Black Workers:

...Years later Douglass's son, Lewis, was denied entry into the typographical union local at the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C...

...However, they did sensitize participants to the interplay of political and trade union issues that some have carried into their current union work...

...BROTHERHOOD FROM WITHIN BLACK WORKERS A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present Edited by Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis Temple University Press, $35.95, $ 14.95 paper, 733 pp...

...Black Workers ought to be required reading for members of Congress considering newcivilrightslegislation.lt should also be read by anyone who cares about working people and the future of American unionism for it contains many expressions of the dignifying effect of labor organizing on the individual worker...

...More than that, they tell a larger story of the American working class and its struggles with employers and inside its own ranks...

...As a black woman hospital worker in Charleston, South Carolina wrote after a long 1969 strike won by an alliance of labor, community, and civil rights forces, "It help me to realize how important I am as a person, which I'm afraid I didn't quite realize before...

...I think the editors give too many pages over to the boilerplate ramblings of black "revolutionary union movements" of the late sixties and early seventies, mostly based in auto plants in the Detroit area...

...They seldom called me to do anything without coupling the call with a curse," recalls Frederick Douglass of his work as a youth in a Baltimore shipyard in 1836...

...Examples of such conflict between deep racial prejudice and the practical need for solidarity run throughout this book...

...workforce continues to slip (now below 17 percent, from 35 percent in the 1950s), black workers, who are organized at nearly twice the rate of whites, are taking a rightful role in leading the labor movement, especially at the regional and local union leadership level...

...By now the longest-lived black unionist group in our history, the CBTU plays a genuine vanguard role in the labor movement today...

...The richest materials here are autobiographical and eyewitness accounts of the aspirations and courage of black workers, and of the abuses they suffered at the hands of racist employers and white workers...

...The book gathers in a single volume selections from the comprehensive, eight-volume The Black Worker, published by Temple University Press beginning in 1978...

...Any future resurgence of organized labor will need full, equal participation of the black unionists Black Workers will inform everyone, black or white, involved in that movement...

...Government agency and union committee reports are less gripping than firsthand tales of toil and struggle, but they provide a rounded view of the changing status of black workers as the U.S...

...As the proportion of unionrepresented employees in the U.S...

...This observation foreshadows the fights over civil rights employment in the 1960s and 1970s, and the recent retreat in antidiscrimination law enforcement by the U.S...

...To their credit, a majority of the white members of the local union voted to accept Lewis Douglass (however, a two-thirds vote was needed...

...A 1943 war industries manpower report, for example, noted that "discriminatory job specifications are still a formidable barrier in many plants and occupations...the occurrence of discriminatory specifications in unskilled occupations leading to skilled machine jobs is primarily a restriction upon the entry of Negroes into skilled work...

...In a letter to the national union, supporters insisted that color should not bar his admission for both practical and principled reasons: first, "Forcing those of a different color into competition with us must eventually insure the reduction of the prices of labor and the ruin of labor associations," and second, "It is just a relic of that barbarism which was engendered by the system of slavery now happily abolished in our country...

...Like other ultra-left groupings of the time, they imploded with little to show for their work...

...allowed a black worker to join its membership be-fore the Civil War...

...Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis convey a trove of letters, diaries, proceedings, reports, journals, leaflets, articles, and memoirs that tell a pointed story of black workers and their struggles...

...Lance Compa No white union in the U.S...

...developed politically and economically from the Civil War to the present...

...At a time when many argue that unions have outlived their usefulness, or that enlightened employers and their "employee involvement" schemes make unions unnecessary, one should ponder A. Philip Randolph's 1927 response to a move by the Pullman rail car company to supplant the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters with an "Employee Representation Plan": "The Brotherhood emanates from within, as an expression of the spirit and lives and hope and faith of the porters in themselves,whereas the plan is imposed on them from without...

...Much more important, but underrepre-sented here, is the progress of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU...

...But in New York City, white workers in hotels, restaurants, and saloons asked the all-black Waiters Protective Association for help in winning higher wages from owners-then rejected proposals to form a single union...

...Supreme Court in cases which, unless reversed by Congress, could take black workers back to 1943 conditions...

...Such expressions of tolerance and solidarity counterweigh the racist sentiments found in this volume, from the slurs of a railroad trainman in 1900 ("the naturally vicious, slothful, filthy, and indolent") to the AFL-CIO's veiled attacks on A. Philip Randolph in the 1960s (charging him with reverse racism for failing to have any whites as headquarters staff employees of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters...

...Surely no one who has the welfare of the craft at heart will seriously contend that the union of thousands of white printers should be destroyed for the purpose of granting barren honor of membership to a few Negroes," said an advocate of rejection...