Eric Arnesen is emerging as one of the most original and independent-minded historians of American labor. The author of a fine book on dockworkers in New Orleans and a famous article discrediting the jargon-clogged movement known as “whiteness studies,” he is especially good at exploring the ideologically charged territory where race and CLASS overlap. In Brotherhoods of Color, recounting the history of black railroad workers and their union leaders, he fills in a vital chapter in the struggle for civil rights.
One of the principal figures in this history will be familiar to most survivors of American History 101. A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, has long been featured in textbooks and documentaries as the éminence grise of the civil rights movement, one of the organizers of the March on Washington in 1963 (a project Randolph began planning during World War II). Randolph is already the subject of an engrossing biography by Jervis Anderson, but Arnesen fills in the background and context that only hard time in the archives can provide.
Arnesen’s story reveals important patterns in the history of race and CLASS. For instance, he presents cases where the initiative behind anti-black discrimination came not from capitalists but from the white working CLASS. In the revealing case of Memphis yard workers around World War I, labor shortages allowed white workers to take low-level jobs formerly defined as black. But after the war, black workers fought to reclaim their positions, and management complied. White rank-and-filers responded with wildcat “hate strikes,” which forced union leaders and government officials to endorse new rules that excluded more black workers than before.
The older Jim Crow system of reserving admittedly unpleasant, low-paid jobs for black workers at least gave them a piece of the pie. But during industrial contractions, the “black” jobs became desirable to white unions, and a tool for controlling the higher positions. White workers in Memphis exploited management’s assumption that black workers could not rise to positions that required education, such as engineer. They insisted on a uniform seniority ladder, while restricting the lowest rungs to “promotable” men, thus achieving the exclusion of black workers. Evil could flow from the bottom up, as well as the top down, and working-CLASS power could produce reaction as well as progress.
Black workers were not passive bystanders. They sometimes made common cause with management, gaining whatever advantages they could. An important corollary to their willingness to be “scabs” when white workers went on strike was what Arnesen calls a “historically rooted antipathy toward organized labor held by a considerable number of African Americans.” This sometimes inhibited their own organization of unions and bolstered the position of organizers like C.W. Rice, who led the National Federation of Railway Workers and edited the weekly Negro Labor News in the 1930s and ’40s. Rice argued that in America black workers could “start at the bottom of an industry and rise, step by step, through the merit system, to the head of that same industry.” Rice championed “company unions,” set up by management as alternatives to worker-controlled unions. Company unions were often genuinely attractive, considering that most “real” unions excluded or exploited black workers. Sometimes black leaders could use these to undercut the more expensive labor represented by white unions, and win real gains for themselves as well as the bosses. Other black leaders denounced Rice as an Uncle Tom and a pawn of management, especially after cio-affiliated unions began accepting black members and fighting union racism. But Rice and other “independent” black union leaders had a big following.
Randolph was on the other side of such disputes. After building a huge, all-black union, he emerged as a national figure. He is remembered partly because, more than any other leader, he forced white unions to recognize organized black workers. But he owed much of his fame to his ability to extract concessions from government—a strategy he borrowed to some degree from rival independent black unions, but used much more successfully than they.
Randolph’s success in winning recognition from government is in many ways more surprising than his winning recognition from white unions. Arnesen shows the U.S. government repeatedly dismissing legitimate black grievances and helping white workers find new ways to exclude black workers. Sometimes this was a result of simple prejudice, as in the case of C.S. Lake, the U.S. Railway Administration official who denied the existence of labor discrimination, claiming to be the Negro’s friend while he invoked his gratitude to his “old black mammy.” But sometimes it was a deliberate technique of CLASS struggle.
Still, in 1941 Randolph won the biggest concession to black rights from a president since the Emancipation Proclamation, and the only significant concession from a Democratic president up to that point. He did this by branching out of strictly labor organizing, into the broader (and in some ways less threatening) field of civil rights. He demanded not only an end to discrimination in government-sponsored industry in the war, but an end to discrimination in the armed forces.
Randolph’s victory on the first demand came more easily than the second. In World War II, labor shortages impelled employers to put black workers into formerly “white” positions when white workers were unavailable. (They tended to allow Mexicans, women, and even enemy POWs to take jobs before black workers, but shortages of white men were so great that the strongest barriers ultimately fell too.) The shortages might have been enough to force, de facto, the change that Randolph demanded, and got, as an explicit policy, in the form of President Roosevelt’s executive order banning discrimination in military industry.
Randolph’s more radical demand to end discrimination in the armed forces was rebuffed until World War II was safely over, and FDR safely dead. Then another Democratic president, the Southern Baptist Harry Truman, far more
conservative on most issues than FDR, was impelled to desegregate the military. The military, which once resisted civil rights as tenaciously and resourcefully as any institution, remains the most successful experiment in desegregation. Once it made up its mind to mix the races, a radically undemocratic, hierarchical organization could pull off what less authoritarian institutions could not.
The most poignant part of Arnesen’s story is the end: other than military desegregation, the successes that Randolph and others strove so hard to achieve were very short-lived. In the 1960s, black unions’ drive merged with non-labor campaigns for civil rights and forced far-reaching changes in employment law. But by then the railroads had begun to shrink. The U.S. government, which lavishly subsidized the railroads in their heyday, now favored the auto, trucking, highway-construction, and oil industries that drove railroads to the margins of American transportation. One gets the impression that white unions yielded to black demands partly because they no longer had much to fight over. The railroad story echoed the broader story: black Americans finally won opportunities in American cities just as industry was fleeing those cities.
But the struggle was not in vain. The efforts of organized black workers—who with often conflicting strategies made discrimination against them ever more difficult—left a legacy that helped oppressed minorities far beyond their own industry. When Randolph and others recognized that unions and corporations could not be changed from the shop floor, they took their struggle to the legislative realm. Randolph—with the workers behind him—was “the crucial link” between an earlier generation who fought the workers and bosses at hand, and the wider-ranging civil rights struggle that finally forced government to outlaw discrimination.
David Chappell teaches history at the University of Arkansas. His book A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion, Liberals, and the Death of Jim Crow is forthcoming in 2003 from the University of North Carolina Press.
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