The Power of Remembering: Black Factory Workers and Union Organizing in the Jim Crow Era

Michael Honey

The black freedom struggle is a long one. It is inter-generational, multi-layered, and includes all classes of folk. More often than not, history tells us about educators, professionals, preachers, and others who we perceive as leading the movement for change. To really understand the freedom struggle, however, we must know about the life histories of ordinary people, the disinherited, working-class and poor people who rarely appear in the history books. To locate their stories, historians have increasingly shifted their research to the local level and to the years and the generations prior to the 1954-1965 period, usually considered the high point of the civil rights struggle in the South. Attention to these earlier years has begun to direct our vision toward connections between community, civil rights, and labor struggles, toward the crucial perspective and influence of women, and toward the role of ordinary people in creating the basis for change. ⁽¹⁾

This shift in freedom movement historiography intersects with recent directions in labor history. Marxists have long focused on links between African American workers and the larger labor movement. While mainstream labor scholars once focused mainly on the minority of workers, most of them male and white, who were organized, since the 1960s the whole field's attention has increasingly shifted to the unorganized majority and to people of color and women. "Proletarianization" of the black population -- the process of becoming urban workers after slavery -- has become a fundamental construct. ⁽²⁾ The role of black women domestic, factory, farm and household workers in the working class and in the struggle for change has also become increasingly evident. ⁽³⁾ The black working class, rural and urban and in many occupations, is moving closer to center stage in labor history. It is doing so in African American history as well. After all, workers have always been the overwhelming majority of the black population; their fate should be fundamental to our understanding the larger picture. Such a perspective seems increasingly relevant in our own era, in which the decline of industrial jobs, unions, and all manner of reliable working-class employment in the inner cities is so heavily undercutting the achievements of past struggles. ⁽⁴⁾

The power of memory as a means of recreating the twentieth century experiences of black workers has become especially important to recovering the lost history of black workers. Their thoughts and experiences rarely appeared in the media or were recorded by anyone in a sympathetic manner. Recollections from "the survivors of the race," as Clarence Coe described himself and his aged cohort who began factory work in the 1930s, thus help us to access a past that has been largely untold. ⁽⁵⁾ Oral history gets us behind the Jim Crow system to find what Robin Kelley has called the "hidden transcript" of sustained black oppositional culture and resistance to racism. ⁽⁶⁾ Behind the walls and masks of silence about black lives in the South, oral historians, including those at the Behind the Veil Project at Duke University and a variety of other places, are increasingly exposing how working-class and poor southern African Americans during the dark days of segregation became a force in history through church, family, work, play, unions, music, politics and community organizations. ⁽⁷⁾

This article focuses on the oldest surviving generation of black factory workers, part of a stream of migrants from the countryside to the cities during the early twentieth century who became part of community struggles by African Americans to improve their conditions in urban areas. These workers explained how whites constructed segregation in factories and how blacks challenged this construction by organizing unions, voting in work-place elections, and fighting for the right to hold union office and to act as negotiators with white bosses. In the 1950s they challenged white workers and employers alike by filing law suits, based on the Brown V. Board of Education ruling (and later, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), to desegregate the factories and open up skilled jobs to African Americans. They also collected donations for the NAACP and joined civil rights struggles in the community. As black women during World War II and younger cohorts of black men and women in the 1960s moved into factory employment, black workers helped create an intergenerational base for labor and civil rights struggles. In their own lives and on their own terms, through labor organizing they also created the tangible economic benefits for themselves and their children that civil rights organizations were largely unable to deliver.

My contribution to this story comes from sixteen years of return journeys to the Deep South city of Memphis, where I had initially spent six years as a community organizer, to talk with the pioneer black and white workers in the labor movement. The Mississippi Delta city of Memphis in many ways provides a fitting microcosm for such research. Memphis historically had been at the heart of slavery and the cotton trade, and was the place where E. H. Crump and his cronies created one of the worst police states of the segregation era. From the early twentieth century to his death in 1954, Crump ran the most ruthless political machine in the United States, based largely on his manipulation of the poll tax. This tax on the right to vote, legislated into existence as part of the disfranchisement of the black population after Reconstruction, accumulated every year it was not paid, and most workers could not afford to pay it. Based on kick-backs from city employees and vice establishments, Crump's machine paid people's poll taxes and told the masses of workers and virtually the entire black community who to vote for. Crump thereby put his people in power, and used a vicious police force to put down any protest. He directed the economic and political life of the city for some forty years, enforcing the plantation mentality of paternalism mixed with violent repression of his native state of Mississippi. Through the Crump regime, segregation's denial of rights to African Americans led to widespread denial of citizenship rights for working-class whites as well as blacks. ⁽⁸⁾

Memphis also had a history of civil rights and labor struggles, dating back to Ida B. Wells' struggle against lynching in the 1890s, yet the Crump legacy of repression and elite control always remained very strong. As the cross road for black and white musical interchange, the birth place of blues and rock and roll, a certain amount of racial mixing inevitably went on. And in the early 1960s, a college-educated, youthful group led one of the more successful NAACP branches in the South in challenging segregation in public facilities. But the labor movement, strong in the 1940s, declined in the 1950s and 1960s. It took an independent thrust by black workers and the African-American community as a whole to burst open the city's repressive history. Memphis became a storm center in the southern freedom movement during the 1968 sanitation strike in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., lost his life. Yet coming into Memphis in the early 1970s after those climactic events, as I did, the town appeared quiescent, even stagnant. While civil rights organizations remained active, unions were weak, and it appeared that organized workers had done little to bring about social change prior to 1968. The reality, as I was to discover in research for Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (1993), was more complex. Although white supremacy had undermined both labor and civil rights organizing for many years, the pre-1960s generation had not been quiescent. On the contrary, various labor activists had resisted Crump's police state, struggled successfully to improve the living standards of black and white workers, and helped create fundamental shifts in the social order. One could only understand this, however, by viewing labor and civil rights struggles as part of a continuum, rather than as separate developments.

Oral histories heavily informed my work by revealing an unwritten history of grass roots struggle, and led me to a closer examination of what black workers can tell us about their long history of resistance to racism. Additional interviews with black factory workers over the years created a first-person narrative of working-class struggle and resistance to segregation, one that had begun long before and continued long beyond what most people think of as the modern civil rights movement. The hidden transcript revealed by black workers in Memphis suggested new ways to show that history is not so much the work of great men as it is the work of ordinary working class men and women. This article accesses just a few of these oral histories, now published at length in book form as Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (1999). ⁽⁹⁾ Perhaps this short review can draw out some inkling of what black workers contributed to African-American, labor, and civil rights history in the South.

If You're Black, Get Back

Big Bill Broonzy aptly captured the nearly universal experience of black workers under Jim Crow in his 1946 song, "Black, Brown and White Blues." Virtually any black worker living in the Jim Crow South could recall the conditions he described. Serving as a replacement for slavery, segregation insured that few black workers could rise above minimal levels in wages, skills, or status. Whites confined them to plantation and day labor in the rural areas, and to domestic and personal service in both the cities and the countryside. In industry and the crafts, both white workers and employers barred them from higher-waged occupations. African Americans thus worked harder for less money, always subordinated to whites, regardless of their abilities and knowledge. As Broonzy sang, "if you're black, get back."

Lynchings and racial violence, control over the vote, segregation in the labor market and in public accommodations, the ever-visible "white" and "colored" signs, and constant racist propaganda in the news media affected all black southerners. But black workers in Memphis reminded me that the South's racial system was not just about race, but about wages, work, and profits. Like slavery before it, segregation drove down the price of black labor and undercut wages for unskilled whites, disunited the working class, and kept it from organizing and becoming politically powerful. Segregation incorporated both racial and economic forms of oppression.

White workers of course played a crucial role in creating and sustaining the racially segmented labor market. The stories of black workers confirm a growing number of historical studies which paint a depressing picture of how white male workers, not just capitalists, kept blacks at the bottom of the wage and job hierarchy, thereby denying them opportunities to feed their families and accumulate household incomes. White worker exclusionary practices reached a particularly ugly stage during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when white craft unions and railroad brotherhoods virtually obliterated black workers from skilled labor markets. Not only craft unions in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), but the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) institutionalized discrimination through contracts negotiated and enforced by white male union members. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Given the horrific record of many unions, one wonders why black workers would have supported them at all. The answer is that black workers, particularly in the low waged and unskilled labor market they dominated in places like Memphis, far more than whites saw that nothing would change for them except through unionization. Black workers often preferred all-black unions when they could get them, as in longshore employment. But they also remained consistently willing to join unions with whites, even if in segregated locals. ⁽¹¹⁾ Even when blacks and whites sat on opposite sides of the room, and even when whites controlled most of the elected positions and kept blacks in the worst jobs, bi-racial CIO unions still offered black workers hope for a change in their relationship to employers and to white workers. Most African American workers in Memphis joined them and stuck by them whenever and wherever they could.

The relationship of black workers to union organizing proved to be very different for black women than black men, however. For reasons explained later, very few black women ever had the option of organizing or joining a union. This reality heavily weights the narratives of union organizing during the hey day of the labor movement from the 1930s to the 1960s toward black male workers. In the South, black men always worked in large numbers in many factories, warehouses, sawmills and on the docks, and it is their story which in large measure defines the CIO experience in places like Memphis up until the 1940s. ⁽¹²⁾ During World War Two and again in the 1960s, more and more black women came into the formal labor market and into union leadership. As the service economy displaced male industrial workers in the 1970s and 1980s, black women workers increasingly took center stage in the southern labor movement. Tera Hunter and others have demonstrated how important the work, associational activities and family life of non-unionized and women workers always has been to working-class history. The non-union, minority and female working class, Robin Kelley also suggests, needs to be seen and understood as an active force; workers cannot be understood just in terms of their relationship, or lack of it, to the organized labor movement. ⁽¹³⁾

Yet the genre of older labor studies which focus on unions and organizers still has a particular resonance when applied to the lives of the black men and women who were union pioneers in the CIO. Instead of white males, black men, and eventually black women as well, provided the animating force for a significant portion of the industrial labor movement, especially in the South. From the perspective of these black workers, the distance between labor organizing and civil rights struggles seems smaller and smaller. For proletarianized black men and women, issues of race and class increasingly intertwined, and the importance of unions in their story is not to be denied. What I found in Memphis, and other researchers have found in other parts of the South and other parts of the United States as well, is that African-Americans usually were the most willing to join union organizing, took the greatest risks to do it, and were the last to give up on it. Many of the great labor movements of the twentieth century would not have occurred without their active participation. ⁽¹⁴⁾

Black workers in Memphis told me in chapter and verse how white factory owners divided workers and their jobs by race and gender. One of the oldest Memphis workers I spoke with, a man named Hillie Pride, explained to me that this could be changed only through organization: he felt that unionization, more than any other factor, determined his fate. Hillie and his wife Laura came from sharecropping in Arkansas, in conditions so bad that Mrs. Pride refused even to talk about them. Hillie began working at Fisher Body factory when unions existed only among a few white skilled workers. If your skin was black, "you didn't have no union, no help, no nothing," Pride said. He remembered that African Americans making ten cents an hour lined up for their pay singing "the lord will make a way somehow." Pride later moved to the Firestone Tire and Rubber factory, where wages were better but conditions were even worse. He never felt confused about the need for an organization which united all of the workers in the plant. "Nobody said nothing for you at all, until the union got there," he recalled. "You were just like mules and hogs." ⁽¹⁵⁾

Matthew Davis also remembered being worked like a mule and treated like one as well. He and other African Americans at Firestone hauled, cut and washed blocks of raw rubber weighing hundreds of pounds a piece, and worked in tire pigment called lamp black, a substance which washed out of their skins long after their work day and killed many of them with cancer during retirement. Unskilled white workers also suffered from bad job conditions, overwork and lack of respect from supervisors, but blacks could never move out of their lower status, for the company assigned both jobs and wages on the basis of race. Blacks usually worked in separate departments from whites, but where they worked together the company classified them as "helpers" to the whites, at lower rates of pay. Whites got higher wages for the same work done by blacks, and had access to a promotional ladder denied to them. As Davis recalled, "all you had to do was come in there and your face be white, brother, and you'd move up." ⁽¹⁶⁾

The CIO's promise of equal rights trade unionism sounded like the answer to these conditions. African-Americans recognized that industrial unions could not succeed unless the CIO organized blacks and whites into the same organization, something the white workers in the AFL craft unions refused to do. But most whites desperately resisted what the companies called the CIO's "nigger unionism." During an organizing drive at Firestone in 1940, they refused to unionize under the CIO and joined a segregated AFL local instead. They discovered only through hard experience how ineffective a racially and craft-divided union could be, making no progress for several years under AFL representation. Reluctantly, whites at Firestone and elsewhere joined the CIO, tacitly recognizing the necessity of a single union which organized the whole work place into one unit, black and white together. This recognition of a degree of common interests among blacks and whites would drive industrial unionism forward during the CIO's crucial period of expansion in World War Two, and created a number of strong unions by the end of the war.

Without the support of black workers, however, the CIO would never have survived in Memphis. Most CIO unions did not enlist blacks as full-time organizers, for under the extremely repressive conditions of the 1930s, employers would not bargain with them, white workers would not listen to them, and expulsion or even death would most likely be their fate. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Even so, black workers made up eighty percent of the unskilled labor force in Memphis factories, which could not be organized without their support. Black rank and file support provided the base for early CIO success, for African Americans proved the most eager to join, took the greatest risks to do it, and were the last to give up. George Holloway's story provides insight into why the CIO had such appeal for black factory workers. ⁽¹⁸⁾ In explaining the early history of southern unionism to me, he put it into a personal context leading us back to an earlier time:

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee on June 8, l9l5. My daddy's parents were slaves in Tennessee. Grandaddy died on a day farm in Somerville, Tennessee, when I was one or two years old. Daddy took me to the funeral. My Grandma died two or three years later. Daddy was a child of slaves; he wasn't a slave though. Daddy said that his parents were allowed to stay on the big farm, when they were free, as sharecroppers. Grandad handled a two-mule plow, and scraped cotton. Dad didn't want to work on a farm, so he went to Memphis and worked in the clothes pressing shops, maybe on Beale Street. Then, he went to the Pullman Company, as a way to travel.

Holloway, like many others of his generation, had direct links to slavery through his family, which had participated in the proletarianizing migration into the cities to escape the dreadful rigors of sharecropping and Jim Crow in the countryside. What he especially remembered, however, was how powerless he felt as he experienced the many indignities of urban segregation as a child. Second hand school books and poor conditions in segregated schools, sitting in the Jim Crow balconies at theaters, abuse from white police on the streets, women being forced to try on clothes in the basement of the local department store -- "we knew all of this was wrong as youngsters, and we didn't enjoy it, but there was nothing we could do about it," he said. There were no alternatives: the NAACP barely existed, driven under ground by Memphis's repressive political machine and a brutal white police force. Boss Crump controlled jobs and city licenses, and had ministers or anyone else who spoke against the Jim Crow system beaten up and run out of town. Murders of black people by police, and in a few cases by employers, demonstrated that they had no rights that whites felt bound to respect. For many black working-class people, unions provided the only light in the black night of segregation. As an adult, Holloway told me, "I joined the union to help change these things."

Holloway knew about unions through his father, who taught him the good things they could do for workers and their families:

My Daddy was a pullman porter and the second vice-president, and then president of the [Memphis] Pullman Porters' Union. They were part of the AF of L. He brought me my first union experiences. My daddy used to run [on the train] from Memphis to New York. I'll never forget, when I was nine years old, my daddy came home one night, singing. When people [passengers] would steal things off the train, such as towels, pillow cases, and water pitchers, my daddy would have to pay for it if he hadn't noticed. My sister, Amelia and I heard him singing one night for the first time in fifteen years since he had begun working there. Because they had formed the union, he would no longer have to deduct stolen and broken items from his pay check. That was my first notion and recollection of the unions. They had a band and would have parades and picnics. My daddy played in the band. Once the union came in, Porters made more than a letter carrier, and they were looked up to in the community. They made good money, enough to buy beautiful houses or cars. Back in the 20's, black people rarely owned cars, unless they were doctors or something like that.

Holloway early on understood why the authorities in Memphis were so dead set against unionization for blacks: it worked. The Pullman Porters union in the latter 1930s raised his father's wages to among the best wages in black Memphis. Holloway also learned about the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car President A. Philip Randolph, who was run out of Memphis twice by the Crump machine. Randolph's continued struggle for equal treatment in society and within the labor movement provided a model he tried to emulate.

Holloway's father, however, also taught him the bad things about unions, which seriously hindered their ability to organize the multi-racial working class in Memphis:

The only other AFL unions that had blacks at that time were the Carpenters' and Bricklayers' Unions. They [AFL] had a separate hall for blacks. Blacks and whites couldn't go to meetings together. They actually belonged to two different unions. The AFL trades building was right on Beale Street, and the black one was behind it. It was a big brick building for the the white union, and a separate little wooden building in the back, at one time a servants' quarters, for the black union. The AFL machinists and electricians were all in the white union. The whites didn't want the blacks in the union, and they weren't going to have them. When Dad was forming the union, they couldn't meet at peoples' houses openly. They had to sneak people in different doors in secret, so no one would notice. Mr. Crump said there wouldn't be any black union.

AFL craft unions had largely excluded blacks from the best jobs and subordinated the few blacks who belonged to AFL unions by segregating them into separate, largely powerless units. Craft unionism organized workers based on their occupation or skill, and used this organization to keep other workers out. This method had excluded not only blacks but other minorities, women and the great mass of unskilled industrial workers. The CIO, which began in 1935 and 1936, emerged out of the AFL as a new spear head for organizing the vast ranks of unrepresented workers, many of them minorities. It sought to bring together all workers in an industry or work place into one union, regardless of race, nationality, gender, or political creed. Communist and other leftist organizers fully committed to equal rights took on a special role in the CIO, leading many of the toughest organizing drives and fighting for the inclusion of black workers in union membership and leadership. In Memphis, CIO organizing began amongst a small group of activists on the waterfront, a number of them Communists. They organized and inspired river workers like Red Davis, a poor white sixteen-year old who became extremely active in Communist and labor organizing for the next twenty years, and who took a strong anti-racist stand. Organization spread from there into other low-wage industries.

CIO unions grew episodically during the New Deal and then by leaps and bounds during World War II. But in places like Memphis it remained slow going. Police and company thugs in numerous instances beat organizers nearly to death for trying to organize the dreaded interracial CIO. When Holloway and the first generation of black union activists began their careers in the 1930s, organizing a union which included African Americans could easily be worth the price of one's life. When Holloway began work at the Firestone factory, a white organizer named George Bass came from Akron to convince workers to join the CIO's Rubber Workers union. Black workers had no difficulty supporting this, and Holloway became one of his lieutenants in the organizing drive. But white workers largely fell prey to the AFL and the company's line that they would be joining a "nigger union" if they enrolled in the CIO. Bass and another white organizer named Noel Bedgood were brutally beaten in front of the factory by company thugs; it took eighty-five stitches to close Bass's wounds. Holloway stood by horrified, with tears in his eyes. He was unable to intervene because he knew it would cause a race riot and undermine unionization even further. In a subsequent election, a segregated AFL union took control of the plant. Holloway left the industry before Firestone could fire him, but he remained a strong union man.

Holloway continued to view unionism as virtually synonymous with his struggle as a black man for equal rights, but like other black workers recognized that industrial unions could not advance without reaching white workers. Breaking down white resistance to an inclusive union of whites and blacks together became the acid test for the CIO in many work places. Almost all white workers came from a culture steeped in white supremacy. They faced racial taunts and the fear of being physically attacked for joining one. Nonetheless, a significant number of southern whites did join CIO unions. Self interest dictated it. The segregated AFL union at the Firestone plant was like "a lost ball in high weeds," as rubber worker organizer Forrest Dickenson put it. ⁽¹⁹⁾ The AFL's racially bifurcated units could not develop an effective plant-wide strategy to handle industrial issues, and made no progress for Firestone workers.

Hence, whites began to reconsider their attachment to the old unionism. Richard Routon came from a farm area where segregation was built into every aspect of life, and his father had been a member of a racially exclusionary white railroad union. Routon initially supported the AFL, but became disgusted with AFL-company collusion and shifted his allegiance to the CIO. Interestingly, he became a CIO leader by advocating black and white unity during a confrontation between white and black workers in the factory parking lot. He, like many other white workers in industries with large numbers of blacks, came to realize that racial division meant poor wages, bad working conditions, and no power. ⁽²⁰⁾

In some cases, white workers changed their attitudes significantly, and in other cases they hewed to white supremacy. Routon became a moderate supporter of integration based on his experiences with African Americans in the union. Red Davis, mentioned earlier, went further; he became a race traitor, and completely jumped the ship of white supremacy. He eventually married an African American woman and dedicated much of his life to fighting racism. ⁽²¹⁾ In other cases, white workers simply accepted interracial industrial unionism as necessary to improving conditions. Based on that logic, the CIO blossomed to 32,000 members during World War II in Memphis. However, the majority of white workers remained all too happy to support departmental and occupational segregation, separate seniority lines and racially-based wage differentials, and sought to use their unions to control blacks and protect white privileges.

African Americans, on the other hand, became increasingly impatient. Once unionization was attained, and after many blacks fought in a "war for democracy" during World War II, they increasingly demanded an equal place in the factory and the union.

The post-war period and early 1950s thus became the decisive turning point for the CIO and for black workers, and an era of vicious confrontations with white supremacists. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, increasing pressures for conformity resulted from Cold War anti-communism, and from the Ku Klux Klan, Dixiecrats, and later the White Citizens Councils and the John Birch Society. All of these pressures pushed union racial practices to the right. The Taft-Hartley act, passed by a Republican Congress in 1947, drastically modified the labor freedoms granted by the 1935 Wagner Act and undermined the ability of unions to organize, especially in the South. The split in CIO unions over support for the Progressive Party's integrationist Henry A. Wallace against the more racially conservative Democrat Harry Truman in the 1948 Presidential campaign, and conflict over Communist leadership in the CIO led to the purge of nearly all of the CIO's left-led unions (with nearly a million members). As the CIO eliminated its most active anti-racists, the segregationist and Christian fundamentalist upsurge decimated union and civil rights organizing. White racial conservatives took over the CIO in Memphis and many other places, and organizing stagnated. ⁽²²⁾

It was in this extremely difficult context that people like George Holloway and Clarence Coe took on struggles to open up skilled jobs in unionized factories to African Americans, and to eliminate separate bathrooms, time clocks, water fountains and other facilities. Holloway, who had become a Pullman porter after leaving Firestone, in 1946 became one of the first people hired at the new International Harvester plant in Memphis, and the leading union activist in the plant. Some 3,000 white and black workers voted in the CIO practically unanimously, but whites still resisted demands for equality at the work place or in the union hall. Holloway eventually became the first black United Auto Workers union regional representative in the South in the 1960s, but only after years of struggles both with and against white workers in Memphis.

While people like Holloway helped to lead organizing and to implement unionism at the shop floor, they fought a battle on two fronts, one with employers and the other with their fellow white workers. Employers, it almost goes without saying, continued to enforce customary segregated work arrangements and unequal wage rates. White workers also resisted any loss of their racial privileges. Many of them had undertaken strikes during the war to protect their higher-paid jobs from black competition, and they continued to uphold separate seniority lists, segregated departments, and discriminatory occupational wage differentials. They also refused to teach blacks how to operate machines so they could move into higher-paying jobs. The contractual relationship achieved by industrial unions more often than not codified discriminatory hiring and promotional practices, thereby consigning African-Americans to the inferior positions established in the pre-union era. ⁽²³⁾

The efforts of their supposed white union allies to try to maintain segregated cafeterias, rest rooms, drinking fountains, and even time clocks and parking lots, never ceased to amaze African Americans. Outraged, even decades later, at the indignities he suffered at the Firestone plant, Hillie Pride asked me: "What would you think, if it was a fountain here, and one over there, and the same water come up here as there, what would be the difference if you drank over there?" Yet even as whites struggled to maintain their control, blacks like Holloway were fully conscious that, in the era before the federal government stepped in with fair employment and civil rights laws, they also needed the support of those same white workers to attack the miserable conditions everyone suffered in the factories. Holloway and the more activist black unionists tried to build their unions for short term gains, hoping to do end segregation in the long run.

Civil Rights Unionism

Holloway and others like him walked a tight rope, on one hand trying to persuade whites to support mainstream unionism, which was concerned about wages and working conditions, and on the other hand to implement the CIO's equal rights philosophy by challenging work place and union discrimination. Civil rights unionists such as Holloway wanted not just the opportunity to be in a union but to participate equally, to qualify for any available job, and to be paid equally for it. Many of black workers were veterans of military service in World War II, and they expected more from unions than higher wages: they wanted to enlist the CIO unions in a more general campaign to end Jim Crow and enact full civil and political equality. They paid dearly for their beliefs and their commitments to that struggle.

In 1948, Holloway joined the first union negotiating committee at International Harvester, an almost unprecedented situation, at the time. One hotel refused conference rooms for union-company negotiations, proclaiming that "this hotel would not allow a black man disputing a white man's word." A second hotel rented its facilities but forced Holloway to enter through a service elevator in the back, where garbage and cleaning disinfectant splashed on him every morning. One company negotiator throughout the proceedings insisted on referring to Holloway as "the nigger," a slur which none of his white union colleagues protested. Holloway told me:

I want you to know that after we negotiated the contract in Memphis, for one year Mr. Bryson, the superintendent of International Harvester Memphis works, would use the word "nigger" at every grievance meeting. Such as "niggers are slow, they are not doing their work, we are going to get rid of them." I used to lay my head on the table and cry within, because the other six union committee men were white and wouldn't defend me. I was the secretary of the bargaining committee, therefore I kept the minutes and I didn't have time to speak up. Many times, I asked the bargaining committee to stop this, but they wouldn't.

Holloway suffered these indignities as perhaps the only college-educated man, undoubtedly a better secretary than most factory workers, on the bargaining committee. He had attended two years at Tuskegee Institute, but had to go to work after the "Roosevelt recession" of 1937; the best work he could find, despite his above-average education, was factory work. But he put these skills to good use at Harvester where blacks, who made up a third of the plant's population, elected Holloway as committeeman and a trustee of the union. While constantly dogged by racism, he did his best to represent all the workers. As a committeeman in the plant, Holloway had jurisdiction over workers in the punch presses, foundries, warehouse, and among truck drivers, janitors, and others. He perhaps had a hundred different stewards, black and white, working under his jurisdiction. He was elected to over ten union committees and was vice-chair of the bargaining committee, working with stewards deciding which grievances to pursue. For over a decade, he remained at the center of negotiations, grievance procedures, and union affairs in the plant. He wrote many of the basic union policies, some of them adopted by International Harvester (now Norstar) around the country. He had extraordinary responsibilities, comparable to those of a political or administrative leader.

Yet for many years he still remained a "nigger" to many white workers, whose very futures in many ways depended upon his integrity and intelligence. White union leaders refused even to give him a ride, as he hitch-hiked or walked miles to his job while white union members drove past him. He was the only black on the local's executive board, and none of the whites would ever second his motions, so none of his resolutions could even be discussed. In 1949, when Holloway became the first black at the Harvester plant to operate a machine, white workers tampered with it while he was on break. Had he not checked the machine before restarting it he could have been dismembered or killed. "I was the committeeman for the man in the department who tried to kill me," Holloway told me. "That's how relations were with whites at the time."

Throughout the 1950s, Holloway struggled with racist whites more often than he struggled against IH's relatively moderate white management. A clique of white supremacist "secessionists" illegally put union funds into a private account in their own names, planning to make the hall a "private club" in order to keep the hall segregated in violation of UAW equal rights policies. The national UAW put the local in receivership and closed the hall. Still, white unionists affiliated with the White Citizen's Council carried guns to union meetings and intimidated white workers sympathetic to integration. Vigilantes broke all of the windows in Holloway's home, and for two years he and his wife Hattie regularly received threatening phone calls in the middle of the night. Several union meetings nearly turned into race riots, and during one entire summer a black worker from the Firestone plant named Lint Coe, brother of activist Clarence Coe, guarded the Holloway home at night with a shot gun. Carl Moore, the white regional director for the UAW, also lived under threat and carried a shot gun in his car. Despite these perils, eventually Holloway and his black (and a few white) allies integrated the union hall, the plant's facilities, and all the skilled occupations. White workers gradually swung toward support of the national UAW against the secessionists. But Holloway's victories came at a very high cost to himself and his family. His wife told me that she still felt nervous about being around whites twenty years after these events, and recalled days when Holloway left home for union affairs telling her he might not return.

The racial strife at International Harvester paralleled a similar fight taking place at Firestone in the post-war era. Clarence Coe was at the forefront of that fight. Like Holloway, his family background and his earlier experiences had steeled him in the determination that he would not bow down to Jim Crow. ⁽²⁴⁾ He had came to Memphis from the rural areas in west Tennessee in the late 1930s. His civil rights awareness started, he said, "I guess, from my ancestors":

Back during slavery, right here at Madison Tennessee, they called it the Magden Quarters, that's the neighborhood where my foreparents came from when they were in slavery. When they were freed, they allowed each slave to buy a tract of land, and my grandparents bought land there. Right up there in west Tennessee. My grandparents got this land. And their parents had been slaves, my grandparents and great-grandparents were slaves. I just grew up in that environment, and my parents taught me some things. They taught me. And then, when you grow up and you see this is the way it really is, you just kind of start fighting back.

Coe managed to get a high school education in nearby Jackson, Tennessee. Although his family had escaped sharecropping, they could not escape the other terrors of the countryside. The sight of a lynching and seeing white men kick black men in the seat of their pants for the fun of it set Coe's mind on leaving. "I wanted to get away from this environment," Coe said.

Coe followed the lead of a friend and joined the chain of migration from the countryside to the city, taking up the civil rights struggle as soon as he moved to Memphis. Here he worked on the campaign to stop the legal lynching of nine black youths in the Scottsboro case, wrote stories for the black press, collected NAACP memberships and tried to organize a union in a small factory where he worked. For his union activity, a fellow black worker, aided by others, stabbed him with a knife and nearly killed him; many years later, the evidence of this encounter remained in the form of a large "X" across his abdomen. Coe concluded from this and other experiences that, despite a general black enthusiasm for the CIO, many black workers were frightened of the consequences of overt organizing, and some would even lash out against those who disturbed their relationship with employers. Many black workers secretly rooted for Coe during his life of struggle at the point of production, but he felt that most of them stood mute on the sidelines while he stuck his neck out for the betterment of the race.

In Boss Crump's town, Coe found "the same damned things" that had caused him to leave the countryside -- namely, a pervasive atmosphere of white racism and paternalism. African Americans had to call whites "mister" or "sir," whites used blacks' first names, called men "boys" or complete strangers "auntie" or "uncle," or, more simply, "nigger." Whites would never shake hands with blacks or sit with them in a mixed group, unless blacks sat behind or opposite them, and whenever African Americans held good jobs, ran businesses, owned homes, land, good tools, or a new car, some white person put them "in their place." For driving a new car onto his employer's parking lot, for example, Coe found his tires slashed by the company's security guard. Whites thought blacks should grin and bear such indignities with good cheer. But Coe, like Holloway and a number of others, would not be contained, and sought out every opportunity for change, particularly where he spent most of his days: at work. Coe began work at the Firestone Tire and Rubber company in 1941, laboring seven days a week, twelve hours a day during the war, never seeing the sun rise or set. He continued there the rest of his working life.

For Coe, the struggle for equality became a life and death battle at work, day in and day out. During the war he sought merely to survive, but like Holloway, after the war he began to take on "the Jackie Robinson role," becoming an activist for equal rights on the shop floor. He became an informal leader among black workers, and later an elected committeeman. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he constantly fought with white workers and factory supervisors to end their use of the term "nigger," to end departmental seniority which discouraged blacks from bidding for better-paying jobs, to abolish segregated facilities in the plant, and to elect blacks to higher union offices. White workers twice tried to maim or kill Coe when he broke into previously white jobs, and by the 1960s he kept a gun in every room of his house and in his car. Desegregating the factory, gaining respect, and opening up better-paying and more prestigious jobs to African Americans was a grim struggle that lasted years: "You had to fight for every inch... Nobody gave you anything," Coe recalled.

After the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision overturned school segregation, Lonnie Rowland, Coe and other black workers secretly collected money at the plant and hired a private attorney who sued both the company and the union to overturn segregation at Firestone. As at International Harvester, some of the union meetings over desegregation nearly turned into bloodbaths, and black workers at Firestone did not completely attain integration until the early 1970s. Coe did not begrudge the struggle, but he felt disheartened about the cost of gaining the most simple, every day rights, such as using a convenient restroom or a fountain in the factory, bidding on a skilled job, or parking in the paved ("white") instead of the gravel ("black") parking lot. Looking back, he couldn't help exclaiming, "My God, man, when you'd given up thirty years of your life fighting for something that should have been yours to begin with, it's a little bit disheartening!"

In such battles, black workers sometimes had the rhetorical support of the unions and sometimes the backing of white union leaders. But they could not rely on them. When the CIO merged with the AFL in 1955-56, black activists had less clear support from their national unions than in a previous era of left-center unity. At the local level, and in the South particularly, they had to initiate heroic battles to end Jim Crow in the factories and union halls. Through their struggles, civil rights unionists sought something more than a union and something more than civil rights. They carried their hopes for change into a series of black-led struggles for factory and work place desegregation, used their unions to register blacks to vote and to exert more power in the community, and as battering rams to break down many of the barriers which had been holding African-Americans back economically for generations. Their actions even convinced some white workers that the barriers of white supremacy did not serve their interests either. After opening up all jobs to anyone and equalizing wage rates at Firestone, for example, older whites realized they might prefer to move out of fast-paced assembly line jobs into sweeping or other jobs previously reserved for blacks. ⁽²⁵⁾

Civil rights unionists also took their struggles into the streets. Encouraged by a Communist-led union which had long taken on larger civil rights issues, Leroy Boyd and 17 other black members of Local 19 of the Food and Tobacco Workers union in Memphis went further into the realm of outright protest activity than most dared during the repressive 1950s. Travelling to Mississippi to hold a vigil to stop the execution of Willie McGee, a black man falsely charged with the rape of a white woman, these 17 men (along with Red Davis and a number of white protesters) were arrested and barely escaped lynching before they returned to Memphis. Shortly thereafter, Willie McGee was executed, with 500 whites celebrating outside. Back in Memphis, those who protested his execution came under heavy attack. But black Local 19 workers had something most black workers lacked: not only did some of its black members take the lead in the civil rights protest in the dark years of the 1950s, but they did so with strong white support, in a left-led union that had always made the destruction of Jim Crow one of its goals. The FTA had been purged from the CIO, but it continued to struggle on (it was eventually subsumed by other international unions). Its Local 19 in Memphis, staffed in post-war period by an extremely committed white organizer and leftist named Ed McCrea, offered strong support for civil rights initiatives.

Boyd's arrest in Mississippi, under the sponsorship of the Communist-led Civil Rights Congress, was only the most public step in a life-long struggle against white supremacy. ⁽²⁶⁾ He came from a poor sharecropping family in Mississippi, and remembered various acts of violence against blacks, especially when whites thought black men had been involved with a white woman. He always hated whites telling him who he could go out with, and the McGee case only reminded him of the racial terrorism justified by white men's fixation on interracial sex. In one incident he remembered, whites dragged a black man behind their car with chains. He knew that whites could be vicious, but his father always spoke up to them, and Boyd learned early how to protect himself with his fists or a knife. ⁽²⁷⁾

At age twenty one, in 1946 he had become a part of the stream of thousands of rural people seeking to get out of Mississippi's mechanizing cotton fields heading north to Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago. He came to the city with no knowledge of unions, hoping to move on, but instead spent the rest of his life in Memphis, battling for his rights as a worker in the low-wage cotton compress and seed oil industry. When he turned to a union for help, employers claimed he and his associates were "communists" or being manipulated by communists. He rejected all such charges out of hand, saying anyone who took a stand for civil rights would automatically be labelled a communist. Said Boyd,

if a white person took too much time with a Negro, they'd always call him a nigger-lover. That's what you'd be branded, a nigger-lover. So they [whites] wouldn't associate with us too much. And that's a mistake with the whites, not to associate with the Negro. The union representatives were branded with another name, they were called nigger-lovers, and also communists.

Boyd knew that "communist" was a scare word, and he also knew that a small number of radical whites had long promoted explicitly integrationist activities within the local CIO. Both black and white Communist organizers built his and other unions from the ground up, and in his opinion there was nothing wrong with being a Communist.

However, most white radicals were run out of the labor movement after Senator James Eastland of Mississippi held hearings attacking Local 19 and other unions with a left tinge as communistic in 1952. Boyd commented on how the anti-communist hysteria eliminated most of the active integrationist whites from the unions. But it did not end agitation for civil rights or unionization among black workers. Boyd, Earl Fisher and other black workers continued over a period of years with work slow downs and unacknowledged strikes to establish rights at work and to open up jobs previously reserved for whites only. These workers made the same demands as civil rights protestors in the streets. "We told them [employers and whites] we wanted to be treated like other decent Americans," Boyd remembered.

Boyd had always worked with Communists, never saying whether he had ever joined the Communist Party. Ideologically, what appealed to him about the CP was its philosophy of struggle. His own struggle for dignity through unionization not only improved his working life, but also provided him with a means to involve members of his union and his family in various struggles throughout the 1960s. He didn't pay any attention when people called him a Communist, and he didn't study on it too much either. His philosophy was straight forward, and guided him throughout his working life: "The union is the people. You got to have your people with you. If everybody fighting for one cause, you got a strong union."

A Way Out of No Way: Black Women Factory Workers

The labor struggle was by no means confined to black men, although they dominated industrial employment until the 1960s. In the early years of industrialization, white employers virtually excluded black women from all but the very worst industrial jobs. At the beginning of the Great Depression over eighty percent of black women in Memphis worked in domestic and personal service, and they usually made so little that even many working-class white families could afford to hire them. The vast bulk of black women working for wages until the 1960s did so in white people's homes or did laundering, waiting, and cleaning jobs with no upward mobility. Those few black women who did get factory jobs worked not as machine operatives but as floor sweepers, cleaners and in other laboring positions, and experienced even worse wage and occupational discrimination than black men. Most white employers thought of black women as servants, not as workers, and at best treated them paternalistically. ⁽²⁸⁾

Black women finally came into industry during World War II in a major way, although employers dispensed with most of them at war's end. Those black women did make it into the factories and into the unions did so under the worst of conditions. Most manufacturers hired white women to replace white men who went off to war, often choosing them over black men when they could. When they got more desperate for labor, employers hired black men, and only after that hired black women, who often did the hottest, hardest, dirtiest work that black men normally did, at even lower wages. Wood, furniture and food processing came to rely on black women for unskilled labor, often supervised by white women. At Firestone, a majority of the work force of 7,000 became women during the war, and a number of black women found unionized jobs there. But they got little aid from federal agencies supposed to enforce equal access to jobs and job training in defense industries.

Irene Branch and Evelyn Bates both falsified their body weights to get jobs at Firestone, and clung to miserable jobs hauling tires in the fields and doing cleaning and other dirty work. ⁽²⁹⁾ These jobs still provided far higher pay than household, servant and field labor. Under segregated conditions, few bathrooms existed for black women in the plant, and these were little better than out houses. Other indignities crowded their days in the factory, as these women struggled with fellow white workers as much as they did with management. White women supervisors could act just as viciously as the men, and did everything they could to keep black women from learning skills that would allow them to apply for higher-wage jobs. In their world of constricted opportunities, black women nonetheless had no choice but to "take it," that is keep working despite abuse. Although the United Rubber Workers union existed in the plant, it remained weak. According to Ms. Branch:

Those supervisors would curse you, call you names, do you any kind of way. They'd call you "nigger" and everything else, and spit on you. Do anything to you. Blacks was really treated bad. And they'd fire you in a minute. I know a lot of men--women too--quit out there. But I didn't quit. I had a hard time, but I stuck on in there.

Because of black womens' precarious position in the labor market, Branch told me, "you couldn't do nothing else but take it or get going on." Knowing how to "take it" meant staying at the job, whatever the company and white workers dished out, without protest. One could count the number of unionized plants that would hire black women in Memphis on one hand. "There was no use, if they didn't have a union." Black workers "just didn't have the privilege" of whites, and without a union couldn't do much to change conditions.

Both Branch and Bates became their family's main providers after husbands died or left, and, as with the generation of black men who came into industry earlier, unionization provided the key to doing this. As Branch put it, "If it wasn't for that union I wouldn't have stayed in there." Indeed, when it looked like all the black women would be reamed out of the industry after the war, black men pressured the union to make an agreement with the company that saved the jobs of the most senior women, white as well as black. Like black men that I talked to, Ms. Branch saw unionization as critical to her work life. "Nothing didn't go right, we didn't see freedom until we got that union." Without it, she recalled, she never would have been able to stay in the industry, or to double and triple her real wages, send children to college, or have a pension that allowed her to retire.

However, while both Branch and Bates supported the union as much as anyone, they experienced it in a different way than black men. Wage work was central to their lives, but it combined with traditional core values which placed raising children before anything else; hence, they had little time for union affairs. Ms. Branch, whose husband died early, had begun work life as a domestic worker, and under the financial pressure of being the family breadwinner she continued to take care of white folks' children and her own in the day, working at Firestone at night. She kept up an exhausting routine of constant labor that included only three or four hours of sleep a night for twenty-eight years. Branch survived this regime of incessant work, but like many black women raising families, she had no time to go to union meetings. But as with black men, her incessant labor and determination rested on strong family models of hard work and persistence. Said Ms. Branch,

I was raised in Athens, Georgia. My dad got his eye knocked out in that railroad strike, somebody beat him up, around 1924. He had a brother here, and my parents moved to Memphis in '24. I was a little girl then, and I went to school here. But I left when I was eighteen, because I had a mean stepmother. Then I married at nineteen, been workin' ever since. I didn't go around these honky tonks, just went to church and worked all the time. They called me a work horse.

So when I got grown and I married, then my husband died. I worked practically all my life from eighteen years old, nursing white children and cooking for white people, 'til I got the Firestone job. I had to do the cooking, and I had to go to the back door. You nursed those children and everything, and then you'd eat after they got through eating. This stoic and heroic routine allowed Ms. Branch to raise her first husband's two children and send one to college, and her position as a unionized factory worker ultimately made her an independent woman. When a second husband tried to make her quit her factory job, "I told him he had to get going." She remained single and independent, working two jobs, for the rest of her life.

Evelyn Bates had similar difficulties in finding any time beyond work and child care. She likewise suffered from supervisor abuse and bad working conditions as she too raised a family largely alone. She identified not just unionization, but the civil rights movement and resultant court decisions, as opening a new day for her and other black women workers:

The integration of jobs happened after the Supreme Court Decision in '54 [Brown v. Board of Education]. Before that, only thing a black woman could do in Firestone was sweep, work on the line doing heavy work like I was talking about, work up on the belt sweeping, where all that lamp black [a carcinogen] was, or clean the restrooms as a maid. They had a few black womens up in the cafeteria, on the black side. The white worked on the white side. That's all a black woman could do before they integrated the jobs. But the idea was, the white women didn't want to sweep, she didn't want to clean up no restroom, so that was a black woman's job. It was just like you had black and white men's jobs. That's the way it was with the womens, too.

Bates eventually broke open one of the higher-paying jobs that had been the exclusive preserve of white women, despite the fact that no one would teach her how to do the work. Ultimately, she recalled, she became good friends with some of the white women who had been most vehement in opposition to her. Like Irene Branch, she felt the union had been at the core of her success, the measure of which remained the success of her children

Accommodation and Resistance

Later generations of black women broke many of the barriers that had held them back in the unions. Alzada Clark in the 1960s organized the furniture and related industries in some of the worst places in Mississippi, going to jail and fighting virtually for her life against some of the most anti-union employers in the U.S. Ida Leachman organized some of the lowest wage workers in the country in the 1980s and 1990s. Black women in the deep South increasingly became union leaders and organizers as the economy shifted from industrial to service employment, and their militancy exhibited the sea change that had taken place in black attitudes compared to the years of "taking it." Indeed, the generation of African-Americans who obtained jobs during the civil rights era would not "take it" as she and other members of the earlier generation had, Ms. Branch and other workers told me.

Edward Lindsey provided an example of the new generation. ⁽³⁰⁾ He had participated in the Nashville sit-in movement in 1960 before taking a job at Firestone, and had intended to become a doctor, not a factory worker. His response to work place segregation was straight-forward: he sat in the "white" cafeteria, drank out of the "white" fountain, and violated segregation every chance he got. Older black workers like Hillie Pride did not object to such confrontational tactics, in fact they admired them. But even Clarence Coe and Matthew Davis, themselves involved in civil rights actions most of their lives, felt that many young blacks in the 1960s became too materialistic. They simply would not work the long hours, and took the higher wages and decent working conditions the union had achieved by then as a given. Some of them had Cadillacs, and once you had such a car, "you got to ride," said Coe. Almost uniformly the older generation felt the younger group had lost the work ethic, and that the next generation in the 1980s and 1990s, a period of union-busting and factory closings, had lost its way entirely.

Evelyn Bates reflected on the timing of a worker's entrance into the Firestone plant, and how it influenced their understanding of struggle over time:

The younger people thought that things had always been better for us like they were when they started. They thought we were making big money all the time, and that we always had a easy job. It wasn't like that. The younger people came in and really didn't understand the struggle that the older people had gone through. No they did not. We went through with something! The mens were the ones that were hired in '37 and '38. To hear some of them tell you what they went through! They really went through with something. We thought we went through something, but we didn't near go through what they went through. When I first started, they had a jack, and the men was pulling all this heavy rubber. When the younger generation come in, all the new equipment was there for them, so they thought we had an easy time all of the time. But, we went through hell! Sure did. When the younger folks came in, they could get a job anywhere. I always figure they thought, "Easy go, easy come."

On the other hand, those who came into industry in the 1960s often thought the generation whose lineage had gone from sharecropping and segregation to factory work were too humble, too willing to "take it" in order to survive. Some of them felt that Hillie Pride and many in his generation had accepted too much of the white man's ways, even while they acknowledged that many in his generation had also displayed great dignity and courage. Indeed, attitudes of the pre-civil rights generation, as Clarence Coe tells us, varied enormously, and of course changed with circumstances.

The testimony of black workers reminds us of the fine line between accommodation and resistance that they walked during the segregation era. They had a limited range of options, all of which demanded some degree of accommodation to the racial system. The price people paid in the struggle for change always remained high. Most African-Americans in the South worked at least until the 1950s as sharecroppers or as agricultural wage laborers. Many others, like the vast majority of black women, did domestic work, or like Memphis black men working in sanitation, some kind of service work, all at rock-bottom wages. Those who could get work in the factories often did better, and those few who unionized did far better. But most older people with families, wherever they worked, feared to risk their jobs by joining mass marches and struggling for rights in civil society. Labor and civil rights pioneers like George Holloway, Clarence Coe, Matthew Davis, Leroy Boyd, Edward Lindsey, and other activists proved exceptional for their willingness to assault Jim Crow at all levels.

A growing historiography demonstrates how the black militancy of the 1960s, whether in the mode of nonviolent direct action or armed self defense, turned around the Jim Crow South. But what of the earlier generation? The role of ordinary working-class African Americans in the freedom struggle is complex and difficult to document. On one level, their accomplishment was survival: being able to keep working, put food on the table, and raise the next generation, hoping for an opportunity to right the many wrongs of segregation. The right to work, they believed, was the right to live. Many people, Hillie Pride among them, focused on that level of struggle. Unlike Coe and Holloway and others, most black workers did not overtly rebel. Yet in discussing his past, Pride displayed anger and incredulity when describing the segregation system; he spoke of his pride in the work he did and how he taught others to work hard and well; and he castigated the cruelties of 1980s-style capitalism in the U.S., telling me that African Americans as a group were being "ripped up by the moral structure of this country." He had strong opinions and understood the sacrifices which he and his generation had made in order to endure.

Pride and others in the early generation of factory workers knew that "taking it" to a degree was necessary for the "survival of the race." They worked harder than most people could imagine today, applying the regimen of hard labor they had learned on the farms to brutal labor required in the factory. They took pride in their ability to withstand these tests, but they had not acquiesced to the system of racial segregation. The accomplishments of this generation also included, by the mere fact of unionization, significant achievements in breaking down barriers between whites and blacks; and union wages strengthened black communities at their core, providing economic support for families, churches, and community organizations. In varying degrees, most black workers fought the racial system at some level, some of them tooth and nail and others covertly. They did not accept white supremacy, did not devalue their own labor, and many of them applauded it if they did not take part in the civil rights struggle.

While many black workers resisted by enduring, some like Holloway, Coe, and others played the "Jackie Robinson role" of standing up and taking threats and abuse in order to openly challenge segregation. All of those who came of working age during the 1930s, however, bore a special relationship to the history of racism and black resistance to it. Most of them knew grandparents who had once experienced slavery. All of them had parents who had lived under the heaviest years of the Jim Crow system. They understood the necessity of accommodation to whites in order not to get killed, and to some degree conformed to the racial etiquette of their times, but they also had parents and other family members who had modeled some form of resistance to the system. Both humility and resistance were ingrained in their characters.

One can understand the accomplishment of these union pioneers in part by looking to their later years. People such as Holloway and Coe, through their unions became politicians in their plants and ambassadors in the community. Holloway chaired many of the International Harvester plant's committees and led much of its negotiating for whites as well as blacks, while Coe at Firestone became a walking union textbook, able to spell out the provisions of a complicated union contract that covered virtually any situation. Both participated heavily in the civil rights movement. Matthew Davis supported the NAACP and marched with the sanitation workers, and used his union at Firestone as a means to play a key role in many of the civic, church, and fraternal organizations of the North side of Memphis. His union sent him to conventions, to represent the workers at city hall, and to hearings and public events concerning workers and the black community. He joined the Firestone union's singing group and became a deacon in his church, frequently preaching the sermons. When he retired in 1982, 300 people, including the mayor and other city leaders honored him, and he received an honorary sheriff badge. Davis felt the union had provided him with a vehicle to participate in the affairs of the larger society, a degree of power non-existent for most blacks in civil society, as well as a means to send his children to college.

Civil rights unionists, male and female alike, did not fight only for justice on the plant floor. They led mass membership drives among black factory workers for the NAACP. They supported many of the civil rights efforts, from the Scottsboro case in the 1930s to the student sit-ins in the 1960s, and became leaders in their churches and communities as well as in their unions. Many of the children of these black workers went to college as the result of their parents' rising incomes and status due to unionization. In some cases it was the children of unionized workers who broke the barriers of segregation at Memphis State University, the public library, and other important institutions. Black workers and their children, with Ph.D.'s, medical degrees, or "no d's," became leading citizens in Memphis and other parts of the United States. ⁽³¹⁾ Leroy Boyd and his children played humble roles as foot soldiers in the civil rights demonstrations in Memphis and surrounding area of Mississippi. He and many of the black labor activists I spoke with played a critical role in supporting the black sanitation workers whose strike shook Memphis to its core in 1968. The United Rubber Workers union hall became the center for daily mass meetings, and was bombed as a result. Unionized black factory workers joined sanitation workers, black ministers, teachers, and the larger black community in finally breaking open the politics of paternalism and racial subordination through this momentous strike. In the aftermath of King's death, labor and civil rights struggles practically merged for a time. Organizing and strikes at the city's public hospital and later and the Memphis Furniture factory continued to raise the issues of black labor in the city. Furniture Worker leader Leroy Clark also led the NAACP in street demonstrations and school boycotts, while Matthew Davis, Alzada Clark, and other black unionists led voter registration drives and community mobilization, leading to the election of Harold Ford in 1974, the first black Congressman in the Deep South since Reconstruction, and in to the election of black Mayor Willie Herrenton in 1991. As civil rights unionist Edward Lindsey put it, these people saw the civil rights and labor struggles as parallel, not separate. ⁽³²⁾

The Power of Remembering Depends on What We Remember

Ultimately, deindustrialization and assaults on the right to organize undermined unions and shattered the economic base for much of the black community. A new phase of struggle began, led increasingly by women and the working poor. Retirees of the United Rubber Workers union remained an important force in trying to save their neighborhood from the plagues of deindustrialization and crack, while black union retirees continued to work in their churches and communities in a variety of ways. But the things they struggled to achieve at the work place were disrupted or destroyed.

The stories and perspectives of this generation of workers who suffered the worst of American apartheid should be recognized and celebrated and made visible. Black workers challenged many of the economic aspects of apartheid and helped to lay groundwork for more systematic attacks on Jim Crow. They not only changed their own lives, but created the basis for advances by their children, who became part of the new generation of college students who so significantly influenced the course of the black freedom struggle. Black workers also changed the character of the labor movement, challenging white control over jobs, unions, and public spaces, and creating a black leadership cadre within it.

They were a transitional generation, moving from farm to factory and from Jim Crow to Freedom Now. This generation which created many of the cracks in the wall of segregation is swiftly passing from the scene. Any efforts we can make to fill in the silence created by segregation with the active voices of such workers will help us to understand a little better the dynamics that led to the destruction of America's apartheid. Recovering lost voices, oral historian Steven Caunce tells us, "allow[s] us to examine life at a level of detail that would be quite impossible to achieve for whole populations." Even talking to one such person can change our perspective dramatically; interviewing many can "have a cumulative effect when linked together." ⁽³³⁾ These workers, George Holloway says, are "witnesses," and their testimonies suggest some of the complexity and the often subterranean character of black struggles for equality and justice.

We need to more clearly link the black working class to the origins and development of the civil rights movement and to highlight economic justice as one of the unresolved issues raised by the movement. The persistent demand for economic justice by poor and working class people, addressed so clearly by Martin Luther King in the Poor People's campaign and the Memphis sanitation strike, remains to be achieved. What generations of factory unionists and other black workers learned through organizing should be researched, understood and incorporated into freedom movement history, carrying it beyond the framework of civil rights to the concerns for economic justice and labor rights that are both long standing and increasingly urgent in our own era.

Despite the limitations placed upon their lives, black working-class activists felt they had gained something by organizing and fighting back. For them, unions meant more than better wages, hours and decent working conditions. As Robert Beasley, a sanitation worker who participated in the 1968 sanitation strike, commented to filmakers, "'I Am A Man,' that really meant something, didn't it." ⁽³⁴⁾ The stories of black workers, rural and urban, women and men, can help us to locate the origins and judge the results of a freedom struggle which had many dimensions, took many forms, and outlasted the oppressor's rope.

Notes

1. For an excellent review and critique of the literature, see the bibliographic essay in Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 413-42. This book clearly places the freedom movement in the context of an intergenerational organizing tradition that largely evolved from the bottom up, even while being influenced by national and international developments. In a similar vein but with a focus on the NAACP, Adam Fairclough shows the diverse and community-based origins of the freedom movement, in Race and Democracy, The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). John Dittmer makes a deep exploration into local origins in Local People, The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Patricia Sullivan suggests the many ways the 1950s and 1960s are tied to the 1930s and 1940s, in Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Certainly this focus on the previous generations and local organizing is not entirely new, however. Clayborn Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), sensitively detailed the relationship between cadres and local people, and a variety of books on the earlier generations of white and black organizers exist, including Linda Reed's, Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Recent autobiographies by Black Panther Party members David Hilliard and Elaine Brown, and studies of Black Power and northern urban struggles, such as James R. Ralph, Jr., Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), have creatively moved freedom movement studies into non-southern terrain.
2. This literate is synthesized by Joe Trotter, "African-American Workers: New Direction in U.S. Labor Historiography," in Labor History 35: 4 (Fall 1994) 495-523, and by Trotter and Eric Arneson's papers at Southern Historical Association, November 7, 1997, Atlanta. For another summation of this scholarship, see Bruce Nelson, "Class, Race and Democracy in the CIO: The 'New' Labor History Meets the 'Wages of Whiteness,'" International Review of Social History 41 (1996), 351-374, and "Working Class Agency and Racial Inequality," ibid., 407-420. The growing intersection of race and labor studies became apparent at the Conference, Racializing Class, Classifying Race, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, July 11-13, 1997. But it should be noted that a focus on African American workers, men and women, has existed in Marxist literature for a long time. Philip S. Foner in particular explored black labor history in depth long before the new wave of scholarship. See Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Workers, 1619-1981 (New York: Praeger, 1973, revised and reprinted by International Publishers, 1981), and his multi-volume history of the American labor movement. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis published an eight-volume history of the black worker, summarized in Black Workers, A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
3. See Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Random House, 1985). On multi-ethnic women's labor scholarship and questions of race, gender and class, see Dana Frank "White Working-Class Women and the Race Question," International Labor and Working-Class History 54 (1998): 80-102. Literature is also cited in Bruce Nelson, "Class, Race and Democracy in the CIO," 372, cited above, fn. 36. A model study is Tera Hunter, "To Joy My Freedom": Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Dolores E. Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), and Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living in, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910-1940 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).
4. See William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears, The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
5. Personal interview with Clarence Coe, Memphis, Tennessee, May 27 and 28, 1989.
6. Kelley and others in African-American labor studies are steadily finding new ways to reveal the truth of Richard Wright's admonition that "we are not what we seem." See Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: the Free Press, 1994).
7. The most recent and compelling oral history linking black workers to civil rights struggles is Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). On the historiography, see Rick Halpern, "Oral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-five Years," Journal of American History 85:2 (September 1998): 596-610. The Behind the Veil project at Duke University has scoured the South collecting precious testimonies from hundreds of black southerners. The transcripts are held at the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University. See William H. Chafe, "'The Gods Bring Threads to Webs Begun'," Journal of American History 86:4 (March 2000), 1531-1552.
8. For chapter and verse of this story, see Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
9. Michael K. Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
10. Not to exhaust the list of contributors to the recent literature racism and labor organizing, see works by David Roedigger, Alexander Saxton, Herbert Hill, Jeffrey Norrell, Bruce Nelson, Eric Arneson, Roger Horowitz, Dolores Janiewski, Rick Halpern, Earl Lewis, Joe Trotter, myself, and others. Much of this work focuses on white working class racial identity and racism, but it also explores trans-racial labor solidarity. It is peculiar (or maybe not) that white males so heavily dominate this phase of historiography. On multi-ethnic women's labor scholarship and questions of race, gender and class, see Dana Frank "White Working-Class Women and the Race Question," International Labor and Working-Class History 54 (1998): 80-102. See also the work by Tera Hunter, Jacqueline Jones and other women cited in this article.
11. See accounts by Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Eric Arneson, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
12. For confirmation of the pattern of black female exclusion from industry before the 1940s on a national basis, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Random House, 1985).
13. Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), and Kelley, Race Rebels.
14. See the recent treatments by Roger Horowitz, "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!": A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90 and Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54 (both Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). Earlier work includes dissertations on Winston-Salem by Robert Rogers Korstad and the Birmingham area by Horace Huntley. For recent labor scholarship on the South, see Gary M. Fink and Merl E. Reed, eds., Race, Class, and Community in Southern Labor History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), Robert H. Zieger, Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), and Southern Labor in Transition, 1945-1995 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997). See Rick Halpern's essay "Organized Labor, Black Workers, and the Twentieth Century South: the Emerging Revision, in Rick Halpern and Melvyn Stokes, eds., Race and Class in the American South Since 1890 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), 43-76.
15. Personal interview with Hillie Pride, May 26 1983, Memphis.
16. Personal interview with Matthew Davis, October 30, 1984, and April 1996, Memphis.
17. Examples of such repression against black workers in the cases of William Glover and Thomas Watkins are given in detail in Black Workers Remember.
18. Personal interview with George Holloway, March 23 1990, Baltimore, Maryland.
19. Personal interview, Forrest Dickenson, February 20, 1983, Memphis.
20. Personal interview, Richard Routon, February 18, 1983, Memphis.
21. Personal interview, W.E. Davis, January 28, 1983, St. Louis, Missouri.
22. See Sullivan, Days of Hope and Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, on the post-war schisms.
23. These patterns of white worker behavior were widespread. Robert J. Norrell, "Caste in Steel: Jim Crow Careers in Birmingham, Alabama," Journal of American History 73 (1986), 669-694, identifies this pattern and concludes that industrial unions, by enforcing departmental seniority and occupational segregation, played a crucial role in undermining black economic progress. In this sense, even industrial unions can be seen as an obstacle rather than a support for black advancement. For a compelling account of white worker resistance to desegregation in the South, see Alan Draper, Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954-1968 (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1994).
24. Personal interview, Clarence Coe, op. cit.
25. Personal interview with George Clark, October 30 1984, Memphis.
26. Personal interview with Leroy Boyd, February 6 1983, Memphis.
27. My interview with Leroy Boyd is supplemented by an interview with him conducted by Paul Ortiz, June 19 and 22 1995, Memphis, used by permission of the Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South Oral History Project at Duke University.
28. In 1930, 17,349 black women (and 5,511 black men) worked in domestic and personal service in Memphis, a larger group than the 10,588 black men who worked in factories. Some 5,000 black women also labored in the hottest and most miserable of conditions in steam laundries. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights, 36-38.
29. Personal interviews with Irene Branch, May 25 1989 and May 27 1989, and with Evelyn Bates, May 25, 1989, Memphis.
30. Personal interview with Edward Lindsey, May 27, 1989, Memphis.
31. As one example, George Isabell, who worked at the Buckeye Factory and belonged to Local 19, had a daughter who got arrested "integrating" the public library, and later became a medical doctor. Personal interview with George Isabell, February 7 1983, Memphis.
32. Personal interviews with Alzada Clark, May 24 1989, Leroy Clark, March 27 1983, and Leroy Boyd and Edward Lindsey, op. cit.
33. Steven Caunce, Oral History and the Local Historian (London and New York: Longman Publishers, 1994), 116-117 on deceiving appearances, and quote on 28.
34. Beasely quoted in "At the River I Stand," a film by Steve Ross, David Appleby, and Allison Graham, available from California Newsreel.