetuate this racial-labor more, the purpose of which was, and is, the perpetuation of segregation—the antithesis of trade union organization.

Thus, they sowed the winds of the division of the workers upon the basis of race, and now they are reaping the whirlwinds.

The leadership of the organized labor movement has at no time ever seriously challenged Jim Crow unionism in the South. White leaders of labor organizations, like white leaders of the Church, business, government, schools, and the press, marched together, under the banner of white supremacy, in the Ku Klux Klan, to put down and keep down by law or lawlessness, the Negro. . . .

While, before Emancipation, the Negro only had job security as a slave because he toiled for nothing, so, following Black Reconstruction, black freedmen labored within the framework of a peonage-sharecrop, labor-barter commissary system for, perhaps, a little more than nothing.

And, despite the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments, clear commitments to the protection of the freedmen, the Negro laboring masses have never fully broken through the barrier of the ethnic-labor mores of the South, which were hardened into a racially segregated order by the celebrated Plessy v Ferguson decision of the U.S. Supreme Court of 1896. Moreover, like the proverbial locusts, the doctrine of least ethnic-labor costs, or a racial sub-wage differential, spread in every area of American industry.⁹⁴

Thus, Negro workers are not yet fully free in the South. By the same token, white workers in the South are not yet fully free, because no white worker can ever become fully free as long as a black worker is in southern Bourbon bondage. And as long as white and black workers in the South are not fully free, the entire working class, North, East, South and West, is not and will not become fully free. There is no principle more obvious and universal than the indivisibility of the freedom of the workers regardless of race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, being based, as it were, upon the principle of least labor costs in a free market economy.

This is why the racial policies of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations have so devastatingly weakened, morally, organizationally, and politically, the American labor movement before the Congress, the public, and the world.

One has only to note that while trade unions, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Ladies’ Garment Workers, and United Textile Workers, are building up decent wage rates and sound rules governing working conditions in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Illinois, corporate capital, highly sensitive to the least threat to high rates of profits and interest upon investments, promptly takes flight into the land of non-union, low wage, low tax, race bias, mob law, and poor schools, namely, Dixie. Southern mayors, governors, and legislatures make special appeals in the northern press to industries to come South for non-union, cheap labor.

But this anti-trade union condition in the South is labor’s fault. It is the direct result of the fact that neither the old AFL, nor the CIO, nor the AFL-CIO ever came to grips with the racial-labor problem in the South. Instead of meeting the racial-labor issue head on, organized labor has always adopted a policy of appeasement, compromise and defeatism. The evidence exists in the fact that it has recognized and accepted:

(a) The Jim Crow union

(b) The color bar in union constitutions, rituals, or exclusionary racial policies by tacit consent

(c) Racially segregated seniority rosters and lines of job progression

(d) Racial sub-wage differential

(e) Indifferent recognition, if not acceptance of the concept and practice of a “white man’s job” and a “black man’s job”

(f) Racial barriers against Negro participation in apprenticeship training programs

(g) Failure to demand Negro workers’ participation in union democracy

(h) Racially segregated State conventions of the AFL-CIO in southern cities

(i) Racially segregated city central labor bodies of the AFL-CIO

Is there anyone so naive or cynical as to believe that these forms of race bias are not organizationally and economically disadvantageous to the black laboring masses? Not only has the long system of color caste condition in American industry thrust the Negro workers to the lowest rungs of the occupational hierarchy, but it tends to reinforce the accepted inferiority hereditary position of black labor, which drastically limits their economic mobility and viability.

Although not unaware of the fact that racial discrimination in trade unions affiliated to the AFL-CIO has existed for almost a century, no profound concern is now manifest by the leadership about this dreadful evil.

Instead of becoming aroused and disturbed about the existence of race bias in unions that affect employment opportunities and the economic status of the Negro worker, AFL-CIO leadership waves aside criticism of the movement’s racial policies, as pure exaggeration unworthy of dispassionate examination.

Such was the reaction to a memorandum on race bias in trade unions, together with corrective proposals, I submitted to George Meany and the Executive Council at Unity House, Pennsylvania, June 1961.

Instead of giving the memorandum a painstaking, rational analysis to determine if it contained any meritorious suggestions, it became the occasion of voluminous rebuttal and attack upon, and censure of, myself.

The rebuttal was not only innocuous, barren and sterile of a single new, vital, creative and constructive idea with which to grapple with the menace of race segregation and discrimination, but was a distressingly vain effort to justify a “do little” civil rights record in the House of Labor. . . .

Just a word now about the objective effects and results of race bias in trade unions and industry in two major cities that are generally considered to be relatively liberal, New York and Detroit.

In New York City, as well as throughout the State, non-white persons make up a very large part of those who live in poverty; a poverty that is frequently related to discriminatory racial practices that force Negroes into a marginal position in the economy, even though opportunities may increase for other groups within the community.

The two major industries in New York City are garment manufacturing and printing and publishing. The printing and publishing industry alone employs more than 160 thousand workers, or about nine percent of the manufacturing labor force. In both garment manufacturing and printing, however, we find that Negroes and Puerto Ricans are concentrated in the low paid, unskilled job classifications.

The Graduate School of Public Administration of Harvard University recently conducted a series of case studies in New York metropolitan manufacturing and concluded that in the New York garment industry Negroes and Puerto Ricans “were largely to be found in the less skilled, low-paid crafts and in shops making the lower priced lines, and in this industry their advancement to higher skills is not proceeding very rapidly. In the higher skilled coat and suit industry the new ethnic groups have hardly made an appearance.”

The New York metropolitan region has twenty percent of the nation’s employment in printing and publishing. In a survey made by the NAACP of Negro employment on the seven major New York City newspapers we find that, with the exclusion of building service and maintenance, less than one percent of those employed on the seven major newspapers are Negroes. Virtually all of the Negroes that are employed on these newspapers are within the white collar jurisdiction of the New York Newspaper Guild.

We estimate that less than one-half of the one percent of those currently employed in the newspaper crafts outside of the Guild’s jurisdiction are Negroes. This includes printing pressmen, compositors, photoengravers, stereotypers, paper handlers, mailers and delivery drivers.

In the past decade very little progress has been made in eliminating the traditional pattern of Negro exclusion and discrimination in the Plumbers and Pipe Fitters Union; the Iron and Structural Steel Workers; the Plasterers and Lathers; the Sheet Metal Workers; the Boiler Makers; the Carpenters, as well as the Bricklayers, Masons and Plasterers Union, and others.

In New York City, Negro waiters and bellboys are more noted by their absence than presence in the hotels and restaurants except, perhaps, in a token form at some banquets. However, Negroes are members of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. One will need the proverbial microscope to discover a Negro bartender anywhere in the city except in a Negro community.

Negro motion picture operators have no job mobility. They are chiefly confined to the second-class motion picture theatres in Negro communities where they receive a sub-wage differential paid operators in this class of theatre.

At present there is a broad exclusion of Negro youth from major apprenticeship programs jointly conducted by industrial management and labor unions in the City of New York. For many occupations the only way a worker can be recognized as qualified for employment is to complete the apprenticeship training program. This is true for the printing trades, among machinists and metal workers, the construction industry, and others.

The role of the labor union in these occupations is decisive because the trade union usually determines who is admitted into the training program and, therefore, who is admitted into the union. This is especially true when the union controls access to employment.

In the New York metropolitan area there are many apprenticeship training programs in the building trades. Apprenticeship programs provide essential training for a wide variety of skills in their important area of the region’s economy. These include apprenticeship programs for asbestos workers, electrical workers, glaziers, ironworkers, latherers, painters, plumbers and sheetmetal workers.

A recent study by the NAACP clearly indicates that less than one percent of the apprentices in the construction industry throughout the nation are Negroes. Unfortunately, the number of Negroes in apprenticeship training programs in the New York construction industry differs little from the national pattern.

The lack of apprentice-trained Negro craftsmen directly affects the economic standing of Negroes as a whole. Data indicates that craftsmen command substantially higher incomes than unskilled workers. If, then, Negroes are not employed in such occupations in large numbers, a potential source of high income is removed from this group. When this is coupled with other income limitations it becomes apparent why Negroes constitute a permanently depressed segment of American society.

“The Struggle for the Liberation of the Black Laboring Masses.” Reprinted by permission of A. Philip Randolph.

4. UNLESS SOMETHING SPECIAL HAPPENS

By Whitney M. Young, Jr.

Before the Third Annual Negro American Labor Council Convention, New York City Friday, November 9, 1962

Mr. Overton, Toastmaster Randolph, President Meany, Distinguished Guests, Members and Friends of the Negro American Labor Council:

I bring you greetings from the National Urban League, and wish especially on this occasion to pay tribute to Phil Randolph—who on November 19th will receive the National Urban League’s EOD Award for distinguished service as a labor leader, one who has made an outstanding contribution to the concept of equal opportunity.

Race relations in America stands today at the crossroads. For both white Americans as well as Negro Americans, the moment of truth has arrived. The direction we shall move from this point on depends upon both of these groups of citizens, and their leadership recognizing the certain realities which face us in this celebration of the Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. For white Americans, these realities are as follows:

1) The widely-heralded progress which the Negro citizen is supposed to have made, is more fantasy than real, more intangible than tangible. The evidence for this can best be seen when we view the extent to which the gap has been closed in the areas of economics, education, health or welfare, between the Negro American and his fellow citizens. The facts reveal little change in the last ten years. For example the average income of Negro families is 53% that of white families as compared with 1952 when it was 57%. There are 2-1/2 times more unemployment among Negro workers, and in cities like Detroit the unemployment rate is as high as 60% although Negroes represent only 20% of the total population. Housing is actually more segregated than it was ten years ago. According to the 1960 Census one out of six homes in which Negroes live is dilapidated, as compared with one out of thirty-two homes for white citizens. Of the one million new homes built annually during the last ten years less than 3% have been made available to Negro citizens. In education our children still receive 3-1/2% years less; and in the matter of health our parents still die seven years sooner.

2) Another reality that Americans must face is the fact that the day has passed when the Negro citizen can be relied upon to react to his abuses and injustices with despair, resignation, or feelings of inferiority. From this day on his reaction to these inequities will be one of resentment, bitterness and hostility.

3) The disappearance of old barriers and the establishment of new laws or even the adopting of the more polite language will not in and of themselves, substantially erase the 300 years of deprivation, and certainly not for many years to come, unless something special happens. The back wheels of a car cannot catch up with the front wheels unless something special happens. I have insisted that if those who make the decisions in this country are really sincere about closing the gaps, then we must go further than fine impartiality. We must have, in fact, special consideration if we are to compensate for the scars left by 300 years of deprivation, which actually represented special consideration of another type. Equality for a while, therefore, is not enough. We must have better schools, better teachers, better facilities, and all else being equal the Negro should be given special priority in employment, including apprentice jobs.

This is not an original idea, since we recall that after World War II veterans were given a ten-point preference in Civil Service exams because they had been out of the mainstream of American life for four years. Certainly those of us who have been out of it for 300 years are not being unrealistic when we ask for similar consideration.

4) The alternatives to positive and accelerated action in this field are becoming quite clear. Either the Negro citizen will be helped to become a constructive, productive consumer, proud of his citizenship, or he will become a disgruntled, chronic dependent through indifference or casual treatment. Either long-time experienced organizations in the field, like the Urban League,⁹⁵ will be given support to provide effective, responsible and most certainly inexperienced. Finally, our choice is between spending millions for programs of prevention, education, and rehabilitation, or billions for social disorganization and international loss of prestige.

For the Negro citizen, he must reflect his new maturity by also facing certain realities:

1) That no individual member of a minority group, however secure and privileged at any given moment, is ever permanently secure and advantaged until the least among these, our brothers, know and feel that same security.

2) That monolithic approaches to the solution of our problems, and no single leader will guide us into the Promised Land. Those who think this, are as naive and out-dated in this jet age as the horse and buggy. It is not a question of whether we need an NAACP or CORE or the Negro American Labor Council, or the Urban League. The issue is whether we are sufficiently informed on the nature of our problems to recognize the value and the unique contributions which each of these groups can make if sufficiently supported both morally and financially.

3) History has taught us that the struggle for dignity and first-class citizenship must always begin with protest and activities that dramatize the injustices and mobilize public opinion. These are also helpful in the removal of barriers, and the opening of new opportunities. But history has also taught us that this guarantees us only the opportunity. It does not assure us of the desired status.

This is why the organization I represent, the National Urban League, is so crucial and so important at this moment in history. And this is why, though much younger, the Negro American Labor Council can be so important. For, while both of us were born in a climate where protest and righteous indignation were appropriate, and had been the proven formula of other minority groups throughout history; and, while to a degree we must never lose our divine discontent—we, nevertheless, must face in a responsible way, the total challenge which is ours.

The Urban League sees its challenge beyond that of protest, to assist a citizenry that has been scarred, discouraged, and in many cases demoralized, to take a second look at a new destiny and their role in helping to share that destiny. Toward this end, we therefore make no apologies for concentrating our efforts largely in the area of counseling and guidance of youth, activities designed to strengthen family life, programs of education to stimulate Negro youth and adults to improve themselves through re-training, adult education, and better use of their economic resources. We shall no longer be embarrassed or intimidated by the charge that we are negotiators—for the mature person must certainly know by now that unless we are represented at the level of policy-making; unless we are there to shape the rules and regulations which implement the new laws; and unless we screen very closely those who have the responsibility to carry out new policies—then all of the legal changes, the legislative changes, and even the new vocabulary which is so now in vogue, become meaningless platitudes and pious hopes.

Finally, we will no longer be sensitive about the fact that our 350 staff people located in 62 strategic American cities where 70 percent of the Negro population lives, are professionals, and highly-trained and skilled in the areas of research, social science, education, and industrial relations. For today we know, as the labor union has so-well learned, that in order to bring about effective social change, one must be able to compete educationally with those whose policies he would seek to change.

The challenge to the Negro American Labor Council, is also to go beyond the protest stage, and to see to it that every Negro first understands the benefits of union membership; and, secondly, that he participates actively in all meetings and programs of his union. I cannot help but feel that when more than 20 or 30 percent of the membership of the union happens to be Negro, and there are problems of discrimination and lack of representation on the policymaking body—then a great deal of that blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Negro members themselves, who have become masters in the art of protest, but remain naive babies in the art of planning and organization.

May I conclude by saying, as forceably and with as much conviction as possible, that it is imperative that we always keep in proper perspective, whatever discontent we in the Urban League, or any other organization in the field, or the Negro American Labor Council itself, may have with organized labor as an institution in our society. Our activity must be clearly focused on a specific and well-documented act of discrimination.

For, in the final analysis, on those basic rights which affect the health, welfare, and social and economic status of the masses of Negro citizens, organized labor has been the institution which uniquely and almost without exception, has been standing by our side.

I am therefore pleased, as a representative of the National Urban League, to join with you on the occasion of your Third Annual Convention, and symbolically associate the Urban League with the objectives of the House of Labor. At this crucial moment in history, we mutually seek for every citizen his God-given right to dignity and equality of opportunity.

Speech delivered at the third annual Negro American Labor Council convention, New York, November 9, 1962, Box 123 Speeches, Whitney Young Papers, Columbia University.

5. RANDOLPH FEARS CRISIS ON RIGHTS

By Raymond H. Anderson

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

The New York Times, May 29, 1965.

6. NEGRO JOBS FOR A STRONG LABOR MOVEMENT

Following are excerpts from the address of Cleveland Robinson, national president of the Negro American Labor Council, to the Council’s national economic conference in Washington last month. Robinson is also the secretary-treasurer of District 65, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, AFL-CIO.

The Negro American Labor Council came into existence as the result of the clash between A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and George Meany, AFL-CIO president, at the AFL-CIO convention in the Fall of 1959.

At the convention Randolph cited the failure of the AFL-CIO leadership to lend its full weight to the struggle of the Negro workers, or to insist that certain unions abolish their lily-white practices and accept Negroes as equal partners.

Meany rejected Randolph’s proposals in arrogant and insulting fashion.

This brought an angry reaction from Negro trade unionists throughout the country and the NALC was formed in 1960.

The NALC founding convention was based on the conviction that the essence of the civil rights struggle is an economic revolution.

We realize that segregation, discrimination and the denial of basic human rights means for Negro masses joblessness, low wages and other forms of deprivations. Thus in the midst of the struggle, while we join forces in the broad civil rights fight, we place emphasis on the economic plight of our people.

The fact remains that despite all the progress that has been made thus far, economically the Negro masses have made no real progress in terms of their every day needs. As a matter of fact, statistics could very well prove that we are worse off today than we were a decade or more ago. In the midst of unprecedented affluence, and a national output of close to 800 billion dollars per year, Negro unemployment is still more than twice that of whites. And unemployment among Negro youth is rising at an alarming pace. Whereas in 1953 average wages for Negro workers was 59 percent that of whites, today’s figures places average wages of Negro workers to be 53 percent that of whites. The advent of automation and cybernetics, and the lack of basic skills amongst masses of Negro workers makes him not only an unemployed worker, but too often an unemployable worker. But perhaps of greater significance is the fact that in the areas where masses of Negroes are to be found working, their wages are abominably low and working conditions deplorable.

The fact is that despite headlines from the employer-controlled press about the strength of the labor movement, less than 20 million of the working people of the nation are organized. Upwards of 50 million are unorganized and the unorganized are to be found, in the main, among that 70 percent of the nation’s work force who are not industrial workers, but in service industries.

Our people are to be found in service. Masses of us work in the laundries, in the hospitals, in the educational system, in the hotel and restaurants, in the stores and in the fields. We perform services in the homes of the rich. We perform services which are vital and essential to the life of our community and our nation in these areas. Yet our jobs are often described as menial.

In most instances we have no unions. We are unorganized and have no way of determining for ourselves what our salaries should be, what our hours of work should be, or whether we work or we do not work. It is a fact that except in rare instances the mainstream of labor has not seen fit to put forward efforts necessary to organize in these areas.

Therefore, it is my proposal that through the initiative of Negro trade unionists and the NALC, in every community throughout the nation, and especially in our large urban communities, we convene conferences of all forces concerned with our struggle. Conferences for the purpose of mapping plans for the organization of our people into unions, unions which we will control, unions that will be democratic institutions, unions whose programs will respond to our needs, unions which will be a force to be reckoned with.

It is my belief that with this kind of determination and with this kind of effort, we will receive the backing of many fine unions now with the AFL-CIO, or even some independent unions. But it will be up to the people in given localities to decide with whom they affiliate, or whether they will affiliate with anyone at all.

Knowing that in unity there is strength, it would therefore be to our greatest advantage to maintain affiliations and alliances with unions and organizations whose workers, programs, and philosophies are compatible with ours.

We of the NALC know that in this society, and in this system under which we live, strong trade unions are essential for the welfare of working people. Where there are no unions the people will surely perish. The failures of certain unions and union leaders to live up to their trust, of necessity had to be highlighted, and this of course has gotten more publicity in the press than the good things the unions have done.

For example, there have been more headlines about the discriminatory practices of certain craft unions and their exclusion of Negro workers from their ranks or of the collusion between certain union leaders and employers in signing “sweetheart” backdoor agreements, thus exploiting Negro workers and others, than there have been of the fine work that has been done by the vast majority of our unions in elevating wage standards, providing health and welfare benefits, vacations, pensions and job security for workers.

This has brought about a situation where Negro workers and other oppressed minorities such as Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans have looked upon unions with a certain amount of suspicion and mistrust, and in too many instances have acted against their own interests by not joining legitimate unions, and fully participating in the lives of their unions. This situation we cannot permit to continue.

It is up to us through such conferences as I have proposed in our localities, and by other measures to bring home to the masses of our people the basic truth that unions are essential, and that in a large sense it is the people, the workers themselves who really make the union; and that their physical participation in the life of the union is as necessary as their financial support.

In these days when there is so much talk about power, I think it is fitting and proper to state unequivocally that we need power and we must have power. Our oppressors would want us to believe that we are powerless. The slogan BLACK POWER has been distorted and taken out of context by people on both sides of the aisle—friends and foes alike. And I am here to say that the organization of our people along the lines we are now projecting will be the greatest manifestation of power ever to be realized by us. Power to demand—power to negotiate—power to decide. Power to make decisions, politically, economically and socially. Unquestionably with this kind of power at our command, alliances with other groups sharing our views and our objectives will first be meaningful.

It is my belief that in the same manner and method that we organize ourselves for the eradication of low wages and exploitation, we organize ourselves so that we can deal effectively with the cancer of discrimination, and adequate programs for the training of our people for today’s job market.

Low wages and exploitation, job discrimination and unemployment carries with it inherently the social problems so prevalent in the communities from which we come. These are basically in the areas of housing, health and recreational and educational needs.

In the meantime the administration and Congress, despite declarations to the contrary, are making it crystal clear that they are not ready to appropriate anything resembling adequate funds for the needs of the millions who are living in poverty and deprivation. Can we imagine how many jobs could be created if in our urban areas there was a massive program for building decent homes, hospitals, schools and facilities for recreational and cultural activities? Certainly if this were done our building trades unionists would have no fear for jobs since there would be more than enough for everyone who wanted to enter these trades.

We have to make it clear what we believe our priorities ought to be. If we believe that our priorities and our national interest and our moral standing in the world community rests with a continuation of our current foreign policy, which today is resulting in the expenditure of countless of billions for a war in Vietnam, and thereby stymieing from a practical point of view any realistic expenditures at home in these areas which are of vital concern to us, then those who keep silent or give support to the administration’s foreign policy are correct; but they should have no illusions that through government efforts there will be any meaningful change as long as this situation continues to exist.

But if on the other hand, we believe—as I do—that our priorities are here at home, that our nation will be immeasurably strengthened when we have closed the gap between the fine words articulated in our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, and our day to day performances, then our prestige with the world community will grow by leaps and bounds when we have erased from our society racism and its effects. And that nations will be more quick to emulate us because of these things, than because of our ability to wipe them out of existence by our military might.

Hence—our current foreign policy is wrong from a moral as well as a practical standpoint. Then I believe it is our obligation to press for this priority which means in the first place that we demand an immediate end to the killing and war expenditures, and that we provide for our nation’s youth, real opportunity and hope for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness instead of the dismal outlook of death on a Vietnam battlefield.

But here again, experience will indicate that the voices of the masses of people must be heard, and this we can only do through organization. Let us not forget that organized labor as a force has been responsible for many of the fine things which today have become a part of our national life. Yes—there was a time when the leadership of organized labor was not the conservative and complacent image that by and large it represents today.

We must profit from these experiences of the past, because then the masses of the people who constituted organized labor were lowly paid, they knew what joblessness and exploitation were. They were hungry and they were angry and therefore, they knew they had to fight. The leadership which arose from their ranks were men dedicated to their struggle who were prepared to fight all enemies, employers or government, and to give their lives if necessary to the cause of the people they represented.

Today we are the jobless, the exploited, the hungry and the angry—and what we need is to learn to fight, and fight we must.

The steel workers, the automobile workers, the workers in the coal mines all have a history. A history replete with violence meted to them by harsh, vicious and unconscionable employers. But a history made rich by the fact that they were smart enough to stand together and fight together, thereby winning for themselves and their families, dignity and self-respect, good wages and security. So now—we the black masses must look to ourselves for some of the answers to the problems that we face today—and that our children must face tomorrow.

The Worker, June 25, 1967.

7. FRUSTRATION IN THE GHETTOS: A NATIONAL CRISIS

Pleas by a Northern Negro Union Leader and by a Southern Group

A Northern Negro union leader and a Southern interracial group have responded to the outbreaks in Negro ghettos with statements built on the same theme: the poverty, discrimination and degradation imposed upon the Negro people must be ended if riots are to be eliminated and the entire society is to progress.

Cleveland Robinson, Secretary-Treasurer of District 65, Retail and Wholesale union and president of the Negro American Labor Council, in an article in the August issue of his union’s paper, makes a strong argument for white to join the Negro in his struggle for equality, “in which whites, too, will be the gainers.”

The Southern Regional Council, an interracial Atlanta-based organization formed in 1944, issued a statement titled “On the National Crisis,” which itself indicates the council’s contention that the problem of the ghetto is the product of the whole country. “We are compelled . . . to speak to the nation,” said the council, “urging that it act against the causes of the riots and not merely with repressive force to end them.” Below are excerpts from both statements.

Following are excerpts from Cleveland Robinson’s statement:

Whether we like it or not the strife raging in many cities of the U.S. is on the rise. Some explain it as just a matter of lawlessness, or simple frustration, or rampant police brutality.

Others blame it on resentment against segregation and poor housing, or job discrimination, or poor education, or ghetto conditions, or plain ugly race hatred.

While it is recognized by most people that all of these and other factors are elements in the picture, many black people are coming to the conclusion that these elements are really by-products rather than causes. Many who see things thus have referred to the events of Newark, Detroit and elsewhere as a rebellion. There is amongst the black people a strong belief that a basic historic force is revealed in the clashes, and that this very force is the root cause of what we see.

It stems from a growing self-esteem among dark races everywhere and amongst the descendants of the African slaves in America. We see ourselves as resisting aggression which we contend America has waged against us for centuries. We are, in effect, demanding that the U.S. confess its historic crime, agree to make amends for its sins, and repair the damage it has inflicted upon more than a dozen generations of black people.

An individual white person who sincerely believes that he personally never did a black man any harm, who may have contributed to “Negro causes” who perhaps even joined civil rights demonstrations, feels that he is not guilty and, therefore, not responsible for the conditions of Negro life. He even agrees to fight to correct these conditions. But he tends to resent what appears to him as ingratitude, lawlessness, irresponsibility, and, perhaps worst of all, race hatred in reverse.

Whites will continue reacting this way if they maintain the illusions which have been obscuring the picture. Can anyone deny that this nation brought Africans here in chains and forced them into slavery? For whose benefit did these slaves toil if not for the benefit of white America? And, are not white workers members and beneficiaries of this America, whose prosperity was at least in part, eked out of the sweat and blood of the black man?

If the black man feels he is unjustly oppressed why should he obey laws which are designed to oppress him? Would whites play according to rules in a game where the cards are stacked against them?

But above all, what good is done, what contribution is made towards a solution of existing problems, by reacting negatively to the black man’s efforts to escape his condition, even though some of these efforts tend to irritate?

Would it not be better to insist that those conditions not be permitted to continue for a single day? Should you not aim your resentment against those who talk of war on poverty, but wage war on the poor; who find billions for guns, but mere pennies for people; who come up with unlimited incentives for fat corporations, but never a hope for frustrated youngsters?

It is impossible for the black man in America to accept his fate without resistance. His spirit of rebellion is a positive thing even though his methods may at times be self-defeating. The reaction to it can make him an enemy or can make him the initiator of a wonderful surge of human progress.

Undoubtedly the job that needs to be done is gigantic, almost impossible. In fact it can’t be done unless you really remake the nation. Somehow, white workers seem to have forgotten that the enemy of the black workers is the enemy of all workers; that their own human needs can never be fully met unless the very nature of our society is changed. If the black man’s rebellion will hasten recognition of such a need, isn’t he making a contribution to all?

If he irritates occasionally as he tries to master the complex technique of rebellion, is that too great a price to pay for a victory in which the whites, too, will be the gainers? A nation good enough for black people to love will be a nation where whites, too, will walk in dignity, in confidence, knowing that their prosperity, their humanity is not built at the expense of, but in partnership with, all Americans.

Following are excerpts from the statement by the Southern Regional Council:

As an organization of Southerners of both races dedicated to equal opportunity for all, the Southern Regional Council has watched with profound grief and alarm the riots that have occurred during this first half of the summer of 1967. But far more destructive than riots would be the failure of the nation to recognize riots as a symptom of profound failure—social and economic—of American society to provide a chance for a decent and constructive life for vast numbers of its people, North and South, white and Negro.

Fully aware of the need for tact and sympathy in doing so, we are compelled as Southerners, out of a knowledge of our own region’s tragic history of racial antagonism, to speak to the nation, urging that it act against the causes of the riots and not merely with repressive force to end them.

We would also urge the South, as it continues to strive to restructure its society to conform to laws of equality and racial justice, to look upon these riots which have occurred in Northern cities as a severe object lesson in the tragic consequences of not achieving these objectives fully for all citizens.

. . . historically, the South has exported people of both races not properly prepared for life in a complex modern nation, and with them have developed new variants of the deprivation and racial antagonisms that have so long crippled the South. And we can only look about our own region and know that the same conditions which have exploded into riots exist in many places in the South.

The starvation-level poverty in many parts of the rural South is a particular problem of ours, more severe and punishing probably than any other poverty in the nation.

We must note too another grave factor in our current crisis. There now are millions of Americans outside our economic system, neither contributing to it or benefiting from it. This must realistically be seen as a serious threat to the economic system.

We continue in the conviction that for the South and for the nation, the only realistic and moral goal in regard to race relations is the full integration of Negroes and other minority groups into the American society. We recognize and applaud efforts of such groups to develop legitimate methods of gaining objectives of self-interest, economically and politically. But we continue to oppose racism and separatism as antithetical to everything America stands for. It is our belief that Southerners, white and Negro, have moved and are resolved to continue to move toward the kind of society, one of equal opportunity and human dignity, made possible by the Constitution of the United States.

It is toward this high goal rather than to the absence of riots that we must look.

The Worker, September 10, 1967.

8. NALC HEAD ASKS LABOR AID MARCH OF POOR

YOUNGSTOWN, O.—Cleveland Robinson, president of the Negro American Labor Council, called on the organization to “play a vital role in the remaining days” of the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington.

He urged the NALC to “carry on the struggle throughout our unions and our communities to mobilize the poor and oppressed people, and their allies to be fighters in this cause.”

Addressing the NALC’s annual convention here last week Robinson declared that “this nation is facing a crisis of untold proportions.”

“Our calls for justice by and large have gone unheeded, many times unnoticed,” he said. The “root cause” of the “tragedy of our times” is “white racism,” he added.

For the past two years, he said, the NALC “has continued to wage limited struggles in the fight for equality of job opportunities, with some limited success.”

“The fact is that our work and our activities are still not welcome in large sections of the labor movement. Maybe, in a way, this is a credit to us because it means that we are facing issues head-on. We reject compromise, and tokenism, and we continue to tear away the mask and expose the hypocrisy that still exists in far too many places.”

“However, there remain areas where our black full-time trade unionists and rank and file leaders are not full participants in our movement. This we must view with deep concern, and seek ways and means to encourage and enhance their participation.”

“This is a time for us to reassess our goals, and make new demands on ourselves, on the labor movement and on the nation.”

“When we raise quite sharply the question of jobs, meaningful wages, the breaking down of discriminatory barriers, meaningful training programs, and show our distaste and impatience, we are so often told or reminded that much progress has been made, and that black workers are better off today than they were ten or 15 years ago.”

“Is this so—really?” he asked.

“Isn’t it a fact,” he asked, that

* “the wage gap between black and white has widened not narrowed?”;

* “unemployment amongst Negro youth is four to five times higher than among white groups?”;

* “with automation and cybernetics all the way from the farms to the factories, thousands of our people are now hopelessly unemployed, and are among the ten million who are going to bed hungry each night, not knowing where the next meal is coming from?”

We know that things are not better, he said.

“For thousands, yea, millions of our people, and others, poverty, deprivation and misery is the way of life,” he said.

“So in reassessing our goals we must come to the conclusion that the elimination of poverty and disease and misery, and the bringing about of conditions whereby all may share in the abundance that is available without regard to race or color or creed, must be our nation’s highest priority.”

“This means demands upon the Congress, upon State Legislatures, upon industry, for radical changes. And it means demands upon our labor movement, that it once again put itself in the vanguard of the struggle for the most oppressed.”

“Our first demand upon the Congress, must be the appropriation of funds—funds that will make possible a decent home for every American at prices he can afford to either own or rent.”

He called, also for—

* “Complete health care for every American.”

* “A job for every worker at meaningful wages.”

* Abolition of the current welfare system.

* A pension, equivalent to a living wage, for the “infirm and the disabled, dependent children and widows.”

* A “guaranteed annual income at a living wage,” for “those Americans who cannot find work” who “can turn their attention to the improving of the academic or vocational skills” while they are unemployed, “thus making them available for today’s job market.”

* Improvement in social security “to provide pensions for senior citizens on which they can live.”

“Six percent of the gross national income,” said Robinson, “approximately 50 billion dollars per year is the price tag for these unmet needs.”

“We must here take note,” he declared, “that today our nation is spending in excess of 30 billion dollars on the war in Vietnam. And an additional 85 billion dollars for defense appropriations.”

“This nation must now face squarely the question as to whether it can continue to wage war in Vietnam. A war in which the poor do the fighting and the dying, and the black youth of this country are fighting and dying in Vietnam in high disproportionate numbers. A war in which the Pentagon is spending 71 million dollars to kill rice crops and starve the Vietnamese people. And napalm bombs are killing thousands of innocent women and children. An unjustified war, an illegal underclared war.”

“Our demand,” he said, “is: stop the fighting, make peace, and spend the money, the talent, and the energy of the nation in creating, prolonging and sustaining the lives of our people here at home, as well as helping other oppressed people.”

“This, we believe, is America’s best and first line of defense.”

“We must make other demands on the Congress and on our nation’s executives,” he declared. “Too long have we seen the spectacle of corporations and contractors who are practicing discrimination, being rewarded with fat government contracts. We say an end must be put to this.”

“We must demand that Congress and the Executive Branch see to it that no corporation, no contractor, does business with the government or performs work where Government funds are involved, where there is not clear cut fair employment to practice on all jobs, and all training programs, and in all hirings pertaining to such firms or contractors.”

“We cannot, as workers sit by and see our brothers, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, or our black brothers in the fields,” Robinson said, “toiling at starvation wages, exploited as slaves, having no laws to protect them.”

He demanded that Congress “pass laws giving collective bargaining rights to all workers,” “see that all such workers are protected under laws governing workmen’s compensation, fair labor standards, child labor and so on,” and “enact minimum wage legislation covering all workers.” Such minimum wage at this time should be no less than $2.50 an hour, he said.

“There may be some who feel that the demands outlined are unachievable. To this I must say, it is not our job to determine what is achievable.”

“Our job is to determine and place before the nation what is needed. Let the Congress and our nation’s chief executive, and the industrialists, those who hold power, let them know what is needed.”

“We know what this nation can afford, and that our people are entitled to these things and more, not as charity, but as a right.”

Robinson charged that the AFL-CIO executive council “has not seen fit to wage an effective struggle for the most oppressed.”

“The dynamic, progressive, demanding, and dissatisfied voice of labor is nowhere present in the top echelons,” he said.

“Nor do we find,” from the top body of the labor movement, directives or calls for total mobilization of all of labor, to the cause of the oppressed in a manner where the strength of the labor movement, in its totality, including its rank and file, can be brought to bear on a given issue.

“Instead, too often we find this leadership is prone to be satisfied with what ‘is possible’, and hail mediocre victories and compromises as evidence of progress, when to the victims of discrimination, the oppressed and the have-nots, such results are totally unsatisfactory.

“We believe that the time has come for a change in the structure of the top body of the labor movement,” he said, in order “to make possible representation from the most oppressed, the Negro, Puerto Rican, and the Mexican American, in the highest councils of labor.”

“We are not asking or suggesting that anyone be replaced,” Robinson said, “we are suggesting that the leadership be broadened, for this is the time when people must speak for themselves.”

He urged that the AFL-CIO “make available funds to aid in the organization of the most oppressed workers, and develop leadership from their ranks in full-time positions, so that an effective war against poverty can be waged on behalf of such workers.”

Robinson called for the building of NALC chapters “in every city and in every community.”

“In every union where our black brothers are to be found, strong caucuses must be developed so that an effective struggle can be waged, not only on the broad programs we outlined, but on the basic day to day grievances and problems which our people face.”

“We must help our people to get into decent unions, and be good union members, and to develop leadership from their ranks for us workers, progress cannot be made in a real sense without unionism.”

“Where we cannot get the help from organized labor” he added, “we can encourage the formation of independent unions of such workers wherever they may be.”

The Worker, June 2, 1968.

9. SOMETHING NEW IN THE HOUSE OF LABOR

By Gene Grove

A black-led union of 40,000 workers of all races has set out on its own war on poverty . . . championing and organizing the unorganized, the underpaid, the underemployed. . . .

The minutes dragged by in the stifling afternoon in Suffolk, a little town between Norfolk and Newport News, Va., and although the air conditioning wheezed manfully it was fighting a losing battle, as were the some 100 delegates deadened by the heat and the mounds of ham and Southern fried chicken they had eaten for lunch. It was a meeting of labor union leaders, and the people in the room represented some 40,000 workers scattered across the country, most of them considered unskilled, most of them among the lowest paid, most of them in what are regarded as menial jobs, half of them black. They had trekked to this little town to register their final protest against what they regarded as the irrelevance of their union, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, and of the AFL-CIO itself.

When the meeting at last got under way a minister pronounced a benediction and led the delegates in Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross, a good hymn which most of the black delegates seemed to know and to which most of the white delegates listened with studied interest. They all continued to listen with care as, one after another, men approached the speaker’s stand to denounce their union. Then a large, impressive black speaker with a musical accent and glasses like the bottoms of Coke bottles rose and said, “We belong to the house of labor, but when the house becomes so rotten and dilapidated that the walls crumble and the roof leaks and the floors sag, then it’s time to get out and build a new, clean house,” and the delegates exploded at last with fervor that brought a sense of purpose to the room.

As a matter of fact, the speaker, Cleveland Robinson, admitted later that he had used that same phrase once before, in 1962, as a threat which helped pry some concessions—which later had proved, Robinson thought, ephemeral—from AFL-CIO President George Meany, and the New York Times had thought it striking enough then to print it as the newspaper’s quotation of the day. Robinson, too, thought enough of it on reflection to use the words again, and this time not as a negotiating tactic. Minutes after he sat down, workers voted to renounce their affiliations with the RWDSU and AFL-CIO and to strike out on their own as an independent union—the National Council of Distributive Workers.

The Times seemed to have something of a predilection for quoting from people who were to turn up at this small, even obscure, gathering in Virginia. Only a few weeks before the meeting it had used another of the speakers, David Livingston, for its quotation of the day. Speaking of labor’s failure to organize black and Puerto Rican workers, he had said: “To say you’re for civil rights is not enough any more; everybody is for civil rights. The oppressed want power and some share of the responsibility and they have not generally found relevance in the labor movement.” Relevance is a much over- and mis-used word in these times, but it is a fact that the union officials meeting in Suffolk were prompted to build anew in what Robinson called “the house of labor” primarily by the race issue. The immediate causes were contained in a statement read to an RWDSU meeting—and subsequently ignored—which referred to the “restlessness of the oppressed in our midst,” as well as the Kerner Report’s identification of white racism and the necessity for unions to organize and develop full-time leadership among Negro, Puerto Rican and Mexican workers. The statement also proposed that the RWDSU, whose national officers all are white, “rearrange and/or expand its national leadership to include outstanding Negro trade unionists in its highest echelon of authority and thus provide inspiration and stimulus to the organization efforts of black working people.” The dissatisfaction went beyond that specific, though, to a general unease about the direction of organized labor: various spokesmen complained that many international unions had refused to let down their racial bars and the AFL-CIO had done nothing effective to force them down, that Negroes were not admitted to the top echelons of union leadership, that the unions had failed to recruit and train members of minority groups and that they had failed to try to organize the poor and the dispossessed. The labor movement, the spokesmen insisted, no longer was relevant (to again use that word) to the needs and aspirations of the minorities, the unorganized, the underpaid, the underemployed, the oppressed.

They punctuated their dissent and convictions, after they had voted to disaffiliate, by electing Cleveland Robinson president of the new union, an election which made him the first black president of a multi-racial union in American labor history, if one remembers that the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, led by Robinson’s good friend, A. Philip Randolph, is an all-black union. And if the fledgling union of 40,000 sounds small by the standards of, say, the Teamsters, the Mine Workers or the Steelworkers, already it is far larger than such established unions as Randolph’s Porters, the American Newspaper Guild or a host of others. Nominating Robinson, Livingston said he would be “glad and proud to serve in a union with black leadership. We will tell our members that they must accept the democratic principle. This will be the first union in America where black leaders are proud to follow.” Including Robinson, four blacks were elected to office, as were one Puerto Rican and three whites.

The trail that led these 40,000 to break away from the RWDSU and the AFL-CIO is somewhat winding and the nuances of all the relationships are not always clear, but the final reason, the one they flung at the delegates to the convention, was simplicity itself. “It is clear to all,” said Livingston, who is president of what was District 65 of the RWDSU before the break and now is District 65 of the National Council of Distributive Workers, “that the AFL-CIO has not faced up to the fight against racism and for liberation.”

Accepting the new national presidency, Robinson put it at some greater length:

“The minorities,” he said, “are left out of the mainstream of American life. There are 57 million unorganized workers in the United States, and the AFL-CIO is not relevant to their problems. The only real war on poverty is the war of workers organizing for a living wage: for the right to say if they work, when they work and for what they work. Without a living wage you can’t take advantage of any other rights. The failure of the AFL-CIO to organize the poor and dispossessed . . . means for the poor whites hungry bellies and for the poor blacks degradation. . . .

“We intend to organize near everybody who is now excluded from the labor movement, and if the AFL-CIO attempts to interfere with our locals we shall not let them rest. When the poor black and the poor white are liberated, America will be liberated.”

Robinson’s talk comes out rather tougher in print than it sounds when listening to him. He is a big man who nevertheless gives an impression of gentleness. His voice, naturally soft, is softened still further by the accents of his native Jamaica. And the syntax of his speech, a considerable improvement over the extemporaneous offerings of most union laeders, is made the more impressive by the fact that he retains only a hint of vision after a losing 10-year fight with glaucoma and, as a result, cannot read his speeches. He is, perhaps, the least known of the significant movers and shakers of the civil rights movement of the past dozen years, certainly less widely known than Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, Jesse Jackson, Whitney Young, James Farmer and the rest, less known even than Bayard Rustin, whom Robinson hired to help him organize the 1963 March on Washington. Yet Robinson is, for example, president of the Negro American Labor Council, a long-time advisor to and recently elected a regional representative of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a member of the New York City Commission on Human Rights.⁹⁶ He came to this country in 1944 from Jamaica (where he had been, at various times, a schoolteacher and a policeman), found himself in jobs that paid in the neighborhood of 30 cents an hour, and within a year was participating in the struggles to organize the clothing wholesalers and warehouses where he worked.

“Aside from whatever dedication came to me from a sensitivity to my own problems and those of my fellow workers,” he says, “I was angered at the discrimination I saw when I came to this country, discrimination I didn’t see in the West Indies. There you could aspire to the heights. A man knew there that the best gift he could give his son was a good education—men would sacrifice all their lives to send their sons to Oxford—because you knew that if your son got a good education he could use it to the best of his ability. You didn’t know that here then, and you still don’t.”

The union in which Robinson found himself showed its social conscience quite early. District 65, the union of which Livingston is president and of which Robinson remains secretary-treasurer while serving, too, as president of the new Distributive Workers union, began life as a union for Jewish dry goods workers on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It participated in the great organizing drives of the ’30s and through mergers with other locals, such as the shoe workers, and efforts to organize such as the city’s textile workers, its membership had risen to perhaps 10,000 by the time Robinson joined it and its ethnic composition was changing rapidly. Within a year after Robinson joined the union he was made an organizer and not long after that the union leadership, then entirely Jewish, made its first efforts at adjustment to the altered facts of its life by backing Robinson and an Irish Catholic, Bob Burke, for election as vice-presidents of the union. It later helped form the Distributive, Processing and Office Workers union and took over many of the locals of the Food and Tobacco Workers and the United Office and Professional Workers when those unions collapsed. This, plus the continuing pursuit, as far as Phoenix and Los Angeles and Kansas City, of runaway shops from New York, succeeded in transforming what had been a New York local union into District 65, with shops scattered throughout the country.

Robinson is fiercely proud of his union and, conversely, contemptuous of unions which haven’t done as much for the underprivileged. With 25,000 out of the new Distributive Workers’ total of 40,000 members, District 65 naturally provided the impetus and leadership for the breakaway, and it was partly to take the focus away from New York that the founding convention was held in the hall of Local 26 of Suffolk. District 65 has some 10,000 black members in its 25,000, while some 70 per cent of the 15,000 members in the 10 locals which joined it in disaffiliating from the RWDSU and the AFL-CIO are black. The members, black and white, remain largely the economically disenfranchised. District 65’s big drive right now seems modest enough: its hiring hall is refusing to send workers out to jobs in which the minimum pay is less than $100 a week. Its headquarters remind one as much of the Rev. Leon Sullivan’s self-help school in Philadelphia as they do of a union headquarters: there is a co-op drugstore, for instance, a dental clinic, classrooms for the teaching of language and arithmetic skills and, for the Puerto Rican members, English itself. Beyond that, there is instruction in community action, how to get improved bus service and police protection and so on.

The new union didn’t begin, naturally, without considerable preparation, all of it directed by District 65. Before they arrived in Suffolk the delegates were assured of a loan of $120,000 from the United Auto Workers to help them get started and of organizing help from both the Auto Workers and the Teamsters.

“If any of the unorganized workers in the country ask for our help,” Robinson said, “we are going to help them. We are going to become the vehicle through which they cross the barrier to dignity and full citizenship in this country. We are going to organize the Mexican-Americans, the black Americans, the poor whites and the American Indians. We extend our hand and our strength to those who have seen the door of opportunity slammed in their faces.” The union is working on plans for organizing campaigns in 50 cities, in cooperation with the Alliance for Labor Action, a new group headed by the Teamsters, who were thrown out of the AFL-CIO, and the Auto Workers, who quit.

The sort of blanket jurisdiction to organize anyone who is unorganized, primarily the poor and disenfranchised, which the union has arrogated to itself is the reason for its new name, the Distributive Workers, a name broad enough to cover anyone this side of the American Medical Association and necessary, too: already the union has such disparate groups as loggers in Virginia, clothing workers in North Carolina and sanitation workers in South Carolina under its aegis, as well as the people who pack the peanuts for your cocktail party and the people who make the buttons for your dresses. It is, then, neither a craft union in the tradition of the old AFL nor an industrial union in the tradition of the old CIO, but a union willing to be all-encompassing in its style.

In his New York office seven floors above Astor Place at the northern edge of the Lower East Side—where the Bowery begins and just across the street from Cooper Union, the ancient school where Abraham Lincoln made the speech which started him on the path to the presidency, Robinson spoke one day recently of himself and his union.

“Generally, in the labor movement, they say they’d really like to have blacks and Puerto Ricans in positions of leadership but that they’ve got no one qualified for the job. And it’s even worse in industry. In other unions they once in a while give Negroes a title but it’s only window dressing and they never see that they do a job. Now, when I was first with District 65 I was placed in charge of 10 or 15 organizers and every one of them knew more about organizing than I did. If they’d have waited for me to have the experience I’d never have made it. It was the same when they made me secretary-treasurer. I was treasurer in name only after I was elected, but I worked in every department—as a bookkeeper, as a teller in the credit union—even if I was the secretary-treasurer, to make myself qualified. What I’m trying to say is that you can take a raw, dedicated guy and train him for the job if you really want to, and that’s what has to be done. You can’t wait for a person to be qualified because he never will be if he doesn’t get the chance and the responsibility.”

Robinson by now is quite comfortable with responsibility. Among his many other jobs, he is a founding member and currently is president of the Negro American Labor Council, an organization of unionists dedicated to the elimination of racial bias in the labor movement and in industry. “The only black in the highest councils of the AFL-CIO,” he says, “is A. Philip Randolph. In 1959 he documented the racist character of the labor movement and called for action. And George Meany asked: ‘Who appointed Randolph spokesman for Negroes and the labor movement?’ Well, we showed him.” Negro labor leaders formed the NALC, elected Randolph president and Robinson vice-president and by 1962 were threatening to picket the AFL-CIO convention unless someone paid attention to them. Meany agreed to meet with 18 of the blacks—six of them from District 65—before the convention.

“The night before the meeting,” Robinson remembers, “there were some who felt we should be docile and polite and they called their own meeting. I learned of it and went and read the riot act and the next day, instead of being polite, we presented a list of angry demands. Meany was totally unprepared. He said of Randolph: ‘I don’t know what’s happened to the old man lately. He seems to be getting senile.’ [Meany himself is in his 80s.] We told him off. We pointed out the irrelevance of the labor movement to the oppressed workers. Instead of helping them, the unions and employers, especially in the craft unions, are in a conspiracy to keep the blacks out.” (Meany advanced to his present position from New York’s Local 2 of the plumbers union which, two years after the confrontation with the NALC, struck the Bronx Terminal Market construction when an employer tried to comply with the state’s fair employment practices law by hiring a Negro and three Puerto Ricans who were not union members. The union later said it was not segregated: it had 16 Negroes among its 4,100 members. What was heralded as a concentrated drive to recruit minority group members ended a year later with four Negroes added to the membership, raising the proportion of Negroes to something less than 0.5 per cent).

“We told Meany he must change or the blacks would find a new home,” Robinson says. That was the first time Robinson used his analogy about the house of labor. “Meany made some concessions and wound up saying he had misunderstood and at the next convention of the NALC he was the guest speaker. But nothing meaningful resulted from it all. Meany would make speeches and use the proper terms but they just weren’t relevant, not in the building trades in particular. Over a period of a year and a half the best they could show was an increase of one or one-and-a-half per cent in the number of blacks.”

It was this agitation within the ranks of labor that was the genesis, a little-known footnote to history, of the March on Washington. The NALC convention in the Fall of 1962 projected a march on Washington for jobs and freedom for the late Summer or Fall of 1963, preferably Labor Day, with the emphasis heavily on the demand for jobs for Negroes and an end to industry and union bias. Then the Spring of 1963 saw an outbreak of civil rights activities and the accompanying violence, the freedom rides, the spectacle of Bull Connor’s police dogs in Birmingham and all the rest. In late Spring, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called on Robinson and Randolph and asked them to move the date of the march up to August and to expand the aims of the march to put pressure on Congress to pass the pending civil rights legislation which became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The relationship between King and District 65 was neither sudden nor casual. It dated back to the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, when King first became a national figure. District 65 had contributed heavily to the boycott—not from union funds but from gifts solicited from the membership—and through the years had given as much to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference as all the rest of organized labor together. King attended every District 65 convention from the days of the bus boycott and announced to a Chicago meeting of labor leaders a few months before his murder that he, too, was a union man, “ever since Cleve Robinson and Dave Livingston made me an honorary member of District 65, about 10 years ago.” The union’s contracts now call for a holiday on Dr. King’s birthday. Speaking at one of the conventions, King once said:

“As against the many massive international unions you are small, but only in one dimension. A deep look into your quality shows that you are like a diamond in a massive vein of coal. You have brought your fighting tradition into the present, and wherever there is a battle of decency you have made yourself a part of it. There may be bigger unions, but none with a larger heart and conscience. In a day when all too many unions have lost their vibrant identity of the ’30s, District 65 is a refreshing ray of hope. Indeed, you are the conscience of the labor movement. When the day comes that your example is the theme of all in the labor movement, the dream of brotherhood of men will begin to live in the world around us.”

After the appeal from Dr. King, the NALC leaders talked with other civil rights leaders and by June word of the March was out. “Whereupon,” Robinson remembers, “the pressures began to grow in Washington to forestall the march. All the top civil rights leaders were called into the White House and asked to call it off on the grounds that it would be uncontrolled and that there would be violence. But we went ahead, the NALC and Jim Farmer from CORE and the SNCC people. Early in June we hired Bayard Rustin, four weeks before the announcement of the March, and for those four weeks he was paid out of District 65 funds while he planned the March.

Robinson, by now an accomplished treasurer, took care of the money and shocked everyone by announcing after the March was over—as they waited anxiously to learn how much more than the $150,000 which was raised had been spent and how much more they would have to cough up—that there was a balance of $16,000. Part of the balance could be attributed to Robinson’s refusal to pay a bill from the City of Washington for $6,700 for portable latrines. “I was going to pay it,” he recalls, “when someone pointed out to me that American Legion parades and such were never billed for latrines, so I said, ‘The hell with it.’” Robinson took personal charge of the balance and used it up in contributions to other civil rights activities such as the New York City school boycott and the Poor Peoples’ March on Washington. When Randolph retired as president of NALC in 1966, Robinson was elected in his place.

His final defection from the AFL-CIO is explained by Robinson with a certain sadness. “There are grave contradictions in our nation,” he says. “It is the richest country in the world but there are millions who work a full day and live in abject poverty, grossly exploited, and you can add to them the millions who are simply barred from their rightful place in society. The government’s response is to talk about the war on poverty but in large measure that’s a farce. It cannot address itself to the real problems. The only real war on poverty takes place when those who are exploited have organized themselves and achieved power on the basis of the collective bargaining of their wages and working conditions and have determined as an organized group what course they will pursue.”

“The AFL-CIO is not relevant to these basic issues. By and large, the masses of Puerto Ricans, blacks and whites have grave distrust for the AFL-CIO despite the fact that they know organization is their only hope. They distrust it because they don’t see themselves reflected at all, even in those unions where the majority is black or Puerto Rican. What we have done in the Distributive Workers is to take cognizance of that and to share the power in a real sense. We’re determined to use our dues money to help the poorest, those the other unions have disregarded, to organize and control their own unions and to become masters of their own destiny. This is a multi-racial organization in which all will share power, in which our aims and aspirations are to organize the poor, not those who already are in the middle class. The Poor Peoples’ Union would be a good alternative name. There are millions of such people, unskilled mostly, doing tasks which in most instances are of the greatest importance in terms of community welfare, subsidizing a rich, affluent society with their blood and sweat.”

“I say the only thing that makes a job menial is the wages. People need wages that make them proud and for good wages they are good jobs: for menial wages they are menial jobs. The jobs we’re talking about go directly to the health and welfare of a community, distributing food or collecting garbage, for instance. If the doctors in a community go on strike for a week, few people would suffer, but let sanitation men strike or the food processors and distributors, and the community would collapse.”

Tuesday Magazine (March, 1970):6, 7, 20, 21, 24.

10. NALC DELEGATES WARN AGAINST REDBAITERS

By J. J. Johnson

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

Daily World, November 18, 1972.

11. NALC CONVENTION URGES POLITICAL ACTION

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

Daily World, November 21, 1972.

COALITION OF BLACK TRADE UNIONISTS

12. CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS, COALITION OF BLACK TRADE UNIONISTS

Chicago September 23–24, 1972

OPENING SESSION SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1972

MR. HAYES:

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please clear the aisles and take your seats. We are ready to proceed with the first annual Conference of Black Trade Unionists. Please clear the aisles. Will the Sargeant-at-Arms please clear the aisles.⁹⁷

(PAUSE)

This is a very historic occasion. Assembled here today is one of the single largest gatherings of black trade unionists in the history of the American Labor movement.

MR. HAYES:

Before we proceed further let me call on someone who is a civil rights activist and certainly a friend of the Trade Union movement, one with whom I served as an Executive Board Member of Operation PUSH nationally, and who is pastor of Monumental Baptist Church here in Chicago. I give to you The Reverend D. E. King for the invocation.⁹⁸

Reverend King.

(The audience rose for the invocation).

THE REVEREND MR. KING:

Thou Who hast made us in Thy image and after Thy likeness, O God, we come acknowledging Thee and all Thy ways, for Thy ways are right and altogether holy.

We come to acknowledge Thee in all our ways, for our ways are not always right, nor are they always holy, but in whatever way we find ourselves, we acknowledge Thee, for we know that we were not made by blind chance or by unthinking dust, but we were made after Thy Supreme Intelligence.

As we come, we pray that Thy wouldst forgive us for not making of ourselves all that we should be, for not making our respective communities all that they should be, for not making of this nation and of this world what they should be.

Forgive us for not pressing our claim to the highest and best in humanity and as trustees of Thy creation. We thank Thee for these Union leaders and members from the various states, and we pray for them as they assemble here for their convention.

We especially pray that they might be sensitive to the unnamed and unappreciated masses who merely exist trying to live, working for others who live by the sweat of their brows.

We pray that they may be sensitive to the unexpressed emotions and to the inaudible sentiments, and we also pray, O God, that Thou wouldst help these leaders and these members of this Union to speak for people who cannot speak for themselves, and to act for people who are unable to act for themselves.

May all of us, whether we are of religious persuasion, or civic, or political, help us to unite in one common bond of leadership to give leadership to those who need us.

We pray Thy blessings upon the President, upon his corps of officers and workers. We pray Thy blessings upon the homes of those who have come to Chicago. Bless their families, and bless their labors back home, and may Thy peace and love abide with us throughout this meeting, and we will give Thee the praise and the glory and the honor due Thy name.

We will be trustees of Thy creation and of the work that hast been assigned to our hands. In the name of Jesus Christ who came to save the masses and to make us free, we pray. Amen.

MR. HAYES:

On your behalf I want to say to Reverend King that we are appreciative of his taking time out from his busy schedule to give us those words of wisdom and to express words of blessing over our conference here.

We would like to extend to him a welcome opportunity, if his schedule will permit, to spend as much time during our deliberations at our conference as he so desires.

Now, to those of you who don’t know me, I am Charles Hayes, Vice President of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America; one of the convenors of this conference; one who has the honor and privilege of making a few remarks in the opening of this historical conference and extending to you some words of welcome, those of you who are from out of town.

Let me say at the outset, personally, I want to thank each and every one of you for being here. You don’t know what it might mean in terms of results your coming here to this kind of conference.

We have people here from every corner of this United States—North, South, East and West,—who are Trade Unionists, who have responded to our call to be here today and tomorrow.

What you have done here has superseded anything that I ever dreamed that we had any right to expect.

(Applause)

Some of you have come here with great sacrifice. Some of you here didn’t come with the umbrella or the blessings of your own organization. You have done so on your own, because you recognize the need to get together and have some dialogue on some of the problems that are of deep concern to black people who are in the Trade Union movement.

We also have among our midst some white Union leaders who feel the same as many of us do when it comes to recognizing the kind of problems that need immediate attention on the part of the members and leaders of the Trade Union movement.

Most of us realize and want to say it in a most profound way that the leadership of the AFL-CIO certainly did not reflect our views when they came out with a position of neutrality in this year’s Presidential Election.

(Applause)

There are many white Trade Unionists who share that view. Many of us realize, too, that we have to begin to give some profound thought to some kind of an ongoing structure that stretches beyond the November elections and reaches out into the bowels of the Trade Union movement to give some guidance and sense of direction in helping us to overcome some of the shackles that are around our ankles within the movement.

We are deeply concerned about the failure of many unions to recognize the need for the elevation of blacks and other minorities into policy-making positions and we intend to try to change this. It is only through organization that we can hope to do it.

(Applause)

Let me hasten to say that I am not suggesting or telling you that it is the purpose of this conference to form and leave here with a structure designed to compete with existing Trade Unions.

We intend to organize and work within the effectuate certain reforms, just like the Democratic Party did in Miami Beach.

(Applause)

During our two days here we are going to be quite hard at work in workshops, panels, and we have tried to select people who will be able to impart to others some of the knowledge and expertise that they have on the given subject matter.

We certainly aren’t going to discourage full participation on the part of the people who are here in the discussions. However, let me caution you that we will not be able to permit monopolization of discussion on the part of any one or two individuals.

(Applause)

I know that many of us are orators in our own rights (Laughter) and have one weakness. The only thing we need is an audience, and when get it we are hesitant about turning it loose. (Laughter)

Well, we don’t intend to, but we haven’t provided you with a forum for you to turn loose the whole ball of wax on people. Express yourselves as concisely as possible, as briefly as possible, and understand that we will not be able to conclude a conference here that will please everybody, or satisfy every whim or wish, or every idea.

Whatever decisions we finally arrive at will, in our opinion, be decisions which will be couched against a backdrop of what is best for the whole. This is the only way we can look at it—not individually as such.

We are pleased to have with us this afternoon a representative of Congress who is a member of the Black Legislative Caucus, and even before he went to Congress he stood on the side of organized labor, and more recently, has been making his voice certainly heard in the civil rights arena, particularly in the area of brutality of police against citizens here in the City of Chicago.

He has gotten out of favor, to some extent, with the Establishment because of his positions, but this is in recognition that his first allegiance is to his constituency, the majority of whom are black like us.

(Applause)

So it is with a feeling of great honor and pleasure that I give to you now a friend of mine, a leader in the political arena, Congressman Ralph Metcalf.⁹⁹

(Applause)

CONGRESSMAN METCALF:

Thank you very much, Charlie Hayes, for that very splendid and very elaborate introduction.

To the members, the convenors of the Black Trade Unionists, in addition to Charlie Hayes who very modestly omitted telling you that he is the Chairman of the Labor Committee of the First Congressional District of the State of Illinois, which I am proud to represent.

(Applause)

Also, he is an advisor on labor matters; a very distinguished and dynamic Bill Lucy, Mr. Jack Edwards, Mr. Cleve Robinson, and Mr. Bill Simmons, all convenors. I would like for you to know that I am right-handed, and I want to now give recognition to my right arm. That is Mrs. Addie Wyatt, Addie, will you stand.

(Applause)

Platform dignitaries, delegates, my brothers and sisters in the labor movement, my brothers and sisters of the Black Trade Unionists, I am most appreciative of the invitation to come and address you this afternoon.

But, Charlie, if you had only said, “Ralph, would you stick your head in the door and just see this outpouring of dedicated Black Trade Unionists,” my afternoon and my day would have been complete without me having said a word.

(Applause)

This is indeed an inspiration to me, and we all need to inspire others, because the tasks before us today and tomorrow are monumental. I compliment you on your concern about the oncoming election, your desire to have a massive registration. And I hope that massive registration is being thought of in terms of 100 percent.

I am where I am because I am a team member. I listen to my advisors, and then I am frank with those that I talk with, and I am going to be frank with you.

Sometimes we want to pat our chests and take a great deal of pride before we are really entitled to it, and, therefore, we dilute our real effort in the goal that we are seeking—which is to bring about meaningful changes in the Trade Union movement, to eliminate discrimination, and to make all of us free.

What we really need to face up to is the fact that you and I have not been successful in encouraging and urging the vast majority of our people to register and vote.

Let me tell you what the Establishment thinks—I am no longer of the Establishment—Charlie and Addie Wyatt have made me free.

(Applause)

They look upon us as just a minority, a minority who casts fewer votes than any other ethnic group. And if you want to prolong the struggle that we are confronted with, then keep our voting record down to the level that it has been.

But if you want to really have recognition and then move in the right direction, then it will be the numbers that count, for there are those who work on strategy—and President Nixon is one—who say that the blacks don’t come out and vote in sufficient numbers to warrant his really programming for us.

This, to me, is one of the challenges that I think all of us must accept. Certainly, you are to be complimented as Black Trade Unionists for working toward the goal of bringing the vast number of minority group members who are presently excluded from participation into the economic life of our country, into areas where they have, and are still being excluded.

You are to be complimented for working toward the cessation of inequities that bring about the discrepancies in the hiring of our people, and thus we have the unfortunate statistic of being more unemployed than the national average.

I say to the Black Trade Unionists that while you have come a long, long way—for I remember when you emerged, Charlie, out of Operation Breadbasket¹⁰⁰—to a very viable and a dynamic force. You are today only at the crossroads.

There is a new black man, and there is a new black woman, and there is a new white person who thinks as we do, and we have new and truly great black leaders, which is terribly important.

I read an article in the paper recently where some of the white fathers discouraged some of the black brothers and sisters from attending this convention. I would want them to come here today, see who is here, see the prestigious group that is here, see what we are talking about, and let them catch up with the changing times.

(Applause)

For we are emerging from that state. I don’t see a handkerchief on anybody’s head here today.

(Applause)

I see men and women, and they only reflect strength and determination, and that is the way we are going to achieve it. We want to send the word out that we are capable of making decisions, of selecting our own leaders, and participating at the decision-making level.

(Applause)

I raise the question, and I haven’t had a chance to talk with my labor advisor, but I want to know how many black people were involved in the decision-making when George Meany decided that AFL-CIO will be neutral.

(Applause)

Well, this is our answer to him. No longer—no longer are we content to be taken for granted. No longer are you to tell us what to do, but you are to discuss with us, and we will make our own agreements.

(Applause)

I have said over a period of time that every election is different. It is different because you have different candidates. You have different issues, and the times are different.

But this is a unique election like I’ve never seen before. There is this idea of neutrality that they are trying to encourage us to witness. They don’t tell you that those who are going to vote for President Richard Milhous Nixon—the suburbanites, the upstaters, the downstaters—will be coming out for the minority party while we stay home.

I must refresh those of you in the State of Illinois with what happened a few years ago, and I think that history is good to let us know where we have been, but to prepare us for today and tomorrow.

We had a great liberal in the United States Senate. His name was Paul Douglas, a proven liberal. He had the nerve, the audacity, to be democratic and to bring about change. He had the nerve and audacity to appoint a black man, Henry Magee, as the Postmaster of the world’s largest post office, here in Chicago, and that position had heretofore been awarded to a white German-American.¹⁰¹

And they resented it. So, when election time came, a little rain fell, and our people just didn’t bother to come out and vote.

(Applause)

At that time I was the Chairman of the City Council’s Building and Zoning Committee. I inherited and welcomed the support of my administrative assistant, who was Polish, and who was also at that time a ward committeeman.

He related to me what happened, that as he would go into the black precincts, the judges would be sitting there twiddling their thumbs with no one to vote. He went into the Lithuanian precincts and into the Polish precincts, and he found them standing out in line with raincaps on waiting to get in and vote against this liberal, Paul Douglas.

Now, what does that say to us?

We want to make sure that we know where our raincaps are on November the 7th.

(Applause)

And we want to remember that if we are to have more friends who are liberal—be they black or white—then we have got to come out and reward them for what they have done for us.

So, our problem is that of indifference. Black youth are not sufficiently motivated, and this world is theirs, after we prepare them for it, and they ought to be exercising the right to vote.

I was one of those who fought for that right to vote, but we have not motivated them. Rather, we stay in the area of “The party ain’t no good,” or “The white man ain’t no good,” you know, instead of saying we are going to bring about changes.

So, we get right back into this old thing called neutrality, call it apathy or indifference, and Dante said in his Inferno, “The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintained neutrality.”

And that is our position. (Applause)

We are confronted with the problem of being neutral, or of being active. I’ve seen a lot of pieces of literature, but let me tell you that while I was waiting for you to convene I had a chance to read this.

I ask you—I beg you—not to read it as a piece of literature, but rather to read it as information that you can take with you and that can motivate you, and you, in turn, can motivate others to do the job. I endorse every word in this particular piece of literature, including that part that says we can’t depend upon the Democratic Party machine bosses to defeat Nixon. We’ve got to do it ourselves.

(Applause)

You know, you are going to hear me making some strange sounds soon at the proper time about a certain candidate that is running for a high County office which I am very much opposed to and will try to do everything that I can to bring about this defeat.

He happens to be a Democrat, but he “ain’t in my corner” and he “ain’t in your corner,” and therefore, we are going to work against him.

(Applause)

I think what we’ve got to recognize is that if President Nixon, whom everybody in Washington says is the biggest politician ever to sit in the White House, is allowed four more years, he will ruin us. He will absolutely set us back.

I am not a great historian, but I do know what happened during Reconstruction days. There are those of you who think that we in the Congressional Black Caucus are doing a marvelous thing. We have thirteen members—a mere pittance of what we ought to have. That is not even as much as we had during Reconstruction days.

We have only one black United States Senator. We had two at that particular time. So we are still really playing catchup, and when you see what he—President Nixon—has done in stacking the Supreme Court with strict constructionists—you know what that means? “Racist.”

(Applause)

And I know of no President who has not during his four years in office had a chance to name at least one or two more members to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court makes the law of our land. Let us quickly review.

There are some of us who believe that we started our ascendancy up when the Supreme Court ruled that there should be no discrimination in education, but I submit to you that there was a momentous decision that was passed down before that.

That decision was that racially restrictive covenants shall not be enforceable in the courts of law, which means that we, by Constitutional rights, have a right to move and have our being and live wherever we can afford and have a desire to live.

Then, of course, came the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and look today at the number of black elected officials that we have. Over two thousand of them spread out throughout the width and breadth of the United States, and it is still but a pittance of our percentage of the population.

So, we cannot afford four more years of Richard Milhous Nixon, and we cannot look forward to eight years of dominance and catering to special interests and disregarding the labor man, the black man, the minorities, the liberals, those who want to move ahead.

Already as you have seen, as I did, viewing the Republican National Convention, that they cut down those handful of liberals who wanted to follow the Democratic Party program of opening up the party to women equal to their population, to minorities equal to their population, to youth equal to their population.

If we don’t give our youth a chance to participate in the early years, they won’t be prepared to do it when they get into adult life.

At the Republican Convention they set the stage for Spiro Agnew to be the Republican nominee four years from now. Mrs. Pat Nixon said already that he was her candidate for the Presidency in 1976, and you know she wouldn’t be talking unless she had conferred with Richard. (Laughter)

You talk about credibility, and this is something that all of us have to be really on our toes and wide awake about, that we really look at the word “credibility,” where the Republicans are trying to show that our very champion of democracy, our champion of the rights of all people, Senator George McGovern, lacks credibility.

I say, to the contrary, he is a man of great courage and determination, and he has taken some very calculated risks for the principles that he believes in.

(Applause)

Contrast that, if you will, with the statement that was made by General Dwight David Eisenhower—and he got away with it—when he said just some few weeks before he ran for election, that if elected, “I will go to Korea.”

He was elected. He did go. But I ask you what the hell did he accomplish?

But the American people were moved by that, and four years ago the American people were moved when Richard Nixon said, “I have a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.”

Well, he didn’t say when, and it is still a secret, and we are still spending $24 million an hour to keep up the escalated war in Indo-China, when that money ought to be spent domestically.

I have voted against all of these military appropriations.

(Applause)

I think that money ought to be spent domestically. Then, when we see the expose of the alliance between the Republican Party and the donations given by ITT, it was so hot they had to leave San Diego and move to Miami to let it cool off.

We see the President still favoring the favored few by tipping off the world market in wheat in Russia and, therefore, they made a killing on that. And they talk about “credibility.”

Here we catch red-handed members high in the Republican Party coming into the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington and bugging it. Where can we have any sense of security, any sense of privacy?

They stop and search and frisk us, a typical example of the fears that we have today, and we have a Governor here who said, when he was campaigning, “I will not raise the taxes.”

As those of us in Illinois know, the first thing that he did, the first year, was to raise the taxes and insult the intelligence of the electorate by thinking that if he did it right away, they would forget it three years from now, which will be 1972, but we haven’t forgotten it.

So, we must recognize that we have to reorder our priorities, and we have to be looking at labor as it truly is in the present situation and devoting our time to education, to housing, to a reduction of crime.

But who is going to do that? It is going to have to be you, the labor leaders, the leaders of our community, the ones that we depend upon to lead us and bring us victory.

Don’t be caught up with this negativism about polls. We remember what happened when they said that Truman couldn’t win. And I tell you this, that he did win by one vote per precinct in the United States.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy won by less than one vote per precinct. And we can be the difference. I don’t ask for us to be the difference between his winning or losing. I ask that we be a part of the main body to pile up the votes so that we can have a victory not only for George McGovern, not only for Sarge Shriver, not only for liberal members of the Congress, but for liberality in itself.¹⁰²

Then, and only then, can we have aspirations of truly being free.

(Applause)

MR. HAYES:

Thank you, Ralph, for giving us those inspiring and informative remarks.

At this time I have an important announcement to make.

There are some people who have taken the liberty to park their automobiles outside of the hotel and proceeded to become participants in this conference. I may already be late, because I forgot to tell you when we first started that the hotel has held them off as long as they can.

The first procedure when you park in a no-parking zone in the downtown areas of Chicago is to place a ticket on your car. And if that doesn’t move you quickly, the tow truck will be along and move it for you.

Then you will have to pay the cost of the ticket, plus the expense of towing and storage when you retrieve your car.

Now, let me make a few introductions. To my extreme left is the International Vice President of the Textile Workers Union, Brother Ed Todd.¹⁰³

(Applause)

I want to introduce—you have heard from Congressman Metcalf. The next person will be introduced by someone else. This young lady here is Mrs. Gwen Hemphill, the secretary to Brother Bill Lucy. I just can’t help but introduce her.

(Applause)

On the extreme right is a representative of the United Steelworkers Union, Brother John Thornton. Would you stand, please.

(Applause)

Next, sitting to him, to his left, is Brother Tom Turner who heads the Wayne County AFL-CIO Council, and is also a member of the Steelworkers Union. Brother Turner.

(Applause)

I see we’ve got some Steelworkers out in the audience. I notice the manner in which they leap up.

Next to Brother Turner is the Director of the State, County and Municipal Workers here locally, Brother Neil Bratcher.

(Applause)

The norm would have been to have you hold your applause until the end, but I thought it was just unfair not to permit some of you to let your steam off. (Laughter)

Next is a leader of the United Automobile Workers Union, Sister Lillian Hatcher.

(Applause)

Next to her, to her left, is a Vice President of the Distributive Workers Union who operates not only out of New York but all over, particularly in the South, Brother Cleveland Robinson.

(Applause)

Now it is my great pleasure to introduce to you your Conference Chairman, who is one of the convenors of this conference and certainly is well represented here by members of his organization.

He recognizes full well what unity of purpose means. His International Union has for many, many years exemplified by action what the struggle for human and economic rights means for working people.

This dynamic leader of the Trade Union movement, while he concerns himself with the problems of collective bargaining, certainly finds ample time to participate in the political struggles and the social struggles which take place not only within the Trade Union movement but within the communities in which we live.

He is a big leader in more ways than one, not just physically, but in terms of his sphere of operations. So it gives me a great deal of pleasure to present to the conference your Permanent Chairman, International Vice President of the United Automobile Workers Union, Nelson Jack Edwards.¹⁰⁴

(Sustained applause)

CHAIRMAN EDWARDS:

For those very kind remarks, I recognize Charlie’s remarks as being the high point of the day, so far as I am concerned. If I would now take my seat and you believed all that Charlie said about me, my day would be a great day.

But Charlie didn’t use a piece of equipment that I think is very, very great, because Bill Lucy decided that the old gavel that he chairs AFSCME meetings with, or the gavels that we have chaired many of our Local Union meetings with, was not sufficient for a new beginning, and he went out and bought a new gavel.

(Applause)

This gavel—this gavel someday generations down the road I hope, will be in a museum, and the youngsters of our posterity will understand why we bought it and what it achieved.

(Applause)

Now we have had several meetings, obviously, to get this kind of outpouring, and we thought we had overshot our field when we said that we would go for a goal of one thousand Trade Unionists from across the length and breadth of this country, that was in total disagreement with Mr. Meany’s neutrality.

At this point we said this, many of us thought that if we have a session and only have five hundred people there, it’s going to look bad for us. It will signify the fact that maybe we are disturbed and our colleagues are not.

Well, I want to report to you that we have already registered 950 delegates to this conference and we are still registering.

(Applause)

I am sure that before the day is over the figure of one thousand will be down the drain, because it could very well go down the drain with my next statement.

Over in the Century Room is a room that we were able to secure for guests. We had expected to have space in this hall to house non-delegate members to this conference.

You need not take my word. Just look around. There is no space for one guest. We are going to be cramped for space for delegates. But over in the Century Room is a group of guests that came here to be with us in this conference, and I am going to predict that there are fifty or more over there, so the one thousand figure has been achieved already.

(Applause)

Now we come together here today voluntarily. No one twisted your arm to come. No one twisted our arms to call you to come. We decided in Miami—Bill Lucy and I and Charlie Hayes and others—always keeping in mind the Old Pro, Cleveland Robinson, that somewhere along the way labor representatives must rise to the point of demanding respect and recognition.

Now, in Miami that was a big convention. The track was fast, and everyone was doing his thing there, and no one thought about you or the representatives you sent there. You had more lawyers speaking for labor people than ever before. You had the clergy there telling what was good for all of you, and we never got a chance to say a word.

We had technical, professional people there saying what was good for you that never associate with you, never know a thing about your hopes and aspirations, but they spoke for you.

We decided that it was about high time that the labor movement stand on its feet and say that there is a section of the labor movement that was ignored—the black section—that the next Democratic convention, we will go into that convention united and we will demand respect and no one will take it away from us.

(Applause)

Now, Chicago is a great city, for many, many reasons. But Chicago is a symbolic city if you look at the purpose for which we came here. In 1890, a conference was held in this city, and the delegate attendance was 145 delegates.

The delegates came into this city and formed the Afro-American League of the United States. And the purpose that brought them here is the same purpose that brings us here today.

I will read to you, quoting from the stencil history of that conference:

“They gathered themselves for the purpose to protect against unfair taxation, to secure a more equitable distribution of school funds, to insist upon a fair and impartial trial by a judge and jury, to resist by all legal and reasonable means mob and lynch law, and to insist upon the arrest and punishment of all such offenders against their legal rights.”

Now, you can say, if you will, that you are from a certain section of the country, and that while lynch mobs and that sort of thing is passe, is no longer with us, that if you are from Michigan, you can say that. If you are from New York, you can say that. If you are from Ohio, you may say that.

But I can tell you that I am a seed from Alabama, and I wouldn’t want to write that off at this conference. We had better prepare to fight against it coming upon us again, because it has not disappeared from the American scene.

A growing mentality in this country suggests that in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi—where my good friend Charles Evers can’t see the difference between the two candidates—I don’t know what’s blurring his eyesight.

I see very clearly the difference between the two.

(Applause)

One is against us and the other is for us. But let’s be candid about the whole subject. We have never had in the history of this country, to my knowledge, and I have read about evil men in the White House to a degree, but we have never had a man in the White House that fanned the flames of hate and racism against us.

When Tilden and Hayes made the great compromise in 1886, President Tilden didn’t do a thing for us. The deal had done enough against us, and he went on through four years of doing nothing except what he was told.

And you can read into your history, looking for the guy in the White House that said no blacks ought to be housed in the suburbs because it’s not good for the nation. Blacks ought not to have integrated schools, after the Supreme Court says separate but equal means inherently unequal, and he says no, we ought not integrate our schools.

The Congress prepares a bill to deal with unemployment, and he says, “I can’t sign that bill, although it is passed by the Congress. It is inflationary.”

You send a kid to school that is out of a home that is a welfare home, and he has built the welfare rolls higher than they have ever been in the history of this country, but he vetoed the bill to give them milk and food in the classroom.

If you can’t see the difference between that man and Mr. McGovern, I suggest that we ought to all go home and die early so our posterity can bury us.

(Applause)

Now it is fairly obvious that when things are bad in this country, it is always worse for us. We are never on the same plateau no matter how bad things are. But even when things are good in this country, they are not good for us in many cases.

And the unemployment figures that run through the fabric of this country suggest that Mr. Nixon is really wrestling with bringing down unemployment. 5.6 percent of the population that is in the work force is unemployed, but that tells you nothing about what we have in our section because we help to magnify that 5.6 percent, but if you pull us out of that, it becomes 5.1 percent.

And if you look at what happens to us if you separate us from that figure, it then becomes 9.7 percent nationally, and if you bring in our younger people, it goes up to 25 percent.

I can tell you that I worked for a living for a long time in a lot of places, and nothing is more wrecking and discouraging to young people that are looking for jobs and praying that some employment manager will hire them than to have them constantly turned away and told there is no need for your services.

Think of the demeaning value in that alone, and that ought to be enough to make anyone wake up and speak out in behalf of his children. Never mind what’s happening to me that’s good. I have children and I know what’s happening to them in many cases, and you have children, too.

So what we must do here today and tomorrow is to find out how we can collectively bring about a cohesive movement that will say to all concerned, “Don’t take us for granted. We are not automatic. And if you think we have no place to go, we will give you desolation and you won’t have any place to go because you’re not going to use us as a rung.”

Now, finally, I am going to give you what the Congress can talk about, and then I’m going to go on with the program.

Thurgood Marshall, one of the greatest jurists, I think, this nation has ever known, was speaking in Washington at a White House Conference in 1966, and he had this to say about the law.

Before I give you the quote, I think you ought to understand that we have only two areas that are available to us to make progress in behalf of ourselves and our families in the political-judicial area.

If we fail in politics, it is almost obvious that we’re going to fail in the courts, and especially when a court is stacked against us, such as the Supreme Court is now stacked against us.

So Thurgood has this to say. He said, “Some lessons for the future is the history of the struggle for Negro rights.”

Marshall went on to say, “What is striking to me is the importance of the law in determining the condition of the Negro.” “He was effectively enslaved not by brute force, but by a law which declared him a chattel of his master, who was given legal rights to recapture him even in free territory.”

Now if you think the law doesn’t bear upon us, you kid yourself. We can’t win in that area yet, but I’ll tell you where we can win, where we can make progress, and that is in politics, and that is why we are here.

We all have received great equity from collective bargaining, or otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You are leaders and activists in that area, and if we do what this conference was designed to do, and that is have every one of you become a missionary of good will, because our communications system basically differs from this updated, elite system that TV pawns are trampling around and picking up guys. They are not going to pick us up here.

They care less about us, because we are against Mr. Nixon. If this was a black conference in behalf of Mr. Nixon, you would have TV strewn all across these aisles.

(Applause)

What we must do—what we must do is go back home and never mind the tom-tom drums. We have other ways of doing it now. We sold those, got rid of them. They were not effective enough.

We must go back home as missionaries from this conference and decree that no matter what happens on November 7th, we shall not cease our efforts, and what will happen, I think, on November 7th can greatly be determined here today and tomorrow in this conference.

(Applause)

Now, it is my job to move this program, but I just had to say something. I am going to bring to you now a young man that I have a great deal of respect for. All working class, no matter what their color have a great deal of respect for him.

No matter where you hear the name, if men and women have heard of work that he has done, they say, “Oh, he is great. I’d love to meet him.”

Well, many of you here today will meet for the first time this great labor leader, the Secretary-Treasurer of AFSCME, Mr. William Lucy.

(Sustained applause)

MR. LUCY:

Certainly one of the great labor leaders of our time is Nelson Jack Edwards, and I am pleased, first of all, just to be introduced by him, and secondly, to hear the very kind things that he said.

I see Charlie Hayes up here. You know, Charlie almost had the shakes here a little bit ago, because Charlie started talking about what the Lord said do.

I am supposed to tell you why we are here and how we hope to move this movement from the arena of discussion into the front lines of action. We want to talk about what is important to us and maybe contrast that to what has been happening to us.

Like the Congressman, like Charlie, and like Jack, it is awful hard to look out upon this crowd without really just taking a swing at the present incumbent in the White House, because, you see, this crowd is what really raises the questions in your mind as to which way can he be thinking.

Now, we are Black Trade Unionists, and I think—and I hope you agree with me—that it happens to be a worthy combination, worthy of respect, and certainly worthy of admiration, and worthy in the same sense as one would call himself a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer.

We have a profession, and we ought to be doing it. We’ve got to get about doing our work. I just want to add to the voices who have already said it, and I don’t want to review the record too much, but I see no way that Black Trade Unionists, black workers, black people, poor people, can support the candidacy of Richard Nixon. There just isn’t any way.

(Applause)

When Charlie, Cleve, Jack, myself and others of us met down in Miami and said we were going to give some thought to putting this kind of meeting together, I want to tell you that folks went straight up the wall.

They said, “What are you all trying to do—create a separate thing?”

We said, “No, we’re not, but it has always been separate anyhow.”

(Applause)

What we want to do is define our role in whatever it is. What we want to do is point out to you that you have become more involved in making decisions that affect our well-being, and you don’t even remind us orally about it anymore. You let us read about it.

Shortly after our convention, where some of us were lucky enough to get ourselves elected, I suppose a whole lot of folks thought that what we would do now is like we always have done, go into our hole.

When we started to talk about this thing, folks came to me and said, “You are going to mess up your credentials.”

I said, “I have no credentials.”

They said, “If you do this, your constituency might not like that.”

Well, you see, my constituency didn’t know where I was coming from—

What’s going on there?

(Shouts of “Can’t hear”)

Well, I will have to holler, then.

My point is that there are those in high places in the Trade Union movement who said that we shouldn’t do this. My point—and I think it was supported by the rest of the Planning Committee—is that it is time for it to be done. Time has moved by us, and we have not come together and said to ourselves what we are and where we ought to be going.

I want to also say, and nobody has touched on this yet, but I think we ought to do it, that those of us who are workers and who are poor, and those of us who are black and who are hungry, and certainly those of us who have walked the long road from Selma to Montgomery can’t help but look with contempt—and I want to say “utter contempt”—for those of us who claim to be black leaders and yet by endorsement give credence to the program that Nixon has been running down for three and a half years.

(Applause)

When it is made for the promise of maybe a few—and I want to point out—“uncollectible” dollars, or maybe just for the right to get one of those grinning photographs taken next to the man (Laughter), and in the minds of so many people who believe in them, that Nixon is all right.

But, you see, we’ve got a mission to perform, and we’ve got a job to do, knowing that those grins and HEW loans and HUD loans to a bunch of those who have just decided that now is the time to get into what they call black capitalism are not “where it’s at.” We’ve got a job to do in that respect.

(Applause)

I think we have to ask them where is their blackness, where is their sense of integrity, and where is their commitment to millions of black folks and to poor folks who had confidence in trusting them. You see, we have to call the roll before we get out of here; I think we’ve got to do that.

Because, you see, the time has come for the folks in this country to understand the sense of commitment to each other. Now, I know Sammy Davis has got a bunch of money. Lots of money. I want you to know that he is free to support any candidate he wants to, but why wasn’t he doing it earlier? Why wasn’t he doing it before the convention and on national television?

I know that Jim Brown, one of the greatest football players we have ever seen—and I am proud of that—but he is one of the worst political analysts that I’ve ever seen.

(Applause)

There is a fellow in Washington, D.C. I think his name is Paul Jones, or something like that. He is responsible for bringing together the black leaders for Nixon.

They had a $100-a-plate dinner down there, and they got more news coverage than a general session of the United Nations. Do you know why? Because that was a rare occurrence.

But that isn’t rare. Black Republicans have been supporting the Republican administration for I don’t know how long. But I want to make one distinction here, that I would like to see them down in the bayous and the ghettos digging our votes for Richard Nixon.

They have served their purpose. (Shouts of approval)

Now, some of us—and I know the cat from Philadelphia is going to be waiting to see—and I know from Cleveland, from Detroit—we are all going to be waiting to see when the $100-a-plate cats come down and convince our folks as to why they ought to be voting for Richard Nixon.

You see, we also ought to keep in mind a couple of things, and then I’m going to get off Nixon. You see, we for a long time have been acting out of emotion, and I think we ought to deal with that a little bit.

A long time ago, my father used to say, “I don’t have to worry about getting involved in the issues because I sure go to church on Sunday morning and they shall be explained to me.”

And right in the midst of a sermon, as the minister goes for his thing Up There, his arm shall come down upon the issues. It’s not like that anymore.

(Applause)

It’s not like that anymore, because, you see, we are starting to act out of our interests. We are beginning to look at the record. I think Jack was running it down, and Charlie was, and, you see, we can just find enough in the record to convince everybody as to why they should be opposed to Nixon.

Now, we must not make one mistake, though. We must not lie about it, you see, because we quickly believe a lie, and that gets the thing all out of kilter. What we have got to do is tell the truth, because it is the truth that he is at his worst.

You see, when he talked in his Labor Day speech about the “Work Ethic” versus the “Welfare Ethic” and people ate that up because people, in our society, want to have somebody to look down at.

He talked about the fact that we’ve got to control the welfare rolls, yet since his administration came into office they have added six million people to it.

He talked about the fact that all these people ought to be put to work, yet he has eliminated two and a half million jobs in three and a half years.

(Applause)

And then he does the ultimate thing: In this big proclamation that we ought to all go to work, then he vetoes a Public Service Bill that would have created enough jobs to offset the two and a half million that he wiped out.

And then he does the one thing that is terrible in the sense of the high office that he holds: He refused to spend $5.6 billion that was appropriated by Congress for an accelerated public works program.

Now, let me just say one thing on that score. We know where we work, most of us. When you start talking about building highways and roads and things like that, that is us. That is us. (Laughter)

Now, you see, if you were talking about designing a space shuttle, that is none of us. Now, you notice what happened to the space shuttle—right? When you talk about designing fancy airplanes like Lockheed and others do, that is none of us.

You know they got $250 million just to keep them going. And when you start talking about doing in Penn Central Railroad, that is none of us either. (Applause)

Now I want to point out something to you. In summary, let me say that this President has run up the highest budget deficit since the close of the Civil War. This year he will have a budget deficit of $22.3 billion. That is more than me and Charlie make in a week. (Laughter)

The point, then, there is an absolute lack of concern for the things that affect us. But there is an absolute commitment to the corporate interests of this country. When this administration came into office it had no problem in immediately declaring itself in support of the oil depletion allowance.

Do you all know what that is? Well, let me take a moment on that.

That is where the government will grant oil seekers money to go out and look and then will give them more money if they find it, and will give them some more money to pump it, and then will pay them for that that is gone.

Now, I think they have no problem making sure that the big grain exporters understand that they can cut a big deal with the Soviet Union, and that the grain exporters should move out into the country and buy from the farmers when the prices are down here and then sell to the Soviet Union for the prices up here, and then everybody claims they know nothing about it.

But one month before, the man who was cutting the deal now works for the grain people. You see, there is a strange system in this administration. It is known as “Socialism for the Rich and Free Enterprise for the Poor.”

(Applause)

Yet, I want to point out to you that there are some people in the labor movement who can’t tell the difference between them.

Well, I want to tell you that some of us can. You see, our union—and we have a member on that illustrious body known as the Executive Council—frequently winds up in the position of being on the short end of votes. 29 to 1.28 to 2, when Charlie’s union joined us.

But it is always like that, because we are talking about what is important to folks. We served notice on Mr. Meany and his council that we were moving out across the country to try and tell people what’s going down.

(Applause)

And it doesn’t matter if they don’t like it because we have been sitting on the sidelines for all these years and stuff has been happening and they didn’t care if we didn’t like it.

We are saying—and the Congressman said it so well—“If you all don’t do it, we’ll try it.” And I think that together we can tell this country something. We can tell them that it may well be that the politicians, both in the White House and on the Executive Council, have something in common.

Maybe we ought to tell folks that one of the total concerns of the labor movement is not tied up around whether the Iron Workers can do this and laborers can do that—because, you see, when the Wage-Price Freeze hit, it hit both of us.

You see, there is a thing in the industry called the Construction Stabilization Board. Have any of you heard of it? You see, they have their separate pay board, and they haven’t turned down anything yet.

(Applause)

Everybody thinks that a worker is a $10-an-hour plumber. That’s not the way it is. So our people are trying to get a five percent wage increase, and he calls that inflationary. They say we can’t do that because it would contribute to the bad economic situation in the nation.

Well, if it is as bad as it is, we can’t help but make it a little bit worse by giving people enough to eat. There’s nothing wrong with that. You see, I see something wrong when they give Stennis and Eastland thousands of dollars not to plant food and then tell me that it is inflationary just to give me enough to try to buy some.

I think that the Trade Union Movement, that powerful institution that affects and holds sway over practically everything we do, chose this time, like it did when Roosevelt ran against Hoover, to sit this one out. Some of you all remember that, I believe.

It seems like they have to have a situation at its worst in order for the Trade Union Movement to perform at its worst. But we’re going to do what we can do. It doesn’t matter what the Executive Council says now. The impact is there.

(Applause)

There were some of us who talked about whether we, out of this conference, ought to ask them to reconsider their positions. Well, I voted against that. I would like for them to announce their position as loud as they can, because what’s going to be coming after them is us.

(Applause)

You and the rest of us are going to have some time to discuss the issues. We are going to have some time to get our minds together, so that when we go back where we come from, we’ve got a message.

You see, we are not going to talk about any second labor movement. There is no point in that. We are going to do everything we can possibly do to maximize support for Senator McGovern and the Democratic ticket. We’re going to do that.

(Applause)

Then, we are going to set out to organize the neighborhoods. You see, there is only one organization that spans the complete neighborhood—that’s us.

(Applause)

We are going to run into some trouble, though. But that’s the way it is, and we’ve got to do that. I think it is commendable, and I am proud to be a part of the group that called this together. You see, one cat jumped up and said, “Who gave you all the authority to do this?”

“Nobody.”

(Sustained applause)

We’ve got a job to do, and we are prepared to do it. Lerone Bennett, in an article in a recent Ebony, pointed out a bit of history of black workers, about black workers in this society. He pointed out very clearly and very accurately that they had historically been a cheap source of labor, and one to be used if there was ever any problem with the other part of labor.

You know, they would run in a bunch of cats on you in a minute, to work for half of what we were working for, that is true. You see, we are getting ourselves together now. We don’t perform as strike breakers no more. No, we will never be looked upon again as subjects in a total labor market, because when we come out of here we are going to have impact both on the labor market and on the labor movement.

(Applause)

At the present time, we occupy a very important and critical position in the politics of this nation, both in terms of the Trade Union Movement as well as the political parties of this country. I am going to reiterate what Congressman Metcalf said, and I hope and I believe that I will get concurrence from the rest of the group, that we are in nobody’s pocket, do not intend to get in anybody’s pocket, and we are going to assume a position of full partners.

You see, we don’t want anybody to be making decisions for us any longer, because we are quite capable of making decisions ourselves.

(Applause)

That doesn’t mean that we are going to be right all the time. But it doesn’t mean they are going to be right all the time either. And to the extent that we agree, we will go the same route. To the extent that we disagree, we will go our separate ways.

We don’t want to be a thorn in anybody’s side, but we don’t want to be a pivot for anybody’s heel. What we are saying is that illustrious body known as the Executive Council—not criticism of it—and I want to be clear, no criticism of the Trade Union Movement, because if our economic and certainly our social well-being is going to be protected, there is a need for that institution.

But what we are going to do is make it honest. We are going to make it concerned with what its social goals used to be, or else they are going to have a hard time explaining why they’re not.

My organization contributes to that worthwhile enterprise to the tune of $65,000 a month. That is a lot of money out of our union, and it seems to me that we ought to have a voice for that amount.

I know that others will do the same thing. And I want to point out to you that since they didn’t see fit to consult us on their position of neutrality, I saw fit to take a position not to give them nary another quarter because of it.

(Applause)

Now, they get upset about that, but do you know what? They don’t elect me. That’s true.

(Applause)

We will use what resources we have to move our own program. We will use what resources we can gather to move this program. And I am sure, with the support of the other unions, we are going to do something.

Now, they may ask, “Where are you all going to get your money?”

“The same place you get yours.” (Applause)

You see, because, I want to tell you that within the confines of Solidarity House they’ve got some wise cats with pencils and stuff. And I know that at Charlie’s place over there they’ve got some guys that have been plotting and scheming for years. (Laughter)

We are not short on them. We can do it, you see, because we don’t have to ask anybody for anything now. We have already overcome one problem. We have developed a sense of commitment.

A long time ago—when I was talking about the preacher a minute ago—some ministers weren’t free because they had to depend on somebody. I want to tell you that the most free cat in the world is a black preacher. He is responsible to nobody except who’s Out There.

And what we are saying is, “If you will allow us to serve and work with you, we are responsible to nobody except those who are out there. That’s all.”

To the extent that we can develop a program that you can agree with, and to the extent that we can develop some ideas and concepts that you agree with, that is where we’re going, and everybody else has to either get with it, or get out of it, one or the other.

(Applause)

The challenge that is before us is to organize. I think that John L. Lewis said one time, “It is the job of the union to organize.” And what does the union want more? And the cat says, “What does that mean?”

And he said, “Well, you sit around until you figure it out. We want our fair share of the benefits of this society, both as workers and as citizens.”

I think that for too long we have not been a part of the institutions that have brought about change in this society. As the Trade Union Movement has been a haven for others, it is also going to be one for us. If it can be made to move on behalf of others, it is also going to be made to move on behalf of us.

And across the country in the black and poor communities of this land we are going to say to folks, “Join hands with us, and we jointly will see if we can do something about what’s going down.”

Now, we don’t want you all to go back home after we get through spending these few hours and talk about what a great time we had listening to the speeches, because that’s not doing it. You see, we want to develop a program that when some of us come together, maybe after the first of the year, and take a look at it, maybe then we will be coming out across the country, to Cleveland, to Philadelphia, and other places and stretching the program out in front of you and saying, “Let’s think about it.”

You see, we don’t want any hit-and-miss and half-steps. What we’ve got to have is a concrete thing that is going to stand the test of time. As we were talking this morning, a lot of them have tried and for one reason or the other have failed.

But as Black Trade Unionists, I think we have a special obligation to get into the game and stay. We have a readymade constituency that is going to benefit from the expertise that we’ve got.

And I say to you as we move out of here and go into the workshops—and we want full participation because we are searching for something, and we want to find that. We have no problem knowing what to do with it, because, you know, we’ve been doing it for somebody else for a long time.

(Applause)

Now we are going to try and do it for ourselves. We’ve got a good chance to make it work, too, because I want you to know that this is no small local union sitting up here.

We’ve got Cleve’s union. We’ve got the historical and mighty Textile. We’ve got Amalgamated Meat Cutters. We’ve got some Teamsters in the house, too. We’ve got some Steel Workers down here.

(Applause)

We aren’t much in State-County—we’ve got 550,000.

(Further applause)

Every week we organize 1200 more. Here is the point that I’m making. The point that I’m making is that we’ve got the resources, we’ve got the commitment, and among even the people allowed to bring this together we’ve got the dedication.

What we need to hear you say is: “Put the thing together.”

(Applause)

MR. EDWARDS:

Now you know what I meant when I said the people all across the country want to meet this dynamic young man, a great, courageous, articulate man.

We have on the agenda—we may be running a little behind, but we don’t want you to violate our commitment. We had promised a coffee break. If you are desirous of a coffee break, we will break now for coffee.

If you would prefer that we continue the program, we will continue. (Supporting applause)

You know, many of you are acting in the manner of youngsters that grew up during my time. There was a story about coffee which said that you don’t want coffee because it makes you black. (Laughter) You’re not against it for that purpose, I’m sure.

I am told now that if we don’t drink the coffee, we’re going to have to pay for it anyway—(Shouts of disapproval)—AFSCME ordered the coffee, the commitment is made. I want to recognize your wishes, but I am told by others—

In order that we keep pretty close to our agenda, which requires us to get out of this room early enough so it can be arranged for our dinner—we will have to keep our program moving.

I have the privilege of introducing to this conference a man that needs no introduction. If you have been around where labor was involved in a struggle, this personality has always been there.

If it was a civil rights march or a civil rights struggle, this young man has always been there. He was crying aloud for organized Black Trade Unionists to get together ten years ago.

Every time we have had an affair of this sort, that was dedicated to the purpose of advancing the best interests of those that work for a living, this fellow has been with us.

I would like to introduce the panel that will be working with him, because if I introduce him now and not introduce the panel, it would be a bit unfair because this young man will make the trail very fast and very hot for anyone that comes after him.

So we have for the next panel operation three people—in fact, four. I will give out a bit of information on each of them in terms of their contribution to the labor movement and the cause for freedom, and if you will hold your applause, we will try and give you the five names that will operate on this panel and you may recognize them and give your expression of appreciation that time.

The gentleman I have made reference to so far is Mr. Cleveland Robinson, President of the Distributive Workers of America. He is also Secretary-Treasurer of District 65 and National President of the Afro-American Labor Council.

Serving on the panel with Brother Robinson is Neal Bratcher, Director, Council 19, AFSCME. Now, I am told—I don’t know Mr. Bratcher personally, but based upon those that know him and his work, they tell me that he is doing an outstanding job in the field of helping to advance the best interests of all workers.

We have also serving on this panel Mr. Hilton Hanna, International Vice-President of the Meat Cutters Union. And anyone who knows anything about the Meat Cutters Union knows that to ascend from the ranks of Vice President, you’ve got to be doing many, many good things, because that is a mighty tough contest.

So, we have a man that we can salute in this position.¹⁰⁵

Now, the person that I know best that will be serving on the panel is a very dear friend of mine and has been across the years. It is a female, and females today are fast proving that we have been wrong in deciding what kind of involvements we ought to allow them to engage in.

(Applause)

When it comes to politics, they boast—and rightfully so, and this young lady stands out in this area—that we will do as much political action work as any male in your section, including the candidate that is running for President, and this young lady needs no defense from making that kind of statement because she has proven it.

When it comes to economics, she is outstanding in that area because she knows, in this country, that females own more money than males, and most men don’t believe that. But if I were a businessman and had a choice between dealing with males or females, I would take females because they have the money.

But from a Trade Union position, this young lady serves on the staff of our International Union in the Women’s Department and has done an outstanding job there protecting the working of both genders, masculine and feminine.

She has done an outstanding job in the area of collective bargaining. She has articulated the purpose and the goals of the union wherever she has gone. I now would like to announce the great woman of the UAW, Mrs. Lillian Hatcher.

(Applause)

Now, coming on to take the chair at this time will be my great friend, your friend, a fighter that never quits, one that has visions that I believe well should have waited for a few years so that some of us could get wise enough and devoted enough to join in and help them be carried into fruition—I give to you now my friend Cleveland Robinson.

(Applause)

MR. ROBINSON:

Thank you my good friend Nelson Jack Edwards.

Soul Brothers and Sisters and allies, to me this is an occasion that I long dreamed for. I do not want to go too far back in our history and our struggles, but allow me to tell you that in my time this has not been the first occasion.

And before my time there have been other attempts. I think that to make it plain that the black worker of America from the days of slavery was never content in his lot, and he has always been trying to find some way to break the shackles, whether it was during the days when the shackles were of iron, or today when they have certain complexities and niceties so that you can’t even locate them.

I can remember back in the Forties and Fifties the Black Unionists’ attempts to meet, and they did meet and form some kind of organization, and it was short-lived. Our white counterparts said then that we were Communists. They did not talk about dualism then. That word did not reach their vocabularies. We were Communists, they said.

In the Forties they set up other organizations to counteract us, because they could always find what the young people called the “house slaves.”

Then, in the Sixties, after George Blue had blasted Philip Randolph in the convention in San Francisco we met in Detroit, a strong body, and we said that this is the time, then, that Black Trade Unionists must come together.

And we came together. But some of us dropped by the wayside. At that time, it was dual unionism, and those of us who chose to remain were called Mau-Mau’s. At that time, of course, it was felt that to associate with anything from Africa would be degrading.

But thanks be God today we know Africa to be our homeland. We are not afraid of being identified as Afro-Americans anymore.

(Applause)

Yes, men were instructed to stay away, and so they did. But we struggled on, and I thank God today when I look around and see the array of people, including those young leaders who have come forward, many of whom have been brought within the ranks of leadership as a result of the struggles that have been carried on.

(Applause)

And I am here as one who has participated in some of those struggles, as one from a union that has been sensitive because we are a union of poor people —blacks, Puerto Ricans, other Latins, poor whites.

We are not from the big craft unions, and we have been struggling all along for unity and understanding and sensitivity to the problems that beset poor working people in this country.

And say thank God today that we can have a meeting such as this, and maybe if there is one good thing which Richard Milhous Nixon has done is to just let us know where it is so that we can’t be silent any longer.

(Applause)

I remember 1963 when there were those of us who had to confront George Meany in Miami Beach, Florida. We threatened to picket the AFL-CIO Convention on the very issues on which we are meeting here today.

I remember him telling us of the senility of Philip Randolph, but the next year he came to our convention, and he started beginning to say that he understood. But I will tell you something: the leopard never changes his spots.

He has not understood us yet, and the unfortunate thing is that today we have a situation where even once enlightened leadership—white leadership—in the labor movement has now succumbed and sat by and echoed the reactionary backward sentiments that he expresses, whether it be on the war in Vietnam or the current political situation.

It is a matter of survival, Brothers and Sisters, because I say today—1972—if we were to be silent, who would cry out? Something has to be done. Not enough can be said for the trials and sufferings of our people.

No longer can those of us who think we probably have it made sit by and think we’ve got it made.

(Applause)

It is late in the day. I tell you, as one who goes out in the field, when I today have to negotiate for people who are making $1.60 an hour, even if they are driving 40-foot trailer trucks, black people, when the employer says “5.5 percent is all you’re going to get, because that’s what Mr. Nixon says,” you know something has got to be wrong somewhere.

When workers who are toiling, who by their productivity are producing the kind of profits for big corporations that are unprecedented in our history, and when such workers can have leadership that today can say they have to be neutral, when a man in Washington is there sitting down, setting a wage board that will stop you from getting the wage increases after you’ve gotten them from your employer, something has got to be wrong, Brothers. Something has got to be wrong.

It is my prediction that we are able to change things around. This administration and the people who are supporting them—and I am going to make it clear by saying that is George Meany, He is not neutral because he is supporting Nixon—

(Applause)

That is a fact, and now I am making it plain. Maybe there are some people whom others cannot tell them that it is wrong for us to spend our tax dollars making bombs and napalm and all kinds of instruments of destruction, and to be wiping out a country 10,000 miles away.

Maybe some of us are impervious to that kind of immorality. Maybe there are those who believe that it is right for blacks to be underpaid while whites get higher wages so that they continue to perpetuate racism and support Mr. Nixon’s call for continued racism.

We’ve got to make it plain that when Richard Milhous Nixon gets on nationwide television and condemns the courts because of their stand on integration he is telling people to be racists. That’s what it is, and maybe there are those who feel that it is all right.

They don’t want to ask the working men and women, whether they be Steel or Auto or anything else. You tell me that you are saying it is all right for the man to stop your wage increases?

Well, if anybody has an illusion, they can look at the record, because the Longshoremen on the West Coast got a damn good increase, and Mr. Nixon cut it in two. The Longshoremen in New York got a wage increase, and Mr. Nixon cut it in two.

After that was done, the President of the Longshoremen in the East went to the Executive Board and recommended that the Executive Board endorse Nixon. Of course, the board members turned him down. Something is rotten in the cotton.

(Applause)

Today we’ve got to understand what we face. We are facing one of the worst conditions in our country because racism reigns supreme. Racism makes it so that people cannot think straight anymore. This is what it’s all about.

Why are they so upset about the Democratic convention? Because black and poor people and women now have a say in it, so that it’s going to be a little more democratic, and black and poor people’s programs have to be attended to, and the man McGovern was the one who called for the reforms.

But even so-called Democrats decide that they’ve got to abandon him, and so they met with Mr. Nixon yesterday in Texas eating steaks while our people are going about not having the next meal.

We can’t allow that to happen anymore. So 1972 for us is a year of decision. We have got to make a decision as to where we go from here. Let me say that it is not enough to cheer. It is not enough to say, “Why don’t we?” You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is.

Now, Nixon has all the money and he is getting more and more. They can’t even reveal where it’s coming from. And I tell you, the first thing we’ve got to do, aside from what the good brothers have told us here before, our registration, is that we’ve got to dig in our pockets and put some dough on the line so that McGovern’s program can go across and labor’s program as we see it can go across.

(Applause)

Now, I am not telling you what I am paid to do. Because, at least in my New York union, we have taken the approach that every staff member pays 12 percent of a week’s salary, and every local officer gives at least five bucks, and every worker, if you work on the staff of the union, you have to give six percent because we have endorsed McGovern, and it is a real fight. (Applause)

Let me say one thing further. We can talk about building an organization, but we cannot unless we are prepared to make some sacrifices. I have had experiences over the years, at least the last decade-plus, of working within the confines of what is known as NALC. Many of you know it. Many of you might have heard of it.

The purposes for which we set up that organization are the very purposes for which we are meeting here. And I am telling you here now that we didn’t do so well, because we did not capture the imagination of the broad masses of the rank and file and black leadership.

I am saying here, if we are to set up an organization, we have got to make up our minds that it has to be a broad coalition, that it must encompass all of us, irrespective of our affiliation, within and without the AFL-CIO.

We meet as black people with a common concern. That is what we have to do.

(Applause)

Certainly we are going to support it, because I want to tell you that not many unions are going to give as you believe they are going to give to support it. We have got to be prepared to support it.

Now, some unions will. Let me make no mistake about it. There are fine unions. Some of us belong to some fine unions. But others will not. Moreover, I will tell you something: we’ve got to pay our way. We’ve got to learn to shoulder our responsibilities. We cannot expect freedom without fighting for it.

(Applause)

In this respect we must remember the words of Dr. King. “There are those who are waiting for freedom to be handed them on a silver platter.” It is not going to happen.

We have to struggle and fight and sacrifice and, yes, sometimes we are going to be kicked around. Some of us pay the price of losing jobs, but I will tell you one thing: right must, and will, prevail. And that has to be our watchword.

I have every confidence that we can move forward, and that in moving forward our very strength will protect us. If we fall by the wayside, I have to say bluntly that an organization such as this, where fulltime black leadership exists in every union, if he participates he is more safe than if he is isolated.

(Applause)

In this kind of unity there is strength. In this kind of unity there is a recognition. In this kind of unity you have the ability, if you please, to stand up and talk because you know you have people behind you and organizations behind you that will back up what you say.

Moreover, I will tell you that the days of the Nervous Nellies and the Uncle Toms and what have you are gone.

(Applause)

I will tell you that this is the day of the Bill Lucys. (Applause)

Young bright men and women who are going to come forward and not be so worried about the titles and the positions that they hold are going to use their positions and their titles to enhance the progress of their people.

(Applause)

And this is the new thing about it, and when you have this, when you feel tired—and I’m not getting any younger, believe me—we feel a sense of new direction. We feel that we now can make it.

And above all, let us understand something. McGovern must win the election, should win it, but if he doesn’t, we’ve got to live with it, against evil, the great odds of Nixon for four more years of Agnew waiting behind him.

Brothers and Sisters, we’ve got to live. This country is what we have built by blood and sweat and tears. We made cotton King. We built the castles. We were the construction workers when there was slave labor.

Today we need picks and crowbars and hammers to break the bonds that are holding us back. Thank you.

(Applause)

END OF SESSION

BANQUET SESSION SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1972

MR. EDWARDS:

May I have your attention please. Ladies and gentlemen, may I please have your attention. We are ready now to begin this session of the program and we have a real treat in store for you. We have with us tonight some very important people who will be introduced to you a little bit later in the program.

Right now I would like to take this time to again present to you a young man who this afternoon gave us a very inspiring presentation and who I am sure we will hear a lot from in the months and years ahead. He will serve as chairman and presiding officer for tonight’s program.

Brothers and Sisters, I now turn the program over to Brother Bill Lucy, the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union.

(Applause)

MR. LUCY:

Thank you Jack. We are going to move right along because we have quite a bit to get accomplished in the very short time we will be in Chicago.

Before we introduce the brothers and sisters on the platform up front, I would like to acknowledge and give credit to those people, those members of the combined staffs who worked so hard putting together today’s meeting and putting together tonight’s dinner, and doing the behind the scenes things that are so necessary and so vital to putting together a meeting and conference of this type.

Let me, if I can, do it very quickly. If they are present they can stand. If they are not, forget it. I will just run through some names for you, because these individuals have really given time and effort and energy to trying to make things both comfortable for you and certainly meaningful for you.

I don’t know where Frank is, but Frank Cowan, who is a special representative in the office of the President of our union—Frank has done a tremendous job in putting together the things necessary to make this thing work. I don’t know where Frank is, but let me just run through the list.

I would hope that you would give the entire crew a great hand, because they’ve done a great job.

Working with Frank has been Tony Harrison from the National League of Cities.

Certainly, from the great union of the Auto Workers, Horace Sheffield, who has been representing Nelson Jack Edwards. Charles Brooks, sitting down here somewhere.

Chris Nelson from our convention coordinator’s office.

Brenda Cote, who is Chris Nelson’s assistant.

Edith Moore—I saw Edith around somewhere just a moment ago.

Prince Moon from the United Auto Workers.

Whit McCrae from the Auto Workers.

Al Hyde from the staff of State-County.

And just a tremendous group of people who put a lot of time and effort trying to make things work for us here.

Oh, I almost forgot my good buddy, the one who keeps my office straight, Gwendolyn Hemphill.

(Applause)

I would like now to introduce to you those sitting at the head table.

On my far right, the reverend who gave us such a tremendous and moving invocation, Reverend Claude Wyatt, from the Vernon Park Church. Reverend Wyatt, would you stand up again for us, please.

(Applause)

And sitting next to Reverend Wyatt, whom everybody had a chance to go to church with this morning, the big, really moving person and the moving spirit in the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, Vice President Charles Hayes.

(Applause)

And the brilliant young lady who did such a tremendous job as part of the panel this afternoon, and as she put it, catching up, a member of the International Staff of the United Auto Workers, Sister Lillian Hatcher.

And next to Sister Hatcher—and I think it is fitting, and no more fitting than this moment, to sort of recognize some people who made some tremendous sacrifices, both for themselves and for others—

You know, when Charlie Hayes goes around the country doing his thing, somebody has got to stay home and mind the store. You see, Charlie’s right arm is sitting next to Mrs. Hatcher—Mrs. Charles Hayes.

(Applause)

Sitting next to Mrs. Hayes, one seat over, is our chairman, the one we call the “Maximum Leader” and who has presided over this session today and really has brought us a moving presentation and a great program. I want Jack to stand once again. The great Vice President of the United Auto Workers, Nelson Jack Edwards.

(Applause)

I’m going to skip this cat right here for the time being and go down there next to the far left end and bring to you someone who, again, along with Sister Hatcher, has played a tremendous role in the panel discussion that took place, who sort of came to us in terms of what he thought and what he felt. The Director of District Council 19 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Neal Bratcher.

(Applause)

Sitting next to Neal is someone from the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, a tremendous representative and one who has made a tremendous contribution over the years on behalf of working people—Sister Addie Wyatt.

(Applause)

Sitting next to Addie is the dean of activists, who is a mover, who has made contributions that we all like to think that we could make in years to come, one who gave us a very moving and a very stirring presentation today, the great President of the Distributive Workers of America, Cleveland Robinson.

(Applause)

It seems like all great people sort of sit and stay together. Sitting next to him is a man who is a mechanic. You know you think a mechanic is one who turns wrenches, but this is one who makes things come together and makes them work.

A couple of years ago a great organization came into being and sort of sprung up on the scene and started to do things. They called it in the District of Columbia “nationwide,” the Congressional Black Caucus.

You know the Congressmen go around and make all the speeches and get all the glory, but it is the cats back in the trenches who do all the work. I want to present to you now the Executive Director of the Congressional Black Caucus, Howard Robinson.

(Applause)

You see, in our union, just like in the Amalgamated and all the other great unions, we have our beautiful men, too. You see, we have not only those who are beautiful but also are moving, knowledgeable, and have the ability to project where we’re coming from.

I want to introduce to you now, from the great City of New York, the Associate Director of District Council 37, Lillian Roberts.

(Applause)

We also have with us, from the State of Michigan, representing the Secretary of State of that Great State, Dick Austin, we have his representative Walter Elliot. Walter, where are you sitting?

(Applause)

We also have a number of other prominent people who have come out to share in this occasion with us. We have representatives from various governors’ offices. I have lost the name now, but I believe we had a representative from Governor Gilligan’s office from the State of Ohio, and he may be here somewhere. I apologize for not having the name. If you are here will you please stand.

I think that takes care of the introductions. We are fortunate to have with us tonight someone to speak to us who doesn’t have to talk about Trade Unionism after reading it out of a book.

We have one with us tonight whose background, whose activities, and whose outlook is shaped by his involvement in the very things we talked about today. I was handed a long list of plaudits earlier this morning, and it was said that this was a biography of the one I’m going to introduce to you now.

It was my feeling that long sheets of paper don’t nearly speak to the contributions that people have made on behalf of the working people of this country. We are fortunate to have someone with us who comes out of the movement that we are concerned with.

We have someone with us who spent a number of years representing the interests of workers such as you and I. In 1959 he was elected as an Alderman in the City of St. Louis and served with distinction for a five-year period.

In St. Louis, for somebody like this fellow to be elected, takes a little bit of doing. After spending some years on the aldermanic board of the City of St. Louis, Mr. Clay moved on to some bigger things, one of which, I might add, was having been a staff representative for the State, County and Municipal Employees, which in itself ought to be enough to do something.

Several years ago on the scene in Washington, D.C., came one Bill Clay, elected from the First Congressional District in St. Louis, and certainly a new face and a shining star in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.

Now, some cats, if they had got elected about the time that Bill did, would have come in and tried to be cool so that they would have got some decent appointments to committees. They wouldn’t have made any noise, and that way they wouldn’t have had anybody mad at them.

You know, they say that a freshman Congressman can’t be “for” anything—he can only be “against” something. He is not allowed to speak—he is only allowed to be seen.

I want to say that that is not the case with Bill Clay. He has been a friend of working people. Some of the immediate things that he did, and particularly on behalf of public employees—he immediately introduced into Congress a collective bargaining bill for the public employees.

That bill was joined in by some seventy-seven other Congressmen, and to those of you who are not in public employment, you don’t understand what it is to struggle without a legal means to do that.

Those of us—and particularly from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees—hold Bill in the highest esteem, not because he introduced the bill, but because he talked about what was relevant on behalf of workers.

I want to say to you—and we can go on and on and on talking about his accomplishments, talking about his commitment, talking about the fact that he along with maybe one or two other people have welded together an organization in the Congress of this country called the Congressional Black Caucus, who has done a tremendous amount on behalf of poor people and working people throughout the country.

Some of you may remember right at the time that our illustrious Mr. Nixon was elected that the 13 members presented to him an agenda of items that they considered relevant to the black community.

I would suggest to you that Bill made a magnificent contribution to that agenda, and he was one of those who felt very strongly about the sit-out at the President’s address to the joint houses of Congress.

It is a pleasure for me, both as a friend and as a Trade Unionist, to bring to this gathering the Congressman from the First District of St. Louis—William Clay.¹⁰⁶

(Applause)

CONGRESSMAN CLAY:

Well, first of all, I’m glad that Bill Lucy told you a little bit about me. You know, sometimes after you appear on programs like Meet the Press and on the cover of Newsweek you begin to believe that everybody knows who you are.

And I found this not to be true a couple of months ago when I went home to my District in St. Louis and decided that I would go down into the old neighborhood that I grew up in.

I saw three guys sitting in the alley there drinking some wine, so I said here’s a chance to get three votes. I’ll sit down and drink some wine with them. And we started talking, and one guy said:

“Say, your face is familiar. Did you use to live in this neighborhood?”

I said, “Yes, I lived here for twenty-three years.”

He said, “Yes, I thought so.” He said, “What are you doing now?” (Laughter)

I said, “Oh, I’m working for the federal government.”

He said, “You at the Post Office, too?” (Laughter)

You know, white folks have got a lot of fixations about black folks, and one of them is that black people can fill a hall like this for a dance or a party, but they can’t fill it for a cause.

And we’ve got approximately 1100 black people at this convention. (Applause)

And I’ve never been to a meeting of 300 black people unless I could look around and point out at least two or three people who were there to spy for the white folks. So what I want to say to the five or six spies who are here (Laughter) is that when you go back Monday morning, just report one thing: that there were wall-to-wall niggers there. (Laughter and applause)

You know, a lot of people are disturbed because we see such prominent names like Jim Brown and Sammy Davis, Jr., and all of the rest—Wilt Chamberlain—out supporting Nixon’s effort for re-election.

But it doesn’t disturb me, because I knew there were some niggers that kept Dr. King’s dream.

(Applause)

I happened to be speaking last month in St. Louis at the Urban League’s affair, and right in the middle of my speech one of those kinds of pimps walked up to me with a big pamphlet with pictures of all the black people that Nixon had appointed to office, and I’m sure you’ve seen that garbage that they’re passing out.

At first I didn’t know how to react. He just interrupted my speech. So finally I grabbed it and I took a look at it, and I said, “What’s this?”

And he said, “Well, those are the black people that Nixon has appointed to office.”

And I looked at it again, and I said, “Hell, more niggers in my block have lost their jobs since Mr. Nixon took office.”

(Applause)

I got a little disturbed last week. I was reading The Washington Post, and they said that Vice President Spiro Agnew had an IQ of 145. It really upset me, because that’s getting close to a genius.

So I called the editor to find out about it. And he readily assured me that somebody left out the decimal point. (Laughter)

Last summer I had the good fortune of following our Vice President through Africa. I guess I was about a week and a half behind him. You remember when he made those infamous statements about black leadership in this country.

When I arrived in Kenya, I happened to meet the official interpreter for the Vice President. And I wanted to know what the reaction of black people in Africa was to the kind of vicious attack that Agnew had made on black leadership in this country.

He started telling me, and at first I was greatly disturbed, because he said that Agnew was a very articulate speaker, and that he was able to arouse the people that he was speaking to, and the day he was in Kenya and made the statement, he was speaking to about 400 Africans in an open field.

They said that as he began his attack on black leadership, they started a chant, “Ungawa, Ungawa, Ungawa.”

And as he continued and escalated that attack, the chant continued and escalated, and when he finished they were all on their feet hollering, “Ungawa, Ungawa, Ungawa, Ungawa.”

That kind of disturbed me, until he told me that one of the Secret Service agents informed the Vice President that they were running late for the next appointment, and that from the way the crowd had reacted to the speech, they would probably be there for an hour congratulating him and they would never be able to make the next appointment.

So, the Vice President looked at his interpreter and guide and said, “Is there a way that we can get out of here without going through the crowd?”

And the interpreter said, “Well, we can cut across that open field there, which is a cow pasture. But be careful, and don’t step in any ungawa.”

(Laughter and applause)

Let me say from the outset that I am deeply honored and consider it a privilege to have the opportunity to participate in this what I consider to be an historic occasion.

Bill Lucy has told you about my background of experience in the labor movement, and it coincides with my background and experience in the political movement. I started in the labor movement thirteen years ago in the State, County and Municipal Workers Union, and during that period and since I have done special organizing work for the Seafarers and the Electrical Workers.

My most recent job before I came to Congress was as educational coordinator for the Pipe Fitters Local 552 in St. Louis. So I have approximately thirteen years in the labor movement and fourteen years in the political movement.

I come here not as a neophyte in either, and I think that when I say that this is truly an historic event, I think I know from which I am speaking. Even though it may take a little while for many to realize it, history is being made here tonight.

This group, in a sense, has sounded the clarion trumpet of rebellion to charge the archaic Bastille of dictatorial one-man rule in the labor movement. (Applause)

What you have done is to launch a program based on the concept of manhood for blacks in the field of labor, and by taking up the gauntlet at this time and in this manner, you are saying in no uncertain terms that Black Trade Unionists have a responsibility that exceeds those narrowly defined interests of labor generally.

You, in a sense, are saying what black politicians are saying from one end of this country to the other, that we have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies—just permanent interests. And no one can deny that it is the interests of blacks and poor working people in this country to oppose the re-election of Richard Milhous Nixon this year.

(Applause)

Never in the history of our nation has the working people suffered so adversely from the policies and the programs of a President and his administration. What working man, in all honesty, could let Mr. Nixon win by default?

The interests of labor are more than that of wages and working conditions. Mr. Nixon has sabotaged many programs that would have helped laboring people. He was the one who advocated Day Care Centers, yet he vetoed the bill that would have made them possible. Welfare mothers have particularly suffered from this maniac in the White House.

He isn’t concerned about them. He once said that they ought to be scrubbing floors, because that is employment with as much dignity as employment as President of the United States.

I think his record speaks for itself. He vetoed funds for education and health programs which laboring people are interested in. He vetoed a bill that would have increased hospital construction, and one that would have provided $3 billion for housing programs.

He vetoed a $9 billion bill for manpower training which would have provided thousands of jobs. He vetoed a bill that would have trained many family doctors, and he vetoed a proposal to raise the pay for blue collar government workers.

But in contrast, Mr. Nixon and his administration gave financial assistance to Penn Central and Lockheed and proposed a depreciation allowance that would save big business more than $3 billion in taxes and imposed a wage-price freeze that left high profits untouched.

He has proposed strike-breaking legislation to stymie every national strike since I have been in Congress. He has advocated that families of striking people or striking workers not be entitled to food stamps and other subsidies.

He is opposed to increases in Social Security benefits, and he is presently fighting a minimum wage bill in the U.S. Congress, and we black people have suffered more under this man than anybody else in this country, and we cannot afford the luxury of neutrality in this election.

(Applause)

And neither can we be taken in by the fuzzy talking and thinking of those who say that we can stand another year or another four years of Richard Nixon. It is imperative that we dispel the notion that the Democrats are taking us for granted.

As Julian Bond said recently, and I quote: “If my choice is between a Democrat like George McGovern and a Republican like Richard Nixon, I would rather be taken for granted than just plain taken.”¹⁰⁷

(Applause)

As long as our country is suffering the drastic efforts of this racist society led by a racist President, black people cannot condone neutrality.

(Applause)

As long as our country is beclouded with internal unrest and beset by external war, neutrality is “ungawa.”

(Applause)

As long as this country has five and a half million alcoholics, three and a half million drug users, twenty-five million poverty stricken, fifteen million on the welfare rolls, six million unemployed, fifty million who go to bed hungry and undernourished—neutrality must be considered “ungawa.”

(Applause)

Mr. Nixon, who promised to bring this country together, has torn it asunder. He has aroused and encouraged the racial fears and prejudices of the bigots, and the once subtle words for “keeping us in our places,” such as “law and order,” and “Make the streets safe,” has suddenly grown full bloom into overt racist epithets.

Those slogans have generated specific policies which threaten to set us back in our cause by one hundred years. How could our President, in the name of fair play, decree that quotas be abolished. In the name of racism, yes, but in the name of fair play, no.

Merit employment is a euphemism for discriminatory hiring. There never has been any merit employment in this country, and there never will be. The definition for merit itself totally eliminates blacks from consideration.

The nation has thrived on the concept of white superiority. How, in Sammy Davis’s name, can a black person ever—

(Sustained applause)

Many Americans find most distasteful the regretful aversion for truth which afflicts Mr. Nixon and his party—an aversion which has shown up in this administration and one which has attempted to create the impression that all is well in our country.

You know, they don’t refer to slums and ghettos any more as “slums” and “ghettos.” They are now low-income housing areas. Unemployed people are not considered as individuals any more. They are weapons in the fight against inflation.

And you know, the people who are starving and going to bed hungry—they aren’t “poor” anymore. They are what we call the “near-poor.”

And white racist attorneys who are appointed to the federal bench and the Supreme Court aren’t “racists” anymore. They are rigid constructionists. It is perfectly all right to keep black people out of suburban areas, because you aren’t discriminating against them because they are black—you are discriminating against them because they fall within an economic category.

This is what Mr. Nixon is doing to this country. But no matter how hard he tries to make it appear that this country is made up of well-dressed, well-fed, middle-age and upper-income Americans, the true picture of America will show through.

The real face of America shows the anguish of the poor, the struggle of the minorities, the frustrations of the unemployed, and the tragedies of the war victims. In all fairness to Mr. Nixon, it must be noted that the GOP convention represented the President’s interests and reflected that interest in black Americans. Only three percent of the convention was made up of black Americans.

Twenty-five of the GOP state delegations had no blacks at all. And in an attempt to make up for the conscious, conspicuous absence of blacks at the GOP convention, Nixon made conspicuous use of our own Sammy Davis, Jr.

His play upon the conversion, the miraculous conversion of Little Sammy will not enlarge the black audience of either Nixon or Sammy. I know Sammy personally, and I know that he’s not the type of person that will sell out for one invitation to the White House. It takes at least three.

(Laughter and applause)

Our President has worked miracles with those invitations to the White House. He invited Pearl Bailey. She sat in a rocking chair that broke while she was sitting in it, and he gave her that rocking chair. The next week she was on television rocking in the chair that the President gave to her.

He invited Ethel Waters to one of his prayer breakfasts, and when it was over he offered her a doggie bag. But to her eternal credit, she informed him that she did not have a dog.

You know, it has been tradition in this country for the little girl who happens to be chosen as the Poster Girl for Multiple Sclerosis to have her picture taken with the President of the United States, and that poster is placed all over the country.

Mr. Nixon didn’t think that he should invite her to the White House for the picture, and last year our little black girl had her picture on the poster without the President of the United States.

But for fifteen months the Congressional Black Caucus was seeking an invitation to sit down at the White House and discuss some very important problems with our President. He refused for a fifteen-month period, and during that fifteen-month period he extended three invitations to our wives to come over for tea and crackers.

Fortunately, our wives declined because they knew there would be more crackers than tea—

(Laughter and applause)

I don’t think that our people can sit idly by and let a man whose own contempt for us be re-elected without a struggle. If I had to list three persons who posed the most dangerous threat to the freedom and equality of the blacks in this country, I would have to list them in this order:

Number one, Richard Nixon.

Number two, Richard Nixon.

Number three, Richard Nixon.

(Applause)

My personal opinion of the man—and I may be a little prejudiced—is that he finds security in the past and popularity among those who seek to repeal the Thirteenth Amendment.

He has not made himself, or he has not distinguished himself by expanding the war in Asia, regardless of what he says about winding it down. He has attempted to stall school integration by destroying constitutional protection of blacks with his busing bills.

He has appointed racists and reactionaries to the Supreme Court and has attempted to sabotage the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In regards to the Voting Rights Act, he took the position, and he argued, that all sections of this country ought to be treated equally and fairly.

Therefore, he wanted to take half of the federal voting registrars from Mississippi and assign them to the State of Utah. (Laughter) Now, I don’t want you to get me wrong. I don’t think Mr. Nixon hates blacks. In fact, you can ask some of those who are supporting him for re-election.

The fact is, I think, is that Mr. Nixon not only does not hate blacks, he loves them so well that I think he would like to see every American family own one.

(Applause)

Under his leadership, the whole concept of representative government has been destroyed. This nation was founded on the idea that every section, every segment, every group, every interest was entitled to positions of authority in the decision-making bodies. That is why the House of Representatives is apportioned according to population, and that is why the Senate is apportioned two persons per state, regardless of your size.

Tradition and custom has dictated that labor and management, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, farm and urban dwellers have a voice in our government. But under Nixon all of this has changed.

He did not appoint to his cabinet a Jew, a Catholic, an Italian, a Spanish-speaking American, a woman, a farmer, a labor representative, or a black. Eighty percent of the American population is voiceless in this administration.

Now, what did he do? Instead, Mr. Nixon surrounded himself with those that I have referred to as Nixon’s masses, and they have taken over. The storm troopers and the Gestapo. The Zieglers, the Hartovans, the Erlichmans, the Schultzes, the Kissingers, the Klines, and all those others of German descent.¹⁰⁸

You know, if Dick Hatcher did that in Gary and appointed only blacks, the newspapers would castrate him, and you know it.

(Applause)

Now, he only attempted to justify one of the people that he left out, or one of the races that he left out, and that was the blacks. Mr. Nixon said he did not appoint any blacks to his cabinet because he could not find any who were qualified.

Now, that’s remarkable, isn’t it. In view of the fact that some of his best friends are black. (Laughter) More astonishing is the fact that this nut went on television in an attempt to justify why he did not appoint any blacks to his cabinet, and he said there was a vain attempt to find qualified blacks, and that he went to the campuses of Yale, Princeton, and Harvard (Laughter), and much to his surprise he did not find many blacks at those institutions.

Well, anybody in his right mind would not expect to find many blacks at Yale, Harvard, or Princeton. Anybody who knows anything about the educational system knows that the tuition at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton is in excess of $4,000 a year.

And anybody who knows anything about economics in this country knows that the median income for blacks is less than $4,000 a year. So why would any fool expect to find blacks in overwhelming numbers at those schools?

Further, Mr. Nixon himself did not attend Yale, Princeton, or Harvard. Now, Nixon has implied and has actually said that those of us who oppose the war in Southeast Asia are unpatriotic.

But to those who say that opposition to that war is unpatriotic, I say that Americans spend $72 billion on defense and only $4 billion on education. Some Americans have spent $5 billion for one plane and less than $2 billion on poverty.

I say it is not American to spend $40 billion on space exploration and only $300 million for cancer research.

I say it is un-American to spend $20 thousand for the ammunition just to kill one Viet Cong and only $73 a year to educate each American child. This country is wasting our money.

Last year this government spent $3 billion in tax money to subsidize rich farmers. Four thousand farmers collected more than $100,000 each for not growing food, and this summer our government paid one farmer in California $10 million not to grow food.

We pay some not to grow food while others go hungry and undernourished. And actor John Wayne, who supported Mr. Nixon, received $810,000 from the federal government for not growing food.

And that conservative ass has the gall to attack welfare recipients. (Applause)

Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland got $166,000 of our money last year for not growing food. But in the State of Mississippi a child on welfare receives $9.50 a month, or $114 a year. And in Alabama a person on welfare gets $1.40 a week for food, and in Mississippi, 80 cents a week for food, or four cents a meal.

President Nixon continues to label the helpless welfare recipients as freeloaders, lazy no-good vultures. He wants workfare for the poor and welfare for the rich.

Another thing about our President—he has become a renowned world traveler. He has traveled 750,000 miles since he took office, 150,000 miles in foreign lands. He has been to the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangkok, Thailand, South Vietnam, Midway, India, Pakistan, Rumania, France, England, Russia, China—he even went to the Vatican.

He is truly the Marco Polo of the White House, or the Genghis Khan of the West. He is really the San Clemente globetrotter.

I say that his traveling would be meaningful if at the same time he had traveled to Watts and Harlem and Fillmore and Anacostia.

(Applause)

But he hasn’t seen the ghettos of this country. He hasn’t seen the suffering and the deprivation. He hasn’t seen the 23 percent unemployment for black males in the ghettos of our nation.

He hasn’t seen the 42 percent unemployment of black youth in this country. He hasn’t seen the black children dying from lead-based paint. He hasn’t seen the rat-infested houses in the slums.

He hasn’t seen black babies dying from rat bite at a rate eight times as great as white babies. He hasn’t seen black mothers dying in childbirth at a rate four times as great as white mothers.

I just can’t understand anybody talking about neutrality in this race. (Sustained applause)

There are some black people saying that we should not criticize the President. They said we didn’t support him, and he doesn’t owe us anything. You know, I happen to believe that the President of the United States is the President of all the people.

He should have the capacity to rise above political considerations. I think by the very nature of his office he is obligated to serve the interests of the entire country.

Now, when a United States Senator says that poor people should help themselves, and he helps himself to a large chunk of federal farm money by doing nothing, should we be neutral?

When our President insults black Congressmen, ridicules black welfare recipients, makes buffoons of black entertainers, leads the fight to return us to our previous condition of involuntary servitude—we would be damn fools to take a neutralist position.

(Applause)

Yes, we can be neutral. But if we are, we will never achieve total freedom, economic equality, and social justice. We must take a stand. We must keep on unifying and expanding our goals. This is a practical reality, not an impossible dream.

Let this be the first day of the new reality for black unions, the day when black working people say to America, “We have united, united to make real, to bring into reality now those things so long promised but so definitely denied the 25 million black Americans.”

We witness here tonight by your presence a manifested broad base of black unity in the union movement, a unity of black pride and black confidence, and with this unity we can and we will bring into being not only a basic change in attitudes but also a change in basic positions.

I call upon you to work for the building of a greater foundation upon which we can maximize our level of achievement.

This foundation which I call upon you to help build is made of black votes and black participation in the making of new institutions, and to be sure there are alterations to those so long outdated.

What you are suggesting here assumes one thing, and it implies another. It clearly assumes that there is a developing black political power in the labor movement, and it definitely implies that it will be operative in this Presidential year.

I suggest that both the assumption and the implication are accurate. So let’s take this occasion to devise a plan of single purpose to obtain through the exercise of black political power the reality of economic equality, social justice, and political manhood.

If you are to accept nothing less than meaningful participation at the center of power, then you as black labor leaders must be united. This is the objective of this meeting—full participation in labor’s decision-making process must be the basis of our unity.

It must also be our purpose to achieve this goal now. We must seek not only for the present, but as a group we must develop and demand for the future.

What has to be the positive assumption of this group assembled here is that the achievement of our goals is essential for the maintenance of an orderly labor movement. No longer can Black Americans silently accept the present degenerate calibre of white leadership.

No longer can we passively tolerate the immorality and the insanity that permeates this country. Our obligation is a challenging one. We must assume the mantle of leadership and direct this nation to the path of moral humane consciousness.

We must become the spearhead in the movement to eradicate racism in private and public institutions, and if you please, labor unions.

We must become the vanguard in the struggle to provide every man in this country with a decent living and a decent home, every child with a quality education, and every person with a job commensurate with his training and his ability; every person must be afforded fair and impartial justice.

Every business must be guaranteed a fair share of public funds, and every community must have full participation in determining how tax dollars are to be spent.

These goals are attainable. They are attainable now if only we can unite and dispel our fears, frustrations, and the indoctrinations that we have been the victims of for too many years.

Who convinced us that we must subjugate the interests of black people to the interests of this nation? I contend that what is good for black people is also good for this nation.

(Applause)

That must become our political rationale. We are the only group of people that I know of who are so concerned and so interwoven in the struggle to protect the interests of other groups that we have neglected our own.

If our politics of the Seventies is to be productive and meaningful, then it must be consistent with the rules of the game.

If we are to play the political game, then we must learn those rules. Rule No. 1 says that we must be practical and selfish. We must put the interests of no group before the interests of ours.

And Rule No. 2 says that we must take what we can and give up only what we must.

(Applause)

Rule No. 3 says that you take it from whomever you can, however you can, and wherever you can.

(Applause)

Now, if we are not ready to abide by these rules, then we have not reached the age of political maturity, and all of our talk about the new black politics is just an exercise in frustrated futility.

The power exists in black America today. If we go to that well in November and come back with our buckets empty, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We must realize that we have real power. We have the balance of power in many instances and the power to negate in many others.

And let me say as I close this evening that I hope that we will not be influenced by how many black babies a candidate kissed in Harlem or how many black entertainers are invited to the White House or how many government contracts one black businessman receives.

I think we have reached the point of no return. I think the next two months will determine the course and the impact of black political power for the next fifty years.

Thank you.

(Standing applause)

(Whereupon, the banquet session was concluded with the Benediction).

SUNDAY SESSION

SEPTEMBER 24, 1972

The Sunday session was devoted to work on resolutions. Following are the adopted resolutions, each voted on unanimously.

Resolution On The Formation Of A National Black Trade Union Organization

There are nearly three million black workers who are members of American trade unions. This number constitutes approximately one-third of the total black workforce and a sizable political and economic force within the unions and the black community. For example, the United Auto Workers, with 1.5 million members, has 500,000 black members. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has 200,000 black members out of a total membership of 1.8 million. Two hundred thousand of the 1.2 million members of the United Steel Workers are black. AFSCME with over 550,000 members has approximately 180,000 black members.

Delegates at the Conference of Black Trade Unionists represented the single largest gathering of black union members in history. Throughout the two-day meeting, both union officials and rank and file members voiced considerable displeasure with the neutralist presidential stance adopted by the AFL-CIO without apparent consideration of the consequences of this action on blacks and poor working people. The participants also expressed dissatisfaction with their roles and involvement in the shaping and implementation of union policy at the national and local levels.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the original convenors of the Conference (Nelson Jack Edwards, UAW; Charles Hayes, Amalgamated Meatcutters; William Lucy, AFSCME; Cleveland Robinson, Distributive Workers; and William Simmons, AFT) form a five-man steering committee to develop a structure and program for a permanent national organization for black union members, and that the committee be expanded at the earliest opportunity to provide for participation by women, youth, and representatives from other national and local unions.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That the steering committee convene a second national conference in the spring of 1973 to adopt an organizational structure and by-laws.

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED: That the organization be temporarily referred to as the “Coalition of Black Trade Unionists” which will operate within existing trade union structure, but function as a collective body of black trade unionists in the promotion of the interests of black workers and the labor movement in general.

Resolution On Political Action

Black voters have proven to be a potent force in past presidential elections. Their claims upon the political parties in 1972 are backed by strong evidence that in a close election, they could again hold the balance of power.

Practically every victorious presidential candidate since 1936 has carried the black vote in northern central cities. In at least nine major states—California, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania—the black has had an enormous influence on large blocks of electoral votes. In the South, blacks make up an even larger proportion of the population in many districts, and aided by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they have become a sizable portion of the electorate. As in the past, the black vote will be crucial in deciding the outcome of important national, state and local electoral contests.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the Conference opposes the re-election of President Richard Nixon and will do everything within its power to assure his defeat.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That the Conference declares the AFL-CIO’s position of neutrality in the presidential election “alien to our best interests” and in no way representative of the position of the great majority of black workers.

FURTHER RESOLVED: That the two major political parties establish as their first priority the increase in the number of elected black officials at all levels of government, and encourage the appointment of blacks and other minorities in policy-making decisions in all local, state and federal agencies, and

That the Conference urge the creation of machinery for a black political movement which will develop political sophistication within black and poor communities.

That each delegate at the Chicago Conference return to his local community and become actively involved in the political process and build a local political base within his union and community by working in concert with other political leadership and organizations; and

That black union members be encouraged to run for elected public office wherever such opportunities exist; and

That black unionists demand from their respective unions funds and resources necessary for establishing viable national and local political organizations.

Resolution On Voter Registration And Getting Out The Vote

The U.S. Bureau of the Census estimates that 57.6 percent of the black voting age population actually voted in the 1968 presidental election, compared to 69.1 percent of eligible whites. In the north and west, 64.8 percent of potential black voters actually voted, while in the south the figure was 51.6 percent.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That black trade unionists mount a massive national voter registration and get-out-the vote campaign utilizing every available resource in their unions and communities.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That coalitions be formed between unions and civil rights and civic organizations like the NAACP, Urban League, A. Philip Randolph Institute, Masons, Elks, fraternities and sororities, and church groups.

FURTHER RESOLVED: That the black press be enlisted to help publicize voter registration and get-out-the vote programs; and

That large union halls be used for youth entertainment programs to encourage youth voter registration; and

That “dial a registrar” programs be established in the various communities to help facilitate voter registration; and

That black trade unionists take full advantage of the considerable number of pamphlets, posters, films, and other resources made available—political parties, the AFL-CIO, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, and other political organizations.

Resolution On Job Opportunities And Organizing Workers

Under the pretense of curbing inflation, the Nixon administration has permitted unemployment to consistently hover around six percent—the highest unemployment rate in ten years—with nearly 5.5 million workers without jobs. Hardest hit by the Nixon unemployment program are blacks whose rates of unemployment run as high as 40 percent in many inner-city and ghetto areas.

In spite of the chronic unemployment problem, President Nixon vetoed major legislation which would have provided $5.6 billion for an accelerated public works program and $9.5 billion to assure employment and training for the Nation’s unemployed and under-employed citizens.

Wage controls were established by the Nixon Administration which froze the wages of workers while permitting prices, profits, and dividends to remain unchecked.

Black citizens who now complete on the average nearly 11 years of schooling, still find themselves earning little more than half the average income of their white counterparts.

Of the 80 million or more workers in the American workforce, only one-fourth of them are organized. Few concerted efforts have been made to organize workers in domestic and service occupations, farm labor, and the public sector.

In 1966, the latest year for which figures are available from the Census Bureau, 42.5 percent of all persons engaged in manufacturing were union members. The corresponding figure for blacks was 57.8 percent. In durable goods, the figures were 44.3 percent and 65.9 percent; for the metal industries, 51.3 percent and 74.1 percent; and in the manufacture of transportation equipment, including the auto industry, the figures were 54.2 percent and 89.5 percent.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the Conference urge the labor movement to use its full powers to solidify trade union coalitions which will work to elect a Congress and national administration whose objectives will be equal and full employment and a decent standard of living for all Americans.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED: That organized labor be urged to expand its efforts to organize the unorganized, particularly workers in domestic, service, farm and public service employment.

FURTHER RESOLVED: That funds for the Vietnam War be redirected to programs creating jobs and job training opportunities for the unemployed and underemployed; and

That the Conference support the expansion of minimum wage coverage to all workers; and

That the Conference urge change in educational systems which would emphasize teaching young people how to think as opposed to memorizing data.

Resolution On Community Development

Since he took office, President Nixon has shown a callous disregard for the welfare of millions of black and poor Americans. Under his Administration, the number of individuals and families with incomes below the government defined poverty level has increased for the first time in more than a decade.

The President has been slow to develop meaningful and reasonable programs to help resolve the many domestic problems currently facing the nation. Instead of improving living and working conditions for the Nation’s poor, President Nixon’s record shows that he has:

Proposed regressive and punitive welfare reform proposals.

Refused to spend monies appropriated by Congress for the school lunch program providing nutritious meals for needy children.

Vetoed comprehensive day care and child development legislation.

Vigorously opposed the creation of a strong independent consumer advocate program within the government.

Opposed adequate cost of living increases under Social Security.

Advocated a policy of “benign neglect” toward black citizens and minimized federal civil rights enforcement efforts.

Reopened the nation’s racial wounds by developing negative policies on such sensitive issues as busing, job quotas, and federally subsidized low-income housing for suburban communities.

The domestic policies of the Nixon Administration have proven disastrous for workers, minorities, and poverty-stricken families.

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the Conference of Black Trade Unionists work cooperatively and actively with church, social, civic, education, and civil rights organizations to improve the living conditions of black and poor families, and that black trade unionists seek out opportunities to serve on local boards and commissions in order to maximize the participation and influence of black and poor workers in community decision-making.

The following organizations were represented at the first Conference of Black Trade Unionists, held in Chicago, Ill., on September 23–24:

Allied Industrial Workers of America, AFL-CIO

Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, AFL-CIO

Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, AFL-CIO

American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO

American Federation of Musicians, AFL-CIO

American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO

American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO

American Postal Workers Union, AFL-CIO

Bakery and Confectionary Workers’ International Union of America, AFL-CIO

Bricklayers, Masons, Plasters’ International Union of America, AFL-CIO

Communication Workers of America, AFL-CIO

Distillery, Rectifying, Wine and Allied Workers’ International Union of America, AFL-CIO

Distributive Workers of America

Food Packers Association

Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union, AFL-CIO

Illinois Union of Social Services’ Employees

International Association of Machinists, AFL-CIO

International Association of Marble, Slate and Stone Polishers, Rubbers, and Sawyers, Tile and Marble Setters Helpers and Terrazzo Helpers, AFL-CIO

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, AFL-CIO

International Brotherhood of Teamsters

International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, AFL-CIO

International Longshoremen’s Association, AFL-CIO

International Woodworkers of America, AFL-CIO

Laborers International Union of North America, AFL-CIO

Laundry and Dry Cleaning International Union, AFL-CIO

National Education Association

Newspaper Guild, AFL-CIO

Office and Professional Employees International Union, AFL-CIO

Retail Clerks Workers Union of America, AFL-CIO

Retail, Wholesale, Department Store Workers Union, AFL-CIO

Seafarers International Union of North America, AFL-CIO

Transport Workers of America, AFL-CIO

United Auto Workers

United Cement, Lime, and Gypsum Workers International Union, AFL-CIO

United Steel Workers, AFL-CIO

United Textile Workers of America, AFL-CIO

Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Conference Report (1972), pp. 1–58.

Pamphlet in possession of the editors.

13. BLACK UNIONISTS FORM COALITION

Organization Will Work for McGovern But Will Not Disband After Election

By Philip Shabecoff

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

New York Times, October 3, 1972.

14. A GIANT STEP TOWARD UNITY

By Jacoby Sims

During two cool days in Chicago last September, 1,200 African-American trade unionists gathered to form the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. The attendance far surpassed the initiators’ dreams. One unionist said, “The sleeping giant is awakening.”

There are some three million African-American trade unionists in the U.S. This is one-third of the total Black labor force. If they were all organized, their influence would be sizeable, both in the labor movement and in government. Members of the Coalition feel that the demands of Afro-American labor must be felt in those two areas.

Rank-and-filers and union officials from 37 unions throughout the nation attended the conference. Prior to a national constitutional convention planned for this spring, there will be regional conferences in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Cleveland and, possibly, San Francisco or Los Angeles.

On January 19, I interviewed William Simons, a member of the Coalition’s steering committee and president of Local 6 of the Washington Teacher’s Union, AFT, in the offices of his union.

Mr. Simons, besides his organized labor activities, has been involved in the struggle for equal rights with such groups as the National Urban League and the NAACP. He has also been active in the movement against U.S. intervention in the affairs of people of the “Third World.”

Q: Mr. Simons, what is the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists?

A: The Coalition of Black Trade Unionists is a group that was organized this past summer. The purpose of organizing at that time was to express our displeasure to the position taken by George Meany and the executive council (of the AFL-CIO) on the elections, that of neutrality.

The group was also concerned about the fact that much needs to be done in the labor movement to eradicate the racist practices, the discriminatory practices, which still exist within certain unions.

And we felt that if we could organize, we would then be able to demonstrate that there are real concerns to which the labor movement is not addressing itself. We want the labor movement to address itself not only to the concerns of Black trade unionists but to those of all trade unionists.

Q: Who participated in the conference?

A: In the formation of the group there was Bill Lucy, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Nelson Jack Edwards from the United Auto Workers, Charlie Hayes from the Amalgamated Meatcutters, myself and there were one or two others.

There were members from both the AFL-CIO unions and from non-AFL-CIO unions. We had our initial meeting in Miami in August and we had additional meetings in Washington and we laid plans for the September conference.

Since that conference there have been three meetings. Their purpose was to try to put together a constitution and a structure in order to mobilize trade unionists around the country.

While, the name of the organization is the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, we do not by any means intend to limit it to Black trade unionists.

At our last meeting, we discussed taking our positions to the Secretary of Labor designee, Peter Brennan. We sought to have a conference with him simply to raise certain issues, to get his feeling about how he is going to use his position to further the growth of labor in the United States. Unfortunately Mr. Brennen did not see fit to meet with us.

Today we testified before the Senate Subcommittee holding hearings on the confirmation of Mr. Brennan. We raised these questions with the sub-committee. The sub-committee agreed it would place these questions before Mr. Brennan and elicit responses from him concerning the issues we raised. We did not take a position for or against Mr. Brennan, we simply indicated there were some concerns that we would like the sub-committee to investigate thoroughly before they arrive at any decision with respect to his confirmation.

Q: Who testified for the Coalition?

A: Bill Lucy read the main statement. Dick Parrish, respresenting the New York Distributive Workers of America, made some comments and I also made a few comments.

Q: You just stated that the Coalition is not limited to just Black workers and Black trade unionists. Who else can participate?

A: We have not drawn up our constitution as yet. But we envision that any trade unionist who is concerned with the same problems as the Coalition will be eligible for membership. I might point out that out of the 1,200 delegates in Chicago, there were at least 200–300 non-black, and other minority delegates. And they had full participation in the deliberations of the conference.

Q: When will the constitutional conference take place?

A: We are shooting for a date some time this spring, possibly in April. That has not been finalized.

Q: Is there a preliminary constitution?

A: No, we only have working papers, documents not in finalized form. We are working on a structure and quite frankly we intend to just about parallel the same kind of structure that the AFL-CIO has. That is, with the central body or executive committee or whatever name we give to it—with state federations and local bodies with each body being autonomous—within the framework of being bound by only the constitutional guidelines that are going to be established.

Q: How will rank-and-file participation be encouraged?

A: Rank-and-file participation will be encouraged at the local and state levels. Each local jurisdiction can organize—have membership. And then each local jurisdiction would send delegates to the state federation. And then of course the governing body would be elected by the entire membership at the convention.

Q: Will you be working with the same unions involved in the original conference and will the group be expanded?

A: It’s going to expand. Hopefully, we will get a broad-based participation from the whole spectrum of the labor movement, from those unions which are in the AFL-CIO and those which are not.

Q: What is the purpose of the Coalition?

A: The purpose is to identify the problem that exists in the labor movement as a whole. And to bring whatever pressures we can to try to get these situations corrected, so that all workers can get a fair share of the pie in the labor movement. We are not going to be a watchdog, in terms of practices that exist in individual unions. In other words, a member cannot bring a grievance to the Coalition and expect the Coalition to take action. That is not our purpose at all.

We are looking at the overall trends and, for example, we are trying to influence the decisions made by the executive council of the AFL-CIO. We will try to influence broad policy decisions of internationals.

Also, we intend to concentrate not only on problems in the labor movement per se, but also problems in the community and country.

Q: Could you specify some of the problems which U.S. workers face?

A: For example, I think we had a clear indication just yesterday, when we learned that the American Telephone and Telegraph Company has been ordered to pay some 38 million dollars to upgrade the salaries of women and other nonwhite workers against whom they were discriminating.

This is the kind of thing we would call attention to in other companies. This practice has been condoned by the Communication Workers (of America) over the years. They represent the majority of the employees in the telephone system. There are also some workers organized by the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers). Condoning discrimination has been the policy of the union leadership. These are the kind of things we would call attention to.

Q: In the September conference, rank-and-file workers are particularly concerned with methods whereby they could get more Black elected officials in their locals. Could the Coalition lend support here?

A: Yes, in terms of working with groups of workers and acquainting them with their union structure and how officials are elected. And if a structure is democratic enough—and many unions do have a democratic process—we will tell the Black workers they have to begin organizing on a political basis and be able to mobilize their voting strength at conventions or meetings or wherever voting takes place.

Q: Are there any qualifications for membership in the Coalition? Is it open to trade unionists regardless of political affiliation?

A. The only qualification will be that the person is a member of a qualified union.

Q: What about President Nixon? Since he is a lame duck President, what might he unleash on the Black worker, and workers in general?

A: Of course we have already seen how the wage-price guidelines have affected workers. I suspect there will probably be some efforts on the part of the administration to try to curb the bargaining power of unions.

I do not expect that we are going to get very much in the way of positive action by the President to lift up the workers in this country. It has not been the pattern in the past and I can see nothing that will project that in the future.

Q: Will the Coalition continue to stress independent political action, such as trade unionists running for elected offices?

A: Very definitely we would stress that kind of action. It is absolutely essential that there should be representatives of the workers in legislative bodies in order to try to help shape the legislation that will benefit the workers.

And also we would support those candidates in state legislatures as well as Congress who have a sympathetic viewpoint toward the problems which the working man faces. . . .

World Magazine, February 10, 1973.

15. NEWEST BLACK POWER: BLACK LEADERS BUILDING MASSIVE LABOR COALITION INSIDE UNIONS

By Victor Riesel

WASHINGTON—Not in many, ofttimes fiery decades has black militancy—which is as different from extremism as a winch from a wench—been on the move.

This is a new black movement—within a movement. Black labor men and leaders who see their strategy as structural, quiet, organizational, motivational, and finally, a powerful massive pressure “group” far beyond the “old” era of civil rights.

This is the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU). This is a movement of men, mostly black union officials, who see themselves and the entire three million black rank and filers as the force which will make the national labor leadership “black conscious.” Such consciousness is not, and was not there during last week’s national labor high command meeting in Bal Harbour, Fla., say the CBTU’s leaders, some of whom flew directly from the watering place in sunny Florida to frigid Chicago.

On Feb. 24, they met with some 100 black labor leaders there—men and women from western Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. This was one of the regional conferences which gradually will lead to the official national black, infrastructured membership organization of unionized workers. There will be regional conferences in Cleveland March 10, Detroit March 31, and New York April 14.

Then with a provisional constitution in hand, the five CBTU leaders—officials of some of the nation’s most influential and swiftest growing unions in the land—will make final plans for a national convention of black workers in Washington, May 25–27.

They will sing “Solidarity.” They will sing “We Shall Overcome.” They will be militant. But they will not bolt the AFL-CIO, or the independent United Auto Workers and Distributive Workers to which the black workers belong.

Instead, they will push for more influence, more “relevancy,” more high echelon officials, more representation in the highest councils—including the AFL-CIO Executive Council—and more members on the boards of such unions as the United Steelworkers.

Man, the jargon will be different. But not the spirit of national and ethnic pressure groups gone by—powerful organizations of yesteryear which now are tiny bands of workers who have survived assimilation, tradition and the silent slippage of time.

Ever since the first dues stamp, there have been pressure groups of newly arrived proletarians. There have been—and quietly in some corner of the remnant of New York’s lower East Side there still are—the one-man offices of the United Hebrew Trades, the Italian American Labor Council, German “vereine” and other groups still speaking their native tongues.

They once were powerful. They once were the force behind some of today’s national labor leaders and some who have only recently retired. Some of these men actually launched movements which made Presidents of the U.S. and changed this nation’s social action.

They worked mostly inside the labor movement. Now in that old tradition, though one would hardly note it amid the rhetoric of today’s black speakers, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists quietly is structuring itself. And may well have the success of its ethnic predecessors.

Actually the young (there even are some middle-aged) organizers spring from the very same unions which spurted the old movements—unions whose leaders have “graduated” from the garment industry and those in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butcher Workmen, the United Auto Workers (UAW), the American Federation of Teachers, and the Distributive Workers.

From these unions come the men on the CBTU’s five-man Steering Committee, especially the municipal employees’ secretary treasurer Bill Lucy, the meat-cutter’s Charles Hayes and the UAW’s Nelson Jack Edwards.

They are neo-(Franklin) Rooseveltians, worshippers at the Kennedy’s shrine and newly arrived militants. They are anti-NIXON, anti-Republican and even determined to needle Secretary of Labor Peter Brennan. They have demanded that he be recalled to Sen. Harrison (Pete) Williams’s Labor Committee—not for a rehearing on his confirmation, but to get some promises from him. They want support from the former president of the New York State Building and Construction Trades Council for a universal law guaranteeing civil service workers the right to bargain collectively and to strike.

They want Brennan to pledge the beefing up of the Labor Dept.’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) to reinstate the black quota system of hiring by those who do business with the government. They say that the OFCC has been cut to 45 employees though 112 positions have been authorized.

They are swinging into the fight to keep the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) going, also the mechanism of other groups which once policed the old “Philadelphia Plan.”

But mostly they want militant black representation on the AFL-CIO Executive Council, and on the executive boards of their unions. They are saying to the labor movement, match your actions with your official oratory and resolutions. In the lead is Bill Lucy, actually the highest placed black official in the labor movement—secretary treasurer of Jerry Wurf’s municipal employees.

There’s a labor song which says, “We’ll thunder high the battle cry.” The CBTU plans just that, not only at its second national convention in May but in street rallies in the big cities with heavy black populations—Detroit, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, Atlanta. The big cities where once the civil rights extremists roared soon will hear the calmer, but more powerful, voices of black militancy attempting to march upward inside their own movement.

Press release dated February 26, 1973. Copy in possession of the editors.

16. BLACK CAUCUS IN THE UNIONS

By Stephen C. Schlesinger

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

The Nation, 218 (February 2, 1974):142-44.

BAYARD RUSTIN

17. MORALS CONCERNING MINORITIES: MENTAL HEALTH AND IDENTITY

By Bayard Rustin

It would appear that the public morality in America at the present time is being dominated, to an alarming degree, by a concern with technological and corporate priorities. This concern, quite naturally, ignores the problems and aspirations of the ordinary individual, particularly the individual who is not equipped either by spiritual inclination or technical training to participate in the processes and values in which these priorities are pursued. A humane culture as we have imagined it and dreamed of it in America, and which at certain periods of our history has appeared possible, seems today to be on the verge of being sacrificed to the special exigences of the marketplace: That is to say, as the new technological and organizational obsession spreads, the possibility of our creating an engaged social conscience recedes further and further into the background, leaving more and more people, particularly our minorities, stranded and neglected in a deepening mire of social and economic problems. . . .

At the heart of this problem—the dehumanization, demoralization, and exclusion of the individual from the prevailing concerns of our society—is the problem of our minorities. And increasingly today the heart of our minority problem is being located in the urban centers of our nation. None of us—even those who are least interested in solutions—can have escaped the sense of fear and frustration that are building up in our cities, perhaps towards an explosion whose effects we might not be able to control. And none of us can deny that this situation is being brought about by the gradual diminution of social morality and social concern for the value of the individual. . . .

As minorities are driven to the cities in search of a better life, those in a position to help them fulfill these aspirations shrink from them to the greener suburbs, leaving behind growing reservoirs of helplessness and misery.

This is by no means an excessive estimate. An objective profile of what the cities will look like in the year 1980, or even 2000, gives no less cause for concern. In a paper written for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Victor Palmieri, president of the Janss Corporation, states:

Within the next two decades—probably in 1980—the core area of almost every major metropolitan city of the United States will be a racial—predominantly black—island. This is not a speculatiln. It is already very largely a fact in Washington, Chicago, and New York City. It is rapidly becoming a fact in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Three established factors—the rate of population growth among minority groups (almost three times that of the white population in the City of Los Angeles); the increasing income level and mobility of middle class white families; and the resulting domino effect on racially impacted school districts—will maintain the velocity of the trend and virtually guarantee its ultimate concern. . . .

It is in the face of this situation that white majorities become fearful of their mental and economic security and the minorities become more and more frustrated. The privileged majorities either retreat into pockets of resistance or flee to the suburbs, a flight, incidentally, which the government has been subsidizing for years now by the building of new highways and the establishment of suburban housing. While the white majority has been able to find these outlets for their fear, there has been no outlet for minority frustration except in rioting. The cycle seems so vicious and I’m convinced that this whole problem—the problem of our minorities and of our cities—grows out of one source, and that is fundamental social immorality in our society; the failure or unwillingness to establish humane priorities; the absence of a major public commitment to eradicate poverty and slums. . . .

I myself wrote in the November 1966 issue of Federationist magazine that a vicious cycle was being set in motion:

Failing to deal with the social and economic roadblocks to equality, we stoke the fire of frustration in the ghetto; violent riots and cries of “black power” in turn feed a white backlash which makes constructive solutions to the problems of blacks and whites more difficult. Finally, backlash only confirms Negro isolationists in their hostility toward white America. We are today at the crossroads. Within the next 50 years, if the cycle of fear and frustration is not broken, if the just economic demands of the labor movement are not coupled with the democratic aspirations of the Negro people, and if men of goodwill do not join in the fight for programs such as the Freedom Budget for all Americans, which would end poverty within the next ten years in this country, then we may very well be propelled into a racial nightmare. And not only the ethnic minorities will benefit from the Freedom Budget; 75 percent of the poor white. All of us are affected by the persistence of poverty—in the conditions of our neighborhoods and schools, in our tax rates and public services, in the quality of our lives. . . .

Minority Poverty and Joblessness: The white immigrant waves of the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries faced ethnic and religious prejudice but they were never confronted, as today’s ethnic minorities are, with an organized system of race hatred with its own laws and myths and stereotypes, its own economy. Those of the older generations of the white poor who fought their way out of poverty could thus assimilate into American life as soon as they acquired money, education, mastery of the language, and so forth. Also, the older white immigrant came into an economy which could put grade school drop-outs to work. The minorities who are struggling today are faced with an entirely different problem; they must compete not only within race prejudice but also against machines.

Moreover, the unemployed rates today are much higher than they were even during the worst years of the great depression. As James McGregor Burns points out, 20 percent of the population was then unemployed. Today, a U.S. Department of Labor study estimates that in the 12 largest areas unemployment rates between 14- and 19-year-olds range from 18.4 percent in Washington, D.C., to 36 percent in Philadelphia, with the rate running about 30 percent in seven areas. The rate of nonwhite girls is somewhat higher than for boys (over 40 percent in Philadelphia and St. Louis).¹⁰⁹

I believe, therefore, that, in the same way the society provided the old immigrants with opportunities to lift themselves and play a meaningful role in the American social and economic order, so also it is obliged to find a way to provide today’s minorities with the opportunity and potential to lift and save themselves: And, in keeping with our present circumstances, any program which is conceived to help our minorities out of their present plight must include, first and foremost, a program for full and fair employment, i.e., federally guaranteed jobs for all those—whether members of minority groups or not—who are eligible or can be made eligible for employment in the production of goods and services in the public sector. Gerhard Colm of the National Planning Association is correct when he suggests that such a program of full employment per se will not solve all the problems of poverty, and especially not the racial problems, but it would contribute substantially to the solution and would create the best conditions for attacking the residual problems. Secondly, the program must include a two-dollar minimum wage; and, thirdly, a guaranteed annual income for those too old, too young, or too sick to work.

We need federally financed public works programs for the creation of the necessary physical institutions—more schools, more hospitals, more roads, more clinics, more psychiatric facilities, more libraries. Not only should the poor benefit from the increased services of these physical facilities, they should also participate in building them—acquiring skills while being paid. This is especially important if we are going to convince young minority group members to take advantage of training or retraining programs. One cannot train young people in a vacuum and expect to win their seriousness, their hope, or their cooperation; in other words, one must show them that the jobs exist for which they are being trained, and that they can work on those jobs even while they are being trained.

Part of any program for full employment is the need for a “redefinition of work.” This is necessary to make up for the inroads which automation has made into areas traditionally served by human labor. That is to say, we must redefine work around those kinds of efforts which the technological revolution cannot affect. What are some of these efforts? They involve creating a whole new hierarchy of non-professional workers to help the professional perform some of the functions he now performs. . . .

There must be creation of new opportunities for human services. Academic study should be redefined as work and paid for. Many functions which are performed today by underprivileged people but which do not have the stamp of prestige should be redefined as prestigious labor and be paid for at dignified wages. All of this, of course, must be part of a grand plan to solve poverty and to create new motivations and liberate new energies by which minorities can achieve a new sense of belonging and a new sense of identity in American life.

I would make the two-dollar minimum wage the next major priority. That alone could do as much as the entire poverty program in terms of helping people rehabilitate themselves through their own lucrative labor. . . .

Even the passage of a two-dollar minimum wage is modest. It guarantees an income of $4160 for a year’s work, and that is roughly $2000 less than what the government has computed to be a “modest but adequate” urban family budget. We should not be satisfied until every American family has at least that “modest but adequate” income. For now, however, an increase of the minimum wage to $2.00 is a responsible and reasonable step in the right direction.

Here, I would like to discuss the most common argument against extending wage coverage and against raising the minimum wage itself to $2.00. Rising labor costs in unskilled and semi-skilled work, it is said, provide an incentive to employers to mechanize or even to automate. The results will be the elimination of precisely those marginal jobs which now provide at least an employment opportunity for unskilled Negroes, young people, and others who are not qualified to compete in the modern economy. There is some truth in this argument. If Congress simply amends the Fair Labor Standards Act and lets it go at that, then the result could be negative. That is why we cannot regard minimum wage as a panacea. That is why my proposals make sense only within the framework of a national commitment to generate new jobs.

I would then add a guaranteed annual income. But let us consider a few figures. As recently as March 3 this year, Joseph Alsop wrote in his syndicated newspaper column:

At present, a million American families with 3,200,000 children are living on welfare. In addition, another 3,600,000 American families with 11,800,000 children, though not caught in the welfare trap, are subsisting in grinding poverty that mocks and dishonors our national influence.

Now, obviously, we need a bold social and economic innovation to end the pathetic dependence of so many millions of our citizens on the caprice of welfare agencies, and I would suggest that the innovation ought to be a guaranteed annual income for those who are too old, too young, or too sick to work; or mothers or families who cannot or should not work.

I do not believe that the way to deal with man is to deal with him only as an economic person. . . . We cannot keep on handing out checks like leaflets. A man needs to feel that the check he gets is a wage for services to the society and, given the nature of our Western values, I do not believe that he can feel dignity and humanity by simply having checks given to him periodically. . . .

The foregoing are some of the basic areas in which minority mental health and identity have suffered in the past, and are still suffering, but in which they should be protected from suffering in the future. And, as I suggested earlier, the creation of a more humane future—a more humane 21st century—for these people requires a commitment in social morality such as we have not had at any previous period of our history.

And here I should like to say a word about one or two of the possible ways in which the minorities themselves can help to generate or set in motion the sweeping social changes that the coming decades demand. Without going into the Freedom Budget, I may say I believe the programs it puts forward represent the most urgent demand for economic change in the lives of the poor in America, and provides a rallying point around which millions of America’s poor and excluded can mount a massive campaign in behalf of their own future.

Which brings me to the point I really want to make: the need for organization and coalition. As stated earlier, the only elements among the minorities that are in any significant motion are the Negroes and Spanish-American minorities. This is a serious problem because these groups do not have sufficient political power to deal with any of the stubborn economic problems in the society. The only way in which these problems can be dealt with is through the creation of a political coalition made up of Jews, Catholics, Protestants, the labor movement, liberals, the students, intellectuals, civil rights, and other minority groups. And I believe one of the key partners in this coalition has to be the labor movement, particularly because it has been the most successful voluntary organization for the abolition of poverty in American history.

Elizabeth Wickenden points out that “such a coalition will become effective when there is a wide-spreading network of mutual interest. This involves a very delicate balance of what is particular to one group and what is the common interest of many groups. . . . More members of the majority need to recognize their own interests are jeopardized by an excluded submerged minority, not through fear but through real understanding.”

The economic challenge that now faces minority groups gives the labor movement an opportunity to face up to a new and profound challenge. Almost half of the heads of poor families work hard and long—yet they are still poor. Some of them are denied coverage under the nation’s collective bargaining policies—especially Mexican-American farm workers—others lack Social Security, some work at sub-poverty wages, and many work in unorganized shops. Therefore, I believe the labor movement’s program for increasing minimum wage and extending its coverage can constitute a major step forward for the working poor. I also believe that the labor movement must bring its unique skills—organization and collective bargaining—to the unorganized poor. Some trade unionists have already suggested that strong, stable internationals and locals should “adopt” organizing campaigns among workers who are so poor that they cannot pay the cost of organizing themselves, at least at the outset. Others have indicated that union organizing experience can make a major contribution to help organize the poor for “maximum feasible participation” in the war against poverty.

While I have no doubt about the value of maximum feasible participation in solving problems of poverty, or any other problems, I would just like to add that we ought to look at maximum feasible participation as broadly and realistically as possible. More than anything else it should represent from here on one of the vital features of the grass-roots relationship to the political institutions of the society. In other words, I am all in favor of maximum participation if it means participating as fully as possible in the political decisions of the entire society. Finally, in whatever way one interprets maximum feasible participation, it should not relieve political parties and other social institutions of their obligation to act with courage, commitment and responsibility in solving people’s problems. That is to say, maximum participation of the people in the solution of their problems should not be an excuse for the traditional political institutions to shirk their own responsibilities to seek and propose remedies for the ills of the people.

All of which takes me back to the need for coalition—a coalition of effort, a coalition of conscience, a coalition of social morality, and a coalition of concern. I have no crystal ball, I have no way of knowing whether the new century that we create in America will be the one that ought in all justness to be created. But I do know that we can at the present moment ask no less. I do know that it will be a tragedy if we cannot find social answers to the problems created by the progress of technology and automation. So we, therefore, ought to fight for what is right, now. And in doing so we have to work to weld behind us a broad coalition of morality, now. For if we reject the possibility of this kind of coalition, or if we despair that it will ever come about, then we are rejecting and despairing of the only viable democratic alternative that is available. We cannot look any longer to third political parties. No third political party could do what Catholics, Protestants, Jews, intellectuals, students, civil rights workers, labor organizations, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and other minorities did for the passage of civil rights bills, voting rights bills, public accommodations bills, and the March on Washington. If we cannot build that force again, this time around economic and social priorities for the excluded members of our society, then we are on our way to a social cataclysm that we will not be able to control except perhaps by tyranny.

Speech prepared for the Conference on “The Next Fifty Years,” sponsored by the American Institute of Planners, Box 65 Committee Affiliations 1967, Whitney Young Papers, Columbia University.

18. ADDRESS TO THE 1969 CONVENTION OF THE AFL-CIO BAYARD RUSTIN

Executive Director, A. Philip Randolph Institute

President Meany. Lane Kirkland, members of the Executive Council, brothers and sisters, and particular greetings to our guests from overseas. I am going to deal this morning with a very difficult, trying and agonizing problem which is facing America, that is the problem of justice for all of our citizens, regardless of color, race or creed. But before I do, I would like to congratulate Brother Meany on his analysis of Mr. Haynsworth in his speech yesterday, to point out something to our visitors which I know they will see, but which I would not want any one of them to fail to see, and that is that when there were millions of people in this country who were prepared to let the Haynsworth appointment go unchallenged, there were two groups of people who stood up. The first one was George Meany, representing the labor movement, and the other was Roy Wilkins representing the civil rights movement.

I am convinced that we are going to get this man, but even if we do not, President Meany, the civil rights movement and the trade union movement deserves profound credit for pointing out to the American people the nature and the danger of his campaign, and for this I congratulate all of you in whose name Brother Meany acted. (Applause).

I would like to secondly point out to our visitors from overseas that COPE, the political arm of the AFL-CIO performed a miracle in the 1968 elections, for history will record that when the ship of progress and liberalism in this nation was sinking it was again the labor movement and the Negro people who in coalition stood up and held the banner of justice; and it’s a pity, George, they beat us by a couple of votes.

Now, friends, if anything decent is going to happen in these United States, as has been the case since the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it will be because the trade union movement and the black people of this country do not permit themselves to become divided but stick together.

(Applause).

My friends, alliances are not made in the way in which one marries his wife; alliances are not made out of affection; alliances are made out of mutual interest and, although there will be difficult times for us, we must remember that this mutual interest does in fact exist and we must hold on to it.

Finally, let me salute the AFL-CIO for the work it has done for the sanitation workers in Memphis, for the farm workers in Delano, and for the hospital workers in South Carolina. Then let no man say that together we are not fighting poverty, for that is precisely what we are doing, more effectively than any other combination of forces.

I note also, and I hope the Wall Street Journal will take note and the New York Times will take note, that there was a magnificent march in Raleigh, North Carolina, a few weeks ago, with 12,000 men and women, white and black, demonstrating in solidarity, and that was organized by the North Carolina AFL-CIO and the Building and Construction Trades Council. There was unity there and, therefore, half of you don’t even know about it because the press does not like unity. It records only discord and ugliness. (Applause).

My friends, I did not come here to make a congratulatory speech. I came here to talk to you about what I consider to be two of the most serious problems this nation faces. We are in a difficult period and I think that you know this better than I do, for you are working daily with the people in the streets, in your neighborhood, and your factories and shops. Therefore, you know more about it than the journalists and the television commentators and the politicians.

What is the difficulty? It is called by many names, but the reality is there has been so little done to meet the needs of the American people that we have cropped up with two twin evils, and I want to say a word about these evils.

One of them is black rage and the other is white fear. We hear all about black rage and riots but the newspapers are not telling us about the fantastic fear of many white people, a justified fear in many respects.

These two things feed on each other and they set this nation on a collision course. I believe there are people in this country who want us to be on a collision course. First there is a small handful who want this collision because they see it as the first act of a revolutionary drama of their fantasies. But they are small and sick and a sorry lot with an inflated notion of their strength which comes from seeing themselves too often on television.

But there are more powerful groups. They are not the Left but the Right. This group knows that revolution by fanatics will not succeed, but they would use this threat as a pretext for an assault—and do not misunderstand me—not only on black people but first of all on the trade union movement, on social legislation, on civil liberties, and on black people, and they will work hard at it. They would seize on the fear of the future to draw us back into the past. If they succeed then the American dream will be shattered.

My friends, this need not happen. We can get off this collision course, and to do that we must understand what makes for black fear and rage and what makes for white fear.

There are those who say black people have made no progress, we have won no gains in the last decade. But they don’t know what they are talking about. Of course we have made much progress. Our long struggle has not been for nothing. The problem that we face is that progress is all that’s relative, as every trade unionist knows.

For example, I could say that across the country union wages last year raised 5, 6, 7 or 8 percent, or what have you, but every trade unionist knows that these are related to prices and you know that many of your workers have been robbed of this net gain by spiraling prices. Therefore, they are resentful, they are afraid, and they are angry.

Despite this progress that black people have made, there are also many parts of our ghettos in which unemployment is double, and there are more rats and roaches in the slums than ever before. Fifteen years after the Supreme Court decision there are more Negro children in segregated schools than there were before that decision.

Now, my friends, no matter what some of the black militants and white intellectuals say, the fact is that segregated education is an inferior education and we must not permit anyone to say differently. But you know these things. You know the anguish that comes when men have hopes which have been dashed.

My friends, there is another misery. It has nothing to do with black people but with white people. And that is that they are up to here in mortgages. They appear to own homes which are not paid for; they do not have enough money to feed their families; therefore these white people have as much fear because they are afraid of losing what they have, as black people have raged because they do not have what they feel they should have.

For millions of these white people their jobs and their homes are all they have got. Because their position is so dangerous they feel threatened by the demands of black people for justice because, they argue: “This nation says we will not have enough houses. Therefore, I fearfully cling to mine lest my black brother get it. This nation says there will not be enough jobs. Therefore, I nervously cling to my job lest my black brother get it.”

Now, my friends, the only answer to that is adequate housing, adequate jobs, adequate education for all. Then white fear and black rage can be contained.

Now, my friends, I maintain that we have got to build. We have got to build and rebuild. I propose that we tear down all that is dying and dead, all that is ugly and divisive, all that breeds hate and misery, and I propose that we put new towns and cities in their place, new schools in their place, new neighborhoods in their place, fresh air and clean water. I say, friends, let us build.

But the minute I use the word “build,” I get right into the middle of a problem which is on all of our minds and which none of us can sweep under a rug. My friends, to use the word “build” brings a subject to the foreground which has caused much controversy and intensely strong feelings, I refer, of course, to the events that have recently occurred in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and other cities, about which I would now like to have a word and would like to have you listen carefully.

The problem raised by these events, the problem of minority participation in the building trades is difficult and dangerous, but let those of you who are in the trade union movement not mistake the problem. It is not the problem of the building trades. It is the problem of all organized labor that to this date, while we have done much, none of us has done enough to completely solve the problem, and we cannot make a scapegoat of any segment of the trade union movement, of any segment of the civil rights movement. This is a fight where we are all in together and nothing can be done without the cooperation and effective action of all.

There is no doubt in my mind that the events of Chicago and Pittsburgh are a source of tremendous satisfaction to the powerful enemies of the black movement and the labor movement. Read, for example, what was written in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. You know, the Wall Street Journal is an interesting paper. The big boys who read that want the truth. There are seldom lies in the Wall Street Journal. They don’t want to lie to themselves.

The New York Times lies, but not the Wall Street Journal.

(Laughter).

This is what the Journal says to its people. “It is no accident that the civil rights groups have chosen this particular time to press their attack on the building trades. They clearly are betting that contractors beset by spiraling wage costs and the public in general will be sympathetic to demands for expansion of union hiring and training efforts in the hope that it might slow inflation in construction by increasing the supply of workers.”

I don’t know whether you got that, because that is a very fancy sentence. But let me proceed.

You and I understand perfectly well what is meant by that delicate and articulate little language—“slow inflation in construction by increasing the supply of workers.” Baby, that simply means, let’s cut some wages, let’s use the building trades to do it, and let’s aggravate the Negro to attack them in order to achieve that little bit. (Applause).

I do not for one minute believe that a single civil rights group would want to take such a position, for we know that it is pointless and self-defeating to get more Negroes into the industries where there are skilled jobs and well-paying, only to have the wages in that industry decline. What the hell you want in for then, only to have the wages drop?

After all, one of the main reasons why black workers are now attracted to these jobs is because the pay and the benefits are the best. They didn’t get that way because contractors did it, as the Wall Street Journal would have us believe, or because the public in general somehow uplifted the building trades. It got that way because the building trades fought hard to make it so. (Applause).

So I want to say a word to my fellow freedom-fighters in the civil rights movement. We must continue to press vigorously for greater minority participation in the building trades. We will not let ourselves become stooges for those powerful economic interests that would use our struggle to depress wages and standards, or to cripple the unions that won them. (Applause).

We black Americans have struggled too hard, come too far and learned too much. We are not dumb niggers now sitting on a cotton bale playing the guitar. We have learned too much to be exploited ever again by the capitalist classes of this country.

There is a great Negro spiritual which says, “No more auction block for me,” and along with Brother Randolph I say, “No more union busting, either.” (Applause).

Some unscrupulous interests have mounted a propaganda campaign to blame labor for the high cost of home building and other socially needed construction. They want to divert attention from the profiteering of the large corporations and the tight-money bankers and the real estate interest—and, if I may say so, from the economic policies of the Nixon Administration. They would divert us and our attention from the dismal record in integrating black Americans into the decision making process.

Now, baby, let’s look where the real money is. The real money is in the 500 major corporations in this country. Look at those corporations, and if you can find a black face in any one of them I will give you what money I have. It won’t be much, but you can have it.

Look at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. How many black faces have they got amongst their reporters, editors, and managers? Not enough to make a black power movement, and today you only need two people to make a black power movement. (Applause).

Well, my friends, having said this I want to say a very serious word to any of our friends who still have a problem left with their unions, and for this opportunity I take off on what has happened with the building trades. I read with profound interest of your recent 55th Convention. I must say that I especially noted your policy statement, which I want to quote.

“We favor the acceleration and expansion of the apprenticeship outreach programs which have proved successful in actual operation.

“We make the flat and unqualified recommendation to local unions throughout the United States that for a stated period of time they should invite the application of qualified minority journeymen for membership in their respective local unions and should accept all such qualified minority journeymen provided they meet the ordinary and equally administered requirements for membership.”

I note further a final quote. “We also recommend that local unions and local councils explore and vigorously pursue training programs for the upgrading of minority workers who are not of apprenticeship age.”

My friends, I believe that to be a statement of importance and a statement on which we can base profound progress. But one of the problems is that black people have had 350 years of statements where often things did not really happen. Therefore, today many people are the victims of that unfortunate history, though their hearts are totally in the right place. We also know that in the past there has been reluctance on the part of some local unions to comply with such policy statements. This has happened not only in the building trades but throughout that there has been foot-dragging and evasion, and there has been also some implementation. There must now, if our alliance is to remain firm and beautiful, be forthright action. There must be visible results, and now, for policy statements are never read in the ghetto and they cannot close the credibility gap. Action, and action alone, will.

I believe the time has come when such action will be taken. I believe that there will be translation of these words into deeds. I know that for many unions there will be serious obstacles in the face of shortages, but I sincerely believe that you have the leadership, the power, the commitment, and the belief in democracy to overcome whatever those problems are.

I believe this, my good friends, because I know that you have already made progress, in cooperation with the apprenticeship outreach programs of the Urban League, the Worker’s Defense League and the A. Philip Randolph Education Fund, and of other groups.

I know that in many cities the building trades themselves have taken the initiative to initiate such programs.

Now, let me give you a few facts. These programs are now operating in 52 cities, and since their inception in 1967, they have brought in 3,862 apprentices. The fact that over 1500 were recruited in the first six months of this year alone indicates that the pace of these programs is accelerating. I was most impressed to learn that of all the apprentices enrolled in the first half of 1968, over 9 percent came from minority groups. This is nearly four times the percentage of 1960. This is progress. This is moving in the right direction. As my grandmother used to say to me, “Son, it is not so important how far you get, the real question is, are you headed in the right direction.” (Applause).

We know that it is possible to find and train qualified young Negroes and other minority youth to become apprentices. We have done it, and we have done it with the help of the AFL-CIO and the building trades themselves.

What we are saying is we need to do a hell of a lot more of it. . . .

My friends, it is precisely because we have made such progress, which no one believed possible a few years ago, that we now know, and everybody else knows, we can do more, and we can and we must.

Proceedings of the Eighth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO, Atlantic City, N.J., October 2–7, 1969, Vol. I, pp. 104–12.

19. THE BLACKS AND THE UNIONS

By Bayard Rustin

Which way will the blacks choose—to fight to eliminate all segregation in the trade unions, or to become pawns in the conservatives’ games of bust-the-unions?

One of the main articles of faith in liberal dogma these days is that the interests and objectives of the American trade-union movement are in fundamental conflict with the interests and objectives of Black America. One can hardly pick up any of the major journals of liberal opinion without reading some form of the statement that the white worker has become affluent and conservative and feels his security to be threatened by the demand for racial equality. A corollary of this statement is that it is a primary function of the labor movement to protect the white worker from the encroaching black. Furthermore, the argument runs, since there are no signs that the blacks may be letting up in their struggle for economic betterment, a hostile confrontation between blacks and the unions is not only inevitable but necessary.

It may well be that historians of the future, recording the events of the past five years, will conclude that the major effect of the civic turbulence in this period has been in fact to distract us from the real and pressing social needs of the nation. And perhaps nothing illustrates the point more vividly than the whole question of the relations between blacks and the unions.

This question itself, however, cannot be properly understood except in the larger context of the history of the civil rights movement. Negro protest in the Sixties, if the movement is in its turn to be properly understood, must be divided into two distinct phases. The first phase, which covered something like the first half of the decade, we one in which the movement’s clear objective was to destroy the legal foundations of racism in America. Thus the locale of the struggle was the South, the evil to be eliminated was Jim Crow, and the enemy, who had a special talent for arousing moral outrage among even the most reluctant sympathizers with the cause, was the rock-willed segregationist.

Now, one thing about the South more than any other has been obscured in the romantic vision of the region—of ancient evil, of defeat, of enduring rural charm—that has been so much of our literary and intellectual tradition: for the Negro, Southern life had precisely a quality of clarity, a clarity which while oppressive was also supportive. The Southern caste system and folk culture rested upon a clear, albeit unjust, set of legal and institutional relationships which prescribed roles for individuals and established a modicum of social order. The struggle that was finally mounted against that system was actually fed and strengthened by the social environment from which it emerged. No profound analysis, no overriding social theory was needed in order both to locate and understand the injustices that were to be combated. All that was demanded of one was sufficient courage to demonstrate against them. One looks back upon this period in the civil rights movement with nostalgia.

During the second half of the Sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower-class blacks? “. . . the bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city.” Southern blacks migrated north in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a Lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier’s prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: “. . . as long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity.”¹¹⁰

Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.

In such a situation, even progress has proved to be a mixed blessing. During the Sixties, for example, Northern blacks as a group have made great economic gains, the result of which being that hundreds of thousands of them were able to move out of the hard-core poverty areas. Meanwhile, however, their departure, while a great boon to those departing, only contributed further to the deterioration of the slums, now being drained of their stable middle and working class. Combined with the large influx of Southern blacks during the same period, this process was leaving the ghetto more and more the precinct of a depressed underclass. To the segregation by race was now added segregation by class, and all of the problems created by segregation and poverty—inadequate schooling, substandard and overcrowded housing, lack of access to jobs or to job training, narcotics and crime—were greatly aggravated. And again because of segregation, the violence of the black underclass was turned in upon itself.

If the problems of the ghetto do not lend themselves to simple analyses or solutions, then, this is because they cannot be solved without mounting a total attack on the inadequacies endemic to, and injustices embedded in, all of our institutions. It is perhaps understandable that young Northern blacks, confronting these problems, have so often provided answers which are really non-answers; which are really dramatic statements satisfying some sense of the need for militancy without even beginning to deal with the basic economic and political problems of the ghetto. Primary among these non-answers is the idea that black progress depends upon a politics of race and revolution. I am referring here not to the recent assertions of black pride—assertions that will be made as long as that pride continues to be undermined by white society—but to the kind of black nationalism which consists in a bitter rejection of American society and vindicates a withdrawal from social struggle into a kind of hermetic racial world where blacks can “do their thing.” Nationalists have been dubbed “militants” by the press because they have made their point with such fervent hostility to white society, but the implication of their position actually amounts to little more than the age-old conservative message that blacks should help themselves—a thing that, by the very definition of the situation, they have not the resources to do.

The same is true of black proposals for revolution. For to engage in revolutionary acts in contemporary America—where, despite a lot of inflammatory rhetoric, there is not even a whisper of a revolutionary situation—not only diverts precious energies away from the political arena where the real battles for change must be fought, but might also precipitate a vicious counterrevolution the chief victims of which will be blacks.

The truth about the situation of the Negro today is that there are powerful forces, composed largely of the corporate elite and Southern conservatives, which will resist any change in the economic or racial structure of this country that might cut into their resources or challenge their status; and such is precisely what any program genuinely geared to improve his lot must do. Moreover, these forces today are not merely resisting change. With their representative Richard Nixon in the White House, they are engaged in an assault on the advances made during the past decade. It has been Nixon’s tragic and irresponsible choice to play at the politics of race, not, to be sure, with the primitive demagoguery of a “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, say, but nevertheless with the same intent of building a political majority on the basis of white hostility to blacks. So far he has been unsuccessful, but the potential for the emergence of such a reactionary majority does exist, especially if the turbulence and racial polarization which we have recently experienced persists.¹¹¹

What is needed, therefore, is not only a program that would effect some fundamental change in the distribution of America’s resources for those in the greatest need of them, but also a political majority that will support such a program. In other words, nothing less than a program truly, not merely verbally, radical in scope would be adequate to meet the present crisis; and nothing less than a politically constituted majority, outnumbering the conservative forces, would be adequate to carry it through. Now, it so happens that there is one social force which, by virtue both of its size and its very nature, is essential to the creation of such a majority—and so in relation to which the success or failure of the black struggle must finally turn. And that is the American trade-union movement.

Addressing the AFL-CIO Convention in 1961, Martin Luther King observed: “Negroes are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires and few Negro employers. Our needs are identical with labor’s needs—decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community.”

Despite the widely held belief that the blacks and the unions have not the same, but rather irreconcilable, interests—and despite the fact that certain identifiable unions do practice discrimination—King’s words remain valid today. Blacks are mostly a working people, they continue to need what labor needs, and they must fight side by side with unions to achieve these things.

Of all the misconceptions about the labor movement that have been so lovingly dwelt on in the liberal press, perhaps none is put forth more often and is farther from the truth than the unions are of and for white people. For one thing, there are, according to labor historian Thomas R. Brooks, between 2,500,000 and 2,750,000 black trade unionists in America. If his figures are correct, and other estimates seem to bear them out, the percentage of blacks in the unions is a good deal higher than the percentage of blacks in the total population—15 per cent as compared with 11 per cent, to be precise. And since the vast majority of black trade unionists are members of integrated unions, one can conclude that the labor movement is the most integrated major institution in American society, certainly more integrated than the corporations, the churches, or the universities.

Moreover, blacks are joining unions in increasing numbers. According to a 1968 report by Business Week, one out of every three new union members is black. The sector of the economy which is currently being most rapidly unionized is that of the service industries, and most particularly among government employees, such as hospital workers, sanitation workers, farm workers, and paraprofessionals in educational and social-welfare institutions. This category of worker is, of course, both largely nonwhite and shamefully underpaid. . . .

Thus, it is clear why unions are important to black workers. What may perhaps seem less obvious and must also be sharply emphasized is that the legislative program of the trade-union movement can go a long way toward satisfying the economic needs of the larger black community. The racial crisis, as we have seen, is not an isolated problem that lends itself to redress by a protesting minority. Being rooted in the very social and economic structure of the society, it can be solved only by a comprehensive program that gets to the heart of why we can’t build adequate housing for everybody, why we must always have a “tolerable” level of unemployment, or why we lack enough funds for education. In this sense the racial crisis challenges the entire society’s capacity to redirect its resources on the basis of human need rather than profit. Blacks can pose this challenge, but only the federal government has the power and the money to meet it. And it is here that the trade-union movement can play such an important role.

The problems of the most aggrieved sector of the black ghetto cannot and will never be solved without full employment, and full employment, with the government as employer of last resort, is the keystone of labor’s program. One searches in vain among the many so-called friends of the black struggle for a seconding voice to this simple yet far-reaching proposition. Some call it inflationary, while to others, who are caught up in the excitement of the black cultural revolution, it is pedestrian and irrelevant. But in terms of the economic condition of the black community, nothing more radical has yet been proposed. There is simply no other way for the black Lumpenproletariat to become a proletariat. And full employment is only one part of labor’s program. The movement’s proposals in the areas of health, housing, education, and environment would, if enacted, achieve nothing less than the transformation of the quality of our urban life. How ironic that in this period when the trade-union movement is thought to be conservative, its social and economic policies are far and away more progressive than those of any other major American institution. Nor—again in contrast to most of the other groups officially concerned with these things—is labor’s program merely in the nature of a grand proposal; there is also an actual record of performance, particularly in the area of civil rights. Clarence Mitchell, the director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP and legislative chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a man more deeply involved in Congressional civil rights battles than any other black in America, has said, “None of the legislative fights we have made in the field of civil rights could have been won without the trade-union movement. We couldn’t have beaten Haynsworth without labor, and the struggle against Carswell would not have been a contest.”

Labor’s interest in progressive social legislation naturally leads it into the political arena. The Committee on Political Education of the AFL-CIO, the Political Action Committee of the UAW, and the political arm of the Teamsters were active in every state in the last election registering and educating voters and getting out the vote. This year trade unionists were more politically active than they have ever been during any off-year election. The reason for this is clear. With so many liberal Senators up for reelection, and with political alignments in great flux, 1970 presented itself as a year that would initiate a new period in American politics—a period which would see the regrouping of liberal forces or the consolidation of a conservative majority.

One of the important factors determining the kind of political alignments that will emerge from this period of instability will be the relationship between the trade-union movement and the liberal community, and today this relationship is severely strained. Differences over the war in Vietnam are frequently cited as a major cause of this division, but there has been a great deal of misunderstanding on this issue. The house of labor itself is divided over the war, and even those labor leaders who support it have enthusiastically backed dove Congressional candidates who have liberal domestic records, among them such firm opponents of the war as Mike Mansfield, Edward Kennedy, Vance Hartke, Philip Hart, Howard Metzenbaum, and Edmund Muskie.¹¹²

A better understanding of the trade-union movement by liberals may be developing, but for the present the antagonistic attitudes that exist cast an ideological pall over the chances for uniting the democratic Left coalition. It must be said that the vehement contempt with which the liberals have come to attack the unions bespeaks something more than a mere political critique of “conservatism.” When A. H. Raskin writes that “the typical worker—from construction craftsman to shoe clerk—has become probably the most reactionary political force in the country”; or when Anthony Lewis lumps under the same category the rich oilmen and “the members of powerful, monopolistic labor unions”; or when Murray Kempton writes that “the AFL-CIO has lived happily in a society which, more lavishly than any in history, has managed the care and feeding of incompetent white people,” and adds, “Who better represents that ideal than George Wallace”; or when many other liberals casually toss around the phrase “labor-fascists,” one cannot but inevitably conclude that one is in the presence not of political opposition but of a certain class hatred. This hatred is not necessarily one based on conflicting class interests—though they may play a role here—but rather a hatred of the elite for the “mass.” And this hatred is multiplied a thousandfold by the fact that we live in a democratic society in which the coarse multitude can outvote the elite and make decisions which may be contrary to the wishes and values, perhaps even the interests and the prejudices, of those who are better off.

It is difficult not to conclude that many liberals and radicals use subjective, rather than objective, criteria in judging the character of a social force. A progressive force, in their view, is one that is alienated from the dominant values of the culture, not one which contributes to greater social equality and distributive justice. Thus today the trade-union movement has been relegated to reactionary status, even though it is actually more progressive than at any time in its history—if by progressive we mean a commitment to broad, long-term social reform in addition to the immediate objectives of improving wages and working conditions. At the same time, the most impoverished social group, that substratum which Herbert Marcuse longingly calls “the outcasts and the outsiders,” has been made the new vanguard of social programs. And it is here that liberals and New Leftists come together in their proposal for a new coalition “of the rich, educated, and dedicated with the poor,” as Eric F. Godlman has admiringly described it, or in Walter Laqueur’s more caustic phraseology, “between the Lumpenproletariat and the Lumpenintelligentsia.”

This political approach, known among liberals as New Politics and among radicals as New Leftism, denotes a certain convergence of the Left and the Right, if not in philosophy and intent, then at least in practical effect. I am not referring simply to the elitism which the intellectual Left shares with the economic Right, but also to their symbolic political relationship. Many of the sophisticated right-wing attacks on labor are frequently couched in left-wing rhetoric. Conservative claims that unions are anti-black, are responsible for inflation, and constitute minorities which threaten and intimidate the majority reverberate in the liberal community and are shaping public opinion to accept a crackdown on the trade-union movement.

While many adherents of the New Politics are outraged by Nixon’s Southern strategy, their own strategy is simply the obverse of his. The potential for a Republican majority depends upon Nixon’s success in attracting into the conservative fold lower-middle-class whites, the same group that the New Politics has written off. The question is not whether this group is conservative or liberal, for it is both, and how it acts will depend upon the way the issues are defined. If they are defined as race and dissent, then Nixon will win. But if, on the other hand, they are defined so as to appeal to the progressive economic interests of the lower middle class, then it becomes possible to build an alliance on the basis of common interest between this group and the black community. The importance of the trade-union movement is that it embodies this common interest. This was proved most clearly in 1968 when labor mounted a massive educational campaign which reduced the Wallace supporters among its membership to a tiny minority. And the trade-union movement remains today the greatest obstacle to the success of Nixon’s strategy.

The prominent racial and ethnic loyalties that divide American society have, together with our democratic creed, obscured a fundamental reality—that we are a class society and, though we do not often talk about such things, that we are engaged in a class struggle . . . and its outcome will determine whether we will have a greater or lesser degree of economic and social equality in this country.

Pamphlet reprint by the A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund, 1971. Copy in possession of the editors.

20. LABOR’S HIGHEST AWARD HONORS BAYARD RUSTIN

By James M. Shevis

New York—The AFL-CIO honored veteran civil rights leader Bayard Rustin with its highest honor, the Murray-Green-Meany Award, for his years of struggle to end racial discrimination and oppression the world over.

The award, named for pre-merger presidents Philip Murray of the CIO and William Green of the AFL and for George Meany who presided over the merged organization for 25 years until his death in January, was presented at a dinner here in conjunction with the 20th national AFL-CIO Community Services Conference.¹¹³

Rustin is best known as the organizer of the massive 1963 March on Washington, which drew over a quarter-million Americans to the nation’s capital to press for adoption of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was a close associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But, as AFL-CIO Vice President Peter Bommarito noted in his presentation address, Rustin’s cause has not been the cause of blacks alone.¹¹⁴

Rustin led the first Freedom Rides in the late 1940s, incurring a 30-day sentence on a North Carolina chain gang, Bommarito observed. As a result of that experience, he wrote an expose for a New York newspaper, which led ultimately to abolition of that practice.

“This was not a political achievement but a humanitarian one,” said Bommarito. During World War I, Rustin went to California to help Japanese-Americans who had been interned because of the color of their skin and their ethnic heritage. He also found time to help hospital workers, teachers, and sanitation workers build unions, to work with Mahatma Gandhi in India, to rally support for the democratic state of Israel, and to travel throughout Africa in behalf of independence movements there.¹¹⁵

More recently, Rustin went to Indochina to draw Americans’ attention to the plight of the Boat People and the thousands of starving Cambodians. Only two weeks ago, he returned from Stockholm, where he participated in an international tribunal to focus attention on the continuing imprisonment and persecution of Soviet dissident Anatoly Scharansky.¹¹⁶

“But lest you think that Bayard is a mere gadabout who hops from one problem to another, bear in mind that he also created a durable organization that is very close to the heart of the labor movement—the A. Philip Randolph Institute, which has opened a new two-way channel of communication between the black community and the trade union movement,” Bommarito told the 300 dinner guests. Rustin is chairman of the institute.

AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland praised Rustin’s “extraordinary organizing talents and ability to articulate the aspirations of black Americans,” and pointed out that he was among the first black leaders to recognize that the gains of the civil rights revolution could not be secured unless they were rooted in economic progress for the black masses.

“Along with A. Philip Randolph, he argued that such progress could only be made through a movement dedicated to full employment at decent wages for all Americans,” Kirkland observed. “And at the heart of such a movement, he repeatedly insisted, were the trade unions of America. He was right then. He is still right.”

A moving tribute to Rustin came from actress Liv Ullmann, who joined him and a dozen other prominent persons in Indochina in February in a march to draw world attention to the plight of the Cambodian refugees.

“Being with you in Thailand, visiting the refugees from Cambodia, left me with images of your wonderful laughter, your deep and sincere commitment to the homeless, your striding as if you were the freest man in the world, the warmth of your handshake, your fight against injustice, your compassion and commitment, and your happiness to be alive,” she said, “always looking like you lived comfortably within yourself with such pride and, as we all know, at the same time, far, far outside yourself.”

In accepting the award, Rustin paid tribute to Randolph, who died a year ago, and to Meany.

“Whatever I’ve been able to do has begun with that great and marvelous man, A. Philip Randolph, on whose shoulders I stood eternally,” Rustin said of his closest associate during decades of struggle for civil and human rights.

Of Meany, “he believed in me, and this helped me to grow,” said Rustin. He also credited Meany for his role in enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

There would not have been a meaningful law if Meany had not prevailed upon President John F. Kennedy to put an effective enforcement provision into the statute, Rustin told the gathering.

Rustin had some sobering comments on the recent racial rioting in Miami as well as the influx of refugees into the U.S. from Cuba and Haiti.

“It has been an agony for me to learn of blacks and whites killing each other in Miami,” he said. “If we do not deal with our problems at home, sooner or later the President and the Congress will be crippled in helping those who suffer abroad.”

As for the debate over whether to let Cubans and Haitians find asylum in the United States, he observed: “If America is ever so cruel as not to allow these people in, she will never be able to deal with those in the black community.”

AFL-CIO News, May 24, 1980.

UNITED STEELWORKERS OF AMERICA

21. STEELWORKERS FIGHT DISCRIMINATION

By David J. McDonald

President, United Steelworkers of America

Men can work together and they can live together.

This is the creed of the United Steelworkers of America. We believe in civil rights on the job and off the job. We know that life and work are synonymous and that we cannot afford the atomization of our people that inevitably accompanies any denial of civil rights. Ours is not a Sunday or holiday creed. Throughout the year we work to make a reality of our great American ideal of equality for all.

We know that men work together because they do so daily in the mines, mills, and plants of the steel industry. We are confident that men can live together in harmony and on equal terms outside the work-place, as well as inside.

We know that there are problems—that bigotry and suspicion will not of themselves break down and evaporate. Nevertheless, there is no room in our democracy for ghettos of any kind—racial or religious. We call upon all segments of American life—labor, management, churches, civic groups, government—to unite in a common and continuing effort to eliminate such ghettos and the hurt they bring to millions of our citizens. The United Steelworkers of America pledges full cooperation with all who will work with good will in this effort without regard for any differences of view on other aspects of our national life.

In the Plant

Some time ago I visited a big steel plant. In one area, I noted a crane operator manipulating a ladle of molten metal at the end of his crane-hook. As the metal streamed from the ladle it was poured by hand into pigs by a brawny white worker. Beside this worker there stood a husky Negro youth whose job it was to scrape the scum from the surface of the metal as it was being poured. Nearby, another Negro worker was repairing some defective equipment.

As the ladle on the crane-hook gradually emptied of metal, it became necessary to manipulate it manually. Without a word from anyone, the Negro repair worker brought over a two-by-four which he placed in the loop at the end of the ladle handle. The white man and his colored helper, both of whom were stripped to the waist, pulled hard on the ladle to get out all the molten metal.

Finally, the Negro repairman left his work to lend a hand. The white crane operator also came down. It was a hot operation, made even hotter by the heat of the molten metal. Together, they accomplished the job. All the metal was poured into pigs.

There was no attempt to enforce segregation on this job. No foreman rushed over to order the men to separate nor did any mill superintendent order all operations halted. Industry has not built segregated production facilities because they would be entirely uneconomic—it just wouldn’t make good sense. If segregation doesn’t make good sense on the job, it doesn’t make good sense anywhere.

Obviously, the Negroes, the Puerto Ricans, and other minority groups have been and are today discriminated against in employment opportunities and at the job level. We have sought earnestly to eliminate this discrimination in our industry. We have been quite successful. I do not mean by this that our success is total or that we have no remaining problems. The important thing is that we recognize our problems, and we are working actively to overcome any difficulties that we may find.

In a Southern plant some time ago, such a difficulty was called to the attention of the international union. This plant employed 5,100 white workers and 900 non-whites. There were dual lines of promotion and seniority. This resulted in the by-passing of longer service workers in promotions and in the retention of both whites and non-whites of lesser seniority on the job during layoffs while longer service workers of both groups were laid off.

When we learned of this situation, we sent a representative of our international to meet with the all-white local executive board. After we clearly explained the international’s policy, the local board agreed to promotions according to qualifications and seniority as well as to a layoff procedure entirely in accordance with contract provisions.

We then called upon the company to end discriminatory practices. While the company did so, it handled the matter poorly. It took eighteen months of dealing with this company to get the problem finally cleared up. Today, this Southern plant is fully integrated. Initial resentments among the workers have been forgotten. The union is better off and so is the company, since there are fewer grievances on the job and fewer production hitches.

Equal Rights in Union

We built the Steelworkers as an integrated union all the way. So far as we are concerned, all members have equal rights and it has been that way from the start. We do not tolerate Jim Crow locals or Jim Crow meetings. Our international policy has been firmly established by convention after convention.

In 1954, the United Steelworkers met bigotry head on at the key employment level. The three chief officers of our organization directed a letter to our staff members and to every local union calling for full compliance with the law and with union policy in employment practices.

The constitution of the United Steelworkers, we pointed out, dedicates our union to uniting all workers in the industry regardless of “race, creed, color, or nationality”; grants membership on equal terms to all of these workers, and obligates the union “to establish through collective bargaining adequate wage standards, shorter hours of work, and improvements in the conditions of employment for the workers in the industry. . . .

“Thus this union stands unequivocally opposed to discrimination of any sort, shape or form. That policy applies specifically to discrimination in employment. This union is flatly opposed to discrimination in hiring, promotion, layoff, or any other term or condition of employment. Any collective bargaining contract which either by its terms or actual operation permits discrimination on account of race, creed, color, or nationality violates the policy of this union.

“It is not only the policy of this union to fight job discrimination because of race, color, creed or nationality; it is its legal duty to do so. The United States Supreme Court, the lower federal courts and the National Labor Relations Board have all held that when a union acts as exclusive bargaining representative of employees in a bargaining unit, it is the union’s legal duty to represent every employee in that unit fairly and equally, and in such a manner that no discrimination results because of race, creed, color or nationality.”

In the United Steelworkers, no contract, which by its terms or operation permits discrimination against any member, is approved. This is and has been our union policy. Because we have made this clear and because we oppose and fight discriminatory practices, the matter of equality at the job level is settled affirmatively in the United Steelworkers of America.

Equality Is Indivisible

Long ago we learned that the fight for civil rights cannot begin in the morning when a man enters the factory gates and end when he leaves at night. When a union member is deprived of adequate housing because of his color, creed, race, or nationality, his standing as a citizen, a union member, and worker is adversely affected. When equal educational opportunities are denied, the productivity of America is lowered to the detriment of union members and all Americans. When discrimination of any kind occurs in the community, fundamental freedoms are under attack, including the freedom of workers to unite into unions of their own making.

The fight for freedom and equality must proceed simultaneously at all levels of our lives, since freedom itself is indivisible. Long ago, we of the United Steelworkers recognized this—out of our experiences and through the long hard years of building our organization. In 1948, we formed a United Steelworkers National Civil Rights Committee which has been provided with the staff necessary to work at the job throughout the year. At our recent convention, this Committee was able to report that as the result of union policy “many categories of employment heretofore closed to non-whites have opened in the past two years in the steel industry.” It noted, nevertheless, that discrimination in employment will finally be eliminated “only with the passage of a Federal Fair Employment Practices Law, with adequate finances and personnel to administer it effectively.” Once again, at this convention, the United Steelworkers called for federal legislation to end discrimination on the job and in the community.

Our civil rights program is carried forward in four basic areas—in employment, housing, community, and education. We have sought to build for a human relations or civil rights committee in each local. Such committees are concerned with the civil rights and civil liberties of our members on the job and in the community. While they do not function perfectly, they have proven to be of tremendous value in our work. We coordinate the work of these committees through our districts, through our National Civil Rights Committee, and through our union educational work.

In the Community

Our national Civil Rights Committee is represented on the executive or advisory boards of national and local agencies devoted to the fight for civil rights and civil liberties, since we recognize the value of working with other groups in this key area. In the City of Pittsburgh, for example, we are one of 15 participating organizations in the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations and we have representation on the Commission’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, which is concerned with enforcement of Pittsburgh’s local fair employment practices ordinance.

In Pittsburgh, we joined with the public school system, the Carnegie Museum, and the Commission on Human Relations in sponsoring a booklet called, “We Humans.” This booklet deals with the races of man. It is used widely in the junior and senior high schools. In Los Angeles, we are now working with the school board in an effort to establish a similar project.

A slum clearance project in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles will necessitate the relocation of 16,000 low income families, many of whom are nonwhites. The Civil Rights Committee of our union is now working with housing authorities to obtain resettlement of these families without discrimination because of race, color, creed or national origin.

So that there may be greater understanding among our members, our union sponsors human relations institutes and seminars, both as part of our regular education program and as part of our work in civil rights and civil liberties. We have worked with university experts in this field to learn how we can better work with each other to promote greater understanding. We have developed and circulated widely within the union and in the community literature combating discrimination.

When a trouble spot develops, we act. Where a situation requires cooperation with other unions, we seek that cooperation. Our district directors have unequivocally condemned mob action against integration in their areas and we have combated bigotry in such areas by following up fast with meetings and conferences aimed at the maintenance of good race relations.

The United Steelworkers is doing its part in the battle against discrimination. The AFL-CIO and its unions are bearing their share of the load. Many religious and civic groups are also in the fight and can be depended upon to continue their work at the national and community level until discrimination is wiped out.

Management Has Responsibility

It is time, however, for management and enterprise to take a forthright and positive stand. I call upon the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce, and their local bodies to move. Their power is great. They know that all discrimination is costly and uneconomic. I ask them to take a stand with us against the appalling waste of human resources that grows from segregation and discrimination.

More, I ask the managements of American corporate enterprise and individual businessmen in our communities to take an affirmative stand. I ask that they show by example that all Americans are equal. I ask that they work with us to end discriminatory practices in the plants and to end racial and religious ghettos in the community.

The plant manager in a smaller community is a very important person whose word often causes local politicians to tremble. But this man, like the unskilled factory worker, is subject to orders from top management.

Top management in steel, textile, furniture, chemical, and all of our great industries usually are men who live in the North. I urge them to begin educational work against discrimination among their local managers, North and South. This is an obligation of industry. It is not labor’s role alone and not alone the role of the political parties to uphold the Supreme Court’s edict on education. With the practical help of corporate management, school integration could be carried out more effectively and more smoothly everywhere.

I will make management an offer: If top management will agree, the district directors and staff representatives of the United Steelworkers will work with local managements in programs of education at the plants and at the community level. I cannot speak for all labor, but I will do all I can to get all of our unions to go along, and I am quite certain that almost every one will work effectively in putting over such a program. With the help of management, we can enlist community organizations of all kinds in the work—PTA’s, veterans’ organizations, Kiwanis Clubs, Rotary and many others.

Together, we can eliminate second class citizenship once and for all. All Americans will benefit. In the words of a delegate at our last convention, “the problem can be solved if we only get together and be sensible and reasonable about this thing—much easier than you think if we just make up our minds that we want to get together.”

Industrial Union Department (AFL-CIO) Digest, 2 (Winter, 1957):3–9.

22. USWA’S CIVIL RIGHTS PROGRAM WINS PRAISE

District 15 Delegates Urged to Fully-Integrate Communities

The United Steelworkers of America under the leadership of President David J. McDonald, has done more to solve the problems of civil rights and bring about social justice than any other union in the United States, according to the Rev. Charles Owen Rice, Pittsburgh.

Father Rice, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church, Washington, Pa., addressing the annual conference of District 15, United Steelworkers of America, quoted the late Pope John XXII regarding the rights of people and their duties.

“Go after your own rights—live up to your full potential,” Father Rice urged. “These people (the minority groups) must go after their rights—it is our duty not to interfere,” Father rice told the more than 350 delegates attending the conference at Mountain View Hotel, Greensburg.

“We, as members of the United Steelworkers of America, must help them—we must accept them completely in our own communities.”

“We must not only be good members of the United Steelworkers of America but also we must be good members at heart, too,” Father Rice declared. “If our labor communities are not integrated in every way—our homes, our hearts, what chance has the United States of America?” Father Rice asked. “If you do not believe that the man working next to you is as good as you—then God help America,” Father Rice added. “Peace is gone in our country until that problem is settled,” he continued.

Director William Hart of USWA District 19, following the theme set by Father Rice, also lauded President McDonald’s leadership and said that the United Steelworkers of America has expended more monies on the problems of civil rights than any other union in the United States.

Supporting this claim, he said, is the fact that the United Steelworkers of America has the “ablest Committee on Civil Rights in existence”; that seminars conducted at major universities emphasize the importance of civil rights and that, finally, the entire program of the USWA is aimed at social justice for all people regardless of race or creed or national origin.

Director, Hart, president of the Allegheny County Labor Council, said that, as president, he had established a Civil Rights Committee for the first time in the council’s existence.

Attacking the problem of unemployment in Allegheny County, Director Hart cited the fact that the county needs 130,000 new jobs to attain the national employment level.

“There is need,” he said, “to engage in warfare to promote the United Steelworkers of America—to change the image that Pittsburgh is a center of labor strife.”

He said that news datelines carry the name “Pittsburgh” because so many national contracts are signed in the city and that people elsewhere get an erroneous opinion when they read the agreements have not been reached.

Director Hart also called for all-out support of the County Labor Council’s political action program and he cited instances where federal and even state appropriations and contracts are going elsewhere because of the weak support from elected politicians.

Director Paul Hilbert, chairman of the conference program, listed the steady drop in employment in the steel industry in District 15—that employment which once was 45,000 had dropped last February to 23,000—then bounced back to 31,000 in May. Automation and technological advancement was blamed for a good part of the decline.

In summarizing the USWA program in District 15 during the past 12 months, Director Hilbert launched the Community Services Committee which he called the “silent service” because most of the help arranged by this committee remains secret . . . and recipients of union help are not embarrassed as is so often the case in public relief or charity.

He also praised the blood donor program and the eye care program.

Guest speakers included Roland Sawyer, USWA housing consultant, who outlined the Four Freedoms Inc. program providing low-cost housing for senior retirees and their wives. He said that the USWA’s pamphlet—“Housing After 60”—had been widely acclaimed by other unions and by housing authorities throughout the nation. He disclosed that, at the present time, the Steelworkers have 107,000 retirees.

Other speakers at the one-day conference included Maurice Schulte, who represented Vice President Howard R. Hague; Director Paul Normile of USWA District 16 and Charles Ford, USWA legislative representative at Harrisburg.

Mr. Schulte, member of the International staff, traced the course of current Human Relations Committee talks and lauded the “wisdom” of President David J. McDonald and other top officers, including Mr. Hague and Secretary-Treasurer I. W. Abel, in anticipating the inroads of automation and technological advancement which had led to widespread replacement of manpower in the mills.¹¹⁷

He cited the 13 weeks extended vacation plan in the can industry and the supplemental unemployment benefits (SUB) program which has helped during long periods of layoffs and is now creating new job opportunities for Steelworkers.

Mr. Ford rapped the leadership of Republican Gov. William Scranton who imposed a five per cent state sales tax—highest in the nation—and cited the fact that 71 per cent of the state revenue now comes from the “bottom”—the little people, so-called. Prior to this, corporations and machinery taxes made up the lion’s share of the tax. He rapped the state’s antiquated educational system and constitution and declared that “Pennsylvania is fast losing status—it is not up to par with other states.”¹¹⁸

The Wage Policy election highlighted the day’s festivities with the following elected to represent District 15:

Pete Latin, Local 1407, James Betters, Local 1514, Sigmund Balogh, Local 2227, all basic steel; Francis Scumaci, Continental Can Local 4337; Matt Brulja, National Tube Salaried Local 2316 and Anton Bon, Vesuvius Crucible Local 3730.

Steel Labor (July, 1963).

23. ADDRESS BY VERNON E. JORDAN, JR. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR NATIONAL URBAN LEAGUE AT SIXTEENTH CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION (UNITED STEELWORKERS OF AMERICA), 1972

This great union is convened at a time when the precious, hard-won rights of black Americans are under massive attack. By implication, this means that labor, too, will soon come under a similar attempt to tear from it, its own bitterly-won advances, for history shows us that America’s actions towards its black citizens is a barometer of its eventual actions towards its organized working men and women.

Black people sense today that the Second Reconstruction—that remarkable stride toward equality made in the 1960s that benefited labor and white people no less than black—is on its deathbed, fatally ill from the diseases of reactionary vindictiveness and liberal withdrawal.

Those who would strip from black people the gains of recent years are also intent on using the labor movement as a pawn in their struggle. The extent to which they have been successful in changing the image of the labor movement from one of progressive activism is readily seen.

Unions, striving to win decent wages and better working conditions for their members are condemned as selfish and affluent. Since when does a factory worker’s income of $8,000 or so make him affluent? Since when do attempts to catch up with galloping inflation become “selfish?” And how can the limited power of unions be compared with the massive power of giant corporations?

But those who would split the mutually beneficial alliance of liberals, labor and blacks go beyond their relatively mild attacks on the labor movement to slander the decency of working people and of ethnic groups. Workers are Wallacites, they say. Poles—or Slavs, or Italians—it doesn’t matter, pick your own sample ethnic group, are anti-black, they claim. Working people and union members are stigmatized as hard-hat bigots. The Archie Bunker-ization of the American working man is a myth fed by the media, by the enemies of both working people and black people, and by those who roll the clock back to the good old days when blacks knew their place and unions weren’t recognized.

I believe this new mood of anti-black, anti-labor feeling represents a dangerous threat to labor and to black people. If the labor movement is split away from its natural allies in the civil rights movement it will itself become weaker and more liable to direct attack. And to the degree that the general public is convinced that labor is selfish and bigoted, the labor movement will lose the moral standing and public goodwill it needs to succeed in its aims.

What I have outlined here is not science fiction or futurist fantasy—it is a clear and present danger that threatens us both. I care profoundly about this situation because I believe that the cause of black Americans would be seriously weakened if the labor movement became less active in the alliance that has benefited us both. And I care profoundly because if the labor movement is significantly weakened, then the black working man, who has joined unions to a greater degree than any other group, is also significantly weakened in his chances for a better life.

I would contend that unless black Americans are brought back to center stage in this nation’s affairs, everyone will suffer, but most especially, the union movement and the average working man. The problems of black people have been shunted to the back of the bus, once again ignored and invisible. And all the while our cities are deteriorating and the thrust toward social reform and greater equity is fading.

This can be seen clearly in this election year. The campaign thus far has centered around charges and countercharges, to the exclusion of serious discussion of the issues of importance to black people. Neither candidate has come up with proposals for better housing, for penal reform, for welfare reform. The issue of education is totally ignored, except for the code-word phony issue of “busing.” The value of paychecks is shrinking and the rights of black people are systematically eroded and the cities are sinking fast, but none of those basic issues is getting the considered attention they—and we—deserve.

An example of a new issue recently injected into the campaign—one that spells serious trouble for black working people—is the issue of so-called quotas. Both candidates have declared they are opposed to quotas. It appears too, that because of the President’s opposition to quotas, the Philadelphia Plan may be greatly modified to remove numerical and percentage benchmarks for employment of blacks in construction work. Such a step would be a transparent attempt to drive a wedge between black people, who have historically been denied the right to work and to join unions in the construction industry, and the labor movement. Such an attempt dishonors the labor movement by publicly assuming that the handful of unions that practice discrimination in the building trades are representative of the bulk of the labor movement, which is integrated and which opposes discrimination.

Anyone—from the man with the shovel to the men contending for the White House—knows that without some sort of effective numerical guidelines, no affirmative action plan can work. Already there are self-satisfied statements coming from people in the construction industry about how the removal of firm guidelines will mean they won’t have to integrate their union or their work force. An end to the Philadelphia Plan spells an end to the only moderately effective effort to open job opportunities for black workers, but it also spells the end of the very many voluntary hometown plans jointly formulated by the civil rights movement, government and the building trades locals.

Let us not forget that this country has always had negative quotas against black people who were barred from jobs, schools and homes. Black people today seek no special treatment as special Americans, but assurances that we will not receive the special treatment we’ve received throughout the history of this nation. For blacks have been special Americans—singled out for discrimination and oppression in the past and today singled out for the special treatment of isolation and withdrawal. By labelling goals and guidelines as quotas and by refusing to admit the realities of the necessity of federal enforcement of civil rights laws, the nation once again threatens black people with enforced poverty and inequality of job opportunity.

The real obscenity here is that groups have been set squabbling amongst each other for the scraps from the table of the affluent society; that there are not enough jobs and employment opportunities to go around in this, the richest nation in the world’s history, and that political expediency is being allowed to obscure the driving need for black equality in our economy.

The quota issues has come to prominence at the same time that we have seen the emergence of what might be called “The New Minorities”—groups of Americans who, most of them for the first time, have forged a self-consciousness and a realization that they too, have not fully shared in America’s bounty. Among these “new minorities” are various ethnic groups, women, students, and others.

In general, I believe this is a healthy development. It has resulted in a creative ferment that stresses the true pluralism of our country and rejects the melting pot myth that deprived millions of people of their culture and heritage. If there is a negative side to this development however, it is in the way the just demands of various groups for equality of results tends to obscure the priorities necessary to enlightened social reform. And those priorities must be those that will reverse the basic racism that deprives the largest and most impoverished minority—black Americans—from a rightful share of the country they helped build.

The new minorities arose only after the civil rights movement matured and showed the way. Their rhetoric, tactics and strategies are direct copies of those used by the civil rights movement. Their very existence is an indication of the positive moral effect the black movement has had on the rest of the nation. But it is just clear that the establishment is striving to accommodate the needs of the new minorities at the expense of blacks. Instead of baking a bigger pie and giving everyone decent portions, they’re slicing the same old pie of economic opportunities thinner.

I believe that unless blacks return to the spotlight of social change in America; unless activists and reformers recognize the basic truism that as blacks go, so goes the nation, all of us will lose out. The issues the black people are raising and the aims of the civil rights movement are issues and aims that will benefit all. The tactic of settling the claims of the new minorities to counter the aspirations of black people is a tactic designed to drive another nail in the coffin of the Second Reconstruction.

White Americans, and especially the working people, have a lot to lose if the Second Reconstruction is allowed to die an ignoble death. If we look at some of the issues of importance to black people, we see that if we lose, white working people join us in defeat.

The current vicious welfare measure under consideration, for example, will affect more white people than blacks. Black people are disproportionately poor, but two-thirds of all poor people are white and a true reform of the welfare system that corrects the inequities of the economic system will benefit everybody.

If the civil rights laws now on the books were adequately enforced, black Americans would have their fair share of the rewards and responsibilities of American life, and that could only result in an expanded economy that helps white people as well as black. It also would result in an America in which there is domestic peace and mutual concern for justice, a nation in which the resources now wasted in keeping the lid on black people can be diverted to the benefit of all.

The Supreme Court’s about-face from the landmark decision of the Warren Court affect us both. On the very day that the court split for the first time on a civil rights case involving school desegregation, it also handed down a decision sharply limiting labor’s rights to communicate with the public and with prospective union members. Once the Court places property rights above human rights, we both—labor and the black man—get it in the neck.

This goes too, for political liberals who are compromising on the just claims and rights of black people. Historically, we have seen that black people are but the first to be deserted. Union-busting traditionally follows retreat from principles. Today it is the black man’s rights that are being compromised. But I can promise you that the next steps will see the revival of right-to-work laws, curbs on strikes, and other anti-labor measures. If there is any doubt on that score, just look at who was the target of the economic freeze and the policies of Phase Two.

The suburban housing freeze that shuts out low and moderate income families is something that hits white workers as well as blacks. Many communities think their zoning laws will keep them lily-white, but those same local restrictions in many instances make it impossible for working people of all colors to live in the towns in which they work. The labor movement has been alerted to the dangers of international companies relocating manufacturing plants in foreign countries; it has still to become fully aware of the need to protect its members from losing their jobs or from having to commute four or five hours a day because of relocation to sites that don’t have adequate housing opportunities for families that earn average or below-average incomes.

And the busing issue is one that has been used to divert many working people from the real issues of concern to them. The use of busing is only one of many ways in which quality education can be achieved through ending the illegal and unconstitutional system of segregated schools. Many white Americans have been diverted from their true interest in economic gains and in a more equal society through emotional and irrational appeals to their latent prejudice. The right to equal educational opportunities is a right sanctioned by our Constitution, and if black people’s rights to desegregated schooling are compromised, then white people’s rights to organize into labor unions and to enjoy other Constitutional guarantees will be compromised.

On nearly all points of the economic and social compass, our mutual interests converge. A full-employment economy with meaningful jobs for everyone who wants to work must be the cornerstone both of the labor movement’s desire for jobs and the black community’s need for economic empowerment. A total restructuring of our health, welfare, and housing system is on both of our agendas. In a multitude of areas, we both know that our mutual dependence is our mutual strength; that together we will overcome, divided we will succumb to our common enemies—the enemies of the working man and the enemies of the black man.

It sometimes seems as if the tide against us is irresistible, but we should remember that often what seems irrestible is only the unresisted. I am here today to ask you to join us in resisting those who would weaken us both.

Black people have been excluded from the fruits of this society for four hundred years, and in a thousand ways, white people have been held down because of our exclusion. Black demands for inclusion in our society and white worker’s demands for security and peaceful progress are identical. Together we can build a new, better society; together we can create an America that is in tune with its ideals.

Black Americans have not yet renounced America, for all the hatred and deprivation that have been lavished upon us. It is increasingly clear that to the extent that there is among the citizenry hope and faith in the American ideals, they are held by those who have suffered most and benefited least.

Black people, for all our righteous anger and forceful dissent, still believe in the American dream. We believe today as we once believed in the dungeons of slavery; as we once believed in the struggles of Reconstruction, and as we held our faith through the dismal days of separation and segregation. Black people have a claim on this land. We have fought in its every war—even in segregated armies—and are dying today in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam. Our sweat and blood have created its wealth, as our faith and our hope have given it a soul. This nation must find within its innermost being the understanding that our needs, our dreams, and our sacrifices must be shared and that together, black and white, we can build a society that is humane, that is civilized, that is a true community in every sense of the word.

Many years ago, Samuel Gompers was asked: “What does Labor want?” “What does Labor want?”, he replied, “We want more school houses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.”

And that, my brothers and sisters of this great American labor union, is what black people want!

Address by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., at the Sixteenth Constitutional Convention of the United Steelworkers of America, Las Vegas, Nevada, September 19, 1972. Reprinted with permission of Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

24. HISTORY OF THE UNITED STEELWORKERS OF AMERICA: STEEL UNION BUTTRESSES RACISM

By Staughton Lynd

I. W. Abel, the present president of the Steelworkers union, defeated David McDonald in 1965 partly because he was supported by black members of the union. Once elected Abel would not even grant black spokesmen an interview.

The incident was part of an historical pattern: first, of management deliberately setting blacks, Latins and whites against one another; second, of white union politicans making election-time promises to members of minority groups which they forget after election day.

Blacks and Latins entered the steel industry in large numbers during and just after World War I. Previously the industry had recruited its workmen from American whites and from Eastern European immigrants. As one supervisor put it, the two groups were combined in a “judicious mixture” tp prevent effective group action.

The outbreak of World War I stopped immigration from Europe. Blacks from the American South, and later Mexicans, were solicited in their place. By the mid-1920s blacks and Latins together made up about 25 percent of the steel labor force.

The steel companies fostered race hatred among these new workers just as they had among the old. The city of Gary, Ind., is an example.

When U.S. Steel laid out the city of Gary in the early 1900s, it build homes only for its skilled, white, American-born workers. Unskilled laborers, both Eastern European and blacks, had to fend for themselves. There was a severe housing shortage for all poor people. As a result, they lived not only crowded but also very mixed. White and black rented rooms from each other in the same houses. One early resident recalls:

“If you had a house with an apartment on the street and an apartment in the back, in a lot of cases you and your family took the apartment in the back and rented the front out to black people, because the front apartment paid a little bit more. During the hot weather you and your tenants and their family would share in the front porch and the front yard.”

Blacks Stayed Below

In this early period, immigrants and blacks had pretty much the same jobs. Later the immigrants moved up the ladder and the blacks were held in the hardest, dirtiest jobs. After World War I the immigrant population of Gary slowly began to move out of the poor area. U.S. Steel’s man on the Realty Board did everything he could to discourage residential integration.

The steel strike of 1919 hastened the emerging racial antagonism. Blacks had little reason to support the strike because 20 of the 24 craft unions involved excluded blacks. Whites were offended when the company imported Mexicans and 30–40,000 blacks as strikebreakers to Gary, it is remembered:

“The mills brought black people in here from deep parts of the South in box cars. They promised the black workers promotions and good jobs. Some of them did work on some of the jobs, until the strike was broken, and then they went back to work at the end of the line.”

The incident made use of by the Gary authorities to bring in federal troops to crush the strike began when white workers tried to pull a black scab off a streetcar carrying him to the mill. The CIO organizing drive in the 1930s overcame to some extent the division among blacks, Latins and whites. A black worker says:

“Black workers rushed in in large numbers because they were like drowning men. The white workers kind of hung out. Some of the white workers said, ‘Well, I don’t want to be part of something that is going to give a black worker as much right as I have.’ But all people don’t think alike no matter what race they are. If you are going to elect some officers, and some folks are active, that’s who you are going to elect. The first election in the Tin Mill we had a black worker for recording secretary. We had a black worker vice president. We had a black worker grievance committeeman. The foreman called a meeting one day of all the white workers. His remarks were, ‘Men, the union might be all right. But why in the hell do you have to have a Negro to represent you?’ One of those men spoke up and said, ‘You might call him a Negro but we call him a brother union member and we are sure that we trust him in all that he has done.’”

After the union was organized, according to this man, “blacks and whites alternated at jobs so that everyone could take a coffee break, pitched in for anyone who didn’t have lunch money, played softball together at Roosevelt Park and brought their families.”

Racist Union

The spirit of brotherhood evident during the organizing drive has faded, along with the democracy and militancy of that period. The international union itself is demonstrably racist. Today blacks are about a third of the Steelworkers’ membership and in some plants they are a majority. Yet there has never been a black member of the international union executive board. The same is true of the union’s appointed personnel.

According to the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers, a caucus of black steelworkers formed in 1964:

“Of more than 1000 employes of the international (in 1968), less than 100 are Negroes. Of 14 departments of the international, only two have Negro personnel. One of these two departments is the Civil Rights Department (obviously). Blacks were in the forefront during the formation of this union 25 years ago. Through the acceptance of crumbs down through the years instead of our just deserts, we now find ourselves hindmost.”

More significant than the exclusion of blacks from leadership positions in the union is their concentration in dirty, unhealthy, poor paying jobs in the mills. True, blacks now work in areas of the mills from which they were previously barred. But departments like the coke plant, sintering plant and blast furnace continue to be all-black in most mills and the black worker’s ability to move into better jobs continues to be less than the white’s.

A study made in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1964 concluded that “given the same seniority and education, the white employe’s chances for advancement are substantially greater than are the Negro’s and that is true at all levels of seniority, at all levels of education, and at all job levels.” A study of black employment in the basic steel industry of Pittsburgh made for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1968 observed that “Negroes comprise 12.27 percent of the laborers, 12.93 percent of the service workers and 10.86 of the semi-skilled operatives, but only 3.21 percent of the craftsmen.”

The union has a direct responsibility for this situation because of its failure to insist on plant-wide, rather than departmental seniority. Placed in traditionally all-black departments by the hiring practices of the companies, black workers hesitate to try to transfer to other departments because they must give up their accumulated seniority in (say) the coke plant and start all over again.

Also, in every economic recession blacks who had found their way into a previously all-white department tend to be squeezed out. A white worker in the open hearth in a mill in Youngstown, Ohio, who has worked for years to integrate his department, puts it this way:

“Our department was desegregated and blacks moved into all the jobs. I didn’t hear any complaints at all. But now, with the recession again, it is an all-white department for all practical purposes. People are getting bumped according to seniority. How does a black person break through and become a machinist when the youngest machinist has 30 years in the plant?”

Discrimination in job assignment can literally be a death sentence. It has recently been established that a person who works on top of the coke ovens for more than five years is 10 times more likely to get lung cancer than are other steelworkers. Coke oven workers are almost all black.

Guardian, April 11, 1973.

25. NATIONAL AD HOC COMMITTEE OF CONCERNED STEELWORKERS ANNUAL MEETING, 1972

The National Ad Hoc Committee has been instrumental in increasing the number of international representatives, the number of sub-district directors, and the number of black staff representatives in the steelworkers union.

The National Ad Hoc Committee has also been a contributing factor in the promoting of five (5) black staff representatives to the position of key staff.

Through the efforts of the National Ad Hoc Committee the Civil Rights Department has been reorganized with a black man as the Director. There is also a black Assistant Director of the Contract Administration Department.

Out of twenty-eight (28) departments in the Pittsburgh office, ten (10) now have black staff representatives as members.

There are still eighteen (18) departments that need integrating. In the steelworkers union, we still do not have a black person on the executive board of this union.

The purpose and intent of the National Ad Hoc Committee will remain the same until the United Steelworkers has been completely integrated:

OUR PURPOSE AND INTENT is to secure our rightful share of all the benefits our Union has to offer including employment in all levels. This Committee has embarked on a Three Point Program to achieve this goal.

1. Negroes on the Executive Board.

2. Full integration on all levels within the various districts and National offices as department heads and policy makers.

3. Reorganization of the Civil Rights Department has been dealt with.

Prior to 1964 a National Ad Hoc Committee was a dream; something hoped and longed for. This dream was cherished in the heart of many black steelworkers. These brothers had met in convention after convention trying to unfold their dream in reality. At the 13th Constitutional Convention of the United Steelworkers in Atlantic City, New Jersey, these brothers joined themselves together and molded their dream into three demands. These demands were presented in both candidates aspiring for the office of President of the International Union.

1. There must be blacks on the Executive Board.

2. There must be blacks in every Department.

3. The Civil Rights Department must be integrated with a Black Director.

I am happy to have been one of the founders of this great committee.

This national committee has organized local branches in eleven (11) States: Gary, Ind.; Chicago, Illinois; Baltimore, Maryland; Birmingham, Alabama; Cleveland, Ohio; Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Philadelphia, Pa.; Pittsburgh, Penn.; Houston, Texas; Los Angeles, California.

This brochure will give a report of the progress made in those eight (8) years. Many Ad Hocers have moved up into the International Union as International Representatives, technicians, sub-district directors, assistants to department heads.

I have had the privilege to serve two (2) years as Secretary-Treasurer and four (4) years as National Chairman, during these years; I have had the pleasure of visiting every branch.

In this 16th Annual Convention, my term of office will expire. The guidelines prohibit a national officer from succeeding themselves more than once. Coupled with the fact that 1972 makes it possible for me to retire from physical labor, under our labor agreement; this I have taken advantage of.

I appreciate the cooperation given me by the various branches.

I hope that the Ad Hoc Committee will carry on until every vestige of segregation and discrimination has been eliminated.

Fraternally yours,

Rayfield Mooty, Chairman

National Ad Hoc Committee of

Concerned Steelworkers

After Abel’s election as International President, the Committee tried for four years without success to meet with him. Finally, convinced that it was time to use labor’s strongest weapon against labor leaders, black steelworkers confronted Mr. Abel with a picket line at the 14th Constitutional Convention in Chicago’s International Amphitheater in 1968.

After three days of demonstration and publicity Mr. Abel was forced to meet with the Committee and discuss the three point program. Some progress had been made. The Civil Rights Department had been reorganized and some departments had been integrated (tokenly). But there was still no black department heads, the number of black employees was less than 100 of a total of about 1200, and the Executive Board was still all-white.

Mr. Abel promised that the Board was planning to support Mr. Leander Simms for District Director. The demonstration was called off. The Committee made an all-out effort to help Mr. Simms in District 8. But this was a handicapped race: every one knows that you can’t start in September to run for District Director the next February. Mr. Simms lost the election. Mr. Abel won. He has never met with the Committee since.

THE AD HOC COMMITTEE OF CONCERNED STEELWORKERS ALSO JOINS OTHER RANK-AND-FILE STEELWORKERS IN DEMANDING;

1. No Neutrality in the Presidential Election! The membership cannot afford to stand in the middle of the road while vital decisions are being made. The rank and file is accustomed to look to the International Union for leadership in national politics. If that leadership is not forthcoming, the rank and file will act on its own.

2. Eliminate the Productivity Clause From the Contract! The union was started in the first place mainly to keep the company from defining jobs and arranging work schedules as it pleased, eliminating jobs any time it wanted, and generally pushing people around on the job. In the last contract the union agreed to help the company do these things. It takes all the strength out of the union when local presidents and grievance committeemen are required to help the company do its dirty work.

3. Amend the Constitution of the USWA to provide for a referendum ballot of the membership on all contracts.

4. Seek immediate inclusion of our contracts of a clause which gives our members the right to strike for reasons of health and safety, against speed-up, racial and sex discrimination, and company violation of the contract after a 30-day waiting period.

5. Adopt as the top priority goal of this union the fight for the 6-hour day, 30–hour week at 40 hours pay to make room for a FOURTH six hour shift in the 24–hour day, thereby increasing employment to the potential of 25% and returning part of the benefits of new technology to the working people.

6. Provide that pension funds be invested in loans to union members at the same rate of interest given to large borrowers, that portable pensions be instituted so that total time in the steel industry is the basis for retirement pensions, and that the pension funds give full disclosure of all investments.

7. Provide a full quarterly disclosure of the membership in each company of the current status of the SUB funds, that all interest accrued from such funds be plowed back into the fund, that all workers be included in the fund from the first day on the job, and that senior workers shall have the option to take a layoff instead of younger workers.

8. Repeal the Wage Freeze.

National Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers, annual meeting and election of officers, Convention Hall, Las Vegas, Nevada, September 18–22, 1972. Copy in possession of the editors.

26 . BLACK STEELWORKERS’ PARLEY SPURS REPRESENTATION FIGHT

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

Daily World, September 29, 1972.

27. THE FIGHT AGAINST RACISM IN THE USWA

An Interview with Rayfield Mooty

There is no union, with the possible exception of some in the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, where the leadership has such a long and inglorious record of accommodation to, and cooperation with, racism and racist practices as does the “Official Family” of the United Steel Workers of America.

This long history of racism in the USWA has been countered by an equally long campaign by rank and file steelworkers to overturn these policies and practices. White as well as Black and Latin steelworkers have been a part of these struggles but Blacks—as they have since the struggles against chattel slavery—have played a leading and decisive role in those struggles.

The 19th Constitutional Convention of the United Steel Workers of America is an important event, not only for steelworkers but for workers everywhere. One of the biggest challenges before the Convention will be the struggle to unite the steelworkers union in preparation for the sharp economic and legislative battles that lie ahead. This, in turn, requires a new level of unity between Black, Latin and white steelworkers—and a sharper struggle against racism within the steel industry and within the United Steel Workers of America.

The 19th Constitutional Convention will mark the 10th anniversary of the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers’ picket line at the 1968 convention of the USWA. Rayfield Mooty led that picket line. Labor Today spent a day talking to him about the event and about the struggle for Black representation within the ranks of the steelworkers union. We think it’s a story worth sharing.

I see that one of the signs you carried at the 1968 convention says, “Integrate all departments.” Just what did you hope to accomplish when you decided to picket the place?

That was just one of our demands. We had three. Our first was that there be Blacks on the International Executive Board. Our second called for reorganization of the Civil Rights Department and our third was for full integration in all levels of the union so that Black steelworkers would be represented at all levels where policy was determined. We called it our Three Point Program.

There’s another thing that you must remember—we did not begin our activity in 1968. The Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers grew out of the Negro Steelworkers Leadership Committee that had been established at the 1964 convention in Atlantic City. This was the group that set up the Three Point Program. Ad Hoc was just continuing the work that had been started earlier.

Also, we didn’t end our activity with the 1968 picket line. We picketed the International office in 1970 and we went back to the 1970 convention. But none of these had the same impact as our picket line in Chicago. How could it? After all, how many times before that had members of a union set up a picket line at a convention of their own union—to say nothing about the fact that this was a picket line established by Black workers.

You say that the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers grew out of the Negro Steelworkers Leadership Committee. What happened to that group?

I’ve learned one very important thing in the 42 years since I joined the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in 1937: Events sometimes force you to take action before you are prepared for it, before you’ve been able to think everything through. That’s the way it was in 1964 when we organized the Negro Steelworkers Leadership Committee.

Don’t forget, the United Steel Workers of America was organized in 1942 and before that we had been the Steel Workers Organizing Committee for six years. And in all of those thirty years, fewer than thirty Blacks had been hired by the International Union—despite the fact that the USWA employed, and still employs, between 1,200 to 1,500 people.

In 1964 there were no Blacks in any position of decision or authority. There were no Black department heads. There were only a handful of Blacks on staff and very few working as clerks, secretaries or bookkeepers.

Blacks had been burning over this discrimination—it was racism, pure and simple—for years and we finally decided to do something about it. We organized ourselves at the convention, drafted our program, a statement of intent, and went to work.

As we traveled around the country building support for our program, we came to understand that the concept that gave rise to the Negro Steelworkers Leadership Committee was too narrow. We realized that we would have to establish an organization that would allow white participation as well. So, we dissolved the Leadership Committee and reorganized ourselves as the Ad Hoc Committee of Concerned Steelworkers. Although few whites joined Ad Hoc, they could have if they wanted to. There’s nothing wrong with changes if they are necessary, just as long as you don’t forget what you’re all about—that’s another thing I’ve learned.

Labor Today (September, 1978).

MUNICIPAL WORKERS

28. UNION BATTLE WON IN MEMPHIS

Editor’s Note: We are reprinting this article (slightly modified) from MDS Newsletter, Box 2647, New Orleans, La. 70116, because we feel it can serve several useful purposes. It is a vivid lesson in building wide community support for workers’ struggles and in going beyond strictly trade-union forms of struggle. Memphis is also a case study in the sources of the recent ghetto uprising which go deeper than the bullet that killed Martin Luther King.

By Fred Lacey

A titanic union struggle in the city of Memphis, Tenn. is over and the workers have come out on top. City sanitation workers stayed out on strike for 65 days. They defied a court injunction demanding their return. They braved police terror which included mass arrests and the widespread use of mace, tear gas, and police clubs against them. And they defeated a city administration which brought in scabs by the truckload from the bordering states of Mississippi and Arkansas in an effort to break their strike.

The strike began on Feb. 12, in the wake of the sanitation workers’ strike in New York City, and was sparked by a typical action of job discrimination against black workers (black workers make up over 1,300 of the city’s 1,600 sanitation workers). On a rainy morning a good number of black workers were sent home, while a smaller group of favorites, including white workers, was told to stay by the trucks. Later, the weather cleared up and those who were told to stay got in a full day’s work. The workers sent home demanded that the city pay them for the lost day, but the administration refused to give the men more than two hours compensation. Piled on top of all the other rotten working conditions, the men decided that they had taken enough, and walked out on strike.

Some of those other conditions that led up to the strike include: (1) no bathrooms, no washrooms, and no showering facilities for the men to clean up with after work, and no protective work-clothing, which meant that all workers had to go home in the same clothes they had been working in all day; (2) no place for the men to lunch, which meant a situation that one worker described as “having a sandwich in one hand and a garbage can in the other”; (3) job discrimination against black workers, who were consistently denied job promotions; and (4) no pension or retirement system.

Besides this, the sanitation workers were not listed as regular city workers, and therefore did not qualify for workmen’s compensation. Early in January of this year, two men were crushed to death by a defective packer in their truck. The men’s families received a “gift” from the city of $500 for “burial expenses,” and one month’s pay. Nothing more.

Wages were another factor causing the strike. The city administration hired mostly older men with families for the job, and paid them 5₵ over the minimum wage to start, with the maximum wage rate set at $1.80 per hour. This pay scale, averaging between $53-$60 a week after taxes, came nowhere near to supporting the men’s families. Forty per cent of the sanitation workers qualified for and were drawing welfare checks in addition to their sanitation pay to support their families before the strike. Many more workers were on the food stamp program as well.

Long Organizing Effort

Memphis is one of the many big Southern cities that the freedom movement never really organized. But there is no question that the battles of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia and the early Memphis sit-ins had a major impact on the city’s black workers. Their response to this tide was to move and try to organize against what was oppressing them the most, which began in 1963 for the sanitation workers when they threatened a strike. Another strike was planned in 1966. But on both occasions the city administration immediately got an injunction against the threatened strike, fired the most militant workers, and promised to fire any man who dared to walk out on strike. These tactics of the city stopped the walkout those years, but nothing changed for the workers, and in 1968 they were ready to fight.

One reason for this lies with a man named T. 0. Jones. He was fired by the city in 1963, after six years on the job, for leading the workers to strike. Later that year he was hired by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to continue organizing among his former co-workers.

The Opening Guns

On the first day of the strike, T. O. Jones appeared with a committee of sanitation workers at the office of the city’s director of public works demanding a pay increase and action on many of the job conditions the men were fed up with. When the public works director refused to commit himself to improving the conditions or raising wages, and insisted that the strike was illegal under the 1966 injunction, T. O. Jones pulled out a brown paper bag, took off his dress clothes in the director’s office, and put on what he called his “jail clothes.” He then told the director that they could throw him in jail if they wanted to, but that the strike was definitely on.

The next night, the city’s mayor, Henry Loeb, addressed a union meeting of over 800 striking workers. He told them that this was not New York City and that “nothing will be gained by violating our laws.” He also said that the walkout was posing a grave “health menace to the city”—the men laughed at him. He sternly told the men to go back to work and then there would be negotiations—the men laughed at him again. . . .

The Movement (June, 1968).

29. MEMPHIS: KING’S BIGGEST GAMBLE

March Was Out of Hand Before It Even Started

By Robert M. Ratcliffe

MEMPHIS, Tenn.—Martin Luther King took the big gamble here last Thursday, and lost: his prestige went on a nosedive and his image was dented and cracked.

Dr. King put his international fame on the line when he dared lead 10,000 or more on a march that was already out of hand before it started.

First sign of trouble popped up when Memphis’ handful of “black power” youngsters and “the invaders” rushed to the front of the march ahead of Dr. King. They refused to move back and shouted: “King is not our leader, we want Carmichael.”

Anticipating serious trouble, the Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr. of Memphis, advised King to get into a car and move out of sight until the “black power” group could be brought under control. It was learned that Rev. M. Lawson would have called off the march if given the necessary encouragement.

King’s aides reportedly recommended that he go on with the march through downtown Memphis, and off they marched.

What happened a few minutes later made international headlines.

The widely ballyhooed march, composed of thousands of junior and senior high school students who had cut classes and hundreds of adults who took a day off from work, was to have been a peaceful one in behalf of 1,300 negro sanitation workers on strike nearly two months.

The mass of humanity, taking up all street and sidewalk space, moved off around 11 a.m. from in front of historic Clayborn Temple AME Church, up Hernando to famed Beale St. and then west on Beale to Main St.

Smashing of store windows and looting began on Beale just as march leaders turned into Main St., and there was more window-smashing and looting for one block on Main St.

It was at this point that Dr. King and local march leaders agreed that the thing was out of hand. The more than 600 policemen on duty were called into action. Tear gas was squirted into faces of fleeing marchers, many of the looters, and those who couldn’t run fast enough, were beaten with police sticks.

Meanwhile, King was hustled down a side street where he and his lieutenants bummed a ride back to his suite in the fabulous Holiday Inn-Rivermont.

King and the local march leaders denied that they deserted. Beale St., the street famous with his blues, was in a shambles, broken glass, sticks, placards, stolen items and blood littered the pavement and sidewalks.

The innocent as well as the guilty were clubbed by policemen. Clayborn Temple, where it all started, became a rallying point for “black power” and the AME church administration building next door to the church became a temporary hospital.

Police soon cleared out the entire area and sealed it off. But window-breaking and looting continued throughout the city. A 16-year-old schoolboy, Larry Payne, was killed a mile away from Beale St. He was accused of looting a Sears branch store. Policemen said the boy had a knife in his hand and that the killing was in self-defense. Witnesses said the boy had no knife. That both of his hands were in the air when the officer shot him.

Mayor Henry Loeb set up a curfew Thursday night, 7 p.m. to 5 a.m., and this continued throughout the weekend. State troopers and 4,000 members of the National Guard rolled into town to help keep order. Whiskey stores were closed and no beer was sold.

Pittsburgh New Courier, April 6, 1968.

30. ECONOMIC BOYCOTT IN MEMPHIS TO CONTINUE

MEMPHIS—The Memphis sanitation strike of some 1300 Negro workers which took the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was settled last week but the Rev. James Lawson, one of the leaders of the economic boycott which has cut white-owned business profits 80 per cent said the “Poor Peoples Campaign” here “is just starting.”

“We’ve just begun,” he added. “We want to get to the point where every poor person in this Shelby County of ours will be able to walk on their own two feet. The battle is not over. We’ve got a fight on our hands.”

Along this line, the Memphis City Council was to meet this week with Negro leaders and discuss remaining civil rights issues, including police brutality.

Thus the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, now headed by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, moved to concentrate more time on its national “Poor Peoples Marches,” of which the Memphis campaign is but one part.

That the agreement for an across-the-board wage hike of 15 cents per hour bringing the wages of most of the men up from $1.50 to $1.75 and those of drivers and supervision leaders to $2.20 per hour was a victory, it was agreed.

The City Council voted 12-1 to accept the agreement, including its features of union recognition and dues check-off. The garbage workers okayed the settlement by giving a unanimous vote at their meeting.

Moreover, J. O. Patterson, one of three Negroes on the Memphis City Council pointed out that the final agreement which settled the strike was practically the same one that had been voted by City Council even before the strike.

Councilman Patterson said: “Seven weeks ago, we agreed to the main issues almost identical to those before us today and then a majority of the Council changed its mind, . . . refused to take any action on this matter and a lot of hell broke out across this city and across the nation. We could have avoided all this including the death of Dr. King.”

The resistance against recognition of the union and a settlement had been placed by most Negroes at the door of Mayor Henry Loeb, long—time leader of white hard-line resistance in the city to civil rights legislation.

Some Negroes would stereotype Mayor Loeb as the man who vetoed the appointment of a Negro to the Metropolitan Transit Authority during Mayor Loeb’s first term from 1960 to 1963. They also point out that he was against the chosen Negro because he had taken part in civil rights desegregation cases.

Mayor Loeb in last year’s primary also defeated a wealthy Negro, A. W. Willis, in a city which is more than 40 per cent Negro in its population.

For this reason much of the economic boycott’s fire was directed against the chain of laundries, restaurants and other stores owned by the Loeb family, although Mayor Loeb was said to have sold his interests several years ago.

Typical of the new issues of race and economic uplift in which Memphis Negroes are now interested is the suit filed in the name of Colie Jennings, a car man helper, against the Illinois Central Railroad, in behalf of all Negroes in Tennessee employed by the railroad.

This suit in Federal Court charges that the railroad discriminates against Negro employees and others in the areas of promotions, restrooms, locker facilities and time clocks.

Pittsburgh New Courier, April 27, 1968.

31. THE STRUGGLE IN MEMPHIS

By Bayard Rustin

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

New York Amsterdam News, April 6, 1968.

32. IN MEMPHIS: MORE THAN A GARBAGE STRIKE

By J. Edwin Stanfield

This report is written and published as the strike and accompanying Negro protest—the old civil rights movement still alive—in Memphis continues. Perhaps by the time this report reaches the reader, the strike and turmoil will have been settled. This is to be wished—but only if the settlement is honorable, if it reaches honestly to the issues, from the surface economic ones to the deep-lying ones of human dignity. Otherwise—as in the past in Memphis and all too many other southern and American locales—the time of danger and of disaster will have only been postponed, with an ever-increasing store of anger and loss of faith. There is the real possibility, too, that the situation in Memphis may have deteriorated into violence and repression. If so, this report can only contribute to the record, so badly misread and misunderstood in America, of how such tragedy comes about, and of how it might be averted. In simplest terms, avoiding such tragedy was in Memphis and across America merely a matter of government and society living up to their responsibilities to all citizens.

There have been at work through the time of tension in Memphis forces and influences for positive and intelligent action meeting the highest obligations of society and government. Such forces and influences come from both races of men in Memphis. It remains a problem in all of American life how such positive people and institutions might be supported and encouraged. It is toward that end, primarily, that this report is submitted.

The Strike

On Monday, February 12, 1,375 men (mostly sanitation workers but also other employees of Memphis’ Department of Public Works) went out on strike.

The walk out originated over a sewer workers’ grievance. Twenty-two employees of that department who reported for work on January 31 were sent home when it began raining. White employees were not sent home and, when the rain stopped after an hour or so, were put to work and paid for the full day. The Negro workers complained. The city then paid them two hours’ “call up pay.” When they saw their pay envelopes at the end of the week, they called a meeting of Memphis Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFL-CIO). Local 1733 is all Negro. The local had no official status, a result of the city of Memphis’ policy of not recognizing a particular union as bargaining agent for municipal employees. The question of recognition of the union was to become a central issue in the strike.

Mayor Henry Loeb, who was elected in October, 1967, took the position that the strike was illegal and that the strikers had to return to work before their grievances could be discussed. He declared that he would never sign a contract, that the city could not recognize a particular union as bargaining agent for municipal employees, and that he would not agree to a dues check-off. The union insisted that federal precedent supported its demand for recognition. Indications were that the mayor would not be adamant on any of the other points.

Coming even as it did in the shadow of the devastating, nine-day strike in New York City, the Memphis strike received little notice outside the state. It did not create a “newsworthy” crisis as the New York strike did. The reason is simple: Memphis has a population of just over 500,000. Using non-union workers and supervisors, the city managed to keep picking up garbage and trash downtown from vital institutions, such as hospitals. They also kept enough scab crews operating to pick up in designated residential sections each day. The daily papers printed maps showing which neighborhoods would get service on that day, and the location of city dumps so that citizens could dispose of their own accumulations, if they wished. The garbage problem was kept below crisis proportions.

Mayor Loeb, a tall, big-boned, darkly handsome man, spoke of plans he still had in reserve, such as one to place garbage trucks at shopping centers to which citizens could bring their garbage. When 317 men reported for work on the seventeenth day of the strike (108 non-strikers, 62 strikers who returned, and 147 new men) the mayor was delighted and spoke of the possibility of tapering off on hiring as soon as the force “gets high enough to provide once-a-week pickups.”

The strike was merely a symptom of Memphis’ larger problem.

More than 200,000 of the city’s citizens are Negroes—about 40 per cent of the population. The 80,000 Negro voters were almost solidly against Loeb when he was elected last October; but Negroes failed to vote in a bloc for any other candidate, including A. W. Willis, Negro representative to the Tennessee House. Mayor Loeb’s handling of the sanitation strike, with concurrence of the City Council, apparently triggered the release in the Negro community of built-up resentment over low wages generally and under-employment of Negroes in local government. Their resentment was heightened by disappointment, for there had been hope that the new mayor-council form of city government (changed from commission form in January) and a new police commissioner would mean a change for the better.

On February 16, the local chapter of the NAACP threatened massive demonstrations unless the city met the demands of the strikers. A group of Negro ministers, with the Reverend James Lawson as chairman, became interested in the strike, since many of the workers were members of their congregations. They began by sponsoring a series of meetings between city and union officials.

On Monday, February 19, while the second of this series of meetings was in progress, representatives of the NAACP and some of the strikers picketed in front of city hall. Little progress was made in the negotiations. The demonstrators continued their vigil through the night and left at dawn without incident.

The “Sit-In”

The City Council’s Committee on Public Works scheduled a public hearing for Thursday at 10 a.m. Some 100 people, including union officers, ministers, and sympathizers were present when the hearing began. Fred Davis, committee chairman, hinted that the union representatives might not be speaking from the viewpoint of the strikers. “We are going to pay particular attention to what the men themselves have to say on the issues,” he declared. “We are concerned that the men as individuals have not been able to bring out their views.”

With that, union officials called the Rubber Workers’ Hall, where the daily rally of strikers was to begin at noon. In a short time, roughly dressed sanitation workers began to drift into the City Council’s chamber. Soon the room, which has a seating capacity of 407, including chairs for councilmen, clerks and reporters, was crowded with about 700 people, mostly sanitation workers.

Chairman Davis insisted that the rank and file were being misrepresented. Officers of the union local insisted that they were the proper spokesmen, not some unlettered member chosen at random. Mr. Davis declared that due to overcrowding of the chamber contrary to fire laws, the committee would recess.

The workers and their leaders and friends said that they would remain in the hearing room until they got satisfaction. Speaker after speaker exhorted the workers and voiced grievances of the strikers in particular and of Memphis Negroes in general. There was singing of spirituals, patriotic songs and the anthems of the civil rights movement. “The plush, red-carpeted council chamber,” reported the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “was jammed with strikers who vaulted across the railing onto the dias reserved for city officials.”

Since no one had eaten lunch, union leaders sent for bread, bologna, cheese, luncheon meat, ham, and mustard. The city attorney’s table was appropriated for making sandwiches. “The usually immaculate carpet for the chamber,” the Commercial Appeal complained, “soon became spotted with bread crumbs and tiny pieces of paper despite the small trash cans placed in each aisle for refuse.”

Meanwhile, Inspector Sam Evans of the Memphis Police Department had 142 officers converge on city hall. They remained parked within a block, five to a car, with car motors running.

The committee eventually capitulated. It reopened the hearing and finally, about 5:30, agreed to recommend that the city recognize the union and agree to “some form of dues check-off.” A newsman asked Councilman Davis what the mayor replied when told of the committee’s recommendation. “He maintained a polite silence,” said Mr. Davis. The recommendation was to be presented to the City Council in a special meeting at 2:30 p.m. the next day.

A cartoon published in the Commercial Appeal on Friday, February 23, after the sit-in at city hall on Thursday, silhouetted a fat Negro sitting atop a garbage can surrounded by a pile of rubbish and overturned receptacles. The garbage can was labeled, “City Hall Sit-in.” Wavy lines indicated an odor rising from the garbage from the garbage heap and the black man. Above his head these fume-lines formed the legend, “Threat of Anarchy.” The cartoon was titled, “Beyond the Bounds of Tolerance.”

“Memphis garbage strikers have turned an illegal walk out into anarchy,” said an accompanying editorial, “and Mayor Henry Loeb is exactly right when he says, ‘We can’t submit to this sort of thing!’ . . . When the Council deals with the problem today it should not be intimidated or stampeded into imprudent decisions by yesterday’s belligerent show of force.” (Ironically, on Wednesday evening, scarcely twenty-four hours before that cartoon and editorial were published, Commercial Appeal Editor Frank R. Ahlgren had received a brotherhood award at the annual affair of the local National Conference of Christians and Jews).

The February 23 March

On Friday afternoon, so many people showed up for the Council meeting that it was moved to a municipal auditorium. (The Memphis Press-Scimitar estimated one thousand. An observer sympathetic to the strikers estimated two thousand. Estimates of crowds at meetings and marches by the two Memphis dailies were, with notable consistency, about half those of Negro leaders).

In view of what ensued, the Negro ministers and union leaders wondered why they bothered. The meeting was called to order at 2:30 p.m. with the traditional cry of the sergeant-at-arms: “Oyez, this honorable City Council of the City of Memphis is now in session. All persons having business to transact or matters to bring before the City Council draw nigh, give attention, and ye shall be heard.” The Public Works Committee’s resolution was never heard. Another resolution, obviously prepared and discussed by the councilmen in advance, was substituted and passed by a vote of nine to four. (The four opposed were three Negro councilmen and one white man who thought the recommendations too compromising). The substitute resolution suggested concessions by the mayor on all points, except the vital issues on a contract recognizing a union and a system of union dues check-off. After passage of this resolution, Council Chairman Downing Pryor announced that members would not, at that hearing, hear citizens—and the Council was adjourned at 2:45.

This had an electric effect on the assembled strikers and their leaders. As on Thursday, union officers and community leaders, including some recognized even by the white press for the “responsibility,” got to their feet to express anger and resentment. T. O. Jones, president of Local 1733, was quoted by the Press-Scimitar as saying, “We are ready to go to their damned jail.” Dr. Vascoe A. Smith, Jr., a Memphis dentist and NAACP leader, was reported in the press to have said, “Don’t let them hoodwink you. You are living in a racist town. They don’t give a damn about you. . . .”

A march along Main Street was quickly organized after the meeting and an understanding was reached with the police that marchers would stay on the west side of the street.

For several blocks all went smoothly. Then, in the marchers’ version, a police cruiser edged over the center line, bumping and nudging the marchers, crowding them closer to the curb. The Tri-State Defender reported that the car stopped on a woman’s foot and the marchers tried to push it off. Other accounts were that it ran over the woman’s foot, and in anger, marchers tried to shove it back over the center line. The white press questioned whether the car even touched the woman’s foot. Whatever the case, marchers were under the impression that it had; there was pushing of the police car.

Indeed, in the police version it was claimed that (for unspecified reasons) an attempt was made to overturn the squad car. Officers quoted one marcher as yelling, “Let’s turn the patrol car over,” and said that men then started rocking the car. At any rate, five policemen jumped from the cruiser and, joined by other officers, began spraying the marchers with Mace, a new tear gas-like chemical causing temporary blindness and severe facial discomfort. They sprayed not only the men in the immediate vicinity of the squad car, but other marchers up and down the block. In the ensuing confusion, they gassed a number of bystanders and even fellow officers.

Jacques Wilmore, staff director of the regional office of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, whose office is in Memphis, saw the police grab a man in the crowd, pulling him toward the curb. According to Wilmore, “a third policeman came up and just cracked the man across the head. I walked up to them and pulled out my identification. That’s when they squirted me two or three times directly in the eyes with Mace.” Bobby Doctor, another employee of the Civil Rights Commission, and Baxton Bryant, Executive Director of the Tennessee Council of Human Relations, were with Wilmore at the time and were sprayed in the same sweeps of the gas canister.

Gerald Fanion, director of the Shelby County Community Relations Commission, a Negro, said he was helping a woman out of the ruckus when a policeman walked up to him and squirted him in the face. “I told him who I was and that I was acting as liaison for the county and he squirted me again,” said Fanion.

P. J. Ciampa, white field director for the striking union, was sprayed repeatedly. On the following Monday he still had raw, peeling skin under his left eye. He was treated for abrasions and bruises inflicted by the police. “I’ve never seen such brutality,” said Ciampa.

The Tri-State Defender, a Negro-owned weekly, published a page of photographs of the fray. One showed a policeman sprinting directly toward a camera, club in hand. The cameraman reported that a few seconds after he snapped the picture, the policeman yelled, “Gimme that camera, nigger,” and chased him into the crowd.

The lead editorial in the Press-Scimitar on February 24, the day after police broke up the march, lamented that “leaders of the union have shown no respect for Tennessee law. . . .” It continued:

On the other hand, Memphis can take deep pride in the prompt and efficient way its law enforcement officers handled the volatile situation. Police were on the job as the strikers and their leaders boiled out of the meeting and started a march on Main Street.

They had guns, but they didn’t shoot.

They had Mace, the new irritant gas which incapacitates but does not permanently injure—and they used it. They went into action as soon as fired-up marchers attacked a police car . . .

How much better to do it this way than to be late and soft as were police in Detroit and other places . . . letting disturbances grow into full-scale rioting.

The use of Mace and billy clubs by the police resulted in unprecedented unity among Memphis Negroes. According to residents, Negro ministers who in other years were often leaders of divisive factions were virtually unanimous in calling for support of the sanitation workers and the union.

The ministers cancelled a demonstration scheduled for Saturday and had a strategy meeting instead. Next day they went into their pulpits and called for a boycott of (1) all downtown stores; (2) the two daily newspapers; and (3) every establishment doing business under the name of “Loeb.” (Mayor Henry Loeb’s brother, William, owns a chain of barbecue and fried chicken restaurants, and a laundry chain). They also announced downtown marches in support of the strikers and the boycott for both Monday morning and Monday afternoon, and a mass meeting at Clayborn Temple AME Church on Monday night.

The action of the police greatly strengthened the strikers. It made the preachers mad, and preachers still have influences among Negroes in the South. One of them, still furious on Monday night, urged the boycott of all Loeb businesses in this manner: “Somebody tried to explain to me that William Loeb who owns the cleaning places is just Henry Loeb’s brother. I don’t care if it is his brother or his sister or his mother or his father or his uncle or his auntie or his cousin—if it says ‘Loeb’ on it, you stay out of there! If it says ‘Loeb’ on the sign or on the front of the store or on the back of it, on the side or on the top or on the bottom of it—you stay out of there!”

The boycott was effective, and again the actions of the police had helped. Downtown streets and stores were virtually empty throughout the next week. Clerks straightened and restraightened stock, arranged and rearranged window displays. Negroes apparently were supporting the boycott. Speculation was that white people stayed away from town out of fear of another melee.

Demonstrations

In spite of Friday’s bitter experience, marches were conducted daily throughout the following week (February 26 - March 2).

In Monday’s march, which was typical of others during the week, most of the demonstrators were adults and nearly all were Negroes. There were four white girls from Southwestern at Memphis and a couple of young white men from Memphis State. Not many Negro youngsters were in the lines. Quite a few were on the sidewalks, watching and chuckling.

Some of the signs were neatly stenciled and carried pointed, but judicious messages: “Dignity and Decency For Our Sanitation Workers,” and “Keep Your Money In Your Pocket,” and “Jim Crow Must Go,” and “We Are Together Once And For All.”

Others were crudely lettered and blunt: “Only God Is King, Henry,” and “Watts Also Waited Too Late,” and “Watts Also Fired Negroes,” and “Sign Contract Blue-Eye Soul Brother.”

The march moved slowly up Beale Street and turned north on Main. Trying to keep two car-lengths apart, as instructed, the marchers moved past the pawn shops on Beale; past dozens of fashionable shops on Main. All but a few of the stores were empty. So were the streets, except for clerks who had stepped out to watch and people waiting on corners for buses.

Asked how the boycott was affecting business, a dime store clerk answered, “Well, it ain’t helping any. People stay away from fear of getting involved.”

An elderly woman carried her sign and faced straight ahead, lips pursed and eyes darting from side to side. She was dressed simply, but neatly, and wore a hat. Asked if she were a member of a striker’s family, she answered, “No, I’m just a church member and a friend. It’s easier for me to march because I am alone now, and don’t have children to take care of. I could be home in bed. But I remember. I been there. I’ve been without work. And I’ve been too poor and hungry to go to work when I had it.”

On Saturday, March 2, 400 to 500 college and high school students picketed downtown stores all day. That afternoon there was a joint march by the young people, the ministers and their followers, and the sanitation men. The papers estimated 1,000 people in that march; again observers sympathetic to the strikers guessed twice that many.

Meanwhile, on the day after the use of Mace on marchers, Mayor Loeb and City Attorney Frank B. Gianotti decided to seek an injunction against the strike in Chancery Court. Chancellor Robert Hoffman issued an injunction prohibiting engaging in a strike against the city; picketing city property and coercing the city by striking, picketing, or other means by recognizing the union as bargaining agent. Officials explained that it would be difficult to enforce the injunction so as to require the men to return to work, but 23 persons specifically named could be cited for contempt and jailed for up to ten days. These included Jerry Wurf, president of the union international; P. J. Ciampa, the union’s field director; T. O. Jones, president of the local; and other national and local officers.

City Council Meeting - February 27

The City Council agreed to give Jerry Wurf thirty minutes at its regular meeting on Tuesday, February 27, to present the views of the union and the purposes of the strike. Even as they sought to do well, however, insensitivity and, perhaps, fear caused the Council to wound the feelings of Negro citizens.

Mr. Wurf was scheduled to appear at 3:30 p.m. Strikers at the noon rally were urged to fill the Council chamber. The daily march from Clayborn Temple was timed to arrive at city hall just before the council session began at 2:30. Police had ruled that the public seating capacity of 407 would not be exceeded, stating that fire laws prohibited standing in the aisles. But strike leaders wanted a show of strength and determination and urged the men to fill the lobby outside the chamber. Loud-speakers were arranged so that persons in the lobby could hear the proceedings.

Shortly before 2:30 the doors of the chamber were opened and people started filing through the two entrances. Four to six policemen were stationed at each, counting the people going in, murmuring, “If you will go in two by two, we would appreciate it.” Neat cardboard signs scotchtaped to the marble wall beside each door stated, “Council Chamber - Public Seating Capacity 407.”

The first hour of the session was taken up with bone-dry business having to do with licensing and zoning. Then Council Chairman Downing Pryor observed that it was time for Mr. Wurf’s presentation and he had received word Wurf was delayed, so there would be a recess until he arrived.

Pryor did not tell the crowd that Wurf, along with other union officials, had been cited for contempt and summoned to Chancery Court. The summons had come, Wurf said later, just as he arrived at city hall for the Council meeting. Aware that he was to appear in court at precisely 3:30, he had asked Councilman Pryor if it would be possible for him to make his presentation earlier in the meeting. Pryor told him the agenda of the Council was fixed by law, but assured him that the Council would recess and stay in session until he completed his business at Chancery Court—unless, of course, he was sent to jail for ten days. (At the mass meeting that night, telling the crowd the Council should be credited with decency about this matter, Wurf said when two members of the Council made him that promise, the attorney for the city told them they might be in contempt of court).

When the recess of the council meeting was announced, people began milling around. After an hour of growing restlessness, Baxton Bryant, with others, persuaded Chairman Pryor that it would relieve tension if some of the ministers were allowed to speak while the audience was waiting for Wurf. Pryor called the meeting back to order and nervously laid down the rules. Each speaker would be limited to five minutes, a standing rule, he said, and not new for the occasion. If Wurf arrived, the person then speaking would be allowed to finish, then Wurf would speak. If he had not arrived after thirty minutes, the council would recess again and wait for him.

With only five minutes apiece, the preachers wasted no time on amenities. The clerks sat round-eyed, spellbound, giving the impression that they had never heard anyone address the Memphis City Council in such tones before—certainly not Negroes.

The Reverend S. B. Kyles said that all the policemen at the door and the five or six “emergency cars” outside made him think he was in Russia. He resented the thirty-minute time limit—“I’ll tell you, we have all night!” He rebuked spokesmen for the ministers for agreeing to speak to the Council on the Council’s terms: “We aim to talk to you on our terms.”

“If you don’t settle it here,” he told them, “it is going to be settled, anyway. You may have to settle it down where we are.”

The Reverend James Lawson, chairman for the group of ministers, said he was so flustered and angry that he hardly knew how to begin to express himself. Negroes, he said, are still the victims of two “sticks”: (1) the police—“those symbols of repression” guarding the door and (2) rigid structure. “If you dont’ beat us over the head with a night stick, you hit us over the head with an agenda!”

“Some of us want to settle this in this council,” he told them, “but if we can’t, we may just go back to our studies, perhaps just go fishing, and let whatever happens happen! Just forget it! This is not a threat, because Memphis is a part of this country, and this country is in turmoil, whether we like it or not!”

It was during Lawson’s speech that Wurf arrived. During the preachers’ speeches, the police had moved along the sides of the chamber and stood there, watching. One had a two-way radio, another a bullhorn.

“I planned to come here to make a humble statement,” Wurf began. “Posturing does more harm than good. In the interim some of us have been arrested . . . and now it is a temptation to try to prove one’s manhood. But I am going to forego that and simply state our goals.”

He reviewed the objectives of the strike and negotiations with Mayor Loeb. “The mayor has made much of the fact that he will not sign a contract,” Wurf told them. “It has become a posture which is more important to him than the substance of the issue.” He concluded with the suggestion that the Council should not abandon its responsibility entirely to the city’s chief executive. The meeting was adjourned.

Legal Actions

At the request of counsel for the defendants, the hearing on the contempt citation had been postponed until Friday morning, March 1. On Thursday, union attorneys filed a petition to have the matter shifted to federal district court, arguing that the injunction violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the rights of free speech and due process of law. On Friday morning, Chancellor Robert Hoffman refused to relinquish jurisdiction voluntarily, but did grant a continuance until Tuesday, March 5. On Friday afternoon, the federal court refused to take jurisdiction. Subsequently, the leaders were given sentences of 10 days in jail and $50 fine in state court. They were freed pending appeal.

Legislative Action

In the state capitol at Nashville, meanwhile, Senators Joe Pipkin and Hugh Stanton of Memphis had introduced three bills aimed at the strike. The bills were rushed through the Senate committee system and scheduled for a vote in only three legislative days.

One bill, passed by 21-10, provided a five-year prison sentence for persons disrupting public communication with police and fire departments. (There had been some talk in Memphis of tying up police and fire department telephone lines).

The other two bills would have outlawed strikes against police, fire, and sanitation departments and prohibited union dues check-offs from government paychecks. Little opposition had been expressed to them, perhaps because of the speed with which they were sent through the legislative machinery. Then, on the night of the 26th, according to the Nashville Tennessean, “Organized labor . . . descended on the legislative halls . . . and appealed to each senator.” Matt Lynch, president of the State Labor Council, said “all elements of organized labor” opposed the two measures. The bills were defeated, in effect, by referring them to a committee.

Thus, in the first two weeks, a pattern was set which was not in significent degree to change through subsequent meetings of the City Council, protest confrontations of strikers and their sympathizers with police, and negotiating sessions with city officials. In effect, the Negro community, unified as probably never before around the issue of the garbage strike, met and became increasingly aware of stubborn resistance from the city’s top official, and less stubborn but vacillating and ineffective response from the City Council, this accompanied by abrasive encounters with police and harsh criticism from the press. A measure of support unprecedented in the South had come from white union members who marched some 500 strong with the strikers on March 4. But beyond that, the other elements of white power, including clergy and businesses, the latter hard-hit by the boycott, had not effectively entered the crisis on either side, a not unusual situation in the South. With each passing day of inability of the city (and beyond it, the state and the nation) to deal realistically with the simple terms of the strike and the larger issues of Negro rightful demands, tension in Memphis mounted.

By March 7, such whites as Baxton Bryant, who had played a valuable role as a trusted intermediary between the Negro community and the city, began to doubt the utility of their function. It seemed to them that the city officials retained the imperturbable, immemorial southern charm and willingness to discuss the problem, but that in fact they were not yielding an inch. Perhaps he should cease walking through open doors which led only to closed minds, Bryant suggested to the Reverend Starks, president of the black Interdominational Ministers Alliance, over breakfast that morning. “Oh, no,” responded Starks. “Somebody’s got to talk to them; some channels have got to stay open. And we can’t do it. We’ve got nothing to say to them any more.”

But a man as positively disposed toward life as Reverend Starks has difficulty in persuading himself of his own counsel of despair. He decided to join Bryant and a reporter in interviews with the mayor and Downing Pryor. In both interviews, Bryant tried to convey his sense of the dangerously escalating hostility between the solidified Negro community and the city officialdom. He cited the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Memphis was becoming a perfect example of two alienated, antagonistic communities tensely confronting one another, he said. The mayor responded with great personal warmth, repeated his unalterable opposition to dues check-off, now the crux of the conflict. In the large, beautifully appointed, softly shaded office, the anguish expressed by Bryant and reflected in the tense faces of Starks, seemed incapable of passing to the other side of the executive desk.

But if the mayor was unmoved, he was not inactive. He wanted so much to “keep talking” to the Negro leadership and he was so happy Starks had come. Could he not return later; the mayor would be happy to clear his calendar. Was it not the utmost importance “that we keep talking to each other?” The group was rising to leave, but it looked as if Starks were rising alone. He drew himself up to his full height and said, “No, mayor. I cannot come to see you. Our community has taken a position and I stand with them. You have to talk to all of us.” There was no sign that the mayor had heard the death knell of plantation politics for the duration of this crisis.

Downing Pryor tried to express his personal concern, and the helplessness of the Council. Any action by the City Council would require six weeks to hurdle a mayoral veto—surely that was too late? But Starks did not let him off so easy. A pro-union resolution by the Council would not only hearten the Negro community, but show them that there was now an independent agency at city hall, capable of redressing their grievances. Pryor evaded this challenge, describing instead the bold new fair employment resolution promulgated by the Council: Increased hiring of Negroes until their number in city jobs equals their percentage in the population, accompanied by the necessary placement and training services. It sounded like a serious piece of legislation and there was little doubt that it had been hastened, if not inspired, by the mobilization of the black community behind the sanitation workers.

The Issues

The objectives of the strike were outlined by Jerry Wurf, president of the AFSCME (AFL-CIO) as follows:

(1) Union recognition and a contract with the city.

(2) Effective grievance procedures (“So if it rains they don’t send a man home like a dog without wages—or worse, send you home and give the white man “wages.”)

(3) Union payroll deduction, or dues check-off.

(4) Merit promotion—without regard to race.

(5) Equal treatment in the retirement system.

(6) Payment for overtime.

(7) Decent wages.

Something like accord was reached early in the strike on all of the strikers’ demands except union recognition and dues check-off. At the start of the strike, wages averaged about $1.70 per hour, and the strikers were demanding $2.35. The mayor and councilmen made an offer of a five per cent raise immediately, with another five per cent scheduled for the next fiscal year, and the sanitation men seemed willing to accept this. The other points apparently did not present insurmountable problems, either. As previously noted, Mayor Loeb said publicly that he would never sign a contract and could not agree to a dues check-off. The union tried to give him a face-saving way out by suggesting an exchange of letters between him and the president of the union in lieu of a contract, and collection of dues through the independent employees’ credit union. It was reliably reported that the mayor was considering such a letter, but when a news report labelled the projected letter a “compromise,” the mayor was incensed and resumed his stance.

After the Negro community, led by the preachers, got into the fight other issues were defined. Dr. Ralph Jackson, director of the Department of Minimum Salary of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was principal speaker at the mass meeting on Monday night, February 26. “We’re going to march until the sanitation workers say ‘Satisfied’!” he told the crowd, and the crowd shouted its affirmation. “But I have news for you: We’re going to march after that!” And again the crowd let it be known that he was speaking for them. He listed the following issues:

(1) Police treatment.

(2) Housing. (“The housing authority has announced plans for 12,000 units—8,000 for whites and 4,000 for Negroes. Well, they’ll never get off with it!”)

(3) Jobs. (“And the days of the one Negro are over. You know what I mean,—one here, one there, and one over yonder—and look what we’ve done for you!”)

(4) Wage scales.

(5) Justice in the schools.

The Police

“Almost invariably,” says the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, “the incident that ignites disorders arises from police action. Harlem, Watts, Newark, and Detroit—all the major outbursts of recent years—were precipitated by routine arrests of Negroes for minor offenses by white police. But the police are not merely the spark. In discharge of their obligation to maintain order and insure public safety in the disruptive conditions of ghetto life, they are inevitably involved in sharper and more frequent conflicts with ghetto residents than with the residents of other areas. Thus, to many Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white oppression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread perception among Negroes of the existence of police brutality and corruption, and of a ‘double standard’ of justice and protection—one for Negroes and one for whites.”

Obviously, the police spark was present in Memphis. The injudicious use of Mace seemed the worst excess of the first month. It was far short of the injudicious use of rifle fire by state police against rampaging students at Orangeburg, South Carolina, at about that same time, but something less than even-handed and cool-headed protection of all citizens, including those exercising constitutional rights of protest.

At the mass meeting on Tuesday night, February 27, after the Reverend Mr. Kyles’ impassioned speech before the City Council, the Reverend Malcolm Blackburn thanked Mr. Kyles for “calling attention to our blindness.”

“We have been blind to conditions of life in America,” he told the crowd, “for none of us noticed or questioned how we were surrounded by police in the Council chamber this afternoon, and counted like cattle as we entered our chamber. . . . ! If none of us can stand in the aisles or around the walls because of the fire laws, then next time we ought to see to it that the police do not, either, because we don’t need them!”

Then, pointing into the ranks of upturned faces, all black, he added, “We don’t need them watching us in this mass meeting, either!”

“And we don’t need two or three policemen on every other corner during our marches,” he went on, “or helicopters circling overhead, when we have shown that we can march peacefully and with dignity without some damned cop . . . !” His arm shot out for emphasis and the end of his sentence was lost in applause.

Bishop J. O. Patterson attempted to deal gently with the Negro policemen who apparently had been singled out, but in so doing he made the point again. “I feel sorry for our Negro policemen,” he said. “Most of them are nice fellows. But now they have been assigned a task that is contrary to the Bible. The Bible says that the law is for sinners, not the righteous.”

The police were always very much in evidence before and during the marches downtown or when workers and sympathizers attended meetings at city hall. They talked back and forth on walkie-talkies. They cruised in police cars with shotgun muzzles visible above the dashboards.

Little wonder the crowds were sparse for the marches. Rumor had it that the mayor was greatly pleased at the report that only 120 people showed up for one of the marches, and concluded that the strike would play out. But at the union hall, when no police were in evidence, the meeting places were packed and jammed.

One other police incident during the first month was noteworthy. On Thursday night, March 1, three policemen—two patrolmen and a lieutenant—arrested two Negroes outside the church where a mass meeting was being held. They charged them with jaywalking. One of those charged was Gerald Fanion, and the other was Edward Harris, photographer of the Tri-State Defender.

Police commissioner Frank Holloman personally appeared in city court the next day and asked that the charges be dropped. “We have been trying to keep the peace in our community,” he explained, “and if a mistake is made the best thing to do is to admit it and try to correct it.”

Judge Ray Churchill granted the motion and commented, “I think this is a wonderful step forward. In all my experience I believe this is the first time anything like this has happened.”

Police Chief J. C. MacDonald announced that the three officers had been suspended and said they had made an “error in judgment.”

“I never have, and I never will tolerate harassment of citizens by police,” he said.

The past record of the Memphis Police Department in this crucial area of relations with Negro citizens has not been a notably bad one, as these things go in the South and the nation. In a special report of the Southern Regional Council on Memphis as among southern cities which had made most progress by 1964, Benjamin Muse wrote: “In few cities have the police been so largely and favorably identified with the civil rights advance. Public order has been maintained in Memphis—tranquility in which negotiations could quietly proceed and insurance against disorder which enabled desegregation steps to be confidently taken. With small exceptions, police brutality, which is incompatible with any durable public order, has been absent, but the police ‘mean business,’ and the public knows it.” But, perhaps ominously for the crisis that was to come in 1968, the report pointed out that in the sit-ins of 1961, police were deployed in numbers that some considered excessive, arrests were made in great quantities with very many of the cases subsequently dismissed, and complaints of rough handling of demonstrators were numerous. All of this was under a former police commissioner, but it is indicative of the kind of police relations with Negro citizens that underlay the outburst of feeling against police in 1968. In that same 1964 report, incidentally, the Memphis press was praised for its role in fostering successful desegregation, but once more an ominous note was sounded: “. . . Those demonstrations [of 1960-61] were larger and more disruptive than many realized—owing to the policy of the Memphis press of minimizing the publicity.”

Incredibly, albeit incidentally, it was reported on February 27 that 3,000 Tennessee National Guardsmen were to bivouac in Memphis on March 9 for one day of riot control practice. Other drills were to be staged simultaneously in Nashville and Knoxville. The practice was planned to acquaint Guardsmen with the topography of the city and identify potential trouble spots. Details were not revealed. The Guardsmen would be outfitted, the report said, in full field gear, including weapons.

The drill took place on schedule, but without incident. The Guard avoided “areas of existing tension.”

Dignity As An Issue

Negro citizens’ complaints against police and the newspapers were only a part of the problem in Memphis. The attitude of public officials was the common demoninator of the preachers and the garbage collectors in their struggle. If one were required to say in a word what the strike and the marches and the mass meetings in Memphis were all about, that word would have to be dignity. One can read in the narrative of events of those days in Memphis a chronicle of indignities suffered by Negroes at the hands of the Public Works Department, of the City Council, and of the mayor. Early in the strike, the people began calling him “King Henry.”

Dr. Ralph Jackson was by his own admission a conservative minister. But he happened to be marching in support of the strikers when the police broke up that march and his ministerial standing meant nothing: he was gassed with all the others. Preaching at one of the mass meetings, he let it be known that the Mace had opened his eyes:

I have a confession to make. For thirty years I have been training to hold myself in check. I couldn’t understand what made some people lose control of themselves and fly off the handle. I never thought it would happen to me. But I lost thirty years of training in just five minutes last Friday!

A union official said, concerning negotiations for a settlement of the strike, “I don’t think Mayor Loeb has any objection to seeing the men get more money. But he wants them to continue in dependency. It’s a strange social system he is trying to preserve.”

Jesse Epps, another official of the union who is a young man, looked out over the rally of more than a thousand black men at the Rubber Workers’ Hall. Most of them were in their upper thirties or older. “We have to win this one,” he told them. “This is the last chance for many of us to be men.” The willingness of the men to hold out so long when they could have settled for better wages, grievance procedures, and everything else except the dignity of collective bargaining with the mayor, suggests that they agreed with Mr. Epps.

Jesse Epps is the AFSCME’s staff man in charge of the southern region. Highly capable, he is a union organizer who recites poetry (“Heaven is not reached at a single bound . . .”) and quotes the Bible accurately. In one of those quiet, two-men-in-a-room conversations that do not lend themselves to posturing, he said matter-of-factly and with a far-away look, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so hurt as I was when the City Council walked out last Friday afternoon without hearing the people.” This was Jesse Epps the man, the black man, talking—not Jesse Epps the union organizer. “The basic issue,” he continued, “is not pay, but recognition of the union. There has never been the unity in the Negro community of Memphis that there is now, and the reason is that recognition of the union involves recognition of the workers as men. The mayor wants to say, ‘Go on back to work and then we’ll do right about your complaints; you know our word is good as our bond.’ Just as if Memphis were a Delta plantation.”

A Coalition?

There is much talk these days about coalitions, and particularly a coalition of the labor movement and the civil rights movement. What happened at Memphis seems, at first glance, anyway, to be an example of the kind of coalition that is so much discussed. Union men readily acknowledge that, if it were not for the Negro ministers and the unity of the Negro community behind them, the sanitation workers “wouldn’t have the chance of a snowball in hell.” On the other hand, the union has provided the sort of know-how (and money) that seems to be necessary these days to come to grips with a not-so-simple issue around which to rally liberal and minority-group forces. AFSCME officials did this without preempting—and, in fact, encouraging—local leadership of the strike. “This is a new day for these ministers and these churches,” said one observer.

As noted, organized labor forces torpedoed anti-strike legislation in Nashville. That was fine, according to coalition strategists, for, while it was obviously a matter of self-interest, it happened to be supportive of an all-Negro local and the black community of Memphis backing that local.

In Memphis, labor forces were standoffish at first. The rank and file were all for better wages and working conditions for the sanitation men, but did not care for the civil rights overtones. As late as the fifteenth day of the strike, an AFSCME official commented that he had heard from only three white men representing local labor unions. There had been a few relatively small checks for the strike fund, he said, but helpful as that was, he needed some white faces at the union hall rallies to let the sanitation men know that they had labor’s support.

The evidence of support came on March 4, at the beginning of the fourth week of the strike. Under leadership of Tom Powell, head of Memphis’ AFL-CIO Central Labor Council, and Dan Powell (no kin), Southeastern Regional Director of the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education, five hundred white labor unionists joined Negro ministers and sanitation workers in the daily downtown march. It was a red-letter day for the strikers.

It remained to be seen whether the AFSCME or other unions will find in the Memphis experience anything like a standard procedure for organizing in the South. Perhaps conditions in Memphis were unique, so that there would be no way of approximating the developments there in other cities. Moreover, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees is not just a union of sanitation workers. It seeks to include all municipal employees, “from city engineers on down.” But as one union official put it, it is hard to get white Southerners to join a black man’s union.

Nevertheless, the coalition of civil rights forces with organized labor in Memphis, however brief or singular, was noteworthy. President Wurf had the candor to acknowledge at one mass meeting that some parts of the AFL-CIO have given Negroes less than a fair shake. “But we see this labor struggle as part of the basic struggle of the Negro community for decency and dignity,” he said.

A few minutes later he added, “Memphis has been, for me, one of the most moving experiences of my life.”

It was unusual, labor observers said, for a national president of a union to put so much of his personal prestige on the line in a situation as unsure of victory and unpredictable in tone as that in Memphis. Mr. Wurf’s union does have a large number of Negro members across the nation, and they might be expected to be pleased with his role in Memphis. But beyond that, he seemed genuinely involved in the demand for dignity that transcended the practical and pragmatic aspects of the struggle in Memphis.

Outcome in Doubt

The outcome of the strike remains doubtful. At the end of the fourth week, both city officials and strikers were standing firm, despite pressures building up on both sides.

On Thursday, February 29, Mayor Loeb, in a letter to the strikers, could still only “restate the city’s position.” The letter offered eight cents an hour pay increase and, in general, met demands of the workers on insurance, retirement plans, a grievance procedure, and hours and overtime. But the mayor still refused union recognition, refused a dues check-off and insisted that “as a precondition to any rearrangement of wages and working conditions, the strike must end.” He concluded:

I assure you of fair, dignified treatment. As I have said many times, there will be no reprisals. In fairness I should remind you that some of the regular jobs have been filled and others are being filled daily. Your jobs are of the utmost importance to you and your family and I am sincerely interested in your welfare.

Next day strikers assembled in Rubber Workers’ Hall rejected by a thundering, unanimous vote an offer from the City Council that proposed a raise of ten cents immediately and five more cents in July, but made no concession on union recognition or dues check-off. The morale of the men was good.

“But they’re getting hungry,” admitted one union officer. “On the other hand, it was warm and sunny today, and the garbage is getting noticeable. All in all, I’d say the city is in as bad shape as we are.”

By that time, as obligations mounted, the strike was costing the union $2,000 a day, up from about $400 a day at the beginning, to provide the absolute necessities of the men and their families. Collections at the mass meetings were running $600 to $800, but $2,000 per day was hard to come by.

Just the logistics of aiding the strikers was a problem. Some of the men were in debt to more than one loan company; some owed several months’ back rent; some reported demands for immediate payment or payment in advance of rent. An older worker summed it up: “The man came for the payment on my burial insurance. I told him that right now I’m just trying to keep alive. Reckon I can let somebody else worry about it when I die.”

Tragedy Waiting in the Wings

In the midst of all the drama in Memphis, the excursions and alarms, one sensed tragedy waiting in the wings.

For one thing, there was a strong undertone of alienation, even among the ministers, whose basic attitude toward the society is positive. “This country has given us a bad check” one of the preachers said. “It bounced. They had the money. They just didn’t put it in the bank.”

Dr. Jackson, who seems to have become the semi-official money-raiser for the strikers, told the audience one night, “I’m going to New York on Monday to talk to some of these white folks who keep talking about their consciences.” He mentioned the National Council of Churches. “I don’t guarantee we will get the money. But if we don’t, this whole nation is going to know that they’ve just been lying about their consciences!”

That was not the only hint of deepening disillusionment. Another minister told of receiving a letter from the Memphis Ministerial Alliance asking him to contribute toward a $1,700 ad titled, “An Appeal to Conscience.”

“Well, where are they now?” he shouted. “They would do better to give the $1,700 to the strikers’ fund, make their appeal to conscience from the pulpits of their own churches, and come to the meeting to show their support.”

He was followed by the Reverend John W. Aldridge, the assistant minister of Idlewild Presbyterian Church, who also happens to be chairman of Memphis Presbytery’s committee on social concerns. He was the only white preacher present that evening, except the Reverend Malcolm Blackburn, only white minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Aldridge read a resolution of support which had been adopted by the Presbytery’s committee.

The Catholic Council of Human Relations, like the Memphis Council on Human Relations, passed a resolution calling upon the mayor to meet all stated demands of the sanitation workers. The Catholic Council on Human Relations is affiliated with the National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice, a voluntary association of laymen and clergymen concerned about intergroup relations.

Otherwise the white churches and churchmen of Memphis were not notably involved. Jerry Wurf made a poignant statement in his talk at one of the church meetings. “I’m a Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” he said. “I’ve stood in a lot of Protestant pulpits in times of stress and trouble. It just occcurs to me that these have always been the pulpits of Negro churches. You have always made me feel welcome and at home.”

“The ministers are in this thing until it is proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that our way won’t work,” said the Reverend Malcolm Blackburn on another occasion. “Then, as one minister said yesterday, we shall just have to go fishing.”

Another preacher said that the ministers were committed to nonviolence as a way of life. “But if we ministers, leading the people our way, cannot get results, we have no alternative but to withdraw and. . . .” The end of his sentence was lost in an approving roar, in the midst of which he turned and pointed into the balcony where three or four young black men, self-proclaimed radicals, stood watching. They broke into broad grins.

Bishop J. O. Patterson said he believed completely in nonviolence. But he added, “Someone asked me, ‘What would you do if somebody was standing on your foot?’ I said, ‘Well . . . I got to have my foot!’”

The Reverend W. Herbert Brewster preached on Wednesday night. An orator of the old school, he admonished the crowd: “Don’t reduce yourself so low that you will hate any man. I feel sorry for any man who is a little man in big times, because a little man in big times is a loser.”

When he had finished his sermon, Dr. Jackson came to the pulpit to direct the taking of a collection for the strike fund. “Dr. Brewster better go on back and pray some more,” he said, “because he hasn’t got me liking Loeb yet. . . .” The crowd loved it.

“When he was up here talking about loving Loeb,” he continued, “Bishop Patterson passed me a note that said, ‘He didn’t get a whiff of that gas, did he?’” The crowd loved that, too.

“You better be careful, Doctor,” he concluded. “You might be up here calling for water while the rest of us are calling for fire!”

With that he pulled an object out of his pocket and held it up for the crowd to see. It was a gold-plated cigar lighter.

That Monday night meeting was drawing to a close. It had been in progress for three hours, which is not unusual for civil rights mass meetings. Before the Reverend Mr. Blackburn pronounced the benediction, he introduced a tall young black man wearing a light, olive-colored jacket with the word “INVADERS” across the back.

“I’m a radical,” the young man began. “I’ll tell you just like that. I’m a radical . . .

“Before Henry Loeb will listen, the garbage has to be in the street . . . not in your back yard. As long as those trucks are allowed to roll, they can keep it picked up wherever they want it picked up . . .

“Preaching and money raising are fine. Somebody has to do it. But there are some men out there, we’ve got to do some fighting. Not marching—fighting!

“And when you talk about fighting a city with as many cops as this city’s got, you better have some guns! You’re gonna need ’em before it’s over!”

When he sat down the minister who had been presiding throughout the evening returned to the pulpit and said he apologized for not recognizing the young radical. It is a free country, he said, and while he did not agree with the brother, he certainly granted him his right to say what he thought. Then he reminded the crowd, “We have chosen our weapons. These are the weapons of nonviolence.”

The incident was discussed later by a small group at the front of the church. Someone commented that the sentiments expressed by the young man were a new wrinkle in mass meetings. “Yes,” replied Blackburn, “but I felt we had to let it wrinkle to keep it from tearing. We may be in trouble this way, but if we did not recognize this mood as part of the picture, we most certainly would be in trouble.”

“Yea,” someone else added. “One of the young folks said to me, ‘You old folks are barking up the wrong tree. But we’ll wait and let you bark a while longer.’”

And so at this writing, with the strike a month old, the tension mounting (in the fourth week, there were incidents of brick throwing by Negroes, of garbage being set afire, of a sit-in at City Council with 121 Negroes arrested and released on their recognizance, of a policeman brandishing an over-sized club gleefully and just as gleefully being laughed at scornfully by Negroes), the outcome was highly uncertain in Memphis—both as to the immediate issues of the strike, the deeper one of dignity, and the awesome one hanging over America in 1968 involving the danger of massive violence and police-state repression.

Out of the impasse, these points, with meaning not merely in Memphis but for all the nation, seemed clear:

1. Spiritual as well as physical needs are imbedded in Negro protest and agitation and, indeed, anger. The demand for dignity as well as better pay was the most profound and moving quality of the Memphis garbage strike. In all of its floundering with the problems of race and poverty, America has seemed unable to grasp that there are hurts in deprivation to the psyche as well as the stomach. Organized labor, in many of its modern manifestations, has seemed to miss this point, also, concerning itself with economic security rather than social needs of people. The excellent performance of labor in Memphis, like the old Operation Dixie, and the current efforts to organize textile plants in the Carolinas and farm workers in Texas, served to point up how rare such attention to the underdog by labor has become.

2. Black power, for all its ambiguity and sometimes irrationality, is a psychological force at work in such a situation as that in Memphis, not by any means all negatively. Indeed, the most positive, constructive meanings of the phrase were implicit in Negroes’ demand for dignity. That this demand was made in a context of nonviolence and in the traditional framework of a labor strike should serve to give new insight into the semantics and psychology of black power as an influence on Negro thinking and emotion.

3. The impetus to violence by Negroes is also a factor to be reckoned with in such a situation as that in Memphis. In the simplest terms of human anger, the capacity and ability of Negroes in such a situation to espouse and practice nonviolence was extraordinary. For here as in nearly all other southern locales, there had been the beautiful spirit of the Negro movement of the early 1960’s met with hostility and force and arrests when all that had been demanded was the most basic rights of American citizenship. And here as in nearly all other southern locales, eight years after the sit-ins and four years after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the demands were the same ones of basic rights—for an end to discrimination in education, jobs, housing.

Those who have pronounced the civil rights movement dead and buried may want to take a second look at such phenomena as Memphis. “Well, well,” said an old man there, shouldering a protest sign and moving out of the church for a demonstration, “marchin’ again.” The tone and much of the spirit of the old movement was newly alive in Memphis, and its impetus still lives in Negro communities and hearts across the South’s cities, towns, and farmlands. One of the very most hopeful things about such new manifestations of the movement as Memphis has been the absence of exploitation from afar for less than local interests of the braveness and beauty and belief of the local people who are the strength of the movement. It was to be hoped that such exploitation would not be attempted in Memphis.

Maintaining nonviolence among masses of untrained and volatile demonstrators was never easy. The implicit threat of the nonviolent leaders in Memphis to “go fishing” and leave things in the hands of “radicals” was a mark of the loss of faith, the frustration and the despair that has come to so many Americans of good will and pragmatic common sense out of the failures on every level of government and through all elements of American society to answer the most elemental needs of race and poverty.

Two Negro women waiting for a bus during one march were asked by an observer if they were supporting the boycott. “We sure are,” one of them declared. “I ain’t buying nothing!” She glanced at the man’s white face, looked down at his notebook, then straight into his eyes. “I don’t know who you are,” she said firmly, “but we’re tired.”

4. Failure was on prominent display in Memphis. The city government, the press, the business community, the white church, all the institutions, seemed for the first month simply incapable of coping with what was at once a fairly clear-cut demand, and also a highly dangerous situation. The role of the police in such crises is of particular concern. The danger of Negro violence exploding out of all the failure of the government and society was matched by the danger manifest across the nation of overreaction and repression by police. Instead of agencies for maintaining peace and order, police departments in racial encounters have become themselves direct and dangerous influences toward disorder. In Memphis (and this is not an uncommon situation in the nation), there seemed to be a failure of men on the force to carry out the police commissioner’s generally enlightened racial policies and methods aimed at avoiding violence. If the pay of garbage collectors in Memphis was a surface issue, reflective of unmet problems confronting cities the nation over, a less obvious but far more fundamental problem was that of the pay of policemen—the need that such pay and the standards and qualifications for police services be greatly increased. But it was a paralysis of the normal function of the city and society to resolve the strike and its issues and its dangerous potential, rather than a will to confront basic problems that characterized the first month of the strike in Memphis. An observer felt that those in positions of power never seemed to grasp the reality of the situation, its danger, or its promise. And this same sort of paralysis seemed to afflict the other agencies of government, state and federal, which might be expected to act toward mediation and reconciliation when a city did not.

Special Report, Southern Regional Council, Atlanta, Ga., 1968, Box 31 Administrative Files, Whitney Young Papers, Columbia University.

UNITED AUTO WORKERS

33. ADDRESS OF WALTER P. REUTHER BEFORE THE ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, DETROIT, MICHIGAN JUNE 26, 1957

Mr. Chairman, friends, it’s difficult for me to tell you how happy and proud I am to be here, because when I come to an NAACP meeting, I have a feeling that I belong here. I’m home here. And I can never escape the same reaction every time I hear that wonderful song, “Lift Up Our Voices and Sing.” It always gives me a sense of renewed faith and dedication, because I feel that a people who can sing that song cannot lose.

I’m proud to belong to the NAACP, because it is made up of people who are dedicated in a great crusade to make America true to itself. This is what this is about. Make America live up to its highest hopes and aspirations and translate those hopes and aspirations into practical, tangible reality in the lives of all people, whether they are white or black, whether they live in the North or in the South. I say that each of us is blessed that we can be engaged in this crusade, in this struggle for justice for human dignity—in this struggle to wipe out in every phase of our national life, every ugly and immoral kind of discrimination.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of attending an ADA meeting in Washington and Roy Wilkins was the principal speaker. And I want to say that Roy did himself proud that night. He was reporting on some of the struggles in the South. He had just returned from a speaking tour in a number of the Southern states, and he said there are three organizations that are being held responsible for the drive for civil rights and human dignity in the South. He said there is the NAACP. There is the ADA, and there is the CIO. Mrs. Roosevelt was my dinner partner and I said to her, “No wonder I’m having trouble. I’m an officer of all three of those organizations.”

Now why did they come together? Well, because they shared the same values, the same respect for human dignity. They shared the same hopes and the same aspirations. And they dreamed the same dreams about the bright new tomorrow that we’re working and fighting to build. A tomorrow where discrimination will be no more. Where Jim Crow will be buried for keeps in every phase of our national life. A bright tomorrow where every child, regardless of race, creed, or color, all created in the image of God, will have equal educational opportunities so that every child can grow, intellectually, spiritually, and culturally, limited not by a segregated schoolroom, but limited only by the capacity that God gave each child to grow.

But the NAACP and the American labor movement do more than just dream about that better tomorrow. And that’s why you can preach about the brotherhood of man from morn til night, and the Eastlands and the Talmadges and the bigots will never raise their voices in protest. But when you begin to work to translate the brotherhood of man into practical fulfillment, that’s when they begin to fight back. They are fighting us because we are working, trying to give practical substance and meaning and purpose to the noble concept of the brotherhood of man.

We had a distinguished churchman, Bishop Oxman, who addressed the UAW convention some months ago. He said, you know there is a lot of noble talk about the brotherhood of man, but there are some people who keep the hood and drop the brother. And those are the people who are fighting us. And because they are fighting us, we meet at a time of great crisis. The challenge is compelling, but when the burden is heavy, always remember that the reward is so great and wonderful in terms of basic human values that it’s more than worth the struggle and the sacrifice that go into winning the reward. Since you meet in the city in which the headquarters of the UAW is located, I am sure you will permit me to bring to you the fraternal greetings and the best wishes from the one and a half million members of the UAW, and I would like to say for them that we are with you all the way until victory is ours in this fight for civil rights.

You have come back. You were here in 1943. Detroit was the great arsenal of democracy. We were turning out more weapons of war with which to fight Hitlerism, totalitarianism, than was any other city in the world. But unfortunately, this city went wrong and we had tragic, ugly race riots back in that period. But one of the things that we have always been proud of about the UAW is that when the people of Detroit were rioting and destroying and killing each other on the streets, white and Negro workers worked side by side in brotherhood in the plants under our contracts. Because they had learned to know the meaning of human solidarity, of brotherhood, because they had learned through the hard experience of struggle that when the employer can divide you and pit white against black, American-born against foreign-born, he can divide and rule and exploit everyone. And we learned a lesson that only in the solidarity of human brotherhood, only as you stand together with your fellow man can you solve your basic problems.

That’s the lesson the whole of America needs to learn. I’ve often thought—why is it that you can get a great nation like America marching, fighting, sacrificing, and dying in the struggle to destroy the master race theory in Berlin, and people haven’t got an ounce of courage to fight against the master race theory in America? We need the same sense of dedication, the same courage and the same determination to fight the immorality of segregation and racial bigotry in America as we did in the battlefields against Hitlerism.

We’ve made progress in Detroit since you were here in 1943. We haven’t made enough progress, but we have made great progress, and I think that we can take great satisfaction and encouragement from the progress that we have made. The delegates to this convention in 1943 were treated as second-class citizens, and you were put in second-class hotels. This time you are in the best hotels where you ought to be.

We made progress on the FEPC front. The NAACP, the trade union forces, the church groups, civic groups worked together, and despite the overwhelming opposition of the Republicans in our State Legislature, we finally got an FEPC law on the books in the State of Michigan. Negro workers have made progress, but we still have not broken down the barriers to equal job opportunities in every phase of our economic life. They are in the factories, but they are not in the offices, where they have a right also to equal job opportunities.

And just as the Negro workers have proven themselves in the factories and on the assembly lines, Negroes have proven themselves in the field of public service. Since 1943, we have elected four Negroes to important political positions in the City of Detroit. They were elected by tremendous majorities, have demonstrated the good judgment of the people who put them there, by dedication and by a high sense of public trust and service. We’re proud of the fact that the Honorable Judge Wade McCree sits in the highest court in the City of Detroit. And we are proud that another Negro, the Honorable Judge Davenport sits in another court of Detroit. And we are equally proud that in the City of Washington from the Thirteenth Congressional District, a Negro, the Honorable Charles Diggs, is in that position. And we are proud that a distinguished Negro doctor, Dr. Remus Robinson, sits on the Detroit Board of Education. Because of the outstanding public service and the sense of dedication that these four outstanding Negro citizens have demonstrated in the public positions to which they have been elected, I would like to predict that in the fall election of 1957 in Detroit, we will elect a prominent Negro to the Common Council where we need one.¹¹⁹

I think we all realize that the world is troubled—that we live with crisis in America and the people of every nation are living with crisis in the world. I have been saying for a long time that the crisis in the world is not economic or political or military. Essentially, the crisis in the world is a moral crisis. It’s a reflection of man’s growing immorality to himself. Of man’s growing inhumanity to man. The H-bomb is the highest and most terrible destructive expression of that growing inhumanity.

And in a sense our crisis in America, the crisis in education, the crisis in civil rights is not political, it is moral. We’ve got all that it takes to solve these problems. But we haven’t demonstrated the moral courage to step up to solving these problems, and this is our basic problem. America is in crisis, not because it lacks economic resources, not because it lacks the political know-how, not because we don’t know how to do the job of squaring democracy’s practices with its noble promises. We just haven’t demonstrated the moral courage. And until we do, we will not meet this basic crisis in civil rights and in education.

And I believe that the civil rights issue—and I don’t say this because this is an NAACP convention, I have been saying this wherever I go, because I believe it—I believe that the question of civil rights must be made the top priority item on American democracy’s unfinished business in the twentieth century. Civil rights is not a political issue, because when a matter or issue is essentially a moral matter, it must transcend partisan politics. This is exactly the approach that we have been making together. We have been trying not to play politics with civil rights, but to put the civil rights question in its proper focus and mobilize people from all political parties to try to adopt legislation and to take necessary steps to implement an effective civil rights program.

We have been saying that there are three basic reasons why we support civil rights. First, we support it as a matter of simple justice. As a matter of human decency. As a matter of dignity and as a matter of basic morality. Secondly, we fight for civil rights to make them universal, because as Joe Rauh said in his speech, civil rights and human freedom are indivisible. You cannot have those things unto yourself. You can be free only as your neighbor is free. You can be free only as you share freedom with the people you live with. Hitler taught us that when he jeopardized the freedom of the smallest country in the world, he jeopardized our freedom. And when Mr. Eastland and the Dixiecrats and the bigots in the South jeopardize the Constitution and deny Negroes their freedom, they are putting my freedom in jeopardy, even though I live in the City of Detroit.

Those people who can’t understand the first two basic reasons that ought to put America on the highroad in the struggle for civil rights at least to understand the third reason: that civil rights is no longer a domestic question confined to the geography of the United States. The question of civil rights in the United States is an international issue. As a matter of fact, there are more people thinking about it abroad than there seem to be in America thinking about this problem. Because more than one-half of the people in the world are dark of skin, and they look at America, and they brush aside our noble slogans about the virtues of American democracy. They brush aside our economic indexes which say that we are the richest country in the world. And they say, yes, but how do you square your noble professions with your ugly practices in the civil rights field?

Mr. Eastland sits there in his Committee, and you would think that he is really trying to fight the Communists. He doesn’t know anything about what makes a Communist. What he does not understand are the great social, dynamic forces sweeping the world. This struggle between freedom and tyranny is not an old-fashioned struggle for geography. This is a struggle for the hearts and minds of people. And you can’t win it with an H-bomb, even though you need one to defend yourself. You can’t win the struggle of ideas and ideals with guns, although we as a part of the free world must of necessity be strong on the military front, in order to meet the challenge of aggression no matter where it may raise its ugly head. But what we need to understand in the world is that military power is the negative aspect of a dynamic foreign policy, and that if you want to win the struggle of ideas and ideals for the hearts and minds of men, you have got to wage the struggle on the positive basis, and civil rights is the key issue in the world. Mr. Eastland and his associates and the association of bigots don’t understand this. We need somehow to get through to the dark corners of their small mentalities on these kinds of things.

My feelings on this are not based upon reading a book. I have been in Asia, India, and North Africa. I have talked to people—workers in the big cities, intellectuals, businessmen, government officials. I have gone into the mountain villages. I am here to tell you that they know what’s going on in America. I went up into the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains in Northern India, in a little village of three hundred people, and we had a meeting, and I talked about America—what we were doing trying to bring to fulfillment the great promise of America. They didn’t want to know about how many Chevrolets General Motors made last year, or whether the Chrysler fins had a bigger sweep than the Cadillac fins. They asked me about Montgomery, Alabama. Just sit down on a doorstep with a peasant in a village of Northern India and take on the task of trying to explain to him why America, conceived in freedom and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, a nation that can split the atom, that can make a pursuit ship go three times as fast as sound and yet, in this twentieth century, we can’t live together in brotherhood and we continue to discriminate against Negroes. It will tax your ingenuity, and you will give them no answers. You can only give them excuses. And excuses are not good enough, if we are going to win the struggle of freedom in the world.

I came back more convinced than ever, after talking to people in North Africa and India and Asia, that America’s immorality in the field of civil rights could be the Achilles’ heel of American democracy in the struggle against Communist tyranny. Because when you have to put footnotes to try to explain in a feeble way why American democracy fails to meet the challenge on the civil rights front, when you have to make excuses, you are in serious trouble, and we are in serious trouble, because the people of the world are not going to judge America by the number of tons of steel that the U.S. Steel Corporation can roll in a year, by the number of shiny new automobiles with more chrome that we turn out every year. They are not going to judge us by these things. They are going to judge us by what we do about basic human problems. Not how modern is our plumbing, but how modern is our civil rights program as it affects people. These are the things they will judge us by, and if this Congress would step up to its responsibilities and pass a civil rights bill in it, with effective enforcement machinery, that civil rights bill would give America a moral force in the world more powerful than all the H-bombs that we will ever make in the fight against Communism.

And yet we have enemies. I get a lot of literature, you know. I don’t read it all, but I read a couple that came over my desk the other day. Here’s one: “Behind the Plot to Sovietize the South.” And on the back it tells you in summary what this pamphlet is about, and I’ll quote it to you: “This booklet tells about the activities of Walter Reuther and his collaborating white and Negro Communist, Socialist and Marxist kind of labor agitators who are mobilizing a massive offensive to impose an insidious civil rights program on the South.” I want to say to the people who put out this kind of literary trash that the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and all of the good people who are joined together in the fight for civil rights, we do more to fight the Communists in one week, than all these people would do in their whole lives put together.

We need to understand that this fight between freedom and tyranny is for keeps. It’s the only world series in which there is only one game. No play-offs, no return matches, no next year’s season. You either win the first game, or you lose for keeps. That’s what we are in. Now you would think that in that kind of a game you would put your best team in, and Mr. Eastland and Mr. Talmadge and those fellows shouldn’t even be on the scrub team. We’ve got to put our best team in, because we’ve got to demonstrate not only that we have great economic muscle, but we have the sense of moral responsibility to find a practical way to equate economic muscle with social and political morality in terms of the lives of everyone, because, you know if we were just a little country, no bigger than Luxembourg, it really wouldn’t be tragic if we were doing so badly. But in truth, America is the last hope of freedom. If we can’t make freedom and democracy work in America, then it can’t be made to work any place in the world. And I say we are going to make it work in America, because it must be made to work.

Now the task ahead is a difficult one. We will need to mobilize all of our forces. We will need to pull together men and women of good will and good faith—people in the NAACP, our good friends in the churches, the labor movement, the liberal people who are willing to stand on the side of morality in this struggle. We need to broaden our efforts to get more allies in the leadership conference that has been working so effectively in the past. And we need to have the courage to tell both political parties that they both should be ashamed of the shoddy record that they have registered on the field of civil rights.

The Supreme Court is living in the twentieth century and the Congress is still somewhere back in the dark nineteenth century. It’s about time they catch up. You know, these fellows are the same fellows who passed the Taft-Hartley Act. The same people who fight against civil rights are the same people who fight against social progress. Well, I want to say to these people in Congress that they have been on the longest sit-down strike in the history of America—eighty long years. And we think it’s about time that they terminate that sit-down strike on civil rights and begin to turn out some legislation. Now the bill has passed the House, but that’s nothing new. That’s happened many times, but now it’s over in the Senate, the graveyard of civil rights legislation. I think that we’ve got a job to do. It can be done. We must mobilize the American people, and we must translate their moral will into practical pressure and say to that Senate, “Stay in there. Outlast the filibuster, if it takes all summer and all fall, until the next Congress meets in January.” And if these evil men who use the right of unlimited debate to block the will of the majority, if they know that the majority is going to stay put through the hot summer into fall, and into the winter months, maybe they won’t try so hard, because they know it will not succeed. And the only people in America who can see to it that the filibuster does not succeed are the American people, and our job is to mobilize the American people, so that their will and their moral pressure will exert itself upon the Congress.

We also must make it clear there can be no compromise on the jury trial provision. We don’t want a civil rights bill in name without any substance. We don’t want a civil rights bill that looks good on paper, that has no enforcement machinery, and these people who talk aobut the jury trial, they are using that only to try to destroy a civil rights bill that can be enforced through the federal government and the federal courts.

Then we have the long-range fight on Rule 22. Because even though the present limited civil rights bill is adopted, this is only the beginning, because there are many other areas in which the ugly forms of discrimination are working every day in the lives of millions of Americans and Rule 22 is the key that will open the door in the Senate so that majority rule can prevail and the filibuster can be ended. We have been saying a long time that the right of debate does not mean the right to prevent the majority from acting.¹²⁰ Debate is not an end. It is the means to an end, and the end must be legislative action.

We are very happy that the UAW was able to join forces with the NAACP in originating the original approach to changing Rule 22. We helped finance some of the constitutional lawyers who went back to the Hamilton papers and the early constitutional papers and developed the whole case to prove that the Senate was not a continuing body. Therefore, every new Senate on the day of its organization can adopt its own rules and, any new Senate can abolish Rule 22 and substitute in its place a rule providing for majority rule. And because we participated in that historic effort, with the NAACP, we have received many brickbats from the people in the Senate who believe that filibuster is their best line of defense.

Now we made progress on Rule 22. In 1953, we only got twenty-one votes. We had fifteen liberal Democrats with us. We had five liberal Republicans, and we had Wayne Morse, the Independent. In 1957, we got forty-one votes, seven votes short of what we needed. I say we need to intensify our efforts between now and the January date in which the new Congress in 1959 is organized to get those other seven votes, so that we can abolish the filibuster in the United States Senate for all time.¹²¹

We are continuing to work on this matter. As a matter of fact, hearings are being held now. Friday morning, June 28, 1957, I’m going to testify on Rule 22 before a Subcommittee of the United States Senate dealing with rules of procedure. But Rule 22, let us always remember, has been the shovel with which the Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans have always dug the grave for our civil rights legislation. And until we abolish Rule 22, we will never be able to translate our civil rights program into practical legislation and implementation.

We have the question of FEPC. Yes, thirty-eight major cities have adopted the local FEPC ordinances. Fifteen states have state FEPC laws. We have made progress, but no one should kid us into believing the answer to FEPC can be found either locally or at the state level. Tell me how you’ll get relief in Mississippi, at the state level, where you need it most. The only way that we can get a comprehensive FEPC law on the books is to do it in Washington, D.C., and to bind the forty-eight states in the process.

Well, there are some mighty fine people in America who tell you, yes they are against discrimination in every phrase. They are opposed to it in terms of job opportunities. They are opposed to it in terms of education. They are opposed to it in terms of transportation. But, they say, legislation is not the way to do it. Education. You’ve got to educate people. You’ve got to get hatred out of men’s hearts. Well, we agree. Education is important. But you can’t educate this problem out of existence by education alone. You’ve got to work both on the educational front and the legislative front. And you’ve got to parallel those two activities right down the line.

I have told a story on other occasions which I think bears repetition beacuse it’s the simplest way to illustrate what I think to be a very fundamental point. These people who talk about education as the answer to FEPC, and these other problems, I ask them to look to see what happens in America in about ten days from now. We’re going to have a Fourth of July weekend. There are going to be millions and millions of Americans in their automobiles driving all over America. And on the Friday before the weekend, the National Safety Council will launch its comprehensive, intensive educational program. They’ll be on the radio networks, the TV networks, and the newspapers. Everybody is going to be told and warned to drive carefully, don’t exceed the speed limit. Don’t go through a red light. Observe all the traffic regulations. We’re going to just saturate America with education on traffic safety, but no one would propose that that’s where we end. In addition to this educational program, we have thousands of fellows on motorcycles in blue uniforms. And when you go through a red light or exceed the speed limit or violate some other traffic law, the motorcycle officer pulls you over to the curb. He gets a book out, and he gives you a ticket. It costs you ten bucks, and that speeds up the educational process like nobody’s business.

So we say let’s educate and educate and educate. But let’s expedite the educational process by some effective legislation. And if an employer will not give a qualified Negro, or a qualified Jew a job, because of prejudice, let’s take that employer into court the way you go into court when a cop catches you going through a red light. And you will see how fast the educational process picks up. Now these good people who are all for education and opposed to legislation don’t think it’s wrong to have this fellow on the motorcycle. They think that’s perfectly proper, perfectly fine, and yet, when you’re dealing in a field of basic human values of human rights of basic morality, they just want the educational process to take its own course. We’ve got to keep pressing and pressing and pressing until we get a federal FEPC law.

We’re proud in the Auto Workers Union of the progress we’ve made. Other unions have made great progress in breaking down discrimination in the factories. But we haven’t got one single major contract, although we’ve got one and a half million workers under contract, and although we try and try and try at the bargaining table in which the employer has agreed to a clause prohibiting discrimination because of race or creed or color at the hiring gate. They say to us, “Oh, you don’t represent the workers until we employ them. We aren’t going to let you say anything about whom we hire. After we hire them, then you can talk about their work, their conditions of employment, their wages.” Well, we believe that the question of the policy at the hiring gate is important, and if we can’t do it at the bargaining table, then we have to do it in the halls of Congress.

Now there are many other things we need to be thinking about. I want to say to this convention of the NAACP, the American labor movement is not a fair-weather friend of yours in the fight for civil rights. I want to say for the AFL-CIO, its leadership, George Meany, and the people involved in directing that organization: “We are with you all the way, and we are going to stay with you all the way until we get on the statute books of America effective civil rights legislation in all of these fields, not only in FEPC, but in every other aspect of our national life.”

We want an America in which every citizen is equal when he walks into the polling place to cast his ballot. We want an America in which every child has educational opportunity, an America in which every citizen has equal job opportunity, equal rights to the use of all public facilities, the right to live in a decent neighborhood, in a decent house.

It’s about time we look at this problem of clearing the slums in our major cities. We’re not clearing the slums. We’re just modernizing them. We’re just creating new ghettoes. I say it’s about time we had some courage to build decent communities in which all Americans can live on an integrated basis as decent citizens living together in a wholesome community.

Now these are not matters of special privileges. These are basic rights to which every American is entitled. And no American should be satisfied with less.

The task is difficult. The struggle will be hard, but let us always remember that human progress has never been served to mankind on a silver platter. The history of the world shows chapter after chapter that men of faith and courage have had to fight to bring to fulfillment their dreams and their hopes and their aspirations. What we need to do is to keep the faith. Keep the faith in ourselves. And when the going is rough, as it will be, let us remember that the test of one’s convictions is now how did you behave, how did you stand up when it was convenient and comfortable. The test of one’s convictions is: do you stand up for the things that you believe when it takes courage? Do you stand up in the face of adversity, in the face of great controversy? This is the kind of fight we are engaged in. That’s why when the going is rough, always remember that there are millions of us, and that together we can move mountains, and that together we can solve this problem and make America in the image of what it really stands for.

So I say to you, we pledge our hands and our hearts, we pledge our all to you in this struggle, because we believe that this is the most important struggle that America must win, if it is going to be true to itself and provide leadership to the free world. And if we mobilize our multitudes, if we mobilize all the people of good will and good faith in America, I say that we can do the job, and together we can build that brave new tomorrow that we dream about and fashion it in the image of peace, freedom and justice, and human brotherhood.

Henry M. Christman, ed., Walter P. Reuther: Selected Papers (New York, 1962), pp. 195–208.

34. THERE’S NO HALF-WAY HOUSE ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM

In the two years since our last convention, this nation has made more progress in achieving civil rights for all citizens than was made in all the years since the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War.

Yet this progress, historic when measured against the habits and hostilities of the past, falls short when measured—as we must measure it—against the prejudice and discrimination that remain and the goals of equal rights and equal opportunity that must yet be attained.

The UAW, true to itself as a union whose strength is derived from the solidarity of all workers and to its mission to make progress with the whole community, played a prominent role in the historic 1963 Washington rally and in efforts to obtain the strongest possible civil rights law from Congress.

These efforts were climaxed with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a sweeping law attacking segregation and discrimination on a broad front, including public accommodations, jobs, education and the right to vote.

However, the voting rights section of the law left intact much of the southern pattern of systematic denial of voting rights to Negroes; it equivocated in the matter of literacy tests and made no provision for Federal voting registrars in states and localities where Negroes were deliberately kept from registering.

The Negroes of the deep south were terrorized by southern officials and the Klan whenever they attempted to exercise their rights. They mobilized early in January, 1965 under the direction of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference to assert their constitutional right to register and vote. As this campaign of nonviolent demonstration progressed, the violence against Negroes intensified, reaching a climax of calculated terror in March.

I had the honor that month of leading a UAW delegation to Selma in support of equal rights and in protest against the brutality of southern racism. UAW members from every region participated in that freedom march.

The Montgomery march was shadowed by the tragic murder of a northern civil rights worker, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, wife of a trade union official, who was shot by Klansmen on the highway. The failure of all-white southern juries to return murder convictions in the Liuzzo case and in the trial resulting from the earlier slaying of the Rev. James Reeb brought to national attention another aspect of southern injustice which requires further Federal legislation.

In June, 1965, as work went forward in and out of the Congress to shape a strong voting rights law, President Johnson made an historic address at Howard University, dealing with civil rights legislation in the broader context of the entire struggle for equality of opportunity in a society that professes to be free and democratic.

He opened up for national discussion and public action an aspect of the civil rights revolution which the UAW had long been concerned—its economic aspect. For us in the UAW, the chief interest of the President’s address lay in his emphasis on what he called “the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights”—that of reinforcing legislative gains by an across-the-board attack on the unemployment, poverty and deprivation which hit the Negro hardest but affect millions of whites as well.

The rioting in the Watts section of Los Angeles that occurred in August, 1965 soon after enactment of the Voting Rights Act, was a clear signal to the nation of the urgency of our getting on with economic solutions.

The bitterness of frustrated hopes gave rise to the destructive and senseless violence of Watts. We cannot approve or condone violence, for the futility of violence born out of bitterness will solve no problems. But it is not enough for the advantaged to condemn the violence on the part of the disadvantaged. The advantaged must work harder to help the disadvantaged to achieve equal rights and equal opportunities in every phase of our national life.

The UAW was actively involved in efforts to fight unemployment and poverty in the Watts area before the rioting, through the Watts Community Labor Action Committee. We were working with other AFL-CIO unions to find jobs for Watts’ residents, to help set up a Head Start program and a problem clinic, and to campaign for greater health facilities.

Throughout the UAW, and in all the communities where our members are concentrated, we are making an expanding effort on behalf of equal rights and equal opportunity. New state, area and local fair practice councils have been established in several regions.

We are participating in a registration drive in southern communities where Negroes under the 1965 law are protected in the exercise of rights long denied them.

In Boston, we joined in an attempt to end a regime of entrenched bigotry on the board of education. In Pontiac, Mich., we have been working with the county AFL-CIO council to overcome municipal opposition to sorely needed additional public rental housing.

In Detroit, the Citizens Committee for Equal Opportunity—which we were instrumental in founding in 1963 with the cooperation of religious, business, civil rights and other civic leadership in the metropolitan areas—has worked effectively in creating understanding and proposing reasonable action in all the sensitive areas of race relations.

Nationally and in many cities, we are active in cooperation with human relations councils and through local union educational programs in fostering equal opportunity in housing.

This is not to say that civil rights legislation will not continue to be of basic importance. Laws already on the books must be strengthened as experience dictates.

Senators Douglas of Illinois and Case of New Jersey have already introduced a bill proposed by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, in which the UAW participates, which would have the effect of integrating southern juries and would provide Federal protection for civil rights workers and Negroes exercising their constitutional rights.

The point is that we must press forward on all fronts toward full citizenship and equal opportunity for all our people. Centuries-old prejudice dies hard, but we have to understand that there can be no half-way house on the road to freedom.

UAW Solidarity (May, 1966).

35. WATTS: WHERE THEY MANUFACTURE HOPE

By Alvin Adams

At the age of 14, he had saved enough money to buy a train ticket that would take him as far as Meridian, Miss, as he could get.

In Los Angeles, he washed cars, steam-cleaned engines and managed to finish high school. He learned something about the police by being one: an Army MP.

For something like 25 years, he was one of the unspectacular citizens of Watts. In 1949, employment at Ford’s Los Angeles plant and his resultant membership in the UAW brought out leadership talents he admits he didn’t know he had.

Early in 1965, Ted Watkins became a UAW International representative. After a day and a half in the Region 6 office and long conversations with UAW Director Paul Schrade, he went to the Watts section of L.A. “to bring some activities.” He hasn’t been back.

Watts, where he went to work, is the predominantly-Negro area of some 150,000 people at the south central edge of Los Angeles that gained world-wide notoriety as a result of racial rioting in August, 1965. The Kerner Commission, established to study the rash of riots since that time, said the Los Angeles riot “evoked a new mood in the ghettos around the country.”

Before the riot, Watkins and other trade unionists who wanted to put their union skills and experience to work in the improvement of their home community laid the groundwork for a unique combination of labor and community forces: the Watts Labor Community Action Committee.

As full-time administrator of WLCAC, 45-year-old UAW “rep” Watkins directs a staff of 150 persons in the programs of the organization, which is chartered by the state of California. The scope of the program has grown beyond the traditional borders of Watts to include surrounding territory.

With the eyes of a man surveying his own neighborhood, Watkins sees the problems in human terms:

“The people of Watts have no community economic base. They have no major food markets; no major department stores; no theater; no hospital. Whatever they need, they have to go outside the community—sometimes, miles away. The buses are expensive, and slow, and many of our cars don’t always run right.

“And Watts is boxed in by housing projects at each corner. This is a concentration of poor people, a concentration of problems, a concentration of families without fathers, a concentration of mothers on welfare, a concentration of kids who don’t have any male images or anything to go by,” Watkins said.

The consumer action office of WLCAC goes right to the heart of many problems.

“Any problem that the resident might have, whether it be contract buying, food stamps, welfare, lighting, street maintenance, sweeping—just about anything that affects the consumer, we work directly with them,” said former UAW Local 509 mechanic Ollie Taylor, director of the office.

“A car dealer will sell you a car and know that in three months you can’t keep up the $122 a month payments,” Taylor’s staff tells people. “So he gets your trade in, the extra money you had to borrow on the side to complete a down payment and the car back.”

Often the help needed is legal, and WLCAC refers such cases to the Neighborhood Legal Services of the anti-poverty program.

Other problems require direct action. And a delicate touch.

“People will come in and say the store on the corner has high prices. Run him off,” Taylor said. “Unless this man is just a regular gyp artist, you’ve got to try to establish some communication to see why his prices are so exorbitant, what he can do to bring them down, before you do anything to him. We find in this community, a lot of people have everything they own invested in one of these little stores. I think it would be wrong to chase him out of business before trying to relate to that individual.

“You have to try to solve the consumer’s problem and the merchant’s problem.”

Such are the cool heads at work in the once-hot Watts.

Along with advice on spending, WLCAC now offers advice on saving through the newly-opened WLCAC federal credit union, chartered with the international unions’ support.

The credit union’s trained, nine-member board of directors which raised $2,000 to get started, include UAW members E. J. Franklin (a retiree from North American Local 887) who serves as president; Ellsworth Freeman, also of Local 887 and WLCAC program director George Williams, UAW Local 923 member and credit union treasurer.

In its first six months of business, the credit union acquired $8,000 in 180 accounts, many of which were opened by WLCAC-paid workers. Payroll deductions now bring in $1,400 a month. In the same six months about $5,000 was loaned, in amounts from $25 to $200.

“Loans are made for every reason that banks and finance companies would not lend money,” said credit union manager Melvin D. Streator, “such as if a man had his utilities shut off, he got arrested last night, or—who knows what.”

“Nobody would make loans on these grounds, but we do. Just because we know that they’re telling us the truth and we know the circumstances.”

Although the underlying factor in all the problems of the Watts area, economics is not always easy to get at, thus WLCAC has found itself reaching out in nearly every direction to build a better community.

Significantly, the first success of the brand-new organization was a drive to have built a new hospital to serve the area.

(The need for hospital facilities was involved in the spark which ignited the six day of rioting, which cost 35 lives, $200 million in damage and was called the worst U.S. riot in nearly a quarter century.

(Rioting broke out in Los Angeles after a white policeman, two miles from Watts, stopped and shot to death a Negro motorist Leonard Deadwyler who was rushing his expectant wife to County General Hospital).

With the nearest hospital 15 miles from Watts, the McCone Commission—created to study causes of the riot—recommended that a hospital be built to serve the community. WLCAC spearheaded a hospital referendum drive, which failed, but “we went before the commissioners until they finally got tired of looking at us and pushed that hospital through,” said Watkins.

Construction is now underway on the 470–bed, $24 million structure, renamed the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital, to serve the Watts-Willow-brook area which has a population of 347,000. Watkins has been named a vice president of the permanent South Los Angeles Hospital Authority Commission.

WLCAC next turned its attention to the kids of Watts.

With understanding no outside organization could muster, WLCAC realized: “Much of the mischief and more serious trouble that our youngsters get into is a desperate cry for help, for attention.”

Watkins observed: “The process of socialization that our boys and girls are exposed to from the time they begin to crawl is a very tragic one.

“The destruction of our family structure has been effective to the point where the father has been driven out of the home (because of his inability to provide for his family) and the mother has been forced to become dependent upon the welfare system, which stifles drive, ambition and motivation.”

A father in the family can be a proud possession.

One teenager, enthusiastic about his WLCAC activities, described his family: “two brothers, one sister, a mother—and a father.”

Ferman Moore, a husky 19-year-old, is typical of many Watts youth.

In the days immediately following the riot, Ferman Moore was “full of animosity.”

“I had a lot of problems. I disagreed with a lot of things that were going on. I talked and tried to advocate a lot of violence; a lot of no good.”

He was talking in a barber shop when he met Ted Watkins, who asked if he needed a job. “I said yeah, I need a job.”

At the age of 17, he went to work as a WLCAC crew chief, supervising a group of young workers. But first, “I had to change my image, so the young brothers and sisters would grow up and want to be the right type of young men and women.”

The work with the youth of Watts has been one of the most rewarding aspects of WLCAC for Watkins.

“The month we started working with kids we had 1,700 with us—cleaning up the community, going on trips, taking hikes,” he recalled. “We found that these kids had never gotten any positive attention. It gave them some real, new kind of feeling as far as being somebody.”

Obtaining funds from government anti-poverty programs to augment support from labor and other sources, WLCAC was able to engage once-idle youths in work-education-recreation projects and, at the same time, launch services beneficial to the community at large.

Enrollees are paid wages, whether their work is to help construct buildings or to clear a vacant lot of weeds and debris. They are not paid when they do not work. From the beginning it was clear that they would not be content with “make work” activities. They wanted skills, training, real jobs.

Both job training and transportation were tackled when WLCAC obtained from the government broken-down trucks and buses. The motor pool not only serves as a NYC-enrollee mechanics training school but also as a transportation center using the 60 repaired vehicles.

Just as the problems of Watts are interwoven, attempts to solve a given problem may begin to unravel others.

The seemingly single task of cleaning and beautifying the community led to the concept of “vest pocket parks,” the utilization of scattered, home-sized vacant lots as playgrounds. Some 23 parks, including at least one to have swimming facilities and one for senior citizens, are near completion.

Attractive parks required, in addition to playground equipment, shrubbery and WLCAC persuaded private business to contribute half a million dollars worth of street trees, shrubs, ground cover and flowers. Then, for a place to cultivate these plants until they are planted throughout the community, WLCAC turned to the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power. In an unprecedented move, the department leased to WLCAC 12 blocks of fenced land beneath gigantic power lines and provided free water and thousands of feet of pipe for irrigation.

Providing training of CCC and NYC work crews, the “growing grounds” project is directed by Duane West, a landscape architect who said youths have an opportunity “to learn what it takes to grow a plant, how to water it and care for it. Most of them have never done this before. Then they realize that plants are a part of the visual improvement of our community.”

A second service station recently was put into operation by WLCAC after officials of Mobil Oil described the volume of sales at the organization’s original, eight-month old station at 103rd and Central Ave. as “fantastic.” That station sells 65,000 gallons of gasoline a month and performs minor repairs through a program that offers training to 34 young men and women ages 16 to 21, said former longshoreman Lehman Copeland, WLCAC staffer and Mobiltrained general manager of the station.

The trainee program at service stations includes young women as well as males. Although this program works well, WLCAC discovered that young women in the area generally are more difficult to work with than the young men. “Their future expectations, based on their observations of their mothers and older sisters, are self-defeating,” one adult explained. To meet this need, special girls’ programs, including grooming courses designed to revive a sense of feminity, have been established.

Another youth training and money making venture launched by WLCAC is a poultry ranch located on an acre-sized lot outside the city limits. Equipped with incubators, cages and additional equipment, the ranch is stocked with 5,000 fowl and produces about 70 dozen eggs a day. Manure from the ranch is aged, chemically treated and used for fertilizing the portion of Water and Power Dept. land cultivated for the growth of farm produce.

Under the direction of Vertis Hayes, former chairman of the Dept. of Fine Arts at Le Moyne College in Memphis, Tenn., and one time product designer for a California-based maker of house and gift wares, young people work in ceramics, paints, pastels, papier-mache, soap carving and other methods of creative expression.

“In order to develop a person totally and well, you must help him to feel free to express himself,” is the belief of Hayes, who, as a young man, entered the field of art against the advice and best wishes of persons who warned that as a Negro he would never be able to make a living.

“The art talent, though,” observed Hayes, “is one of those strange things that sees fit often to visit across the railroad tracks, and we find it everywhere.” In his project, one portion of the remediation program which includes math, English, grammar and social science, he has found “a great deal of talent, a great deal indeed.”

A maker of miniature race cars contracted to have WLCAC put together the 15-piece section of track which counts the tiny car’s revolutions around the track. Eight to 10 17-year-olds complete the production in a small-scale assembly line operation, expected to last two months and turn out 4,000 pieces.

The list of activities will go on—undoubtedly has been expanded even as this report is published, for WLCAC has gained that toehold which has eluded similar-intentioned groups in other communities.

Solidarity (August, 1968).

36. A BLACK CAUCUS FORMED IN AUTO UNION

By Jerry M. Flint

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

The New York Times, October 1, 1968.

37. OUT OF STRUGGLE—SOLIDARITY

By Cornelius Cobbs

The Solidarity Caucus at International Harvester’s Tractor Works plant was formed three years ago to fight to regain and maintain decent working conditions and to educate the new, young members about their rights under the union contract. Our symbol is the clenched fist. It means that if we all stick together against International Harvester like a clenched fist, we can’t be broken like the fingers of an outstretched hand.

From “All-Black” to “Solidarity”

The caucus had its origins when many of the militant blacks at International Harvester formed the New Breed Democratic Trade Union Caucus to try to break the white monopoly on skilled trades jobs. Last year some whites first asked to join the caucus because they also disliked what was going on in the shop.

They felt that our group was carrying on the best fight against the company, so they asked to be part of it. We believed we would be strengthened by their participation, so we agreed. Of course, the first thing people would catch when they saw New Breed was “all black,” so we changed our name to Solidarity. The name is closer to labor’s goals.

Of the 2400 workers at I.H., about 60% are white and 40% are black, but the leadership in the caucus remains black.

We work under one of the best contracts in the UAW chain. It comes from the fighting tradition of the plant, which dates back to the struggle for the eight-hour-day in 1886. Then, the plant was the McCormick Works Reaper Division, and the week was 60 to 80 hours long. It was the police brutality during the strike for a shorter day that called out the famous Haymarket demonstration 83 years ago.

A Fighting History

Ask any “old timer.” He will tell you about the company goons, the vicious role of the police, the techniques used by the company to break strikes, the harassment, the bloody, cracked heads, the guerilla movement within the shop, the infiltrators and informers, the wildcats and sit-down strikes, the unity forged in struggle.

He will tell you about the speed-up, the dirty conditions, the company favoritism, the dangerous equipment, the impossible work loads and the polluted air.

Pace-setting Contract

The union tradition was developed and fought for by minority-group whites . . . Poles, Italians, Bohemians, Irish, new immigrants who gave leadership to the others. They were members of the old Farm Equipment - United Electrical Workers union (FEUE), and the contracts they won set the pace for the industry. We brought their old contract with us intact when FEUE merged with the United Auto Workers in 1955.

The contract is unusually good in several ways. For example, we have never had compulsory overtime. Almost all of the auto industry contracts require it. We would never accept it. Second, we have one of the best piece-work systems in the Chicago area, and an excellent safety clause, because we can strike on it. Older workers in particular benefit from the contract because of the recent emphasis on pensions, vacations, holidays, medical benefits, and so on.

What the ‘Old-Timers’ Don’t Say

Union tradition and the contract have established the local as a leader in the fight for good working conditions. But the story the “old timers” don’t tell is how white racism or black exclusion was never dealt with. The blacks and other non-white minorities in the early days were put into the foundry . . . the heaviest and filthiest jobs in the plant. They were almost totally excluded from the skilled apprentice trades such as tool and die, millwrights, machine repair, and so on. These latter were the highest paying in the shop.

Under FDR, the union won a Fair Employment Practices clause in its contracts, but the problem of white racism remained. Today probably not more than one tenth of 1% of the apprentices or skilled workers are black or Spanish-American. This is one of the main reasons why we formed the Solidarity Caucus.

Contract Weakened

The second major reason for the Solidarity Caucus is because of the inroads made by the company on the hard-won gains of the past. Although the contract is advanced compared to others, Harvester has knocked big holes into it. For example, formerly there was no prohibition on strikeable grievances. Now, these are limited to health, sanitation and piece-work prices. Before, we had a 52 week-maximum benefit period for workers injured on the job. This has been slashed to 26 weeks.

The list of grievances includes the harassment and speed-up of the piece-workers, the severe discipline imposed for minor violations of company rules, the refusal or delay by the company in controlling smoke pollution in the welding departments and the severe breakdown in the processing of grievances.

An example is the speed-up and harassment of piece workers that affects blacks and whites. Last June we had a sit-down on the Department 55 line, where earth-moving tractors are made, because Harvester tried to put another tractor on the line without adding more men. Traditionally, a new tractor on the line has meant 100 additional new men at the Personnel office. So when they try to sweat more work out of us, we have to use the slow-down or sit-down to make them appreciate the meaning of the contract.

Speed-up Increasing

The piece-work departments are especially vulnerable to speed-up. For example, where a lot of fellows had to do 9 to 10 pieces before, they have to do almost 20 pieces now to make the rate. And if you do not make the rate in 30 days, you are disqualified. They will put you in a lower grade or put you on another job. The company literally wants to tie you to a machine.

Company Harassment

Or take the piece-work count. Anyone can make a human error. If you have 500 pieces to do, you count them. You might count 500, but maybe a checker will come around later and find only 490. You get a 30-day suspension! They say you are cheating. What we are trying to do is to put a stop to this harassment.

Or take vacation dismissals. The fellows want to get off at 12:00 to start their vacations early. Well, the foreman would not issue them personal passes, so they went home without them. When they came back they were suspended, some for three days, five days, seven days. Company harassment.

One fellow got 90 days off for a roll of tape. They found a roll of masking tape which he left in his work clothes going out the gate.

The Harvester Company Is Flexing Its Muscles

Health and safety are both affected because the plant is kept short of maintenance men and janitors. For example, the snorkel-exhausts for welding and cutting break down faster than the maintenance men can get to them for repairs, but the company won’t hire any more men . . . their way of cutting down on overhead. The foremen say they have got to stick within their budget.

Another example: The company would not hire any more janitors, so they had to close up the toilets on the ground floor. Often it is very inconvenient for a fellow to run upstairs to use the toilet. Those that remain open were not cleaned up until the union threatened to bring in the state inspectors.

Right to Ban Overtime Was Lost

Most serious is the question of overtime. As I mentioned, we have never had compulsory overtime. But with every contract the company is coming closer and closer to it. In the last contract the union allowed the elimination of its power to completely ban overtime as a hammer in the grievance demands. Prior to this, the union could ban all overtime if there were outstanding, unresolved grievances. It was one of the most important protections we had.

Sit Down in Allied

Probably the most effective action we have taken was the sit down last fall in the Allied Building, where most of the cutting and welding operations are done. By one o’clock the afternoon of the action, the smoke from the welding machines was so thick you could cut it with a knife. You could not see your hand before your face.

What has been happening is that Harvester has been converting from the old steel-electrode welding to MIG (metal-inert-gas) welding. These machines work much faster. While the old ones had a ten-inch per minute burn-off rate of the electrode, the new machines burn at the rate of 160 inches per minute! They not only increase the workload down the line, but they also give more heat, smoke, and a gas called ozone, which is suspected of causing lung difficulties such as bronchitis and more colds.

The snorkel-exhausts on the machines do not remove the gas fast enough, and the flexible plastic hoses do not last under piece-work conditions. We had been promised fans to help remove the thick smoke, but we never got them. So we decided to stop all the machines. We sat down. Nobody worked. The whites and blacks together. Then we went to the Superintendent’s office and stayed there, even though we were told to go back to work. The men stuck together until we won a concession: the company promised to install fans. Today several fans are in place.

Education for Young Workers

The Solidarity Caucus, I think, has played an important role in educating the workers. We have a program of education which we are trying to build around the young workers in the shop. Many of these kids have never been in labor before and they have just come out of the high schools, a few from college. They constitute at least one third of the force. On the day shift, 250 workers are being retired this year, making room for many more youngsters.

For most of the men over forty or fifty, who fought in the battles of the early days, struggle is just a romantic notion, although they like to reflect on it and feel good about it. They just get up once in a while and have a testimonial to themselves and the good old days.

Of course we are not trying to build another union within Local 1301, so we do not have a highly organized form. Anything that the leadership brings up that is good for the members, we support. The leadership has participated in the civil rights marches to Selma, they have donated money to various organizations, and these things stand to their credit, as far as they go.

Caucus Runs on Program

Basically the caucus is not so much political as it is educational. When we ran a black for grievance man, it was because there was insufficient black representation from the membership. We want to choose our own leaders. And when we ran a white southerner for grievance zoneman, we were not “running a white.” We were running a program. A man will vote for us if he accepts our program whether he is black or white, and whether our candidate is black or white. The main reason Solidarity takes the form it does, of black-white unity from the rank and file itself, is because of the need to put the greatest possible pressure on the company to regain and maintain our contractual gains.

Proportionate Representation Needed

Another big thing that is very important here is that we are demonstrating that blacks can become leaders, too. Here we are trying to show that when blacks are in control, whites are willing to follow that leadership because it speaks for them. When we formed a black-white coalition, we blacks joined it as equals. We were not underdogs in this coalition.

It is hard for some people to accept this. You see, this is something that had never happened before. Usually they had mixed caucuses, but blacks never led them. At one time it was good that a small number of blacks were allowed to participate in the leadership of the union. Even tokenism had its place. Today, however, what is needed is not for someone to accept the “black position” in the leadership, but proportionate representation from the rank and file.

The future coalition, I think, will be the Appalachian whites who are the most dispossessed of the whites and the blacks and Spanish-Americans. The Solidarity Caucus can provide for the whites and blacks the proper trade union focus to trade union problems that have been neglected for years. And we can prove to many of the militant blacks that it is not the white guy who is on his back, who is chaining him to the ghetto, because the poor white does not own any ghettos.

In a way you might say that the black workers in the union are helping lead a fight with their white brothers to keep alive and to update the traditions of this plant . . . black and white unity, rank and file democracy, Solidarity against International Harvester.

The Caucus is Fighting on the Issues

By Bill Foster

I support the Solidarity Caucus and ran on the Solidarity ticket for grievance zoneman, because the caucus is fighting against a lot of things that are going on at Harvester that I don’t care for.

Right now the piece workers, especially, are in terrible shape. Harvester is cutting prices so you just can’t make it anymore. Piece-work grievances are piled over my head, nine or ten months behind. They are not doing anything with them. After a year or so they just throw them out, and in the meantime the piece-workers take the brunt.

They are not giving the black workers a fair shake. In the skilled trades they might take one in, here and there, every so often, but I know that more are qualified. Harvester will tell how you did, but they won’t let you actually see the tests. This makes it easy for them to discriminate against black workers.

It does not bother me that the leadership of the caucus is mainly led by black people. Why should it? I think they have basically the same interest I have.

The opposition knows we are there. When we write a leaflet on some issue, they always come out with something a little more militant! I am sure there will be changes in the next few years, because the union is not serving its members as it should, but the caucus is fighting on the issues.

Investments in Slavery

Every month the company mails us their slick-printed magazine, IH News. Its purpose is to make us feel we are part of a great, modern family, to fill us with pride so we will come in and bang out those tractors. Every month they have a story about one or two of their plants. They try to show labor and management working together in harmony for everybody’s benefit.

But one plant they never write about. One plant they don’t even want us to know about is their plant in South Africa.

Conditions in South Africa are a worldwide scandal. By now, most people know something about a country where three million white colonialists ride on the backs of twelve million Africans and one million “coloreds”—East Indians and people of mixed blood.

In South Africa, the Africans are restricted to 10% of the land and the most menial jobs. They are denied education, and are not permitted to join or organize unions or political parties.

To show how they have been made prisoners in their own country, all Africans must carry a pass which they must show at any time to any white who demands it, or go to jail. In order to hold a job, travel in the white area or move from town to town, an African must have his pass specifically stamped.

Since 1948, five million Africans have been convicted of “pass violations.” In the Sharpeville Massacre of a few years back, 109 Africans were shot down and their bodies stacked up like steel pipe—for the “crime” of refusing to carry a pass.

We think all Harvester workers should know the truth about how big corporations, including IHC, are involved in the looting and enslavement in South Africa.

IHC South Africa has operations in both production and distribution, centered in Johannesburg. In January of 1968 they sold 120 machines, so you can see it is a going concern. They manufacture farm implements to fit imported tractors, and may be producing Scout trucks as well. (Facts are hard to come by—they don’t let their secrets out). Including Pan-African Industries, which they bought out in 1962, IHC South Africa now employs about 1000 workers, two-thirds African.

Wages and working conditions are governed by South African rules: strict apartheid (segregation), no Africans in unions, and so forth. Average wages in manufacturing in 1963 were as follows: whites $2,881, Africans $590 per year.

Now get this—here they are in Chicago with their “New Start” program, trying to show how concerned they are with the problems of black people, and there they are in South Africa with their teeth sunk into the neck of the black people.

Did you ever wonder why there are so few black workers in the skilled trades and higher classifications at Tractor Works? It’s all part of the same policy.

Give one group (whites) a few miserable crumbs to make them feel better than the rest. That’s company policy.

What’s our policy? Is the old union principle “An injury to one is an injury to all” out of date?

Solidarity Committee Caucus, UAW Local 1301.

Labor Today (May, 1969).

38. BANNON URGES MORE OPPORTUNITY FOR MINORITIES TO ENTER TRADES

CINCINNATI, Ohio—New programs are bringing an increasing number of blacks into the ranks of UAW skilled tradesmen at Ford Motor Co. but far greater progress is urgently needed, according to UAW Vice President Ken Bannon.¹²²

Bannon urged 100 delegates at a meeting of the UAW Ford skilled trades subcouncil here to work for expanded opportunities for non-whites in the trades.

Of the 20,525 UAW members in the apprenticeable trades at Ford, 864—4.2 per cent—are members of minority groups, Bannon said. The ratio in non-apprenticeable trades is 6.9 per cent of the 4,000 workers.

Bannon, director of the UAW Ford Dept., and Jeff Washington, assistant director of the UAW Manpower Development and Training Dept., outlined ways in which local unions may increase opportunities for nonwhites in the skilled trades.

Washington detailed Project Outreach, a program under which classes are set up in local unions to provide intensive instruction and counseling to workers who want to take skilled trades apprenticeship tests.

Other actions taken to increase opportunities for minorities and for workers disadvantaged by inadequate education include a pre-apprentice program at several Ford plants. This program allows an applicant who fails a portion of the apprenticeship tests to undergo instruction aimed at overcoming his deficiencies.

The UAW also won agreement from Ford to test only current employes, halting the practice of bringing in new skilled trades apprentices from outside. Testing procedures were changed, allowing greater supervision by the UAW Ford joint apprenticeship committee. Notices of the tests and the procedures for applying were posted more widely in all plants.

Washington told the skilled tradesmen that while upwards of 30 per cent of the UAW membership consists of minorities—blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Indians and Orientals—less than five per cent are tradesmen.

“This is the most serious internal problem facing our union today,” he said, adding: “In many areas, if the union doesn’t eliminate racial imbalance, the government is going to do it.”

While aimed at improving opportunities for minorities, Project Outreach has trained more than 1,500 workers, of whom 53 per cent were Caucasians. Washington noted: “If a member, regardless of color, needs the training, it’s available.”

UAW Solidarity (September, 1972).

39. BLACK CAUCUS BUILDS BLACK-WHITE SOLIDARITY AT CHRYSLER PLANT

By Johnny Woods

“This election wasn’t easy—the victory wasn’t easy. Racism was used against the slate. Some of the union officials told the workers the Progressive Slate was an all-black slate. But our candidates for the Election Committee, three black and three white, ran on the issues, and we won four out of six spots.”

Building Unity

A group of auto workers were talking about the first stage of an election in their union, Local 110, United Auto Workers, at the Chrysler truck plant in St. Louis. The Progressive Slate referred to was the outgrowth of what began as a Black Caucus in the local, expanded to include white workers, and fielded a slate led by a Black candidate for president and a white candidate for vice president. The caucus promises to be a growing, dynamic force in the union.

The brothers and sisters told Labor Today how the Black Caucus used to discuss racism, speed-up, health and safety—all issues—at their meetings: “We found out as we went along that the problems in the shop were problems that had to be dealt with from a worker’s point of view. We found out we had to reach out and pull all workers together—female, male, Black and white.”

Strengthen the Union

Using leaflets written in clear, powerful language aimed right at the brass-tacks issues concerning all workers at the plant, the slate won quick popularity.

But company and some union officials felt threatened by leaflets headlined: “Only a STRONG UNION can Break the Chains of layoffs, cutbacks, oppression, speedups and unjust firing.”

Leaflets declaring: “What we need are candidates who are going to fight against the wage-price freeze, right-to-work laws and other anti-labor legislation . . . And this can only be done with candidates running not on friendship, color, or being a good guy, but on the candidates’ knowledge of the issues, as well as willingness to fight for us once elected. And let it also be added that it is only the rank and file workers that can create this willingness to fight on the part of the elected official.”

The Whispered Lie

A whispering campaign was launched against the slate. Rumors that it represented a Black group seeking Black control of the union, or even planning to form an all-Black union, began to be heard in the plant.

The Slate answered this and other slander with more leaflets. They showed that the six candidates for the Election Committee were divided not only into three whites, three blacks, but also three day-shifters and three night-shifters.

“We didn’t know how effective our leaflets would be,” a leader of the Black Caucus said. However, a white worker candidate who was attacked the most by local union officials and some racist white workers for being associated with the so-called black slate—anyway, after the results were in, he had the most votes. A black candidate came in second and the slate finished one, two, three, four out of the six spots.”

Progressive Slate

Next came the general elections. The Slate ran 28 candidates. The platform dealt with problems faced by all segments of the local. “For instance, we had women workers who were being placed on jobs some men weren’t being assigned to because of physical limitations.” A perverse “concern” for women’s equality found the company putting women on these heavy jobs. And union officials did nothing about it.

They also proposed that the educational committee conduct orientation programs for new workers informing them of the history of unions and the role unions have played in the labor movement.

Racism Dies Hard

But despite—or, really because of—this broad platform aimed at problems shared by all workers, the “all-Black takeover” rumor flew thicker and faster in the general election last June.

The facts of the matter there were only 700 blacks out of 3,000 in the local, and none of the union officials was Black.

“But there was somewhat of a breakdown of sorts in terms of fighting racism,” a candidate on the Progressive Slate told Labor Today. “Some of the white workers became concerned about their own race (for election) in certain departments. But we had some white workers who stayed with it and who really got out there and fought racism to the end. And we won something like 8 out of 28 races.”

The Case of Sister Brown

The Progressive Slate and the Black Caucus did not fight racism in the abstract. “There are so many anti-worker practices underlying racism at the Chrysler plant and others across the country that any union worthy of the name should be fighting on this front of the local and international level every day.”

For example, at Local 110 there was the case of Gloria Brown, who was discharged because she rejected the advances of her foreman.

The foreman “wrote her up” as unable to do her job—a difficult job she had been switched to after refusing to date him on two occasions. She went to the union, which had already deducted $80 in dues and initiation fees from her paychecks.

“They told me there was nothing they could to—I didn’t have my 90 days in.”

No One Safe

Sister Brown went to the Black Caucus and a week or two after she was discharged a leaflet was issued. The leaflet headlined “No One Safe,” pointed out that no worker could be secure in his job if management was permitted to get rid of a person in the manner in which the foreman McCullough reportedly discharged Sister Brown.

“It was only after she stood and defended her dignity as a woman and a worker that she was found to be unsatisfactory.”

The leaflet called for Sister Brown’s reinstatement and the firing of the foreman. (Her case is still pending).

The Issue Is Joined

The second half of the leaflet defended the rights of Danny Burns, a white worker unjustly fired from another department in the plant.

Alonzo Bimbo, a foreman, threw his helmet at Burns, the leaflet charged, with the intention “not only to harass Danny but also to do bodily harm.” Bimbo was angry because Burns, through no fault of his own, had run out of material.

About 50 workers saw the incident and signed a petition to the union, demanding action. They also notified the Black general foreman, Willie Walker, because, as the leaflet stated, they “felt that he would act to straighten out the issue because . . . he was once a worker, and being Black, had received some of the worst treatment.”

Stick Together

But Walker stood with the “wrong-doing foreman.” And the leaflet concluded:

“Now all the workers fully understand that company men stick together, no matter what color the workers are. We as workers must stick together too, stick together and demand the firing of Bimbo and the firing of McCullough.”

Enforce the Contract

The caucus is also demanding strict enforcement of contract provisions for in-plant promotion.

One leader of the Black Caucus said: “They have hired directly off the street in order to avoid putting a Black in the skilled trades area. I have put in for the skilled trades—carpentry—and I have my apprenticeship hours in. But I never heard from management and they have hired directly off the street since my application’s been in. It would be more than a dollar an hour for me if I were in carpentry.”

Selling Us Short

The Black Caucus also feels the UAW is selling out to management in the area of so-called productivity. As one brother put it: “The first thing they say when they sit down at contract time with management is that management reserves the right to run the plant. It’s about the first thing they (union leaders) agree on when they go up to bat.”

As a result, in the speed-up and the use of smaller work forces to do more and more producing, the dispensary and even the morgue fill up.”

“They have millwrights,” one Chrysler worker said, “so when a line breaks down from too much stress and strain and too many hours running, they have men to come and get it back in operation.

“Your body performs so many hours and you don’t have anybody to come put it back in operation. And after 10 hours a day, six days a week, if you have to just, like, rest it, and take a day off because you’re exhausted, that’s not good enough unless you have a doctor’s statement.”

“They want you to have a heart attack.”

Bored, Hell! We’re Tired!

Another worker agreed: “If they don’t fight for these things at contract time this time, we’re just in trouble all over again. When I first started with the UAW, I thought things were supposed to get better. I thought we were supposed to progress. With automation the job should get easier over the years, for everybody.

But it ain’t working like that. When I started, we were on eight hour schedules. But now, as far as I’m concerned the eight hour day is just nonexistent. It’s just on the books. We’re working ten hours a day—and more often than not, six days a week!” Hooting at Woodcock’s harmony proposal, he said: “We’re out there on the line and they’re up there in the office. No way we can get together and play ‘hand-shakey’!”

Bright Future Ahead for the Union

A veteran member of the caucus described the election campaign as “historical.” He went on to say: “We had a Black candidate for president who got the most votes on the first ballot, although he lost in the run-off. Our candidate for vice-president won. We had Black and white candidates running for offices throughout the structure. And a Black won election for a plant-wide office—the first time.”

This brother sees greater successes ahead, and a bright future for the union: “. . . because the caucus is concerned with the well-being of all workers . . . By educating the workers, making them more aware, I think we started on the road to make a progressive union. Because we gave leadership, some of the incumbents, and some of the people elected on their slate have come to the Black Caucus and agreed to work with us on Standing Committees.”

“The recently published positions of the union officials who have just won, are very similar to the ones that the Caucus presented prior to the election.”

“We’re breathing down their backs. We’re not really opposing them. We’re just trying to make them more progressive.

Labor Today (July, 1973).

40. BLACK-WHITE CAUCUSES WIN UAW LOCAL OFFICES

By Ted Pearson

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

Daily World, July 20, 1973.

41. STEPP NAMED FIRST BLACK UAW HEAD AT BIG 3 PLANT

By William Allan

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

Daily World, June 9, 1977.

42. LABOR, BLACKS MEET, MAP POLITICAL PUSH

By Geoffrey Jacques

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

Daily World, October 18, 1978.

BUILDING TRADES

43. NAACP BATTLE FRONT

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

The Crisis, 72 (March, 1965):164–66.

44. NY BUILDING TRADES UNIONS FACE DISCRIMINATION HEARINGS

William H. Booth, chairman of the N.Y. City Commission on Human Rights said he will ask a full meeting of the civil rights body on March 30 to set public hearings to determine whether the building trades unions have made progress against discrimination since the 1963 hearings.

Booth’s announcement came after Peter J. Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York told newsmen in Washington he had no plans to submit reports on discrimination conditions in the council’s affiliates requested by Booth. He said Booth should request each local for such data.¹²⁶

Booth said last Sunday he set a week’s deadline for submission of the reports in letters to Brennan and to Harry Van Arsdale, president of the Central Labor Council, after the two told him progress had been made in integrating some of the lilywhite areas, and promised him reports within two weeks. But such reports never came, he said.¹²⁷

Brennan, attending the Building trades legislative conference in Washington, termed Booth’s action “political.”

Booth said his move in the unions parallels his letters to 15 major suppliers to the city in which he asked them why they don’t employ more Negroes and Puerto Ricans.

Booth said he is seeking an executive order from Mayor Lindsay directing companies to comply with equal job opportunities laws on pain of cancellation of contracts with them.

Booth appeared to be dissatisfied with the rate of integration in the apprenticeship program of Electrical, Local 3, a union that has been cited for comparatively more advanced efforts to get Negro and Puerto Rican youths into its apprenticeship program. Recently, said Booth in an interview, Van Arsdale took him to the apprenticeship school of Local 3.

“Sure enough,” said Booth, “there was a sprinkling of Negroes among the apprentices. But I told him that didn’t prove anything, I’d have to see figures.”

The 1963 hearings, an aftermath of the wave of civil rights demonstrations at construction projects that year, showed that certain building trades unions were almost 100 percent lilywhite, notably in sheet metal, plumbers and iron workers.

The Worker, March 27, 1966.

45. BUILDING TRADES TAKE SOLID STAND AGAINST DISCRIMINATION

Bal Harbour, Fla.—Delegates from AFL-CIO Building Trades unions voted unanimously here that “we wholeheartedly support apprenticeship programs and selection procedures which are nondiscriminatory, uniform and fair.”

Members of 18 unions representing 3.5 million tradesmen in the U.S. and Canada made it clear that “we oppose and will not tolerate discrimination” and, while favoring efforts to encourage the entry of minority-group members into the skilled trades, they will continue to oppose any lowering of the standards each trade has maintained over the years for the admission of new members.

Delegates to the 54th convention of the AFL-CIO Building & Construction Trades Dept. acted on the subject of hiring practices and apprentice training regulations in two resolutions affirming that:

* The department endorses generally the “principle of affirmative action to assist Negroes and other minority group persons in finding suitable employment” and invites Labor Dept. officials to discuss the matter in depth with B&CTD representatives “in the hope that sources of conflict may be diminished and a higher degree of cooperation obtained.”

* Delegates condemn the use of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, a Labor Dept. agency, of such a formula as “minority representation in every craft in every phase of the work” on every federal building project. Such formulas are “often impossible of fulfillment and destructive of working conditions and performance standards.”

* The construction unions call on contractors to join in opposing such “unrealistic approaches and unsound formulas which could destroy the efficiency and flexibility of an industry which historically has met the needs of the country in war and peace” and “can continue to meet those needs totally and without discrimination.”

A convention committee drafted a resolution detailing labor’s objections to proposed regulations for federal apprentice training programs which find the unions “guilty before trial” of discriminatory practices, and destroy the voluntary character of training programs supported by Building Trades unions and the contractors who hire their members.

Labor Sec. W. Willard Wirtz, a convention speaker, said he had read the resolution on the proposed changes and “while I don’t go along with everything” in the department’s list of objections, “I think it is an error” to talk in terms of “one or more Negroes or whites or anybody else as being required” on every single construction job.

Wirtz said he will talk further about the apprenticeship rules at a January meeting with a departmental committee of union presidents.

AFL-CIO Pres. George Meany, noting that the federation has a policy against racial discrimination “to which I completely subscribe,” said he was “quite sure” the Building Trades Dept. adheres to that policy. In today’s world, which is largely non-white, it is “just a matter of good common sense, as well as a matter of decent human relations, to eliminate discrimination,” he declared.

He asked the 255 delegates “how do you get these new members that they say it is desirable to have? How do you get colored boys into these highly skilled trades? Well, you get them in the way you have always gotten” union members.

Meany recalled that he had had to pass an examination as a journeyman 50 years ago to join his local union of Plumbers in New York City, he added “I don’t mind telling you that I failed the first examination. And it was on the level because my father was president of the union.”

Meany said his father was “just as sore as hell—not at the examining board that turned me down, but at me. And I had to wait six months and serve another six months as an apprentice” before taking another exam.

There is “no other way” to meet the problem of screening untrained applicants for membership than by the apprenticeship route, and “no short cut,” the AFL-CIO president declared. “And when we bring them in as apprentices,” he asked, “do we lower the standards? I say absolutely no. We do not compromise the standards.”

Meany was strongly applauded when he said “I think we should say to all government agencies that we are prepared to follow the AFL-CIO policy of non-discrimination but that we are not prepared to lower the standards of our industry or trade to do that.”

The convention received greetings from Pres. Johnson in a message and heard major addresses from two members of his cabinet—Wirtz and Sec. Robert C. Weaver of the Dept. of Housing & Urban Development. Other speakers included Pres. Paul Hall of the Seafarers, Dr. Donald Shulman of the AFL-CIO Dept. of Civil Rights, and Deputy Dir. Joseph Rourke of the federation’s Committee on Political Education.¹²⁸

New four-year terms in office were voted without contest for Dept. Pres. C. J. Haggerty and Sec.-Treas. Frank Bonadio, and two-year terms for the department’s 10 vice presidents, all top officers of affiliated unions.

Bonadio reported that, since the 1965 convention, the department chartered 22 new councils and issued more than 1 million quarterly membership cards to building tradesmen whose unions applied for them.

In other actions, the convention voted to support the present Administration policy on Viet Nam but strongly condemned the activities of two government departments—that of the comptroller general for assertedly advising the Atomic Energy Commission and other federal agencies that they need not observe prevailing wage rates set by Wirtz for contractors on federal construction jobs, and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which was accused of trying to force hiring quotas for a specified number of minority-group members on contractors and unions.

Weaver praised Haggerty for welcoming the opportunity to provide workers and to train new workers for the model cities program and other programs designed to rebuild rundown neighborhoods in 63 demonstration cities. Weaver also proposed that organized labor help raise $1 billion to match the amount pledged by U.S. insurance companies to “create new and rehabilitated” housing.

Slaiman reported that in the civil rights area “we are making progress.” Building Trades councils and local unions are “taking in large numbers of minority group youngsters into apprenticeship trades,” Slaiman said. He cited two examples—120 Negroes and Puerto Ricans were in the graduating class recently of 800 journeymen and apprentices sponsored by New York Local 3 of the Intl. Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; and the Washington, D.C. Bricklayers local has 800 Negro journeymen in its ranks.

Rourke warned of the need for extensive COPE campaigns and the collection of badly needed COPE dollars in coming election campaigns. He said “there are at least 10 friendly senators who could go down to defeat unless we do the job.” He added: “If we lose 30 more congressmen—and it can happen—we’ll have the book thrown at us” in the form of punitive laws.

Earlier, Haggerty had advised local unions to seek qualified craftsmen in city areas and start trainee programs “for those area youths who show an interest and an aptitude.”

Hall reported that the Maritime Trades Dept., which he also heads, is preparing to release a detailed study of the adverse impact of the Landrum-Griffin Act and the way it is used against unions. A similar study will be made of the National Labor Relations Board, Hall said.

He reported that in the South and some other areas, employers can get an “ex parte injunction” against unions any time they want one, and receive prompt action from NLRB regional officials while unions must wait “anywhere from three months to six months” for decisions that could be made in a few days or a week at most.

Pres. Thomas J. Murray of the Chicago-Cook County Building & Construction Trades Council gave the oath of office to the top officers and the following vice presidents: M. A. Hutcheson, Carpenters; Gordon M. Freeman, Intl. Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; Peter T. Schoemann, Plumbers & Pipefitters; Edward J. Leonard, Plasterers; John H. Lyons, Iron Workers; Russell K. Berg, Boilermakers; Hunter P. Wharton, Operating Engineers; Thomas F. Murphy, Bricklayers; Peter Fosco, Laborers, and L. M. Raftery, Painters.¹²⁹

AFL-CIO press release, December 4, 1967. Copy in possession of the editors.

46. BUILDING UNIONS BOILING OVER GOV’T. HIRING RULING

MINORITY WORK GAIN SIGHTED

PHILADELPHIA—A rapidly accelerating showdown between industrial building unions and the Federal government’s new policy of having regional Federal agencies pools insist on population-proportionate hiring of Negroes on all roads, buildings or other contracts using federal money, was developing here this week.

The new Federal agency pool policy of immediately and fully ruling on minority hiring and subsequent cancellation of contracts, without months of red tape, has infuriated both contractors and building trades unions.

The plan has been put into practice in Cleveland first, where much of the current racial peace has been attributed to the program, and later in Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia in recent weeks, it has resulted in cancellation of a $37.7 million contract to a builder to construct a new U.S. Mint. It has voided contracts for $97 millions in U.S. aided road construction and the re-allocation of millions of dollars more being planned for roads in Pennsylvania next year.

The not-yet-allocated millions of dollars for such road work will be used to appeal House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills’ demand that federal domestic spending be cut in light of threats of inflation and Vietnam war demands, it was said.

It has also resulted in cancellation for $19 millions worth of federally-aided building construction.

The regional Office of Federal Contract Compliance said that it will also affect another $50-million to $75-million in Federally-funded construction, outside of road work, within the next three or four months.

That is, said the OFFC official, if contractors fail to provide an unequivocal commitment and proof that they have hired the proper share of minority workmen at most levels.

The impasse has produced “crash” training programs for Negro youths who are to be paid apprenticeship wages while learning in both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Last week a Philadelphia Councilman, W. Thatcher Longstreth, asked the Federal government to institute a three-month moratorium on the Regional Pool of Federal Agencies Plan in Philadelphia. He also asked for an immediate summit conference among unions, contractors and Federal officials.

The new program of the Regional Federal Agencies Pools follows quickly on a report made by NAACP labor secretary Herbert Hill the first week in April in which he stated he had evidence of a secret agreement of officials of the U.S. Labor Dept. with contractors and unions to institute a “token” training program for Negroes in crafts union trades. The NAACP’s Hill said the agreement purported that the Federal contracts would continue “lily-white” despite the token training program.

All this seems to be changed now, as far as the Government is concerned, although Hill has threatened that the NAACP will file suits over the issue.

In light of the cancellations and the new practices, James Loughlin, business-manager of the 30,000-member Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council which includes 55 local unions, said:

“The feeling in some of our unions is that if they try to put non-union members into these jobs, our people will just walk off the job.”

Loughlin said he feels that the new Regional Federal Agencies Pool program is “only a move to destroy the apprentice programs and standards we have developed over the past 50 years.”

He said he believes the plan is illegal in that it “infers a quota system on a race basis for hiring.”

He blasted OFCC coordinator Bennett O. Stallworth, who is director of the Regional Federal Agencies Pool, for “only talking to the Trades Council once in 19 months.”

His views were supported by Joseph F. Burke, president of the Sheet Metal Workers Local 19, which has a membership of 1400, of which only three are Negroes.

Burke said his union had tried to enlist Negro apprentices but the results have been “disappointing.” He said that since 1963 the union took applications from 1148 persons, of whom 99 were Negroes.

Out of the 99 he said 88 qualified to take the entrance test. However, when the tests were given only 60 showed up.

Out of the 60, only 11 passed and were invited to start the apprentice program, but only three showed up.

He did not say how small the number of Negroes was expected to be when the Negro apprentice group reached the journeyman stage.

Burke said this was a typical experience in dealing with getting Negroes into the industrial unions programs.

Meanwhile, Bayard Rustin, outstanding Negro civil rights leader who is executive director of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, said: “The unions are certainly the only major institution that wholly subscribes to, and substantially embodies in its own programs, the proposals and priorities outlined in the Freedom Budget for All Americans.”

The Freedom Budget, which had been endorsed by such other Negro leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Urban League’s Whitney Young and others is the ultimate goal of the “Poor People’s Campaign” set to converge in May from all parts of the nation on Washington D.C.

The Freedom Budget is a program devised by Leon Keyserling, who served as national budget director for President Truman and a task force of the nation’s best national economists, as a formula for ridding the United States of both poverty and racism in the next ten years by a budget of $185 billions and a $2-per-hour national minimum wage.

Pittsburgh Courier, May 4, 1968.

47. OPPOSITION TO PHILADELPHIA PLAN

RESOLUTION NO. 187—By Delegate Maywood Boggs; Metal Trades Department, AFL-CIO.

WHEREAS, The building trades in its efforts to meet the growing demand for skilled craftsmen have in the past worked hand-in-glove with the federal government to select and train the most qualified young men for the skilled trades, and

WHEREAS, This training program has become selective due to the higher skills needed to perform the highly diversified tasks within our industry requiring more education and dedication, and

WHEREAS, The building trades through its own efforts has made progress and its participating in projects which will give minority groups more equal opportunity based on fair and impartial qualifying examinations, and

WHEREAS, The Philadelphia Plan is high-handed, ambiguous and is trying to be enforced without due process, and

WHEREAS, The contractors through the competitive bidding process and government specifications are required to have the best craftsmen possible in order to meet competition and specifications, and

WHEREAS, the Philadelphia Plan can in no way produce instant mechanics regardless of color, and

WHEREAS, This plan can only increase the cost to the contractor and cause detriment to all effected trades, and

WHEREAS, The revised Philadelphia Plan is in definite conflict with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 whereby quotas for Negro or other minority employment are disallowed by law, and

WHEREAS, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be searched in vain for authorization to require such programs; therefore, be it

RESOLVED: That the AFL-CIO use all the power and persuasiveness at its means to defeat this plan, to the point and including the withholding of all manpower from any federal project perpetuating this plan, and be it further

RESOLVED: That this Convention prevail upon the Congress to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by striking down the Philadelphia Plan as not meeting the requirements of the act; and, be it further

RESOLVED, That this Convention prevail further upon Congress to withhold funds from any federal projects where this Philadelphia Plan, or similar plan, is being enforced.

Proceedings of the Eighth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO, Atlantic City, October 2–7, 1969, Vol. I, pp. 472–73.

48. REVISED PHILADELPHIA PLAN

RESOLUTION NO. 270

WHEREAS, The Building and Construction Trades Department (AFL-CIO) has been engaged in a program of practical affirmative action to increase the employment of Negroes and other minority groups in the building and construction industry which has produced substantial, concrete results, and

WHEREAS, The Building and Construction Trades Department (AFL-CIO) at its 55th Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey adopted a Statement of Policy which strengthened and expanded its affirmative action program, and

WHEREAS, The department’s Statement of Policy declared that:

“We are convinced that the goal of increasing Negro and other minority worker participation in the building and construction trades can be accomplished with due regard to the rights of the existing organized work force. We think such an approach is preferable to unthinking actions which tend to pit one part of the population against the other.” and

WHEREAS, The Amended Revised Philadelphia Plan is a part of a pattern of conduct formulated by political strategists in the Nixon administration to divide the labor movement while slowing the process of implementing the civil rights program on voting and education in the South, and

WHEREAS, The Revised Philadelphia Plan was adopted after an admittedly improper procedure which was described by the Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance as follows: “. . . in Philadelphia we announced the Plan then did the hard research.” and

WHEREAS, The “hard research” consisted among other things of describing as “Surveys Conducted by Agencies of the United States Department of Labor” a memorandum to the files by one government employe quoting another government employe’s “conservative estimates” of “minority manpower available.” On the crucial question of minority manpower available, the Philadelphia Order is based also on a single typewritten sheet of “estimates” which apparently became a “Manpower Administration Survey” by writing those words in pencil in the upper right hand corner of the typewritten sheet, and

WHEREAS, the unsubstantiated statistics in this matter raise a serious question as to whether the high standards applicable to the fact finding processes of the Department of Labor have been fulfilled, and

WHEREAS, the Comptroller General of the United States, a non-political officer, who cannot be accused of partiality toward the labor movement, ruled the Philadelphia Revised Plan illegal (August 5, 1969) as in conflict with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and

WHEREAS, There is doubt as to the validity of the after-the-fact ruling of the Attorney General on the said Revised Philadelphia Plan issued September 22, 1969, and

WHEREAS, The Amended Revised Philadelphia Plan continues the quota system under new legal verbiage, and

WHEREAS, It is clearly evident that the Department of Labor is approaching the question of employment opportunities in the construction industry in a manner highly discriminatory to that industry and unlike the government’s approach to other industries such as the textile mills in the South as evidenced by the approved affirmative action program of the J. P. Stevens Company where the “goals” are determined by the company rather than the government and where it is specifically stated that these goals and timetables “will not be interpreted as numerical quotas . . .”, and

WHEREAS, The Amended Revised Philadelphia Plan in addition to its illegality and lack of foundation in fact is impracticable and unworkable.

RESOLVED: That this Convention go on record as opposing the Philadelphia Plan, the Revised Philadelphia Plan, and the Amended Revised Philadelphia Plan.

RESOLVED FURTHER: That the Secretary of Labor is requested to make a personal inquiry into the fact finding and other procedures leading to the issuance of the Amended Revised Philadelphia Plan to ascertain their consistency with the otherwise high standards of the Department of Labor and to take appropriate action on the basis of such inquiry.

The Committee recommends adoption of Resolution 222, and I so move.

. . . The recommendation of the Committee was adopted.

Proceedings of the Eighth Constitutional Convention of the AFL-CIO, Atlantic City, October 2–7, 1969, Vol. I, pp. 472–73.

49. BLACK CLAIMS BIAS IN UNION TRAINING PLAN

By Martin J. Herman

Randolph Hughes signed up for a six-month program to learn how to operate heavy equipment three years ago with a belief he would be making $15,000 a year after completion.

Hughes finished confident he could operate a wide variety of construction equipment. But his dream of a high salary never materialized.

It took him nearly a month after graduation to find his first job. And his first-year salary was $6,900. This year he’s made even less—about $2,500.

Discrimination Charged

The reason for his frustration, Hughes, a black man, claims, is racial discrimination by Local 542 of the International Union of Operating Engineers which ran the now defunct training program.

Hughes said in one year he was referred to 23 different jobs by Local 542. Some lasted a few days; others several weeks.

Some, he said, were long distances from his home, 6253 Old York Road, and most were of the lowest paying in the union, which has a top rate of $8.13 per hour for cherry picker and back hoe operators.

Class Action Suit

Hughes, 30, and several other program graduates, spoke at a press conference called by Community Legal Services Inc. and Attorney General J. Shane Creamer to announce a class action suit seeking to remedy discrimination against blacks by Local 542, four contractors associations and a private contractor.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court, alleges that the defendants have consistently discriminated against blacks and other minority groups to keep them from union membership and high-paying jobs that are available to whites.

The suit specifically lists 12 black persons, most of whom attended the press conference at 311 S. Juniper St. But it seeks to represent the entire class of persons who are so discriminated against.

Claimed 900 Black Members

It alleges that Local 542 was exempted from the Philadelphia Plan for Negro hiring on the basis of its claim that it already had 900 black members and an agreement that the union made with the Federal Government. The agreement was that the local would take more blacks into the union and add blacks to its apprenticeship program and upgrade the existing skills of black members then on union roles.

The suit states that the union actually has 193 black members and undertook to provide these benefits through two training programs which were financed by the state and Federal governments. Pennsylvania paid 80 percent of the cost of the programs which cost $1.2 million.

The money went to rent obsolete equipment at “prime rates,” and to pay white instructors also “prime rates,” the suit alleges.

‘Non Marketable Skills’

“In reality the blacks were trained on obsolete equipment and taught non-marketable skills, and only a handful ever received union membership,” the suit claims. The suit asked the court to supervise recruitment and job training programs of the union.

Hughes said yesterday that some of the trainees have not yet gone to work.

Those blacks who did get job referrals, he claimed, were those “who went along with anything the union said.” Hughes said he could not operate all types of equipment.

‘Because I Was Black’

“I don’t think I was discriminated against because of my inexperience,” he added. “Only because I was black.”

Howard Goodman, a CLS lawyer, said the union refers candidates to jobs through a hiring hall and that this is one way the union performed some of the discrimination. He claimed that a chronological system of referring men should be established.

Creamer said he believed it was the first time such an action had been taken against a labor union by the state. He said after investigating the allegations the state felt it was “in the public interest” to join with the CLS in the suit.

Tighter Controls Needed

William H. Wilcox, secretary of the state Department of Community Affairs, said tighter controls will have to be instituted to see the problem does not occur again. He said the program did not provide the help expected for training the hard-core unemployed.

In addition to the union, the other defendants are the General Building Contractors Association, Ind., Contractors Association of Eastern Pennsylvania Excavating Contractors Association and Glasgow Organization.

The Evening Bulletin (Philadelphia), November 9, 1971.

50. LEAP

PROJECT LEAP TO ADD JOURNEYMEN COMPONENT

As announced in late January, USDL’s Manpower Administration awarded 1.6 million dollars to the National Urban League to extend LEAP’s national contract until August 31, 1971.

The late Whitney Young’s subsequent surprise visit to the White House netted an additional award of 1.8 which brings the total package to 3.4. These additional monies are to be used to expand LEAP projects in 10 new cities. More important, though, it provides for a journeyman training component for eleven existing LEAP projects. The new component to be implemented as a unit under current outreach structures establishes a new route of entry into the building trades for minorities. The JTP will recruit, prep, and follow-up on two new groups. Skilled craftsmen who heretofore were unable to secure journeymen status and semi-skilled craftsmen, mechanics who are unable to meet Apprenticeship requirements, who with additional training can achieve journeyman status.

Cities designated by USDL for the journeymen training program are cities where Hometown Plans have not been developed: Akron, Atlanta, Baltimore, Columbus, Dayton, Hartford, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Omaha, Portland, St. Louis and Tacoma. Although New Orleans has a hometown plan it has been added to the list because the plan is under sponsorship.

Priority cities on USDL’s list for new LEAP projects are: Albany, New York; Louisville, Kentucky; Rockford, Illinois; Toledo, Ohio; Springfield, Illinois; Pueblo, Colorado; and Jefferson City, Missouri.

“WHY APPRENTICESHIP OUTREACH FAILS”

At the Atlanta Conference site, Don Slaiman, Director, AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department, discussed conclusions he has drawn after carefully assessing current apprenticeship outreach programs.

“The reasons they fail” said Slaiman, “has to do with three critical factors. First, the savvy and determination of outreach staff. Second, the cooperation of local joint apprenticeship committees.” He cited examples of good cooperation as providing information as to when and where apprenticeship openings are available, being fair with applicants, providing a calm, positive atmosphere during joint apprenticeship committee interviews. “Finally,” Slaiman explained, “NOTHING is as important as jobs and job openings.”

OFCC CONDUCTS HEARINGS IN ATLANTA

Because Hometown Plan negotiations have been at a standstill since January, OFCC conducted hearings, March 31 - April 2 to uncover reasons for the breakdown. Co-convenors for the Minority Coalition, Lyndon Wade, Executive Director of Atlanta Urban League, and Vice Mayor Maynard Jackson requested from two weeks to a month to resume negotiations and come up with a plan. OFCC is considering an imposed plan.

These events seriously hamper efforts to get the journeyman training component off the ground.

NEW ORLEANS PLAN AWAITS DOL APPROVAL

Although two key locals, Sheet Metal Workers Local No. 11 and Plumbers Marine and Steamfitters Local No. 6 are not within the scope of the New Orleans Plan, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, sponsor of the plan, is awaiting Department of Labor approval. Though signed last June, the plan was sent back twice for additions: a year-by-year breakdown of the numbers of minorities going into the locals and a budget proposal. According to Henry Braden, Director, Project LEAP, the unreasonable delay as far as he can see, can only be attributed to U.S. Attorney, John Mitchell’s delay in signing the agreement regarding actions planned by his staff.

Another reason, perhaps more significant, is the fact that the National Urban League carries the prime contract for all affiliates with outreach programs. The Urgan League of Greater New Orleans is the first affiliate sponsor of a hometown plan. Will OFCC approve the plan if the National Urban League carries the prime contract for the outreach component?

HARTFORD URBAN LEAGUE CONVENES COALITION FOR HARTFORD

Under the capable leadership of Hartford Urban League Executive Director, Bill Brown, Norm Wright, Economic Development and Employment, and Roy Dixon, Director Project LEAP, the Urban League convened a group of representatives from CAP agencies, Civil Rights groups, and social service agencies, to form a coalition for the development of a Hartford Plan. The final draft is being completed by Norm, who will then submit it to the coalition. No input from the trades or employers has been enlisted thus far. The position of the coalition is that it would be better to approach the trades and the contractors with a working document, an established base for negotiating, as opposed to entering negotiations cold.

BREAKFAST HELD IN HONOR OF BALTIMORE APPRENTICES

The Baltimore Urban League, the Baltimore Building Trades Council, and the Association of General Contractors co-sponsored a breakfast honoring more than 400 apprentices and new indentures placed through Project LEAP. Following breakfast, speeches were given by cooperating union and management officials, Travis Vauls, Executive Director, and Tom Waters, former project director for Baltimore, LEAP’s senior project.

“Some very important issues were raised later during the question and answer period,” said Project Director, Joe Washington. Primary issues raised by the apprentices centered around:

• Going through the formal apprenticeship system, meeting the age and educational requirements, and finding that whites coming in through the back door who were not required to go through the same process nor do they meet the formal requirements like, education and age that the blacks had to meet.

• Class training, another prerequisite, is seldom work related. “One of the good things that came out of the meeting,” Washington added, “was the need to establish a ‘buddy system’ within the Project itself. We have guys who are new indentures who don’t know the 1st and 2nd year guys in their same locals because of different job sites and schedules.”

Saturday morning sessions will be held to implement this buddy system where indentures will be assigned to older apprentices in the same craft as well as to discuss and resolve general problems confronted by new indenture.

The Builder (National Urban League), 1 (No. 1, 1970):1–2.

51. COALITION DEMANDS HIRING OF MINORITY WORKERS

The need for fundamental change at Boston State College has led to the formation of a coalition of progressive forces. The Coalition includes the Black Student Association, the Radical Action Union, several student representatives of S.G.A., the faculty of the New University Conference, the Fenway Campus Ministry and the Metropolitan Ministry in Higher Education. These groups and individuals have organized the coalition to establish a working relationship amongst themselves in order to confront issues which are of common concern.

The coalition is dealing with the complex issues surrounding the impending construction of a twelve story, $15.6 million dollar building at the Huntington Avenue Campus. The primary concern of the Coalition is that the building not be constructed in a vacuum, ignoring the crucial political, economic, and moral issues involved. Specifically, the coalition is determining to work with the surrounding community to insure that Black and other minority group workers are represented in significant numbers at the job site. We are also concerned that minority contracting firms receive their fair share of the contracts for the building. To this end, the coalition has begun to work with groups from the surrounding community, especially the United Community Construction Workers (U.C.C.W.). This union of Black workers has been struggling against racism and job discrimination in order to provide work with dignity to its members.

None of this will occur unless the building trades unions, the contracting corporations, the State, and the college are forced and pressured into making it happen. The coalition recognizes this fact. This recognition rests on a number of things, most importantly the collusion of all of the above in perpetuating a destructive situation for Blacks and other minority groups.

The building trades unions have traditionally been exclusionary in nature, especially discriminating against Blacks. The racism of these unions is evident today when one recognizes that a minute percentage of the membership is non-white, despite the fact that Blacks have worked for and demanded entrance into these closed unions for a long time. The unions have preferred to keep their ranks confined to small numbers of skilled workers to try to raise the wages of their members. So some workers “make it” while most others are forced to fight for jobs, let alone decent wages. These unions have lately delved into tokenism, to satisfy federal compliance laws. But, tokenism does nothing for the mass of workers.

The contracting corporations perpetuate this situation. They are solely concerned with profits. They prefer to bargain with small numbers of skilled workers, giving in on some wage demands, the cost of which they simply pass on to whomever is paying for the construction project. Thus they continue to make their huge profits and continue to manipulate a situation where black and white workers are divided and fighting each other. There is little chance then that the construction workers will confront them, for fundamental changes in their work situations; some having been bought off, some fighting each other, and most excluded from construction work by this alliance between unions and contractors.

The State and the college simply want this building up. They are not concerned if minority workers are excluded from the job, if they are unemployed, or if the repercussions from this affect the entire Black and minority communities. ‘

While they supply the money to the contractors with one hand, with the other they exude pious declarations against racism. In the contracts that have thus far been signed between the State’s Bureau of Building Construction and Contractors, there is a weak and meaningless anti-discrimination clause. It supposedly commits the contractors not to discriminate in the hiring of workers, but says nothing about the unions. In effect, there is no affirmative action demanded by the State to end racism on the job site, and no intention of forcing compliance against discrimination.

What is needed, the coalition believes, is strong and affirmative action by the State and the college to force the unions and contractors into hiring significant numbers of Black and other minority group workers. The commitment of the coalition, of U.C.C.W., and of the community is clear. This construction project can become an opportunity for Boston State to reverse its traditional non-concern with the welfare of the surrounding community, and to work effectively against racism and poverty. If the coalition cannot convince the college of the need for this, then we are prepared, along with others, to do anything necessary to see justice prevail.

No less than thirty percent (30%) of the labor force in all the construction trades, skilled and unskilled, employed on the construction sites of Boston State College will consist of Black and other minority workers. The general contractor and subcontractor shall meet this minimum requirement. The general contractor shall be held responsible for the compliance of all subcontracts.

Minority employment efforts are to be coordinated through and monitored by the United Community Construction Workers Union and the Boston State College Coalition. The UCCW’s efforts will be directed towards their membership and other sources of minority employment and training. They will provide recruiting mechanisms for the training and placing of new construction workers, skilled and unskilled. In those trades where there is not thirty percent minority employment available, the United Community Construction Workers will provide minority persons to be trained on the job in the various trades where such deficiencies exist.

Minority persons placed for training by the UCCW shall be counted toward the thirty percent requirement. The UCCW and the Coalition will provide a regular compliance check on the general and all subcontractors. In the event that a subcontractor(s) or the general contractor are found to be in violation of this affirmative action program at any time, this determination being made by the UCCW and the Coalition, they will be given twenty-four hours to bring their employment condition up to the standards provided in this contract. At the end of twenty-four hours the UCCW will again determine whether they are in compliance. If they are not in compliance, but the UCCW and the Coalition has been satisfied that adequate and sufficient steps have been taken to meet the requirements as soon as possible, then the UCCW and the Coalition may permit them to continue on the site with the understanding that the employment requirements for minority workers will be met within no more than five working days. If at the end of five working days the contractor is still not in compliance then he will be required to withdraw from the job and the construction site immediately. Any financial loss resulting from the non-compliance of the contractor will be paid to Boston State College and minority workers who were available to work, skilled, unskilled and/or for training, by the contractor found in violation and forced to withdraw from the site.

To enhance the full participation of the minority community in the construction industry, minority owned and operated construction contractors and subcontractors will be used wherever possible on the construction site. Minority contractors within and around the Boston area shall receive no less than thirty percent of all contracts and/or subcontracts to be given out for construction at Boston State College.

The same minority employment and training requirements shall be enforced against the Black and minority contractors employed on the construction sites at Boston State College. Boston State College agrees to allow the U.C.C.W. to enforce the terms of this affirmative action program on its behalf at the expense of the College.

The U.C.C.W. shall also coordinate and monitor the use of minority owned construction companies. They shall determine compliance and non-compliance with regard to all requirements set forth in the affirmative action sections of this contract. When there is a determination that there is non-compliance with regard to the employment and use of minority construction (subcontracting) companies, the general contractor shall be given five working days to comply. If there is no compliance within five working days, but sufficient steps have been taken to insure compliance (as determined by the U.C.C.W.) then the general contractor shall be given no more than eight additional days to be in compliance or to present and put into effect an acceptable alternative for that particular segment of the construction. This section applies to minority construction companies as subcontractors. Acceptability of all alternatives will be made by the U.C.C.W. and the Coalition.

United Community Construction Workers (Boston) flier (n.d. 1972) in possession of the editors.

52. THE BRICKS AND MORTAR OF RACISM

By Paul Good

Content removed at rightsholder’s request.

New York Times Magazine (May 21, 1972):24–25, 57–58, 60, 62, 64, 68–69.

53. CIVIL RIGHTS AND CHURCH LEADERS WARN OF ATTACKS ON BLACK PEOPLE

Within a period of a few days I came upon two articles which reported the latest propaganda of the non-union segment of the construction industry, this time aimed directly at black people. One article was by Bayard Rustin in a news release from the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the other article was by Msgr. George G. Higgins from the NC News Service. Rustin’s article was titled “A Sneak Attack On Black Construction Workers,” and Msgr. Higgins column was titled “Dog-Eat-Dog Job Competition Prescribed for Black Workers.”

Let me first quote from Rustin’s article:

“Today, much of the bombast, crudity, and overt racism of the recent past has disappeared. Discussion of racial issues has become more refined and civilized. But this ‘cooling off of racial rhetoric raises a new and perplexing problem: many, almost invisible assaults on black people now slip by us unnoticed and therefore unchallenged. Such a ‘sneak attack’ on black people is now underway within the construction industry.

“Blacks have finally begun to obtain their fair share of good-paying, relatively secure jobs in the unionized skilled trades. But now, just as we begin to see encouraging advances, we also witness the emergence of a bold movement among employers to undermine the wages, job security and working conditions of their new black workers by promoting something known as the ‘merit shop.’

“What exactly is the ‘merit shop’ and how does it effect black workers? The merit shop is nothing more than a non-union shop in which the employer—and the employer alone—sets wage rates, working conditions, vacations, fringe benefits, and work rules. Workers (in merit shops) lack the protections afforded by a solid collective bargaining agreement. . . .

“It is no surprise—and certainly no coincidence—that the lowpaying ‘merit shops’ have become so popular in areas with large black populations and high unemployment rates which make labor cheap and docile. . . . All of this is just the beginning for the ‘merit shop’ proponents who are organized in the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC). This powerful, well-balanced organization now hopes to significantly increase the number of ‘merit shops’ in urban areas. By focusing its anti-union, wage-cutting efforts in the cities, ABC will be undermining the position of black workers, workers who have enjoyed the benefits and high wages of union jobs.

“If we ignore this sneak attack on blacks, we will be openly accepting the cruel destruction of opportunity for the black working class, a group which has overcome numerous obstacles in the long struggle for equality and security,” Rustin concluded.

Msgr. Higgins is very disturbed about the essay of a college professor, published in the Wall Street Journal. Walter E. Williams, associate professor of economics at Temple University, declared that blacks don’t need a ‘political savior—what they need is the opportunity to compete in the market.’ But what the professor means by that is that the federal minimum wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act, and all other laws that ‘restrict competition’ in the workplace should be repealed. He also says, in effect, that black workers would be better off if there were no unions because unions limit competition in the marketplace. Msgr. Higgins said that such policies as Professor Williams favors would condemn black workers to the same kind of dog-eat-dog competition that all workers were exposed to in this country before trade unionism and before the enactment of protective labor legislation.¹³⁰

True to form, Professor Williams furnishes the National Association of Manufacturers’ pet argument that employment inevitably declines after increases in the minimum wage go into effect and that black workers are the main victims. (The fact is that civilian employment was 4.3 million higher in March 1979 than in December 1977 just prior to the increase in the minimum wage. There were 25,000 more black teenagers employed in March 1979 than in December 1977, and unemployment of black teenagers declined by 46,000).

Msgr. Higgins has stated that Professor Williams’ arguments against trade unions insult the intelligence of black workers. In fact, black union members fare considerably better than non-union blacks and within the ranks of union members the income gap between blacks and whites is less than among non-union workers. Fortunately, black workers know far better than Professor Williams does which side their bread is buttered on, he said.

Our thanks to both Bayard Rustin and Msgr. Higgins for calling attention to the latest propaganda of anti-union forces against the black workers of America. We agree that their nonsense should be exposed for what it is at every opportunity.

General President

The Laborer (Laborers International Union), August, 1979.