ABSTRACT

Since 1988, when a seminal article by Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein located the origins of the Black Freedom Struggle in World War II-era labor activism, a diverse and wide-ranging literature on what Korstad would later term “civil rights unionism” has burgeoned. Historians have documented numerous instances where African Americans, other racial minorities, and women mounted collective challenges to segregated workplaces, discriminatory pay scales and job classifications, and poverty-level wages paid to service industry workers deemed ineligible for the protections of the emergent New Deal state. In discussing what she describes as the “powerful social movement sparked [in the 1930s] by the alchemy of laborites, civil rights activists, progressive New Dealers, and black and white radicals, some of whom were associated with the Communist Party,” Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has contended that this fortuitous convergence “was not just a precursor of the modern civil rights movement. It was its decisive first phase.” Yet despite the oneness of the labor and equal rights struggles in the minds of many minority and female union members—as they themselves recount in Michael Honey’s collection, Black Workers Remember—it would seem that comparatively few full-blown strikes were motivated first and foremost by civil rights issues. The clearest examples of this are the strikes waged by hospital workers in New York City in 1962 and in Charleston in 1969, as well as the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, during which Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In addition, it should be recalled that in the mid-1960s, at least two civil rights organizations actually organized union locals whose minority members struck in response to discriminatory and degrading treatment by their employers. Finally, numerous smaller-scale work stoppages and wildcat strikes, particularly during World War II, are noteworthy for having turned the spotlight directly on the issue of discrimination against racial minorities and women.