ABSTRACT
On Meany’s watch at the helm of the AFL-CIO, . . . organized labor would find it increasingly difficult to relate sympathetically to a militant civil rights movement that challenged the existing relations of power through mass mobilization of the grassroots. Although AFL-CIO leaders spoke the language of racial equality, they were simply unwilling to launch a frontal assault on the deeply rooted patterns of inequality in trades and industries where labor’s strength was greatest.
