The Problem of Race in American Labor History

The Problem of Race in American Labor History
Author(s): Herbert Hill

Source: Reviews in American History, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), pp. 189-208
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646
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THE PROBLEM OF RACE IN
AMERICAN LABOR HISTORY
Herbert Hill
Much recent labor history has been devoted to studies of black workers and to
the racial practices of labor unions. With some noteworthy exceptions,
however, contemporary labor historians have failed to confront the funda-
mental issue: the historical development of working-class identity as racial
identity. Many labor historians continue to underestimate the depth of
American racism. They fail to understand its deep roots in a precapitalist past
in Europe and America and consequently underestimate the resistance to the
elimination of racist practices and institutions in labor movements no less
than in society at large. From John R. Commons and Selig Perlman in the
early years of the twentieth century to the work of Philip Taft in the 1960s,
what usually passed for labor history was really union history. With few
exceptions, traditional labor history consisted of institutional studies of labor
organizations based largely on an examination of union records. If traditional
labor historians and economists such as Commons, Perlman, Taft, and others
identified with the Wisconsin School mention black and other nonwhite
workers at all, it is as a problem for white labor unions.
This is hardly surprising given Commons's expressed views on what
called "race differences." Additionally, Commons believed that labor un
were only appropriate for Caucasians, that the backward nonwhite races we
lazy, could not compete, and therefore did not need unions. Selig Perlm
undoubtedly represented the views of this group of labor historians when h
wrote that "the most important single factor in the history of American lab
was its success in excluding what he called "Mongolian labor" from the work
force and in securing the adoption of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, th
first racist immigration law in American history.' The central point about t
Commons school, whose views corresponded to the racial policies a
practices of the leadership of the American Federation of Labor, is that the
were overtly racist and made no excuses or apologies for their positio
Charles H. Wesley, Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, Herbert
Northrup, and Philip S. Foner produced very different critical studies
stood apart from the prevailing tendency.2
In reaction to the traditional school, a new group of labor historians bega
Reviews in American History 24 (1996) 189-208 @ 1996 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
190 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 1996
to emerge in the late 1960s. Aware of the limitations of the olde

critical of their methods, Herbert Gutman and David Montgo
others, generated a social history based upon a revived p
Marxism. In their revolt against the "old labor history" they
"study the people": in short to do for American labor histor
Thompson had done for English labor history. The contribu
group, who were much more sophisticated in their view of s
than their predecessors, represent a significant advance over the
earlier labor historians. Nonetheless, Gutman and his followers r
race question as a subsidiary feature of class developmen
approach, still largely predominant in labor studies, while gen
thetic to black workers, treated their collective identity and the
interests as an interference in the formation of a unified worki
regarded the issue of race as an impediment to the class struggle
tends therefore to overlook or excuse the racist practices of org
and to mythologize aspects of labor history in order to make
ideological requirements.3
Nell Irvin Painter puts it in a nutshell when she writes that "t
history has a race problem." This explains, she argues, how David
ery could celebrate the machinists as "the embodiment of the fi
republican tradition, without mentioning that they were ardent
whose union's constitution prohibited black memberships un
scribing Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic, a representative work
labor history, as a "flawed study," Painter points out that
Wilentz makes a hero of a labor leader who is a racist and anti-Semite .... Wilentz
fails to embed race in his analysis, which given the central place that racism
occupies in American culture, is necessary in labor history as in much of
American studies. ... Neither Montgomery's late nineteenth and early twentieth-
century industrial workers nor Wilentz's antebellum New York workers make
sense when their contexts (in their social as well as economic aspects) are distorted
through the deletion of black workers and white racism.4
Labor historians committed to the belief that racial conflict among workers
is a consequence of class relations or an expression of "false consciousness,"
celebrate the episodic occurrences of interracial solidarity while ignoring the
overall historical pattern. If the evidence for their case proves inconclusive,
then it is suggested that many more unspecified examples will be uncovered
by further diligent research. Wishful thinking about the white working class
and the primacy of ideological goals over analytical integrity tend to be
characteristic of the new labor history.
Thus Who Built America? (1989), the textbook that is the epitome of the new
HILL / The Problem of Race in American Labor History 191
labor history approach, confidently declares that "Decades of conflic

the status of slavery [having] ended;.., a new drama pitting capital
labor was about to begin" (p. 415). But the conflict about the status of bl
in American society was not ended by emancipation, and the legac
slavery was to continue through the segregation era into the contem
period. Race in fact remains the fundamental and enduring division
nation, whereas if we are to believe Who Built America? two hundred and
years of slavery were merely the prelude for the class struggle.
The argument that class is the essence of history is exemplified by the
of Marxist historian Barbara J. Fields, who states that "class refers to m
circumstances .... Race, on the other hand, is a purely ideological no
For her "white supremacy is a slogan, not a belief."5 According to Fields
reality of class exists independently of consciousness, whereas the idea o
is merely a social construct and hence of lesser importance. In her effor
find a place for race in orthodox Marxist doctrine she assigns to c
theoretical category of primary significance, while placing race in a der
role. This is, of course, another version of the Marxist formula regardin
and superstructure, and it ignores the actual, material effects of race in
different contexts. It also ignores the fact that class is no less a constru
is race.
This influential but defective approach is now increasingly rejected by

scholars. George M. Fredrickson, in a perceptive critique of Fields writes that
she
and other historians in the Marxist tradition who argue that "class" is real and
"race" is not are captives of a theory of social relationships that arbitrarily
privileges one form of social inequality over others .... Although race and class
are both historical inventions--creative interpretations of alternative types of
human differences-it would be a mistake to infer that, once invented, they do not
become durable and enormously influential ways of perceiving the world. The
construction of class may lead to class conflict, revolution, and socialist societies.
The construction of race may lead to secession in defense of racial slavery, the
creation of social orders based on racial caste, or gas ovens for stigmatized
people.6
Fields is also criticized by Howard Winant, who writes that she "fails to
recognize the salience a social construct can develop over half a millennium
... as a fundamental principal of social organization and identity formation."
Winant believes that "at the level of experience, of everyday life, race is a
relatively impermeable part of our identities. U.S. society is so thoroughly
racialized that to be without racial identity is to be in danger of having no
identity."7
Many labor historians and others whose interpretations are based upon
Marxist assumptions have long been imprisoned by an ideo

them either to ignore the racism of the white working clas
by attributing it to manipulation by employers-what
Erik Olin Wright has called "a divide-and-conquer strategy
he acknowledges "has perhaps been the central theme in M
of the subject."8 Marxist theory fails to recognize the prim
development of the American social order and, as a con
and those influenced by Marxist ideology deny or minimiz
no place in their theory.
Putting racial identity and social meaning at the center o
possible an understanding of race and working-class beh
lacking in much of labor history. Once the notion of a
determined, polarized class structure is abandoned, it
many forces interact with race in a variety of ways and th
principle such as the idea of class struggle can account
behavior.
The concept of racial formation as developed by Michael Omi and Howard

Winant in their book Racial Formation in the United States (1986) provides a
valuable analytical perspective along these lines. They begin with the premise
that race is a fundamental organizing principal of social relations, irreducible
to any other social force. It operates they argue, as an "unstable and
'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by
political struggles" (p. 68). They suggest that race is not a fixed entity, but
rather a cluster of meanings and that the process of racialization confers racial
meaning on identities, practices, and institutions.
This perspective manages to avoid two of the fallacies that bedevil most
other attempts at the conceptualization of race in labor history. It avoids the
dominant tendency that fails to treat race on its own terms but rather as a
consequence of something else of "real" ontological status that has full
conceptual independence. At the same time, it avoids reifying the concept of
race as an ahistorical essence moving across time and space, unaffected by
changing economic, political, and ideological considerations. Thus the con-
cept of racial formation provides a useful foundation for a critical examina-
tion of race as it acquires different meanings, depending on specific historical
circumstances.
Quite clearly, it is necessary to move beyond the limitations of class

analysis in order to realize the full potential of social theory as it applies to
race, and to free the analysis of race and class from the restrictive framework
of Marxist ideology. Furthermore, as we come to the end of the twentieth
century, it is evident that the theory that is grounded in the belief that the
industrial working class will be the source of a great social transformation is
untenable.
The Marxist idea of the revolutionary proletariat fulfilling its his

mission through class struggle is part of a teleology in which class is de
and race and other factors are derivative and of lesser significance. It m
recognized, however, that even at the point of production workers are n
just workers because they have other identities which carry substantive
meaning. Thus race, religion, ethnicity, gender, skill level, and langu
contribute to the formation of workers' identity.
Implicit in much contemporary labor history is the concept of a cohe
class entity that exists above and beyond these divisions. For the w
class to have been "divided" by external agencies it would need to ha
an original unitary existence, but working-class identity does not exist b
everything else; it is not primordial and it is always already divided
it is being formed. The "divisions" emphasized by labor historians ar
and define, at the workplace and in the community, social identities tha
fundamental in themselves. Inevitably, multiple factors will determ
identity of workers, race and gender being foremost among them.
John Bodnar's detailed description of the development of working
identity, which reveals the immigrant worker of the late nineteenth an
twentieth centuries as insular and culturally conservative, illustrate
point. Bodnar's extensive research over two decades shows that fam
ethnic community were far more important in immigrant workers' live
the workplace and the union.' Scholars working in feminist theory,
reject the gendered concept of class that has been a characteristic of bot
new and the old labor history, are conducting important investiga
regarding the formation of workers' identity. Joan Wallach Scott's stud
garment workers found that gender and family were of primary impor
in identity formation and that they defined themselves in these terms.
and others have demonstrated that the abstract notion of class as the pr
referent for the workers' identity is shown to be inaccurate.10
While a multiplicity of factors besides race may have intersected at v
times with class, race was decisive in the formation of the white workin
during the period of slavery and again during its recomposition in
Reconstruction Period and after. Hence close study of white labor an
labor during Reconstruction is essential for an understanding of later de
opments in labor history. The 1869 convention of the National Labor
serves as a telling example.
On the morning of August 18, 1869, Isaac Myers, a skilled black c
from Baltimore, who would later become president of the colored N
Labor Union, addressed the white National Labor Union convention in
Philadelphia. The National Labor Union was the first national federation of
labor of some permanence after the brief International Industrial Assembly of
North America of 1864 and it was the lineal ancestor of the Knights of Labor
and the American Federation of Labor. Myers, who repr

Caulkers Trade Union Society of Baltimore, was accompa
tives of the Colored Molders Union Society, the Colored
tion, and the Colored Painters Society. In addition to the f
from Maryland there were five black union leaders from P
represented the United Hod Carriers' and Laborers Asso
vania, the United Hod Carriers' Union, the United Hod Carr
and the Workingmen's Union of Philadelphia. In his addres
equal treatment and acceptance of the black worker by org
I speak today for the colored men of the whole country,.... when
they ask for themselves is a fair chance; that you shall be no w
them that chance; that you and they will dwell in peace and ha
The white men of the country have nothing to fear from the co
We desire to see labor elevated and made respectable; we d
highest rate of wages that our labor is worth; ... And you, gentle
the support of the colored laborer of this country in bringing
American citizenship with the black man is a complete failure,
from the workshops of this country."
The response to Myers's speech came on August 21, the c

convention. White organized labor had a choice and aft
Convention rejected Myers's appeal and instead adopte
black workers to separate labor organizations as the basis f
the National Labor Union. In practice this meant that b
continue to be left outside the ranks of organized labor as
National Labor Union nor its affiliated unions had any
them.
W. E. B. DuBois, commenting on these events, wrote:
the white worker did not want the Negro in his unions, did not believe in him as
a man, dodged the question, and when he appeared at conventions, asked him to
organize separately; that is outside the real labor movement, in spite of the fact
that it was a contradiction of all sound labor policy.12
As Rayford W. Logan pointed out, "It is not without interest that the first
large-scale exclusion of Negroes by private organizations in the post-bellum
period was the handiwork of organized labor."13 From its inception the
National Labor Union was confronted by the problem of race, and each of the
national labor movements as they later emerged would also be sharply
confronted by this issue.
Blacks had formed their own labor organizations before the 1869 meeting
of the white National Labor Union, and even as they created their own
independent unions, they also responded to virtually every possibil

interracial unionism and sought to make the most of the rare oppor
for biracial alliances. But repeatedly, over a period of many generations
were met with hostility and rejection, or at best restricted to an inferior
within organized labor. While not all white workers and their labor
engaged in the same discriminatory practices at all times and place
subordination in many different forms became a major characteristic o
most important and enduring labor organizations. For black work
consequences were great and of long-term significance, as racial disc
tion by employers and white labor unions prevented them from ad
through the workplace, the strategy that had been so effective fo
ethnics.
Since the late 1930s a widely held belief among all groups on the left
that the emergence of the Congress of Industrial Organizations would l
the mass radicalization of unionized workers accompanied by the d
ment of an interracial union movement, but because the white working
refused to carry out its assigned mission this belief remained unfulfille
scholarship on the CIO and race is marked not only by differe
interpretation, which might be expected, but also by an ideological com
ment that has resulted in a distorted depiction of the industrial unions
Melvin Dubofsky can write in a recent book that "the mass-production
... had perhaps done more to advance the economic, social, and pol
rights of minority workers than any other basic institution in the
States ... the unions that had done the most to advance the cause of min
workers, especially the UAW, suffered most grievously from internal co
generated by the civil rights movement."'4
These generalizations imply that the evidence for the union's ben
role is so well known that it need not be documented, but the fact is n
evidence exists. On the contrary, the evidence paints a very different p
A record based upon thirty years of litigation initiated by black an
nonwhite workers under Title VII, the employment section of the Civil
Act of 1964, documents in great detail the discriminatory practices of m
industrial unions in both northern and southern states.' Furthermore the
emergence of employment discrimination law is arguably the most important
development in labor law since the New Deal period, but Dubofsky dispose
of what he calls "divisive issues related to race and gender" in two and a half
pages in a book of over three hundred pages devoted to labor law.16
In sharp contrast to Dubofsky, Robin D. G. Kelley describes how the
Steelworkers Union "put pressure on companies not to promote blacks to
skilled positions. The union therefore, became a tool to maintain white
supremacy, which had the effect of undermining any vestiges of job security
for black steelworkers.""7 The practices described by Kelle

to southern steel plants, as the decisions of federal courts
the Steelworkers Union at the Bethlehem Steel Compa
New York and in other northern manufacturing faciliti
litigation record also shows that while Walter Reuther, pres
Automobile Workers was marching in civil rights demonst
was negotiating discriminatory union contracts that locked
de facto segregated job classifications in violation of Ti
Rights Act.1"
An egregious example of distortion is Marxist critic S
statement regarding the United Automobile Workers to th
1960, blacks were substantially represented not only in too
of the UAW where they formed about 10 percent of the cra
well paid but backbreaking jobs as riggers, millwrights and
their representation was higher."'9 But again the evidence
these assertions. According to data presented at hearings of
sion On Civil Rights in Detroit in 1960, black workers
constituted a mere seven-tenths of 1 percent of the sk
Detroit auto plants, whereas 42.3 percent of the laborers w
percent of production workers were black.
The report of the Negro American Labor Council dated N
provided additional documentation of the racial pattern
confirmed the conclusion of the Commission. Furthermore
made by the union itself also refutes Aronowitz's claim
black workers frequently referred to the Skilled Trades
union as the "deep south of the UAW."20 Aronowitz has no
and provides no evidence for his erroneous statements.
assumptions as facts has been characteristic of much
regarding race and labor unions.
Misrepresentation and errors of fact and judgment regar
studies take many forms and result not only from incomp
but also from the need to support ideological positi
Gutman's influential essay on "The Negro and the Unite
America: The Career and Letters of Richard L. Davis and So
Meaning, 1890-1900"21 adopts a periodicity that misleads an
on black membership, black leadership, and black disc
union. Especially significant is Gutman's failure to mention
ship of the Mine Workers' union during the period covered
openly and dogmatically racist, first in regard to Asians an
regard to other nonwhite people. Gutman utters not a wor
the union's racist history, not only because it directly cont
the United Mine Workers, but also because it is in conflict with

theory on the issue of race in the labor movement at the turn of th
(Despite the title Gutman does not confine either his judgment or h
exclusively to the 1890s. The last seventeen pages of his essay, pp. 11
primarily with the decade after, and his conclusions embrace the en
1890-1910.)
From the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth century and well into
the twentieth, hardly an issue of the official union publication, The United
Mine Workers of America Journal, would appear without some warning of the
"Yellow Peril." The UMW actively joined the American Federation of Labor in
arguing that labor unions above all others upheld the "Caucasian ideals of
civilization" They argued that unions were the white man's best hope in the
contest for "domination," and the union conducted a campaign urging its
members to purchase products "made by white men." As the years passed,
the anti-Asian attack became even more explicit in emphasizing the urgent
need to preserve the supremacy of the white race.
The Journal referred to the "hordes of black, brown, yellow and striped
workers ... who have not the slightest idea of the meaning of organization."
The ideology of white supremacy had become an article of faith in the UMW
and an editorial published in the Journal in 1903 featured a manifesto on that
theme which closed with the cry: "Help us, men and women of our race, to win
this fight" (emphasis in original). The campaign within the UMW on the anti-
Asian issue openly extolled white supremacy, promoted racist ideology
among whites, and made the status of black miners even more precarious.
The interracial solidarity within the UMW that Gutman celebrates is
contradicted by the extensive record of the union's active hostility toward
Asian workers and its enthusiasm for white supremacy. The attacks upon
Asians often served as a coded expression of racial hostility toward all
nonwhites including black workers. Gutman's failure to report the record of
organized labor generally and the UMW's role specifically in the anti-Asian
movement is more than a gross error of omission. It effectively puts his basic
thesis into question, especially since Gutman himself draws upon union
sources from the period of the UMW's most intense involvement in the
campaign against Asians and other nonwhite people.
It is to be expected that the political commitments of labor historians will
influence their interpretations, but all too frequently violations of the basic
standards of accuracy and respect for the historical record in the service of
ideology have led to a body of work that is deeply flawed.22 Thus certain
important issues in labor history are ignored, such as the history of white
strikebreaking activity including white strikebreaking against black work-
ers,23 and the working-class base of militant white supremacist groups. The
failure of labor historians to address these and related issues is not accidental
but rather the consequence of an ideological agenda that points in another
direction. The treatment of the UAW and other unions by Dubofsky and
Aronowitz as well as by Nelson Lichtenstein is a case in point.
In his recent study of Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers,
Lichtenstein distorts the record when he writes that "The trade union
movement, both the AFL-CIO and the UAW, was primarily responsibl
the addition of FEPC" in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.24 This statement ign
the legislative history of the Act, ignores the role of the civil rights movem
on this issue and fails to note that the modified bill organized labor suppo
was limited to future discriminatory practices. Furthermore, it would
insulated established seniority systems, thus preserving the racial status q
in employment for at least a generation.25 The extensive record of u
resistance to implementation of the statute is not even mentioned. Lichtens
states that a 1961 NAACP report contained "a blistering exposure of instit
tionalized discrimination in the industrial unions, especially the ILGW
But there was no such criticism of that union in the report. On the contr
the only reference to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union wa
fact complimentary as it explained that the ILGWU, with the assistance of
NAACP, had merged separate white and black units of the union in Atlant
A most disturbing aspect of Lichtenstein's work is his tendency to gloss o
or omit critical material known to him regarding the UAW's racial po
and practices.27 As a consequence he provides an unbalanced and
selective rendering of this important part of the union's history.
It was in contrast to the dismal record of most labor unions on race that t
United Automobile Workers generally appeared to be a shining examp
advanced interracial unionism. Much of the public image of the UAW
however, was based on its support for civil rights causes far removed from
factories where its members worked and far from the union itself. There w
in fact a great disparity between the reputation of the UAW and the part
played, along with employers, in preserving discriminatory job patterns.
In 1961, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in a survey of the automo
industry documented the discriminatory employment patterns in pla
where the UAW was the collective bargaining agent and in 1975 the E
Employment Opportunity Commission found that black auto workers
still largely excluded from the skilled trades, and that the traditional discr
natory pattern remained intact. Black workers in the UAW and in o
unions came to believe that labor support for civil rights measures w
substitute for confronting racist practices on the shop floor, and with incr
ing frequency they turned to the NAACP and to government agencies
assistance in their efforts to eliminate job discrimination. Soon after Tit

went into effect black union members filed many charges against the
with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the union
frequent defendant in litigation under the Act.28
The idealization of the racial practices of CIO unions, a major preoc
tion in recent labor history, is exemplified by David Brody, who describ
early CIO as an interracial movement."29 But the fact that blacks w
admitted into CIO unions because it was in the self-interest of whites to do
did not make it an "interracial movement." Interracial organization re
that fundamental shifts in institutional arrangements be made; abov
means sharing power. But the leaders of the CIO and their affiliated orga
tions were unwilling to accept blacks as equal partners in the leadersh
unions, to share control with nonwhites and to permit them to share in
power that is derived from such institutional authority. In contrast to the
unions of the AFL, CIO unions admitted blacks, but CIO affiliates engaged
a variety of discriminatory practices after blacks had been admitted.
In 1955, just before the merger between the AFL and the CIO, Hor
Cayton, coauthor of Black Workers and the New Unions (1939), which haile
CIO, summarized the black workers' experience with CIO unions:
In retrospect, the history of Negro workers and the CIO is a history of exaggera
hopes and broken promises. In the 1930's we very much wanted to believe th
great change was taking place, that the rise of the CIO would mean a real br
with the racism of the old AFL, and that a new interracial labor movement w
about to be born. Of course, that would have been of great importance. Bu
never happened. Even in the early days of the CIO, Negroes were usually i
subordinate position, very rarely permitted real leadership responsibility and
time went on many of the CIO unions just ignored the official anti-discrimina
policy. At the beginning they needed us to help build their unions, but once t
became strong and powerful the old racism reasserted itself. The CIO is a sor
mess ... that's why they are going back into the AFL.3"
While the racial practices of CIO unions varied greatly, they all fou
necessary, at their inception, to accept black workers into members
order to organize their respective industries such as steel, auto, rubbe
packinghouse, among others. In industries where there was a signif
concentration of black workers, establishing control over blacks had
essential for conducting effective collective bargaining. If blacks had
forced to remain outside of organized labor or limited to separate all
unions, they would have constituted a serious threat to the eme
industrial labor organizations. Admission into union ranks was the
effective method of achieving control of the black labor force. But once
control was established, many unions used their powe

inequality, by denying blacks equal promotion and se
limiting them to unskilled jobs in segregated labor classif
The Steelworkers Union, which had a substantial blac
willing to improve conditions for black workers wit
structures, but because it functioned primarily for white
racist job patterns imposed by employers. On the contrar
its power to preserve and expand them. In so doing it
higher-paying, cleaner, and healthier jobs, with oppor
ment into skilled classifications, would be reserved ex
Provisions in union contracts stipulated that black worke
be operative only in segregated classifications, thus ensur
not compete with whites for jobs. Accordingly, the un
institutional repository of white job expectations. This is
that emerged in Title VII litigation against the Steelwork
industrial unions regarding their racial practices.
A 1986 study by Robert J. Norrell of the role of the St
the development of discriminatory employment patterns
of Birmingham revealed that the union "agreed to a s
lines of promotion that preserved white supremacy an
rights of white workers .... Black laborers were put on
that led nowhere." The study also points out that "th
workers new power to enforce job discrimination, thu
black opportunities. The gains made at blacks' expense
a clear economic stake in preserving racial discriminati
detailed examples. Norrell goes on to explain that
white workers used the power gained in the organizing strug

maintain and even to expand their economic advantage in the
harsh irony: the organization made possible by interracial so
greater restrictions on black opportunity than existed before t
In retrospect it is evident that the Steelworkers Union

unions often functioned to perpetuate white supremacy i
The experience of many black workers within the CIO w
black steelworker employed at the Atlantic Steel Comp
where the United Steel workers of America had repe
agreements limiting black workers to segregated labor
dual system of seniority and job classification based upon
When the union first came, most of the whites were afraid
wore the CIO button. We were the first to come out for the
it started here .... But now they--the whites-get all the benefits and we
behind again. Turned out CIO meant one thing for the whites and anoth
for us. The union don't handle our grievances, we are stuck, with
seniority, back-breaking jobs and we get less pay than they do. We
promoted to the good white jobs. White boys just hired off the street g
better than we do after twenty years. That's what we get for bringing in t
here.3
More than a quarter of a century of litigation under Title VII reveals that
what racial exclusion was to craft unions, segregated lines of job assignment
and seniority were to the industrial unions, and that casual informal discrimi-
nation in employment became more rigid and enforceable as a result of
codification in labor-management contracts.
The CIO policy on race was at best an expression of abstract equality in
contrast to the pattern of exclusion and segregation within the AFL, and by
the time of the merger between the CIO and the AFL in 1955, CIO racial policy
had become an empty formality. The dynamic period of industrial organizing
was over and the CIO leadership now had much in common with the
conservative AFL bureaucracy. Robert Zieger, in his history of the CIO, writes
that by the 1950s "the CIO relegated African American workers to the
margins."34 What is significant however, is the way black workers seized
upon every opening provided by some industrial unions to take the lead in
creating militant local labor organizations.
The exception to the failure of interracial unionism within the CIO was the
United Packinghouse Workers of America, where large numbers of black
workers were strategically concentrated with their own leaders before union
organization. The UPWA was responsible for important advances in the
employment status of black packinghouse workers, and from its inception it
functioned as an interracial organization, with black members sharing major
national and local leadership positions.
The Packinghouse Workers union was the only union within the CIO to
actively challenge both employers and their own white membership on the
issue of race. In retrospect it is evident that such a dual program is essential if
a labor union is not to become a party to discriminatory racial practices. It is
not surprising that the Packinghouse Workers union lost white members, as
some locals disaffiliated in protest against the unions' racial policies.
Unions controlled by the Communist party operating as CIO affiliates-
such as the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of
America, which later became the Food, Tobacco, and Agricultural Workers
Union-were able for a brief period, mainly in the South, to organize what
were essentially all-black unions where black workers assumed leadership
positions and conducted militant struggles against the blatant racist practices
of employers. However, the response of white workers in

plants and elsewhere to what they perceived as black un
long-term development of interracial unions and the few i
that developed were tactical, limited, and of brief duration
Industrial unions with a communist leadership and with
white membership were substantially no different in t
than other labor organizations, as litigation records and
indicate. The racial practices of this group were not unifor
exhaustive examination that is beyond the scope of this
noted, however, that the publication of The Secret World of
nism (1995), edited by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Hayne
Firsov, based upon the recently opened archives of the for
should finally put to rest "revisionist" arguments abou
and autonomy of the Communist Party USA and their l
No less for communist-controlled unions with a majority w
than for the rest of organized labor, the imperative of rac
the prevalence of white racism overwhelmed the few sc
interracial unionism.
That race continues to pose a dilemma for many working in labor history
is demonstrated by the two closing interpretive essays in a collection pub-
lished in 1989 devoted to "The Problems of Synthesis" in labor historiogra-
phy, one by the doyen of contemporary labor historians, David Brody, and the
other by the distinguished historian Alice Kessler-Harris.35 What is remark-
able about these two essays is that neither of them regards the issue of race as
significant. Indeed, Brody criticizes what he regards as the overemphasis on
race in one of the papers included in the collection while Kessler-Harris calls
for making gender the primary focus for future labor studies. That these two
eminent historians ignore race as a critical factor in labor history underscores
how theoretically superficial much of the past work in the field has been and
confirms Ira Katznelson's acknowledgment of "labor history's loss of elan,
directionality and intellectual purpose," leading him to declare that "Engaged
history, in possession at least of the conceit of making a difference has moved
elsewhere, to other subject areas."36
Increasingly, a growing number of scholars are rejecting labor history's
impoverished tradition; they are recognizing the critical problems of identity
and the primacy of race in their analyses and questioning many of the
assumptions that have long dominated the study of labor history. The
publication in 1990 of Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White
Republic, followed in 1991 by David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness: Race
and the Making of the American Working Class, indicates that another perspec-
tive in labor history is emerging. Saxton's remarkable study places race at the
center of nineteenth-century American history and examines with

able insight the long-term consequences of white supremacy a
ideological force within the working class. In a book that examines t
and psychological forces that led workers to define themselve
Roediger moves beyond the dominant tendency to reduce work
behavior to economic and class forces. In his analysis of the social ps
of racism among white workers he writes that "racism is not a matte
alone, but is in addition a way in which white workers have com
the world" (p. 10). Roediger explains that "Working class formati
systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in ha
U.S. white working class," declaring that "race has at all times been
factor in the history of U.S. class formation" (p. 11).
Bruce Nelson's studies of the racial practices of industrial unio
longshoremen in California, shipbuilders in Alabama, and steelw
Georgia, constitute a significant advance in our understanding of
practices of CIO unions in many different contexts.37 Nelson is prod
body of work supported by impeccable research that challenges t
tional wisdom regarding race, class, and organized labor. Eric Arnese
research on the activities of the railroad brotherhoods that forced black
workers out of railway employment, recognizes "the white trade unio
movement's active role in the construction of working-class racism," and th
race was the defining characteristic of the railroad brotherhoods.38
A generation of black scholars has emerged that continues to enrich labor
studies with original and often provocative work that represents a break wi
traditional labor history. Among these are Nell Irvin Painter, Joe Willi
Trotter, Earl Lewis, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Julie Saville. The books by Peter
Gottlieb and James Grossman on the black migrations to Pittsburgh
Chicago are valuable contributions as are works by Yuji Ichioka, Thom
Sugrue, Kevin Boyle, Tomas Almaguer, and Henry M. McKiven.39
The appearance of Love and Theft (1995) by Eric Lott is a significant step
forward in our understanding of the powerful psychological forces at work
a culture of white supremacy, and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became Wh
(1995) is certain to be recognized as a major contribution to the study of rac
and ethnicity in labor history. Timothy Messer-Kruse has completed
important doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madis
entitled The Yankee International: Marxism and the American Reform Traditio
(1994), and Paul Taillon, also at Wisconsin, is working on a ground-break
study of gender and race in the developing culture of machinists at the end
the nineteenth century."
The major schools of American labor history are distinguished by th
respective attitudes toward race, and the recent books by Saxton and Roedig
together with the work of a new generation of labor historian

we are at the beginning of the next stage in social science stud
the worker: one that is characterized by the effort to place labo
a larger historical context, one that does not neglect the
cultural, and ideological forces in workers' lives. This is a
rejects the reductive and ideologically restrictive approaches o
that recognizes finally the complexity of identity and the cent
American labor history.
Herbert Hill, Department of African-American Studies and Ind

Research Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the auth
and the American Legal System (1985).
This is an expanded version of a paper given at the Southern Historica

Annual Meeting, November 9, 1995, New Orleans, Louisiana. The auth
John Bracey, Stanford M. Lyman, Bruce Nelson, Nell Irvin Painter, and
their critical reading of earlier drafts.
1. Selig Perlman, The History of Trade Unionism in the United States (192
2. Charles H. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850-1925 (1927
Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker (1931); Herbert R. Northr
and the Negro (1944); Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the
(1965), and Organized Labor and the Black Worker, 1619-1973 (1974).
3. See Herbert Hill, "Myth-Making As Labor History: Herbert Gutm
Mine Workers of America," International Journal of Politics, Culture an
1988): 132-200.
4. Nell Irvin Painter, "The New Labor History and the Historical Moment," International
Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2 (Spring 1989): 369-70. For other criticisms of the new
labor history, see Lawrence T. McDonnell, "You Are Too Sentimental: Problems and
Suggestions for a New Labor History," Journal of Social History 17 (Summer 1984): 629-54;
Michael Kazin, "Struggling with the Class Struggle: Marxism and the Search for a Synthesis
of U.S. Labor History," Labor History 28 (Fall 1987): 497-514; and David Roediger, "Race and
the Working-Class Past in the United States: Multiple Identities and the Future of Labor
History," International Review of Social History 38 (1993, Supplement 1): 127-43.
5. Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Region, Race and
Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (1982), pp. 150-51, 156. A
somewhat more nuanced position appears in her later essay "Slavery, Race and Ideology in
the United States," New Left Review 181 (May-June 1990): 95-118.
6. George M. Fredrickson, "Reflections On The Comparative History and Sociology of
Racism," paper given at a conference on American Studies, June 1992, University of Natal,
South Africa, reprinted in Race Traitor 3 (Spring 1994): 85-86. David Roediger is also critical
of Fields, see his essay, "Labor in White Skin: Race and Working Class History," Reshaping
the U.S. Left, ed. Mike Davis and Michael Sprinker (1988), pp. 292-93.
7. Howard Winant, Racial Conditions, Politics, Theory, Comparisons (1994), p. 16.
8. Erik Olin Wright, Class Structure and Income Determination (1979), p. 202.
9. John Bodnar, Workers' World, Kinship, Community, and Protest in an Industrial Society,
1900-1940 (1982), Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town (1977)
and The Transplanted (1985); Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own
(1978).
10. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (1988), ch. 5. See also Ewa
Morawska, For Bread With Butter (1985), a study of immigrant communities in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania from 1890 to 1940, which emphasizes the central importance of fa

and ethnic associations in the lives of immigrant workers. Hall, "Private
Women: Images of Class and Sex in the Urban South, Atlanta, Georgia, 191
Dolores Janiewski, "Southern Honor, Southern Dishonor: Managerial Ideolo
Construction of Gender, Race, and Class Relations in Southern Industry," b
Engendered, ed. Ava Baron (1991), are indications of the rich empirical studie
and work that have developed in women's labor history during the past decad
11. The New York Times, "Speech by Isaac Myers to the National Labor Union
August 19, 1869, p. 1; also published in the Workingman's Advocate, September
12. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in the United States, 1860-1880 (193
357-58.
13. Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought (1954), p. 142.
14. Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (1994), pp. 224-25.
15. Among the many cases are Albermarle Paper Company v. Moody, 422 U.S. 405 (1975);
EEOC v. Detroit Edison Co., 555 F. 2d 301 (6th Civ. 1975); Gibson v. ILWU, Local 40, 13 FEP
Cases 997 (9th Cir. 1976); Local 189, United Papermakers v. United States, 416 F. 2d 980 (5th Cir.
1970); Oatis v. Crown Zellerbach Corp., 398 F. 2d 496 (5th Cir. 1968); Patterson v. American
Tobacco Co., 535 F. 2d 257 (4th Cir. 1976); Quarles v. Philip Morris, 279 F. Supp. 505 (E.D. VA.
1968); Robinson v. Lorillard Corp., 444 F. 2d 791 (4th Cir. 1971); Rogers v. International Paper Co.,
526 F. 2d 732 8th Cir. 1975); Swint v. Pullman-Standard Co., 13 FEP Cases 605 (5th Cir. 1976),
Taylor v. Armco Steel Corp., 429 F. 2d 498 (5th Cir. 1970); United States v. Bethlehem Steel Corp.,
446 F. 2d 652 (2nd Cir. 1971); United States v. Hayes International Corporation, 415 F. 2d 1038
(5th Cir. 1969); Watkins v. United Steel Workers Local 2369, 516 F. 2d 41 (5th Cir. 1975);
Williamson v. Bethlehem Steel Corp., 468 F. 2d 1201 (2nd Cir. 1972).
16. Dubofsky, State and Labor, p. 223.
17. Robin D. G. Kelly, Race Rebels, Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994), p. 80.
18. A typical early Title VII case on the issue of segregated job classifications jointly
involved the UAW and Hayes International Corporation in Birmingham as defendants. The
United States Department of Justice initiated a lawsuit based on charges filed by the NAACP
on behalf of black members of the UAW, and a federal appellate court found that under a
1965 union contract "black employees performed the lowest paid, unskilled jobs.... This
condition remained substantially unchanged even after the effective date of Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964. The black employees were segregated in their jobs in a manner
which deprived them of the opportunity for advancement that white employees enjoyed."
United States v. Hayes International Corporation, 415 F. 2d 1038 (5th Cir. 1969).
19. Stanley Aronowitz, "Discussion: Race, Ethnicity and Organized Labor," New Politics 1
(Summer 1987), p. 61. Among his books is False Promises, The Shaping of American Working
Class Consciousness (1973).
20. Memorandum from William H. Oliver to Walter P. Reuther, "UAW Fair Practices
Survey-1963," Jan. 16, 1964 (Reuther Collection, Box 90, Folder 12, Archives of Labor History
and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit).
21. Herbert G. Gutman, "The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America, The Career
and Letters of Richard L. Davis and Something of Their Meaning: 1890-1900," in The Negro
and the American Labor Movement, ed. Julius Jacobson (1968), pp. 49-127. All references here
are to the original publication in the book edited by Jacobson. This essay was later reprinted
in Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (Knopf, 1976), pp. 119-208.
22. An example of how the zeal to "prove" a doctrine in labor studies often results in
distortions, half-truths and outright falsification is provided by Peter Levy, The New Left and
Labor in the 1960's (1994). In his strained attempt to show that organized labor widely
supported civil rights efforts, Levy gives as an example certain activity in San Francisco,
where, he writes "officials from the Longshoremen's, Teamsters', Teachers' and several
building trades unions joined with CORE leaders and members of various student and
peace groups to support civil rights. Among this local coalition's actions was a united
protest against the Palace Hotel for its discriminatory and antiunion practices" (p. 16). But
the facts are in complete contradiction to the impression conveyed by Levy's statement. In
1966, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Inte

active support of the AFL-CIO Central Labor Council, obtained a
invalidating an agreement won by civil rights groups with
Employers Association (In re Hotel Employers Association and
Executive Board, 47 LA 873, 1966). This unprecedented agreemen
months of mass demonstrations and sit-ins and it opened many
black workers in a most important part of the economy of San
were soon destroyed by organized labor. The NAACP had activ
demonstrations and the president of the Association's San Franci
Burbridge, had served a prison sentence as a result of his activity. A
NAACP at that time, I had been involved in this project and I can
and anger in the black community regarding the role of organize
won gains. So great was the reaction that some groups within
found it necessary to condemn the destructive behavior of the un
23. For an example of white strikebreaking against black workers,
Mobile Steamship Association and International Longshoremen's Unio
Labor Relations Board, Fifteenth Region, Memorandum in Re Inv
1937, p. 2 (William M. Leiserson Papers, Box 23, State Historic
Madison). Most reports by union officials and labor publications om
strikebreakers who often greatly exceeded the number of blacks inv
impression that only blacks were engaged in breaking strikes. See
and Foner (History of the Labor Movement in the United States,
Warren C. Whatley, "African-American Strikebreaking from t
Deal," Social Science History 17 (Winter 1993): 525.
24. Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man In Detroit: Walte
American Labor (1995), pp. 387-88.
25. See "Interpretive memorandum" in Title VII of House App
duced by Senators Clifford P. Case and Joseph S. Clark, floor ma
Senate (Congressional Record 110, 1964, p. 7213). By 1972 when T
AFL-CIO and most of its affiliated unions had moved from supp
modifications they insisted upon, to failure to implement the la
open opposition and obstruction once the federal courts began to
detailed discussion of this history, see Herbert Hill, "Black Work
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: Legislative History and Liti
America: The Struggle for Equality, ed. Herbert Hill and James E. J
See also William B. Gould, Black Workers and White Unions (1977
Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight, Labor and Culture in the 1940's (1994)
26. Lichtenstein, Most Dangerous Man, p. 379.
27. Herbert Hill to Nelson Lichtenstein, December 19, 1989, Lich
11, 1994, and Hill to Lichtenstein, Oct. 27, 1994 (copies in author'
28. In the two years after Title VII went into effect on July 2
Workers experienced a 300 percent increase in the number of
brought to the Fair Practices Department of the union (Memor
Oliver to Walter P. Reuther, December 30, 1968, Reuther Coll
Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs, Wayne State Univ
Minutes of UAW National Advisory Council on Anti-Discrimin
(copy in author's files). In the first nine years of Title VII, 1,335
union were filed with the EEOC by members of the UAW. The UA
EEOC delay action on complaints filed by members of the union u
exhausted the union's protracted internal grievance procedure, arg
as well as its collective bargaining agreements required that union
grievance before filing charges with the EEOC (Memorandum fr
Walter P. Reuther, "Proposed Procedures for Handling of title V
Reuther Collection, Box 91, Folder 12, ALHUA, Wayne State Univ
EEOC rejected that argument on the grounds that it had a lega
implementing the law, the union eliminated this provision from its constitutio
dum from Irving Bluestone to Emil Mazey, October 10, 1965; UAW Administr
Vol. 22, March 19, 1970, Letter No. 6; Reuther Collection, Box 92, Folder 9, ALH
State University, Detroit). Beginning in the late 1950s there was growing disco
black UAW members on two important issues-continuing exclusion from
skilled trades and exclusion from leadership positions within the internationa
led to a resurgence of black caucus activity within the UAW. Several caucu
workers emerged during the 1960s, from the moderate Ad Hoc Committee of
UAW Members to the League of Revolutionary Black Workers; see James E. G
Class, Race and Worker Insurgency (1977). For information on black caucus activit
UAW, see interviews with auto workers who led various black caucuses in the
the inception of the union to the late 1960s. Among the interviews conducted b
in Detroit are the following: Joseph Billups, October 27, 1967; Hodges Mason, N
1967; Shelton Tappes, February 10, 1968; Robert Battle, March 19, 1968; George Cr
March 2, 1968 and Horace Sheffield, July 24, 1968. Transcripts may be exa
application to the Director, Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs,
University, Detroit. For useful studies of the UAW, see Frank Marquart, An Am
Workers Journal: The UAW from Crusade to One Party Union (1975); Peter F
Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936-1939: A Study in Class and Culture (1975); Ste
Management and Managed: Fifty Years of Crisis at Chrysler (1986); and Kevin Boy
and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (1995).
29. David Brody, "Discussion: Race, Ethnicity and Organized Labor," New
(Summer 1987), p. 40. The same point is made by Elizabeth Cohen, Making
Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990), pp. 333-38.
30. Author's interview with Horace R. Cayton, November 19, 1955, New Yor
31. Robert J. Norrell, "Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabam
of American History 73 (December 1986): 670, 777, 679.
32. See Atlantic Steel Co. and United Steelworkers of America, Local No. 2401, N
4-2964, Motion to Rescind Certification, filed October 29, 1962.
33. Author's interview with Nathaniel Brown, October 21, 1962, Atlanta, Geo
34. Robert H. Zieger, The CIO 1935-1955 (1995), p. 345.
35. David Brody, "On Creating a New Synthesis of American Labor Histo
ment," and Alice Kessler-Harris, "A New Agenda for American Labor History
Analysis and the Question of Class," both in Perspective on American Labor H
Problems of Synthesis, ed. J. Carroll Moody and Kessler-Harris (1989), pp. 203-
36. Ira Katznelson, "The Bourgeois' Dimension: A Provocation About Instituti
and the Future of Labor History," International Labor and Working-Class History
7.
37. Bruce Nelson, "The Lords of the Docks Reconsidered: Race Relations Among West
Coast Longshoremen 1933-1961," in Essays in Waterfront Labor History, ed. Calvin Winslow
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming), "Organized Labor and the Struggle for
Black Equality in Mobile During World War II," Journal of American History 80 (December
1993): 952-88, and "CIO meant one thing for the whites and another thing for us:
Steelworkers and Civil Rights, 1936-1974," in Essays in Recent Southern Labor History, ed.
Robert Zieger (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, forthcoming).
38. Eric Arnesen, "Like Banquo's Ghost, It Will Not Down: The Race Question and the
American Railroad Brotherhoods, 1880-1920," The American Historical Review 99 (December
1994): 1601-33. See also, Arnesen, "Following the Color Line of Labor: Black Workers and
the Labor Movement Before 1930, Radical History Review 55 (Winter 1993): 53-87.
39. Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson, His Life as a Negro Communist in the
South (1979), and Exodusters, Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (1977); Joe William
Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-1945 (1985), and Coal,
Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915-1932 (1990); Earl Lewis, In Their Own
Interests: Race, Class and Power in Twentieth Century Norfolk (1991); Robin D. G. Kelley,
Hammer and Hoe (1990), and Race Rebels, Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994);
Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction, From Slave to Wage Labor

1870 (1994); Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Black'
1916-1930 (1987); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black S
Migration (1989); Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Gener
1885-1924 (1988); Thomas Sugrue, "The Structures of Urban Pover
Space and Work in Three Periods of American History," in The "
From History, ed. Michael B. Katz (1993), pp. 85-117; Kevin Boyle,
of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (1995); Tomas Almaguer, Racial
Origins of White Supremacy in California (1994); Henry M. McKiven
Race, and Community in Birmingham, Alabama, 1875-1920 (1995).
40. Paul Taillon, "By Every Tradition and Every Right: Fraterna
Railway Brotherhoods, 1880-1910," (unpublished paper delivered
Association meeting in Baltimore, November 1991), also Taillo
Racism and Masculinity in the Debate Over Black Exclusion in the
of Machinists, 1888-1895" (unpublished paper delivered to the
History Conference at Wayne State University, September 1990).

The Problem of Race in American Labor History

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The Problem of Race in American Labor History

Author(s): Herbert Hill

to emerge in the late 1960s. Aware of the limitations of the olde

labor history approach, confidently declares that "Decades of conflic

This influential but defective approach is now increasingly rejected by

Marxist assumptions have long been imprisoned by an ideo

The concept of racial formation as developed by Michael Omi and Howard

Quite clearly, it is necessary to move beyond the limitations of class

The Marxist idea of the revolutionary proletariat fulfilling its his

and the American Federation of Labor. Myers, who repr

The response to Myers's speech came on August 21, the c

W. E. B. DuBois, commenting on these events, wrote:

independent unions, they also responded to virtually every possibil

for black steelworkers.""7 The practices described by Kelle

the United Mine Workers, but also because it is in conflict with

assistance in their efforts to eliminate job discrimination. Soon after Tit

control was established, many unions used their powe

white workers used the power gained in the organizing strug

In retrospect it is evident that the Steelworkers Union

of employers. However, the response of white workers in

center of nineteenth-century American history and examines with

together with the work of a new generation of labor historian

Herbert Hill, Department of African-American Studies and Ind

This is an expanded version of a paper given at the Southern Historica

Pennsylvania from 1890 to 1940, which emphasizes the central importance of fa

1966, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Inte

Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction, From Slave to Wage Labor

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