5fish
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It seems in the latter parts of the 19th century African-American miners from Alabama were used to break strikes in Northern and Midwest states.
In the 1880s and 1890s, mining companies procured African Americans to break strikes by white coal miners in Washington, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, West Virginia, and other states.
In the last decade of the 19th century, the outcome of the clash between the miners and the Black Diamond Coal Company in the western mountain community of Mansfield appeared preordained. A labor force that had once numbered about 2500, composed of white men, mostly American, Welsh, Irish, and Canadian, had seen its ranks reduced by unemployment; those still employed endured repeated wage cuts (wages had been reduced by 25% in just over a year), which made it a struggle for “many a miner’s family to exist.” In an earlier bout of labor conflict, employers’ reliance upon militiamen and Italian strikebreakers led to a decisive defeat for the miners’ unions. Now, once again on strike, miners found themselves evicted from their company-owned homes and threatened by “[A]ctual starvation.” With strikers reportedly in an “ugly mood,” an outbreak of violence was only a matter of time.1 Then the company delivered the coup de grace by importing large numbers of African Americans to replace the white union men. Labor agents scoured the Tennessee and Alabama mining district for experienced black miners.
If white workers perceived African Americans as a threat to their economic well-being, they made little attempt to understand the motivations and goals of the black workers they confronted on the industrial battlefield. Instead, they depicted black strikebreakers as depraved and dangerous threats to their livelihoods and collective power. Viewing black workers as ignorant, depraved, largely unassimilable, and the dupes of capital, they drew the line at admitting blacks into membership in the labor movement with little apology. Black strikebreakers, AFL official John Roach insisted in 1904, were “huge strapping fellows, ignorant and vicious, whose predominating trait was animalism.”6 In response to the arrival of southern black strikebreakers during the 1894 Chicago packinghouse strike white stockyard workers even hung the effigy of a black roustabout from a telegraph pole. “A black false face of hideous expression had been fixed upon the head of straw,” a Chicago white daily paper reported, “and a placard pinned upon the breast of the figure bore the skull and cross-bones with the word ‘nigger scab’ above and below in bold letters.”7
SNIPE... TURNING POINT...
Black elites were slower to abandon their conventional economic nostrums and traditional accommodationist advice, but many came around slowly to supporting black workers’ collective initiatives by the Great Depression and World War II. So did an important wing of the American labor movement, particular the industrial unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The “solidarity of labor is another myth as far as the history of American labor is concerned,” the black scholar Rayford Logan declared in 1944. But matters were changing. In contrast to the sorry record of the AFL, the CIO “has been the most aggressive organization in recent years in promoting not only economic equality for the Negro but also political and even social equality.” That same year, the Northwest Herald, a weekly black paper from Seattle, would similarly conclude “in less than 10 years, the Labor Movement has become the most powerful force for progress in the Negro community … Where the Negroes feared unions yesterday, today Negroes look to the labor unions with hope for a New Day.”43 These were something of an exaggeration, to be sure, but such assessments would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier. As contemporaries recognized, the emergence of a new generation of black workplace activists, coupled with the rise of a hopeful new industrial union movement during the 1930s and 1940s, irrevocably altered the relationship of African Americans to the organized labor movement. The historic 1941 face-off between the United Automobile Workers of America and the Ford Motor Company in Detroit wrote something of an obituary for the classic strikebreaker saga. Although not all of black Detroit’s leaders endorsed the UAW, many did; although not all black workers left the Ford plant when the strike was declared, many responded to the strikers’ plea for support
In the 1880s and 1890s, mining companies procured African Americans to break strikes by white coal miners in Washington, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, West Virginia, and other states.
In the last decade of the 19th century, the outcome of the clash between the miners and the Black Diamond Coal Company in the western mountain community of Mansfield appeared preordained. A labor force that had once numbered about 2500, composed of white men, mostly American, Welsh, Irish, and Canadian, had seen its ranks reduced by unemployment; those still employed endured repeated wage cuts (wages had been reduced by 25% in just over a year), which made it a struggle for “many a miner’s family to exist.” In an earlier bout of labor conflict, employers’ reliance upon militiamen and Italian strikebreakers led to a decisive defeat for the miners’ unions. Now, once again on strike, miners found themselves evicted from their company-owned homes and threatened by “[A]ctual starvation.” With strikers reportedly in an “ugly mood,” an outbreak of violence was only a matter of time.1 Then the company delivered the coup de grace by importing large numbers of African Americans to replace the white union men. Labor agents scoured the Tennessee and Alabama mining district for experienced black miners.
If white workers perceived African Americans as a threat to their economic well-being, they made little attempt to understand the motivations and goals of the black workers they confronted on the industrial battlefield. Instead, they depicted black strikebreakers as depraved and dangerous threats to their livelihoods and collective power. Viewing black workers as ignorant, depraved, largely unassimilable, and the dupes of capital, they drew the line at admitting blacks into membership in the labor movement with little apology. Black strikebreakers, AFL official John Roach insisted in 1904, were “huge strapping fellows, ignorant and vicious, whose predominating trait was animalism.”6 In response to the arrival of southern black strikebreakers during the 1894 Chicago packinghouse strike white stockyard workers even hung the effigy of a black roustabout from a telegraph pole. “A black false face of hideous expression had been fixed upon the head of straw,” a Chicago white daily paper reported, “and a placard pinned upon the breast of the figure bore the skull and cross-bones with the word ‘nigger scab’ above and below in bold letters.”7
SNIPE... TURNING POINT...
Black elites were slower to abandon their conventional economic nostrums and traditional accommodationist advice, but many came around slowly to supporting black workers’ collective initiatives by the Great Depression and World War II. So did an important wing of the American labor movement, particular the industrial unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The “solidarity of labor is another myth as far as the history of American labor is concerned,” the black scholar Rayford Logan declared in 1944. But matters were changing. In contrast to the sorry record of the AFL, the CIO “has been the most aggressive organization in recent years in promoting not only economic equality for the Negro but also political and even social equality.” That same year, the Northwest Herald, a weekly black paper from Seattle, would similarly conclude “in less than 10 years, the Labor Movement has become the most powerful force for progress in the Negro community … Where the Negroes feared unions yesterday, today Negroes look to the labor unions with hope for a New Day.”43 These were something of an exaggeration, to be sure, but such assessments would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier. As contemporaries recognized, the emergence of a new generation of black workplace activists, coupled with the rise of a hopeful new industrial union movement during the 1930s and 1940s, irrevocably altered the relationship of African Americans to the organized labor movement. The historic 1941 face-off between the United Automobile Workers of America and the Ford Motor Company in Detroit wrote something of an obituary for the classic strikebreaker saga. Although not all of black Detroit’s leaders endorsed the UAW, many did; although not all black workers left the Ford plant when the strike was declared, many responded to the strikers’ plea for support
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