Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-m9pkr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-09T13:26:17.491Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

What if Labor Were Not White and Male? Recentering Working-Class History and Reconstructing Debate on the Unions and Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

David Roediger
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota

Extract

During World War Two Alexander Saxton, the great historian of race and class, was a young activist working in the railroad industry. In a lengthy article for the Daily Worker he caught the complexity of racial discrimination among railway unions. The brotherhoods which organized railroad labor inculded several unions which had historically established the worst records of attempting to enforce what one commentator called the “Nordic closed shop” in their crafts. By the time Saxton wrote, however, the railwayunions had joined in campaigns against the poll tax and against lynching. What they avoided was agitation against “alleged” racism in their own workplaces. When the Fair Employment Practices Committee canceled hearings inquiring into discrimination in railroad employment, the unions rejoiced. Their newspaper observed that in any case such hearings would be illegitimate if African Americans joined in the deliberations. “Thereshould be on the Committee,” according to Labor, “no representative of any race or special interest.” Saxton added, “Apparently white men belongto no race.”

Type
Workers in Racially-stratified Societies
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Saxton's “Discrimination on the Railroads” is in his possession in typescript and will appear in a forthcoming collection of his historical essays. On the hearings, the delays, and the history of discrimination in railroad labor see Hill, Herbert, Black Labor and the American Legal System (Madison, 1985), 334–72.Google Scholar On the “Nordic closed shop” see Houston, Charles, “Foul Employment Practice on the Rails,” The Crisis 56 (1949):270Google Scholar. Eric Arnesen's research alerted me to Houston's article.

2. Reed, Bernice Anita, “Accommodation Between Negro and White Employees in a West Coast Aircraft Industry, 1942–1944,” Social Forces 26 (1947):7677CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 78–84 passim. I take “whiteness as property” from Harris', Cheryl remarkable “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993):1701–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Northrup, Herbert, Organized Labor and the Negro (New York, 1944), 16;Google ScholarMorrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 1992), 47.Google Scholar

4. Commons, John R. et al. , History of Labor in the United States, 4 vols. (New York, 19181935), 2:252–53;Google ScholarHill, Herbert, “Anti-Oriental Agitation and the Rise of Working-Class Racism,” Society 10 (1973):4851;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFrank, Dana, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cambridge, 1994), 228–32.Google Scholar

5. See Foner, Philip S. and Lewis, Ronald L., Black Workers: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia, 1989), 567–70;Google ScholarFoner, Philip S., Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619–1973 (New York, 1976), 328–46.Google Scholar The quotation on seniority rights is from an AFL-CIO position paper regarding congressional antidiscrimination legislation in 1964, as quoted in Hill, Herbert, “Black Workers, Organized Labor, and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Legislative History and Litigation Record,” in Race in America: The Struggle for Equality, ed. Hill, and Jones, James E. (Madison, 1993), 272.Google Scholar On labor's propagation of the idea and language of “reverse discrimination” see Foner, Philip S., “Black Workers and the Labor Movement: Recent Transformations,” in The United States in Crisis: Marxist Analyses, ed. Biro, Lajos and Cohen, Marc J. (Minneapolis, 1979), 5556;Google Scholar Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 259, 289, 308.

6. Hill, “Black Workers, Organized Labor, and Title VII,” 272; Foner and Lewis, Black Workers, 621; Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” passim.

7. Fullerton, Howard Jr., “The 2005 Labor Force: Growing, but Slowly,” Monthly Labor Review 118 (1995):2944.Google Scholar calculations from Table 1, on 30; Spalter-Roth, Roberta, Hartman, Heidi, and Collins, Nancy, “What Do Unions Do for Women?” in Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, ed. Friedman, Sheldon (Ithaca, 1995), 195.Google Scholar Union membership statistics are from a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics news release (February 9, 1996), accessible at gopher//hopi2.bls.gov:70/00hopiftp.dev/news.release/union2.txt.

8. Draper, Alan, Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954–1968 (Ithaca, 1994), 45.Google Scholar

9. Moberg, David, “Gritty Strikers Chip Away at Pittston Intransigence,” In These Times (November 15–21, 1989), 22;Google ScholarMalcolm X: Labor's Ally?Union (Service Employees International) 7 (1993); 2627;Google ScholarHawking, C.J., “Staley Union Builds Community Support,” Labor Notes (April 1994);Google Scholar 3. The chants and music in Decatur occurred during 1994 Labor Day demonstrations there, attended by the author. Rachleff, Peter, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (Boston, 1993), 65, 85;Google Scholar interview with Rachleff (St. Paul, July 26, 1996).

10. For recent attempts to historicize labor's current position, see Lichtenstein, Nelson, “Revitalizing America's Labor Movement,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 1996Google Scholar, B1-B2. Elizabeth Faue explicitly refers to a membership “less white” and “more female” than ever in discussing possibilities for change in “Anti-Heroes of the Working Class,” forthcoming in International Review of Social History; see also Rachleff's, Peter “Seeds of Insurgence,” in U.S.A. Labor in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hinshaw, John and Le Blanc, PaulGoogle Scholar (forthcoming). Boal, Iain and Watts, Michael, “Working Class Heroes,” Transition 68 (Winter, 1995):90115.Google Scholar

11. Hill, Herbert, “Black-Jewish Relations in the Labor Context,” Race Traitor 5 (1996):8192.Google Scholar

12. Burkins, Glenn, “In Switch, Employers Accuse Labor Unions of Playing Race Card,” Wall Street Journal, May 28, 1996.Google ScholarSee also Johnston, Paul, Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism and the Public Workplace (Ithaca, 1994), especially 213–14;Google ScholarPerkinson, Robert, “A New Voice at Old Blue,” Z Magazine (July–Auggust, 1996): 19–21.Google Scholar

13. Goldberg, Barry Herbert, “Beyond Free Labor: Labor. Socialism, and the Idea of Wage Slavery, 1890–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1979), 281–82Google Scholar (for Haywood) and passim; Goldberg, , “Wage Slaves' and White ‘Niggers’,” New Politics 11 (second series. 1991):6483;Google ScholarGlickman, Lawrence B., “Wage Slavery and American Labor, 1865–1910,” paper presented at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting, Atlanta, April 16, 1994.Google Scholar

14. Burkins, “In Switch, Employers Accuse Labor Unions of Playing Race Card”; Levine, Lawrence, “Slave Songs and Slave Consciousness,” in American Negro Slavery, ed. Weinstein, Allen, Sarasohn, David, and Gatell, Frank Otto (New York, 1976), 143–72.Google ScholarStuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987);Google ScholarBrown, Elsa Barkley, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (1994):107–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Blewett, Mary, Men, Women and Work: Class, Gender and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1860 (Urbana, 1988);Google ScholarStansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1986);Google ScholarKessler-Harris, Alice, A Woman' Wage: Historical Meaning and Social Consequences (Lexington, 1990):Google ScholarDublin, Thomas, Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca, 1994);Google ScholarBenson, Susan Porter, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1910 (Urbana, 1986).Google Scholar

16. Kelley, Robin D.G., “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80 (1993):75112:CrossRefGoogle ScholarLewis, Earl, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, 1991);Google ScholarTrotter, Joe William, Coal, Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–1932 (Urbana, 1990);Google ScholarVargas, Zaragosa, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917–1933 (Berkeley, 1993);Google Scholarsee also Grossman, James, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989);CrossRefGoogle ScholarFriday, Chris, Organizing Asian-American Workers: The Pacific Coast Salmon Industry, 1870–1942 (Philadelphia, 1994).Google Scholar

17. Littlefield, Alice and Knack, Martha C., eds. Native Americans and Wage Labor: Ethnohistorical Perspectives (Norman, 1996);Google ScholarLinebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, “The Many-Headed Hydra,” Journal of Historical Sociology 3 (1990): 225–53;CrossRefGoogle ScholarLinebaugh, Peter, “All the Atlantic Mountains Shook,” Labour/Le Travail 10 (1982):87121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in the Cotton Culture of Central Texas (forthcoming); Takaki, Ronald, Paui Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu, 1983):Google ScholarAlmaguer, Tomas, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994);Google ScholarNelson, Bruce, “The Lords of the Docks Reconsidered: Race Relations Among West Coast Longshoremen, 1933–1961,” in Essays in Waterfront Labor History, ed. Winslow, Calvin (forthcoming from University of Illinois Press).Google Scholar

19. Ruiz, Vicki, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque, 1987);Google ScholarGlenn, Evelyn Nakano, “The Dialectics of Wage Work: Japanese-American Women and Domestic Service, 1905–1940,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History ed. Dubois, Ellen and Ruiz, Vicki (New York, 1990):Google Scholar Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem,’” 75–112. Tera Hunter's To'Joy My Freedom, a study of African-American domestic service in Atlanta, forthcoming from Harvard University Press, sets new standards in this area; equally impressive is Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 107–46.

20. Roediger, David, “Precapitalism in One Confederacy: A Note on Genovese, Politics and the Slave South,” in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, ed. Roediger, (New York, 1994);Google Scholar Martin Glaberman, “Slaves and Proletarians: The Debate Continues” and Ignatiev, Noel, “Reply to Martin Glaberman,” Labour/Le Travail 36 (1995):207–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Boyle, Kevin, “The Kiss: Racial and Gender Conflict in an American Automobile Factory,” paper presented at the Organization of American Historians meeting, March 30-April 1, 1995Google Scholar, Washington, DC; Janiewski, Dolores, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia, 1985).Google Scholar

22. Hall, Jacqueline Dowd et al. , Like a Family: The Making of the Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, 1987):CrossRefGoogle Scholar Frank, Purchasing Power; Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife (forthcoming); Lewis, In Their Own Interests; Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” 107–46; Faue, Elizabeth, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill, 1991).Google Scholar

23. Baron, Ava, Work Engendered: Towards a New History of Men, Women, and Work (Ithaca, 1991);Google ScholarCooper, Patricia, Once a Cigarmaker: Men, Women and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories (Urbana, 1987);Google ScholarFreeman, Joshua, “Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness and the 1970 Pro-War Demonstrations,” Journal of Social History 26 (1993): 725–44;CrossRefGoogle ScholarTaillon, Paul, “By Every Right and Tradition: Racism and Fraternalism in the Railway Brotherhoods, 1880–1910,” paper delivered at the American Studies Association meeting, Baltimore, November, 1991);Google ScholarChauncey, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

24. Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, 1993), 85;Google ScholarLott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

25. Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995);Google ScholarSacks, Karen Brodkin, “How did Jews Become White Folks?” in Race, ed. Sanjek, Roger and Gregory, Steven (New Brunswick, 1995);Google ScholarVecoli, Rudolph, “Are Italian Americans Just White Folks?” Italian Americana (Summer, 1995): 149–65;Google Scholar James Barrett and David Roediger, “Inbetween Peoples; Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class” (forthcoming in Journal of American Ethnic History).

26. Hill, Herbert, “Race, Ethnicity and Organized Labor: The Opposition to Affirmative Action,” New Politics, 1 (second series, 1987):3182;Google ScholarHill, , “Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 2 (1988): 1299;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBrier, Stephen, “In Defense of Gutman: The Union's Case,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 2 (1989): 394 (quoting Salvatore) and passim.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27. Lichtenstein, “Revitalizing America's Labor Movement,” B2.

28. DuBois as quoted in Keppel, Ben, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge, 1995), 50:Google ScholarWilson, Francille Rusan, “Black Workers' Ambivalence Toward Unions,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 2 (1989):378–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. On Cayton, see Hill, Herbert, “The Problem of Race in Labor History,” Reviews in American History 24 (1996):199;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDrake, St. Clair and Cayton, Horace, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945), 314, 341.Google Scholar Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, passim.

30. Such a question is powerfully suggested in Bruce Nelson's “Class, Race and Democracy in the CIO: The New Labor History Meets the ‘Wages of Whiteness’,” (forthcoming in International Review of Social History). Representative of the attention to nuance and variation in the best recent work is Arnesen, Eric, “‘Like Banquo's Ghost, It Will Not Down’: The Race Question and the American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 99 (1994):1601–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. See note 29 above and DuBois, W.E.B., The Crisis Writings, ed. Walden, Daniel (Greenwich, 1972), 380,388–9;Google ScholarDuBois, , “Behold the Land,” Freedomways 4 (Winter 1967):12.Google Scholar

32. Cochran, Bert, “American Labor in Midpassage,” in American Labor in Midpassage, ed. Cochran, (New York, 1959), 57.Google Scholar

33. Hill, “Myth-Making as Labor History,” 195; Brier, “In Defense of Gutman,” 393.

34. Though overgeneralized into a sweeping critique of Marxism, Shulman, Steven, “Racism and the Making of the American Working Class,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 2 (1989):362 is acute on these matters.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSee also DuBois, W.E.B., Black Reconstruction in America (New York, 1992; orig. pub. 1935), 700701.Google Scholar

35. Rawick, George, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, 1972), 156. I take the tone of Hill, “The Problem of Race,” and of remarks on race in the recent Labor History symposium on Robert Zieger's The ClO to be possible harbingers of fuller and more productive debate.Google Scholar See Nelson, Bruce et al. , “Robert Zieger's History of the CIO: A Symposium,” Labor History 37 (1996):157–88.Google Scholar

36. Goldfield, Michael, “Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism During the 1930s and 1940s,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 44 (1993):132, is a well-done recent example. Considerable emphasis is placed on whether union leaders or the white rank and file deserves the blame for lack of antiracist progress in unions;CrossRefGoogle Scholarsee, for example, Glaberman, Martin, “Review of Nelson Lichtenstein's The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor,” Impact (May, 1996)Google Scholar, back cover; and Nelson, “Class, Race, and Democracy” on “cadre,”“mass,” and race.

37. Arnesen, Eric, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York, 1991);Google ScholarTrotter, , Coal, Class and Color; Honey, Michael. Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana, 1994);Google ScholarHalpern, Rick, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1920–1960 (forthcoming from University of Illinois Press);Google Scholar Roger Horowitz, “Without a Union We're All Lost': Ethnicity. Race and Unionism Among Kansas City Packinghouse Workers,” paper presented at the Rethinking American Labor History Conference, Madison, Wisconsin. April, 1992.

38. Mink, Gwendolyn, Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party and State, 1875–1920 (Ithaca, 1986);Google ScholarSaxton, Alexander, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley, 1971), 201–84.Google Scholar

39. Olson, Bruce A. and Howard, Jack L., “Armed Elites Confront Labor: The Texas Militia and the Houston Strikes of 1880 and 1898,” Labor's Heritage 8 (1995): 5263;Google ScholarLichtenstein, Alex, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London, 1996).Google Scholar

40. Roediger, David, “Gaining a Hearing For Black-White Unity,” in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, ed. Roediger, (New York, 1994), 127–80.Google Scholar

41. Goldfield, Michael, “The Color of Politics in the United States,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Capra, Dominick La (Ithaca, 1991), 124.Google Scholar

42. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 20, 23, 17–46 passim;Google ScholarHarris, William H., The Harder We Run: Black Workers since the Civil War (New York, 1982), 2526;Google ScholarCommons, John R. et al. , History of Labor in the United States, 4 vol. (New York, 1966, orig. pub. 19181935), 2:113, 134–37;Google ScholarMatison, Sumner E., “The Labor Movement and the Negro During Reconstruction,” Journal of Negro History 33 (1948): 445–52:CrossRefGoogle ScholarCommons, John R. et al. , A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, 10 vols. (Cleveland, 1910), 9:135, 485–88.Google Scholar

43. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 23, 25–26. Myers's speech was published in the Chicago Workingman's Advocate (September 1, 1869).Google Scholar

44. Logan, Rayford W., The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1965), 149:Google ScholarFoner, Philip S. and Lewis, Ronald, eds. The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present, 8 vols. (Philadelphia, 19781984), 1:407, 3:66;Google ScholarSpero, Sterling and Harris, Abram, The Black Worker (New York, 1969), 18;Google ScholarRoediger, David, “Racism, Reconstruction, and the Labor Press: The Rise and Fall of the Saint Louis Daily Press, 1864–1866,” Science and Society 42 (1978):156–77:Google Scholar Commons et al., History of Labor, 2:135; Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 21–22, 27; Harris, The Harder We Run, 25–26; Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 479–81.Google Scholar

45. For superb accounts of this issue and of the moral stakes involved for organized labor, see Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy, and Messer-Kruse, Timothy, “Chinese Exclusion and the Eight-Hour Day: Ira Steward's Political Economy of ‘Cheap Labor’” (unpublished paper, 1994). Professor Messer-Kruse is at the University of Toledo.Google Scholar

46. Sylvis, James C., ed. The Life, Speeches, Labors and Essays of William H. Sylvis (Philadelphia, 1872), 339–46;Google Scholar Philip S. Foner and Ronald Lewis, eds. Black Workers, 160.

47. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 23–24, 48; Foner and Lewis, eds. Black Workers, 9–10. My own work has similiarly moved back and forth on the NLU's record on race; Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991), 168–69.Google Scholar

48. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 27, 29–34; Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 480; Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 23; Foner and Lewis eds. Black Workers, 12–13, 453–54.

49. Even Philip Foner's forceful attempts to rewrite histories of working-class race relations consistently move, for the Reconstruction period, from (white) organized labor to the black worker. See Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 16–46; and DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 3–31, 352–70. For the quotations, see Black Reconstruction, 727; Harris, The Harder We Run, 7.

50. DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 370, 577, 596; Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro, 7–8.

51. DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 354–55; Foner and Lewis, eds. Black Workers, 1:407–8. See also Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 27; Krause, Paul, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture and Steel (Pittsburgh, 1992), 113–14;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Boston Daily Evening Voice (May 21, 1866). Saxton, Alexander, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990), 301–4 offers useful commentary on failed efforts to extend “producerism” to black workers.Google Scholar

52. David Saposs, “Interview with Elmer Carter,” Saposs Collection. State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison), Series 4, Box 21, Folder 5; DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 354–55.

53. Foner and Lewis, eds., The Black Worker, 1:379.

54. Ibid., 1:385. Labor historiography at times reproduces this logic. Thus Sumner Rosen could write in 1968 that the “Textile Workers Union, although squarely within the ClO tradition of racial equality, [has] found itself forced to accept Southern practices of segregation in hiring and assignment.” Rosen, , “The ClO Era, 1935–55,” in The Negro and the American Labor Movement, ed. Jacobson, Julius (New York, 1968), 202.Google Scholar

55. On “stomach equality.” see David R. Roediger, “Gaining a Hearing,” 139–48; Sylvis, ed., Life of Sylvis. 339–46; Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 26.

56. Roediger, “Gaining a Hearing,” 140–44: Morgan, Shubel, “The Negro and the Union: A Dialogue,” in American Labor in Midpassage, ed. Cochran, Bert (New York, 1959), 144–49;Google Scholar Cochran, “American Labor in Midpassage.” 57.

57. Roediger, “Gaining a Hearing,” 154: Hill, “Black Workers, Organized Labor and Title VII,” 275–81; Norrell, Robert, “Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama,” Journal of American History 73 (1986):669–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58. Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 67. On “intermingling” and Isaac Myers, see Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 35.

59. Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 58, 66–68; Boyle, “The Kiss,” passim; McKay, Claude, The Negroes in America, ed. McLeod, Alan, trans. Winter, Robert J. (Port Washington, 1979), 38;Google Scholar Foner and Lewis, eds., The Black Worker, 1:372. On the costs of the lack of “bridges” between black and white workers, see Rachleff's, Peter fine Black Labor in Richmond, 1865–1890 (Urbana, 1989), 137–38.Google Scholar

60. Quoted in Palladino, Grace, “Forging a National Union: Electrical Workers Confront Issues of Craft, Race and Gender, 1890–1902,” Labor's Heritage 3 (1990):1314.Google Scholar

61. Foner, Eric, Reconstruction, 480; (Chicago) Workingman's Advocate, 03 27, 1869:Google Scholar Foner and Lewis, Black Workers, 2:144–48; DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 283 (on Johnson); on the NLU and the charge of reverse racism against a prominent CNLU leader, see Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 29.

62. Foner, Eric, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983), 85100.Google ScholarOn state power, violence, and black labor in Reconstruction, see Saville, Julie, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Labor in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, 1994), 177–89.Google Scholar

63. DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 55–83, 357–70, 381–486, quotation from 596; cf. Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 28.

64. DuBois, Black Reconstruction, 357–70, esp. 368; Messer-Kruse, “Chinese Exclusion,” 22, 28; Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 34–37; Hill, “Problem of Race,” 193–95. The cooperative which Isaac Myers headed, formed as a result of a hate strike by whites, employed white workers; Foner and Lewis, eds. Black Workers, 155–56.

65. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 173–76.

66. For Cameron, see Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 20; for Marx, see Padover, Saul K., ed., Marx on America and the Civil War (New York, 1972), 244. The CNLU branded exclusion “an insult to God, injury to us and disgrace to humanity.”Google ScholarSee Valien, Preston, “The ‘Mentalities’ of Negro and White Workers,” Social Forces, 29 (05, 1949): 436.Google Scholar

67. Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 43; Roediger, David, “Albert Parsons,” in Haymarket Scrapbook, ed. Roediger, and Rosemont, Franklin (Chicago, 1986), 27.Google Scholar In the same volume, see Roediger, “Strange Legacies: The Black International and Black America,” 93–96.

68. Palladino, “Forging a National Union,” 14; Roediger, “Racism, Reconstruction and the Labor Press,” 70. See also Foner and Lewis, eds. The Black Worker, 3:131; Marshall, Ray, “The Negro in Southern Unions,” in The Negro and the American Labor Movement, ed. Jacobson, Julius (New York, 1968), 138–39.Google Scholar

69. On the dynamism and militancy of postbellum blacks in the South, including many tramping strikes and some armed ones, see Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom, 83–106; Saville, Work of Reconstruction, 177; Foner and Lewis, eds. The Black Worker, 1:344–64, 2:144, 162–64, 183, 277–78, 3:65, 75, 275; Bennett, Lerone Jr., The Shaping of Black America (Chicago, 1975), 247;Google ScholarFoner, Eric, “Black Labor Conventions during Reconstruction,” in Culture, Gender, Race and US. Labor History, ed. Kent, Ronald C. et al. , (Westport, 1993), 91104;Google Scholar Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 47–63; Rachleff, Black Labor in Richmond, esp. 28–29.

70. Whatley, Warren C., “African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal,” Social Science History 17 (1993):530–32;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Foner and Lewis, eds. Black Workers, 15, 18–20; Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom, 106; Foner and Lewis, eds. The Black Worker, 1:357–58; 2:141–47; 3:53, 66–67, 91–93, 141, 272; McLeod, Jonathan W., Workers and Workplaces in Reconstruction-Era Atlanta: A Case Study (Los Angeles, 1989);Google Scholar Olson and Howard, “Armed Elites Confront Labor,” 52–56; Shofner, Jerrell H., “Militant Negro Laborers in Reconstruction Florida,” Journal of Southern History 39 (1973):397408;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMinutes of the General Council of the First International, 1870–1871 (Moscow, n.d.), 228;Google ScholarTindall, George, South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900 (Columbia, 1952), 138.Google Scholar The two counterexamples of African-American strikebreaking in “white” strikes not listed in Whatley are in McLeod, Workers and Workplaces, 98; Foner and Lewis, eds., The Black Worker, 3:52.

71. Hill, “Problem of Race,” 197, 206; Montgomery, David, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967);Google ScholarRoediger, David and Foner, Philip S., Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (London, 1989), xi.Google ScholarSee also Stanley, Amy Dru, “Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation,” Journal of American History 75 (1988):471500, for a sense of the profound issues raised by study of gender and labor.CrossRefGoogle Scholar