1. Despite often copious and informative material, Galenson, Walter (The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor Movement, 1935–1941 [Cambridge, Mass., 1960])Google Scholar and Walsh, Raymond (C. I.O.: Industrial Unionism in Action [New York, 1937]), for example, are most notable for the absence of any discussions of racial discrimination.Google Scholar Sumner Slichter seems to feel that all unions (including those in the AFL) were making “progress” and that “in nearly all instances the influence of the national officers of unions is thrown against discrimination”. Introduction to Northrup, Herbert R., Organized Labor and the Negro (New York, 1944), xii.Google Scholar Though such assessments do great violence to the facts, they should not surprise us, since, as Herbert Hill quite accurately notes, “although racial issues were and are a crucial factor in American labor history, racist practices of labor organizations were either ignored or justified by dubious rationalizations in most of the important studies of that history, particularly in those works based in concept on the Commons-Taft tradition”.“Black Labor and Affirmative Action: An Historical Perspective”, in The Question of Discrimination, ed. Shulman, Steven and Darity, William Jr., (Middletown, Conn., 1989), 216.Google Scholar In this context, it is worth noting the deep racism of many industrial relations practitioners trained by this school, especially William Leiserson, who was to become head of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and later head of the Industrial Relations Research Association. Northrup, 58–59.

2. See Du Bois, W. E. B. and Dill, Augustus G., eds., The Negro American Artisan (Atlanta, 1912);Google ScholarWesley, Charles H., Negro Labor in the United States, 1850–1925 (New York, 1927);Google Scholar and Greene, Lorenzo J. and Woodson, Carter G., The Negro Wage Earner (Washington, D.C., 1930).Google Scholar For further specifics, see also Wolfe, F. E., Admission to American Trade Unions (Baltimore, 1912) pp. 112–34;Google ScholarDe A. Reid, Ira, Negro Membership in American Labor Unions (New York, 1930); and Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro.Google Scholar

3. Spero, Sterling D. and Harris, Abram L., The Black Worker (New York, 1931).Google Scholar

4. Bois, W.E.B.Du, “Race Relations in the United States, 1917–1947,” Phylon IX (Third Quarter 1948):234–47.Google Scholar

5. See Cayton, Horace R. and Mitchell, George S., Black Workers and the New Unions (Westport, Conn., 1939);Google Scholar Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro; and especially Weaver, Robert C., Negro Labor (New York, 1946), 219–20.Google Scholar In fact, one could compile a very thick book of optimistic predictions from the African-American press, civil rights activists, and scholars, especially during the late 1940s.

6. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 347; Gutman, Herbert G., “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. Jacobson, Julius (Garden City, N.Y., 1968).Google Scholar

7. Hill, “Black Labor and Affirmative Action,” 245–48. For similar arguments, see Norrell, Robert J., “Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama,” Journal of American History 73 (1986);CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “Labor Trouble: George Wallace and Union Politics in Alabama,” in Organized Labor in the Twentieth Century South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Knoxville, 1991); and Draper, Alan, “A Sisyphean Ordeal: Labor Educators, Race Relations and Southern Workers, 1956–1966,” Labor Studies Journal 16 (Winter 1991). Unlike Hill, who indicts both white workers and union leaders, both Draper and Norrell put their main emphasis on the former.Google Scholar

8. For references to this literature, see Goldfield, Michael, “Class, Race, and Politics in the United States,” Research in Political Economy 12 (1990): 89, 120.Google Scholar

9. Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro, 1.

10. McLaurin, Melton A., The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, Conn., 1978).Google Scholar

11. Rachleff, Peter, Black Labor in Richmond, 1865–1890 (Urbana and Chicago, 1989).Google Scholar

12. McLaurin, Knights of Labor in the South, 82–84.

13. Bennetts, David P., “Black and White Workers: New Orleans, 1880–1900” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1972);Google ScholarRosenberg, Daniel, New Orleans Dockworkers: Race, Labor, and Unionism, 1892–1923 (Albany, N.Y., 1988);Google ScholarArnesen, Eric, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

14. See Green, James R., “The Brotherhood of Timberworkers, 1910–1913: A Radical Response to Industrial Capitalism in the Southern U.S.A.,” Past and Present 60 (1973):161–200;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDubofsky, Melvyn, We Shall Be All (New York, 1969), 209–20;Google Scholar and Foner, Philip S., The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917 (New York, 1965), 233–57.Google Scholar

15. Dubofsky even suggests that much more such organization was possible for those who were audacious enough to try. We Shall Be All, 209.

16. See Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, for an informed discussion.

17. As Ronald Lewis's comprehensive work points Out, the composition and racial dynamics of the overwhelmingly white coal fields of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana were quite different from those of the majority Black coal areas of Alabama and from the more racially and ethnically diverse fields of Appalachia-especially southwest West Virginia-making generalizations with respect to race difficult for the union and industry as a whole. There are literally hundreds of highly informative books and articles on mineworker unionism and on the coal industry. Lewis, Ronald L., Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980 (Lexington, Ky.: 1987).Google Scholar For recent controversies, see Gut-man, “The Negro and the UMW”; Brier, Stephen, “The Career of Richard Davis Reconsidered: Unpublished Correspondence from the National Labor Tribune,” Labor History 21 (Summer 1980);CrossRefGoogle ScholarHill, Herbert, “Myth-Making as Labor History: Herbert Gutman and the United Mine Workers of America,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2 (Winter 1988): 132–200;CrossRefGoogle Scholaridem, “Black Labor and Affirmative Action”; the rejoinders to Hill in The International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2 (Spring 1989). Trotter, Joe W. Jr., Coal, Class and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32 (Chicago, 1990);Google ScholarCorbin, David A., Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana and Chicago, 1981);Google Scholar and Judith Stein, “Southern Workers in International Unions, 1936–1951,” in Zieger, Organized Labor in the Twentieth Century South; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker; Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers; Taft, Philip, Organizing Dixie: Alabama Workers in the Industrial Era (Westport, Conn.: 1981);Google Scholar and the pathbreaking work on Black workers in coal by Nyden, Paul, Black Coal Miners in the United States (New York, 1974)Google Scholar are all highly informative. For an insightful review critical of recent work by both Trotter and Corbin, see Stein. For extensive references and an overview, especially about the career of John L. Lewis, see Dubofsky, Melvyn and Van Tine, Warren, John L. Lewis (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

18. Kerr, Clark and Siegel, Abraham, “The Interindustry Propensity to Strike — An International Comparison,” in Industrial Conflict, ed. Kornhauser, Arthur et al. , (New York, 1954), 189–212.Google Scholar

19. The UMWA was founded in 1890 as a result of a merger of Knights of Labor National Assembly 135 and the National Federation of Miners and Mine Laborers. From the beginning it was explicitly committed to racial egalitarianism. See Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 137; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 355.

20. Greenberg, Stanely B., Race and State in Capitalist Development (New Haven, 1980), 294.Google Scholar

21. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 323; Lewis, , Black Coal Miners, 46, 54–55;Google ScholarMarshall, F. Ray, The Negro and Organized Labor (New York, 1965), 97.Google Scholar

22. Nyden, Black Coal Miners, 2; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 355–56.

23. Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 63.

24. Ibid., 47; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 371; Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro, 165.

25. Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 64. Further evidence is presented in the testimonies of Black miners surveyed by Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 201; and Spero and Harris, 375–76.

26. Lewis, 49, 94, 104, 164; Spero and Harris, 376.

27. See especially Hill, “Myth-making as Labor History.”

28. Nyden, Black Coal Miners, 23–28; Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 81, 86.

29. Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 361; Lewis, 101–06.

30. Quoted in Spero and Harris, 361.

31. Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 106.

32. Ibid., 117–18.

33. Nyden, Black Coal Miners, 10, 17–19; Northrup, Organized Labor and the Negro, 171; Northrup, et al. , Negro Employment in Southern Industry (Philadelphia, 1970), 15, 33, 37;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 170–76.

34. Nyden, 19.

35. Note, for example, the extremely positive early evaluation by Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 224.

36. Ibid., 205.

37. Eric Leif Davin, “The Littlest New Deal: SWOC Takes Power in Steeltown, A Possibility of Radicalism in the Late 1930s” (unpublished paper, 1989), 30–31.

38. For opposite evaluations of the progress of the union and its commitment to racial egalitarianism in Birmingham during the 1940s and 1950s, see Norrell, “Labor Trouble”; and Stein, “Southern Workers in International Unions.”

39. In the 1970s the proadministration Local 6 president put Out a racist leaflet in the plant, calling some African-American local union officials “fugitives from the watermelon patch,” enraging not merely the over 1,000 Black workers, but large numbers of Hispanic and white workers as well. When the local Fair Practices Committee unanimously filed charges for the local president's impeachment, over 500 workers attended a union meeting demanding his removal; it was the Region 4 UAW office that rose to the president's defense (leaflets and material from Local 6 in author's possession). This was the same regional leadership that marched with Jesse Jackson and Operation Push in Chicago.

40. Key, V.O. Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York, 1949);Google ScholarBois, W.E.B.Du, Black Reconstruction (New York, 1935);Google Scholar Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development; Bloom, Jack M., Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement (Bloomington, 1987);Google Scholar and Schattschneider, F.E., The Semisovereign People (New York, 1960).Google Scholar

41. Huntley, Horace, “Iron Ore Miners and Mine Mill in Alabama: 1933–1952” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1977), 20–26.Google Scholar

42. Kelley, Robin D.G., Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill, 1990), 66, 145.Google Scholar

43. Ibid., 147, 151.

44. Ibid., 145. It is important to note in this context that Mine Mill's record with regard to Chicano workers in the Southwest was equally egalitarian, despite the difficulties that it had in facing recalcitrant employers there. See Daniel, Cletus, Chicano Workers and the Politics of Fairness (Austin, 1992).Google Scholar

45. Huntley, “Iron Ore Miners and Mine Mill in Alabama,” 215–218.

46. The new hiring policy was “the subject of a heated debate” in 1941 at the Wenonah local. The issue was raised by a rank and filer, who expressed the concerns of other Black miners that so few Blacks were being hired. One proposal was that the union demand that the company hire equal numbers of Blacks and whites. The Black vice president of the local opposed this suggestion, much to the pleasure of the white newcomers and the chagrin of Black miners. Although the vice president was subsequently voted out of office, attempts to get the company to change its hiring policies failed. Ibid., 96–98.

47. Ibid., 110, 162, 189.

48. Ibid., 208–09.

49. Korstad, Karl, “Black and White Together: Organizing in the South with the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural & Allied Workers Union (FTA-CIO), 1942–1952,” in The CIO's Left-Led Unions, ed. Rosswurm, Steve (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992), 76;Google ScholarHoney, Michael, “Labor and Civil Rights in the South: The Industrial Labor Movement and Black Workers in Memphis, 1929–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois University, 1988).Google Scholar

50. Korstad, 86.

51. Korstad, Robert R., “Daybreak of Freedom: Tobacco Workers and the CIO, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1943–1950” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1987), xvii, 5.Google Scholar

52. Northrup, Herbert R., “The Tobacco Workers International Union,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 56 (08 1942):606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53. Ibid., 616–17.

54. Korstad, “Daybreak of Freedom,” 201–02, 208.

55. Ibid., 219–30.

56. Ibid., 230.

57. Honey, “Labor and Civil Rights in the South,” 261, 379; Lucy Randolph Mason letter to CIO Organization Director Allan S. Haywood, October 5, 1940, quoted in ibid., 379.

58. Korstad, “Black and White Together,” 76; Operation Dixie papers, Duke University Labor Archives, 1945–1950, passim.

59. Honey, “Labor and Civil Rights in the South,” 500.

60. Ibid., 527–30.

61. Marshall, Ray F., Labor in the South (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 172.Google Scholar

62. For a parallel argument, see Korstad, Robert and Lichtenstein, Nelson, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (12 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63. Brody, David, The Butcher Workman: A Study of Unionization (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 88;Google ScholarHalpern, Eric B., “‘Black and White Unite and Fight’: Race and Labor in Meat-packing, 1904–1948” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1989), 257.Google Scholar

64. Brody, 176.

65. Rick Halpern, “Interracial Unionism in the Southwest: Fort Worth's Packinghouse Workers, 1937–1954,” in Zieger, Organized Labor in the Twentieth Century South, 163; Horowitz, Roger, “The Path Not Taken: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1920–1960” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1990), 440–48.Google Scholar

66. Jones, Leroi, Blues People (New York, 1963), 96,Google Scholar 106, makes this point compellingly in his discussion of the wider social space in Chicago in the 1920s, allowing for the flourishing of jazz there.

67. Halpern, “Black and White Unite and Fight,” 338.

68. Brody, Butcher Workman, 176; Halpern, 365.

69. Halpern, 383.

70. Brody, Butcher Workman, 176.

71. Halpern, “Black and White Unite and Fight,” 509, 507, 534.

72. Horowitz, “The Path Not Taken,” 642.

73. Michael Honey, “Coalition and Conflict: Martin Luther King, Civil Rights, and the American Labor Movement” (unpublished manuscript, 1992).

74. Halpern, “Interracial Unionism in the Southwest,” 158–59.

75. Hill, “Black Labor and Affirmative Action,” 245.

76. Nancy Quam-Wickham argues that during the 1940s the ILWU was insensitive to racial issues despite the ideological commitments of the union's leaders. Eventually, but much later, she argues, the union evolved in a more racially egalitarian direction, in part because of the stance of the leadership. “Who Controls the Hiring Hall? The Struggle for Job Control in the ILWU During World War II,” in Rosswurm, CIO's Left-Led Unions.

77. Critchlow, Donald T., “Communist Unions and Racism: A Comparative Study of the Responses of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers and the National Maritime Union to the Black Question During World War II,” Labor History 17 (Spring 1976):237;Google ScholarWeaver, Robert C., Negro Labor (New York, 1946), 221.Google Scholar

78. Schatz, Ronald W., The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–60 (Chicago, 1983), 127–31.Google Scholar

79. Mark McCulloch, “The Shop-Floor Dimension of Union Rivalry: The Case of Westinghouse in the 1950s,” in Rosswurm, CIO's Left-Led Unions, 193–99.

80. Critchlow, “Communist Unions and Racism,” 238.

81. Honey, “Labor and Civil Rights in the South,” 254, 292, et passim.

82. Ibid., 343.

83. Honey, “Coalition and Conflict.”

84. Such an assessment is supported by virtually all fair-minded observers. For example, Ray Marshall, who believed that the expulsion of communists and left-led unions was extremely positive for the CIO, still acknowledged that the Communist party was an important force for racial equality in the CIO. Labor in the South, 350; Negro and Organized Labor, 36, 46.

85. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 81.

86. Laurentz, Robert, “Racial Conflict in the New York City Garment Industry, 1933–1980” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 1980).Google Scholar Northrup, writing in 1944, cites the ILGWU as one of the most racially egalitarian of unions. Organized Labor and the Negro, 128. Hill documents their degeneration into narrow bigotry. “Myth-Making as Labor History.”

87. Meier, August and Rudwick, Elliott, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

88. Bruce Nelson, “Class and Race in the Crescent City: The ILWU, from San Francisco to New Orleans,” in Rosswurm, CIO's Left-Led Unions; Marshall, Labor in the South, 210.

89. As Gavin Wright notes with respect to patterns of discrimination, unions “were largely peripheral to the industrial story in the South.” Old South, New South (New York, 1986), 181.Google Scholar

90. Marshall, Labor in the South, 272, 281; Michael Goldfield, Race, Class, and the Nature of American Politics: The Failure of the CIO's Operation Dixie (forthcoming).

91. Goldfield, Michael, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago, 1987), 110, 191, 192.Google Scholar

92. Cayton and Mitchell, Black Workers, 212.

93. Bruce Nelson, “Mobile During World War II: Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black Equality in a ‘City That's Been Taken by Storm’” (unpublished manuscript, 1991).

94. See Brody, Butcher Workman, 176.

95. Lewis, Black Coal Miners, 87–88.

96. Goldfield, Michael, “Decline of the Communist Party and the Black Question in the U.S.: Harry Haywood's Black Bolshevik,” Review of Radical Political Economics 12 (1980):44–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

97. Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, “Insurgency, Radicalism, and Democracy in America's Industrial Unions” (Working Paper #215, Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991).

98. Norrell, “Labor Trouble,” 256–57.