“There’s a real inflection point this May Day,” Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, said about the day unions worldwide attempt to recognize workers, their contributions, and the importance of fair employment practices and worker rights. As 80 nations, including the United States, witness union leaders rally for International Workers Day, there is an intersection of civil rights and worker rights. Union-organized rallies are taking shape, evoking memories of the fight for worker rights alongside civil rights. It wasn’t always a happy marriage of ideas. National Urban League President and CEO Marc Morial emphasized that African Americans in union membership and leadership are “a mixed record.”
Black people initially weren’t allowed to join unions or be in leadership. Unions used discriminatory practices to have Black workers fired from jobs, particularly in the South. Today, in contrast, we see “broader acceptance in leadership for African Americans in the public employee unions like the teachers and AFSME and others,” Morial said. He lamented that “many unions refused to admit Blacks.” That reality of a “closed-door policy” birthed Black unions, which moved Black workers into Black middle-income status. That significant socio-economic upward climb also helped fuel African Americans’ pursuit of equality and civil rights.
Leon Russell, board chair of the NAACP, told the Contrarian, “The concept of two movements with one mission developed out of the red-baiting of the McCarthy era.” Red-baiting was to falsely accuse someone of being a communist. Both the fight for workers’ rights and the fight for civil rights were labeled communist activities. “Labor and civil rights workers came to understand they had to work together,” admitted Russell. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was significant in melding civil rights and labor rights issues. Russell recalled “the natural relationship between the NAACP and Sleeping Car Porters.” The bond between the two organizations “matured when A. Phillips Randolph organized the union.
That was a natural coalition, and, certainly, much of the information about civil rights organizing was carried from town to town and state to state by the porters,” said Russell. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a very public display of labor rights and civil rights working together. It is one of the most famous mass rights gatherings in history and is where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The United Auto Workers sent thousands of workers to the march and contributed funding. The UAW support had “a lot to do with the fact that A. Philip Randolph was on the executive committee of the AFL-CIO in those days,” Morial noted. Please visit www.nnpa.org_mewswire to continue reading.
