1943 miners’ strikes set example for fight for Black rights

Fighting Racism in World War II, a collection of articles, pamphlets, letters and resolutions from the press of the Socialist Workers Party during the second imperialist world war, is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for November. “Lessons of Miners’ Strikes,” the selection below, is from the May 22, 1943, Militant. The United Mine Workers carried out a series of strikes that year, defying the War Labor Board and President Franklin Roosevelt. The miners won a raise from $7 to $8.50 per day, the first break in the wartime wage freeze. With over half a million members, the UMW was one of the biggest unions in the country, and this was the largest single strike in U.S. history up to that time. Author Albert Parker urges Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph, president of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, both leaders of the March on Washington movement, to follow the miners’ example and refuse to subordinate the struggle for Black rights to Washington’s imperialist war. Copyright © 1980 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY ALBERT PARKER
The delegates to the coming conferences of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and of the March on Washington movement can learn a good deal from the current mine struggle.

The government, the coal operators, the press, and the radio threw everything they had at the miners. They threatened them, they coaxed them, they appealed to their patriotism, they exerted every form of pressure they had at their disposal. But they did not shake the miners.

If the miners win, it will be because they asserted their independence of the government and followed a policy based on their own needs. If they had listened to all the false arguments of the administration and the press and the labor fakers and the Stalinist betrayers, if they had succumbed to the demands for “national unity” with themselves at the bottom and the coal operators on top, if they had let themselves be talked out of the use of their strongest weapons — then surely they would have gained nothing.

This is of decisive importance to every Negro fighting to achieve equality and to every organization working to abolish Jim Crow. For the enemies faced by the miners in their fight are substantially the same forces standing in the way of Negro advancement. In peacetime these forces are always exerting pressure against the labor movement and the Negro people; in wartime they exert a hundred times as much pressure, and intervene more openly in the affairs of labor and Negro organizations, hoping to dominate them and stifle all militant struggles.

It isn’t that Roosevelt calls Walter White or A. Philip Randolph to the White House and tells them that they can’t do this or that (although he did virtually that in the case of the proposed march on Washington that was scheduled to take place in July 1941). The administrative intervention into the affairs of Negro organizations is usually a lot more subtle than that. It exerts its pressure less directly, but just as effectively.

“We must have national unity in time of war,” says the administration. And while it is saying it, Negroes are being segregated in the armed forces; the Fair Employment Practices Committee is deprived of whatever little effectiveness it ever had; Negroes are being lynched and terrorized in the South, discriminated against in jobs and in housing.

What is this “national unity”? Well, if you abide by what is going on and don’t do anything to change things, that’s national unity. And if you denounce these things and speak with determination against them and appear to be serious about ending the second-class citizenship status of Negroes, then you are threatening national unity and you are accused of stimulating race antagonism and inciting race riots and helping the Axis and betraying your own brothers in the armed forces, and the capitalist press will call you all kinds of nasty names. (If the capitalist press forgets to call you a few names, the Stalinists will step in and supply them.)

As a result you may lose your job if you are a worker, and you may lose whatever “friends” you have in Washington if you are a leader. All of this exerts tremendous compulsion on the Negro leaders who don’t want to lose influence with what they call the “humanitarian” administration in Washington. And so although Roosevelt doesn’t tell these leaders what to do and even does not object to petitions and occasional demonstrations which help to blow off a little steam, there are certain things that will be frowned on and disliked in the White House, and, in nine cases out of ten, the labor and Negro leaders just don’t do them.

The delegates to the NAACP and MOWM conferences will have to make up their minds. Either they will continue to permit their organizations and leaders to be subservient to the administration — or else they will assert their independence, as the miners did, and break the grip of Roosevelt’s domination over their organizations and policies and activities. Either they will work out a program based on the needs of the Negro struggle and go ahead on the road to equality — or else they will permit their organizations to continue to function in such a way that Roosevelt and his southern Democratic supporters will be satisfied.

The lesson to be learned from the miners’ struggle and from the state of the Negro organizations today is that the basic requirement for a successful struggle against discrimination and segregation in wartime is a policy independent of the administration’s desires and unspoken dictates.

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On the Picket Line

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