ABSTRACT
College faculty unionization began in November 1918 when twentynine members of Howard University formed the Howard University Teachers Union and af¿ liated with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) as Local 33. Nearly three decades later, in February 1947, Howard faculty voted 130-1 in favor of being represented by a very different union, the Howard Branch of the United Public Workers of America, Congress of Industrial Organizations (UPW-CIO). Three months later, the union successfully bargained the ¿ rst contract between a faculty and a college or university in the nation. In between, a third union local, the Howard Teachers Union (HTU-AFT Local 440) counted Doxey A. Wilkerson, Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, and W. Alpheus Hunton among its members and was central to social activism in Washington, DC, debates over academic freedom at Howard, and the clashes over communism that split the AFT. This essay examines the largely
organizing at a single institution at the nexus of racial, professional, and political debates. In doing so, it offers historical background to modern considerations and responds to calls for more scholarship on white collar and public unionization. 1 Further, while understanding early faculty attempts and experiences with unionization is in itself important, this essay contributes through its exploration of the efforts of leading Black intellectuals at Howard University, “the leading site, despite internal and external pressures to the contrary, of black intellectual radicalism in academe during the interwar era.” 2 It addresses shortcomings in our understanding of the interplay of politics and faculty activism while meeting Ellen Swartz’s recent challenge to “‘re-member’ American educational history” by correcting the exclusion and misrepresentation of African Americans’ roles in standard historical interpretations. 3
This essay is informed by and responds to gaps in several different strands of literature on higher education, unionization, and African American intellectual history. Despite the importance of unionization in modern higher education, few scholars have considered the beginnings of the movement and fewer have studied, or even acknowledged, the Howard unions. Histories of the CIO ignore college faculty. Those of the AFT offer slight treatment of early faculty organization, even though professors played increasingly important roles that far outweighed their numbers. William Edward Eaton noted that the Great Depression facilitated some faculty organizing and, along with Marjorie Murphy, mentioned Howard faculty as participants in the battles over communism or as part of legislative efforts. 4 Until recently, only Jeannette A. Lester’s dissertation addressed faculty unionization in depth, providing an overview of the activities of AFT college locals over a ¿ fty-year period. This essay expands and complicates her interpretations of Locals 33 and 440, pointing to more varied reasons for their founding and broader ranges of activities and accomplishments, while also extending the analysis beyond the AFT to include the crucial role of the CIO. 5 The larger disregard of early faculty unionization implicates the relative neglect of professional workers in treatments of labor history and the emphasis on K-12 educators in discussions of teachers unions. With few exceptions, those who have considered the history of faculty unions have either implicitly or explicitly indicated that they were insigni¿ cant prior to the beginning of collective bargaining in the 1960s. 6 This perspective is problematic, including because these unions offered important outlets for
successfully bargained almost two decades earlier than is generally acknowledged.
