Workplace equity underpins blacks’ efforts for equality. The Committee on the Status of Black Americans (1989), judging black life from 1944, concurred. Black median family income was 57 percent of white median family income in 1986, it reported. Moreover, 32 percent of black families and 15 percent of white families earned subpoverty incomes; and 22.6 percent of employed blacks, compared to 16.3 percent of whites, were union members. Racial inequality persisted.

Just as slaves and free blacks subsisted normally by helping themselves, freedpeople created guilds, protective associations, and cooperatives to subsist and earn livelihoods. They also established black auxiliaries of white labor organizations. Excluded by the National Labor Union (1866), blacks formed the Colored National Labor Union (1869) for “‘the opportunity to work and rise.’” National Negro Conventions promoted schooling; fairness to tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and urban laborers; and co-ops to buy farm supplies and land. Blacks also took direct action. In 1881 washerwomen of Atlanta, Georgia founded the Washing Society, a citywide secret group, and went on strike for higher pay. Similarly, many blacks joined the white-led Noble Order of the Knights of Labor (1869). Blacks accounted for 10 percent (60,000) of Knights’ local assemblies in 1886, as black Texans began the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. In face of segregation, disfranchisement, and lynching, the alliance enlisted 1, 250, 000 southern members, joined cotton pickers’ strikes, and supported the Populist Party. Locals of the American Federation of Labor (AFL, 1886) usually were for “white only.” Yet some unions, such as the United Mine Workers of America (UMW, 1886), recruited large numbers of blacks. So did the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, 1905); its socialist founders pledged to organize workers of every color, ethnicity, class, gender, occupation, and skill.

Union organizing prior to the 1930s, paralleling “the massive migration of rural southern Negroes to northern cities and to new modes of employment and living,” forecast the Wagner Act (1935), which ensured the right of collective bargaining. Critical early unions – biracial as well as black – included the National Association of Afro-American Gas Engineers and Skilled Laborers (1900), recognized by its parent body soon after, and the Colored Men's Locomotive Firemen's Association (1902), which spawned several colored railway brotherhoods.