Imagine Segregation

It’s easy to lose sight of how Martin Luther King Jr. changed America.

Simply from a labor perspective, here is a sample of union bylaws and practices from 1910-1970— imagine that long span!—

From a black scholar and activist in the early 1900s, W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro American Artisan 87-95 (1912), citing many examples from a national survey of labor unions:

Gardeners’ Protective Union (no Negro members; and officer responded, “I have never heard of a good Negro gardener”)

Machinists’ Helpers and Laborers Union, Washington, Indiana (contracts with employers had language not to hire “any Negroes or foreign men for twenty years”)

Order of Railway Conductors of America (membership limited to “any white man”)

Die and Cutter Makers (“Nothing doing on the Negro”)

Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Engineermen (bylaws and constitution deny membership to Negroes);

International Brotherhood of Boiler Makers, Iron Ship Builders and Helpers of America (“There is a future for the race but it must not be forced on the white race”)

American Wire Weavers’ Association (admits only white males)

The Paving Cutters’ Union of the United States and Canada (“the white man will not, especially in the South, … tolerate the Negro to be on the same level as himself”)

Waycross, Georgia Trade and Labor Assembly (secretary believes that “Negro workers ‘are treacherous and unreliable’”)

The list goes on.

Remarkably, these practices continued after King was assassinated. It took lawsuits to tear down segregation. Examples follow:

Pettway v. American Cast Iron Pipe Co. (5^th Cir. 1974) (prior to 1961, company had exclusively black jobs and exclusively white jobs)

Long v. Georgia Kraft Co., 455 F.2d 331 (5^th Cir. 1972) (local union segregated 190 members in an all-white local, and 80 members in an all-black local);

Local 53 of Int’l Ass’n of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers v. Vogler, 407 F.2d 1047 (5^th Cir. 1969) (mechanics union’s refused to consider minorities for membership)

Local Union No. 12, United Rubber, Cork, Linoleum and Plastic Workers of America, AFL-CIO v. NLRB, 368 F.12, 19 (5^th Cir. 1966) (union opposed racial desegregation of shower and toilet facilities)

The list goes on.

Will America follow the path of integration or return to segregation? The next few years will be critical.