I learned labor and discrimination law from Prof. Daniel Pollitt, who had been appointed to the NLRB by President Kennedy and eventually became a law professor at the University of North Carolina. Here is the brief introduction to his Stanford Law Review article, "The National Labor Relations Board and Race Hate Propaganda in Union Organizing Drives" (1965).
The manipulation of racial hate for political or private gain is nothing new in America. Today's politicians who play on racial fears can trace their lineage through the Silver Shirts of the thirties, the Ku Klux Klan of the twenties, and the Know-Nothings of a century ago. Nor is the exploitation of racial distinctions exclusively an American phenomenon. Hitler rose to power in Germany by fostering a tide of anti-Semitism; Japan's battle cry was “Asia for the Asians”; and even the Greeks had a word for it—xenophobia.
Neither the lessons of history, the growth of public education, nor the passage of time has reduced the effectiveness of race hate appeals. In the recent British elections the defeat of Patrick Gordon Walker, slated for the position of Foreign Secretary in the new Labour Party government, was assisted by the whispered slogan: “If you want a nigger neighbor, vote Labour.” Another defeated Labour candidate complained that he had been labeled “the member for Africa,” evoking memories of Labour Party opposition to restrictions on the rush of dark-skinned immigrants from the overseas Commonwealth nations. In the Congo, Premier Tshombe maintains his hold in part through the exploitation of anti-Arab emotionalism; at a recent rally he exclaimed, “Nasser is not the chief of the state of the Congo.... The real Africa is our Africa, black Africa.” And to the south, Southern Rhodesia and the Union of South Africa maintain their white governments through a policy of apartheid.
Here at home, each major political party in the 1964 presidential election used the other's campaign literature to promote support for its candidates through prejudice. A Democratic campaign folder, with photographs of President Johnson alongside such Negro leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was widely distributed in the South by Republican Party workers. Meanwhile, Democrats in Virginia were busy distributing a Goldwater broadside prepared for an appeal in the District of Columbia Negro wards. This pamphlet was prepared at Senator Goldwater's suggestion “to correct widespread misunderstanding among Washington Negro voters,” and quotes him as “unalterably opposed to discrimination or segregation on the basis of race.” Fearing that it would fall into the wrong hands, the Republican National Committee quashed the leaflet, but the stop order came too late; the Virginia Democratic organization had already prepared 50,000 copies to neutralize the expected effect of the white “backlash” against President Johnson's success in getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress.
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In the United States, Illinois once made it a criminal offense to engage in “group libel,” i.e., to portray “depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue” on the basis of “race, color, creed or religion.” In the political arena, the watchdog Fair Campaign Practices Committees have not ended the calumny and vindictive falsehoods in election campaigning; and experiences with the right-to-reply technique suggest the difficulty of establishing by law a freedom for voters to make up their own minds, without at the same time intruding further than seems advisable upon other related freedoms. But no matter how difficult and controversial the solution, the problem of race hate propaganda for personal and group advantages cannot be ignored. This Article will explore one aspect of American experience—the somewhat ambivalent policy of the National Labor Relations Board toward the use of race hate propaganda in union organization drives, and its possible effect on other values Americans consider vital.
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