Vol. 71/No. 40      October 29, 2007

These struggles laid the basis for the mass, working class-led movement that brought down Jim Crow segregation in the decades after World War II.

This article is the second in a series tracing the leading role of Black workers in the history of working-class struggles in the United States. Last week’s article covered the rise and fall of Radical Reconstruction governments in the South after the Civil War.

With the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction—the biggest defeat suffered by the U.S. working class in history—the capitalist rulers imposed institutionalized racial segregation in the South in virtually all facets of life, from jobs to schools, to keep Blacks in conditions of virtual peonage.

At the turn of the century, more than 7 million of the nearly 9 million Blacks lived in the South. Most worked the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. They were largely denied the right to vote and other citizenship rights.

This superexploitation was enforced through violence, both by the state and extra-legal terror groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The hangman’s noose was a key weapon used to enforce this.

Formed in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched a campaign against lynching. Between 1889 and 1918, the NAACP reported, 3,224 lynchings took place.

The opening of Northern industry during the boom around World War I spurred a massive migration of Blacks from the rural South to the North’s urban centers. This migration accelerated again as Washington headed toward World War II. By 1945 a majority of the Black population had moved to urban areas in the South and North.

Until the 1930s the great mass of unskilled workers were unorganized and the officialdom of the American Federation of Labor organized most unions as narrow craft structures. Blacks were excluded from many unions.

Despite these barriers, African American workers were at the center of struggles in Alabama and West Virginia that built the United Mine Workers union at the turn of the century, and in the 1920s battles by packinghouse workers in Chicago. Black workers organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925 at the notoriously antiunion Pullman Company.

In the 1930s, battles erupted in auto, steel, meatpacking, textile, and many other industries. Millions of workers organized into industrial unions, forging the Congress of Industrial Organizations. By September 1937 the CIO had grown to 32 unions with 3.7 million members.

CIO unions opened more doors to Blacks, who became among their staunchest partisans. Of the 500,000 steelworkers organized in 1937, some 85,000 were Black. At Chicago’s packinghouses, the Chicago Defender reported in 1939, African American workers were “the backbone” of the CIO Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee. The combativity and consciousness of Black workers was decisive to the ability of the working class to wrest basic social gains in the 1930s such as Social Security.

In the lead-up to World War II, the U.S. capitalist rulers, aided by their lieutenants in the labor officialdom, sought to housebreak the working-class radicalization and whip up war fever. In the face of this pressure, many Black workers refused to subordinate the struggle against Jim Crow to the war effort.

In 1941, Black organizations called a march on Washington to demand equality in employment and an end to segregation in the South and in the U.S. armed forces. The March on Washington Movement (MOWM) was headed by A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

The prospect of tens of thousands of Blacks converging on the capital as Washington geared up for war terrified the Roosevelt administration. Randolph, under pressure from liberals, called off the march, but the movement won some concessions.

In 1942, the MOWM organized mass rallies in New York and Chicago. In April 1943 10,000 people—many of them in United Auto Workers contingents—marched in Detroit against discrimination. In August of that year, Harlem exploded in response to a police shooting of a Black soldier. Struggles and skirmishes broke out in factories and workplaces around the country as Blacks refused to be shut out of the war production industries. Groups of Black workers waged struggles on the job for equal opportunity in employment and training, as well as inside the armed forces against segregation.

The mass social movement that built the industrial unions gave a tremendous impetus to the battle against systematic racist discrimination—one of the greatest obstacles to the unity and fighting capacity of the American working class. Workers in the vanguard of this struggle were also among the pioneer leaders of the mass movement for Black rights of the 1950s and ‘60s that would sound the death knell of Jim Crow.
 
 
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