How George Meany Is Helping To Elect A Negro President Of The AFL CIO

...At this time, the Negro vote in the large cities which has accepted COPE recommendations far more consistently and unquestionably than white union members, even against racial appeals, these ballots are the money in the Democratic bank on which Walter Reuther, David McDonald, and George Meany draw their interest in the form of influence, appointments to advisory committees, and black tie din ners at the White House...

...Randolph has emerged as the embattled champion of his race against Meany the villainous racial antagonist, Pharoah, Hitler, and Potofsky all rolled into one...

...Their tactics obviously are designed to flank the white positions in the unions by a demand for representation in regional and national offices (the fight has almost been won in the locals...

...One by one, the usual kibitzers, commission merchants, and opinion brothers in the labor business went home to leave the aging, overweight leaders of the American unions gumming their lines on a stage without an audience...

...Civil rights and anti-discrimination efforts by the government agencies have broken through the tangle of red tape and are now getting loose into the country...

...Meany, AFL-CIO, Faubus, Eastland, Sir Roy Welensky, the Union of South Africa and Verwoerd, and the Belgian colonists in the Congo...

...This is false," the AFL-CIO replied, and as evidence cited four staff positions held by Negroes...

...Once, in a time now past, union spokesmen, especially the staff people assigned to the so-called civil rights or fair practices activities, could enter a skillful and convincing defense by claiming the employer, not the unions, did the hiring, and that it was the employer's prejudice that barred the way...

...Once this was said, no other anticipated event seemed important enough to keep anyone hanging around to pick up the gossip...

...Meany himself trundled his stomach the hundred-yard length of the lobby, his eyes characteristically bugged, and not even Murray Kempton, who so deeply respects the ex-plumber's fierce and guileless honesty, was on hand to say "sir" before a thoughtful question...

...Beyond the prevailing apartheid among elected union officials, Randolph also charged, by implication, that AFL-CIO hiring policy itself within the sacred mausoleum is anti-Negro...

...Were they so utterly cut off from their own experience that they could utter these loud resounding moral brays and not be forced to look within...

...Among the trades that are organized today, noticeably in the government services, the Post Office, for example, but in most industries, except aircraft, the unskilled and semi-skilled vocations, both blue and white collar, are very rapidly filling up with Negroes, so that it is virtually certain, either with or without a fight, that the 99.44 per cent white council of old men that Meany presides over will disappear in a colonial uprising which will bring a cabinet of local, regional, and international Lumumbas, Mboyas and Gizengas to union power...

...Insiders chiefly were bemused over this mindless contribution by the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers to a mounting anti-Semitism among Negroes, especially because it was aimed at the Negroes in the unions who since the organization of the CIO, at least, have always been allied with Jews against anti-Semitism and racial and religious prejudice in general...

...Publicity about the situation of Negroes within the AFL, given this circumstance, is not welcomed...

...Within this or the next administration, the white leaders of the American unions must submit themselves to a vote of confidence, reluctantly where the Meany strategy is followed and almost inevitably after bitter, racial and factional struggles within some unions...

...If a bald-headed, pot-bellied genie should exert itself and relocate the AFL-CIO Taj Mahal which is now across Lafayette Square from the White House, and set it down in Charleston, South Carolina, there would be very little that the Governor of South Carolina would object to, and as for the Governor of North Carolina, the chances are he would suggest that decent respect for the pieties at least required a show of token integration in the AFL-CIO...

...When the travail is over very few of the old-crony midwives who now run the AFL—CIO will be around, and almost nobody will care, because there are indications that the successors to the men who lead labor today will be Negroes, and that the resistance to them, led by George Meany, will precipitate a factional struggle that the Negroes will win along with the AFL-CIO, the emoluments, the perquisites, and the real estate, that is, the neo-Mogul Taj Mahal which houses the AFL in Washington...

...Simultaneously, however, and with less trumpeting, the Negro advance is moving around the other flank through the Democratic Party where the leaders who are not union staff are eager to accommodate themselves to the reality of black metropolises and are delighted to cooperate with new political organizations whose spokesmen are directly representative of the ranks and not non-resident commission merchants...

...UNLESS ALL THE PORTENTS ARE MISLEADING, the future of the AFL-CIO, as Tom Mboya once said of South Africa, is black...

...But the Negroes around A. Philip Randolph who are talking union today, but in cynical accents, are not country boys...

...And it will arrive earlier rather than later, for a political reason, that is, that Negroes, now in a pivotal electoral position, are poised so they can act independently within the Democratic Party and with this leverage can command a mobilization of the Democratic Party and government anti-discrimination agencies as their allies...

...In Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St...

...Walter Reuther stayed away presumably on account of the Ford negotiations, but he was not at the preceding Council meeting either, which was cited by the attendant administrative aides as another evidence of Reuther's political genius...

...ANIMOSITY TOWARD THE AFL by Negroes is not new, but in this historical context, the nakedness of the prejudice and the hostility in the AFL-CIO Executive Council to the political ambitions of Negroes counter-pointed by the quick precision with which Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King personally replied to the AFL-CIO attack, brought on a climax in the American labor movement which is as total, as organic, and as intimate as childbirth...

...In most of the communities where unions have had substantial successes in elections, the winning returns have been based on the confidence Negroes have almost gratefully given to the labor movement...

...Inside the Democratic Party and within the government there is no sympathy for the segregated fraternalism of the AFL—CIO and its affiliated unions...

...What evidence there is around also suggests that the national Democratic Party, like the city and state organizations, would rather deal directly with Negroes and other minority groups than through a union broker...

...Leaders with Bourbon whisky in their bellies are not very different from those with Bourbon blood in their veins, yet it is surprsing that the Meanys, Potofskys, and Dubinskys, and the other latter-day hysteron-proterons who speak so knowingly and glowingly about the revolution of rising expectations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, when it appears in their own colonial kitchens (even as a staff union) are unable to recognize it much less compromise with it to the extent of a couple of pounds of pork chops they would never miss...

...Since this was written the Negro Trade Union leadership Leadership Council in Detroit was instrumentally crucial in the election of a Mayor in opposition to the candidate endorsed by the UAW and the AFL-CIO...

...Other political and economic adjustments are also eroding the AFL situation...

...For months, unions have been receiving warnings from the agency which enforces the Presidential Fair Employment Practices Order, urging them to get things straight before the government descends on them...

...If baboons learned to talk, the first words they spoke would be stiff with moral indignation...

...While the AFL—CIO, ironically enough, was mimeographing its polemic against Randolph, the Washington Post published a feature on discrimination in the District of Columbia written by the Education Director of the AFL—CIO International Electrical Workers, which, acknowledging very substantial advances in the Operating Engineers, reported that more camels are going through needles' eyes these days than Negroes are getting into the AFL—CIO skilled trades in the national capital, with George Meany's own union, the plumbers, among the worst...

...The occasion was dull and distractingly quiet before the Council adopted the three-man report accusing the Negroes and Philip Randolph of segregating themselves against the best efforts of building trades leaders to integrate them into a totally tolerant union movement, and of discriminating against whites seeking jobs as Pullman porters...

...In the newspapers Meany's Hoffa-baiting won a unanimous editorial accolade, with clusters from the ultra-commercial part of it which professes to see a threat to civil liberties in the union shop...

...In the bar at the Commodore Hotel, staff people, who had no vote in the Executive Council on the Teamster issue, said that Hoffa should be readmitted to the AFL—CIO on probation and given six months to clean up the Meany mess on pain of being expelled finally forever...

...To support this, there is the truth so galling to AFL candidates for Presidential appointments, the far greater number of jobs given Negroes as compared with AFL hopefuls...

...In the recent election of delegates to the Michigan Constitutional Convention there was evidence that the Negro rank-and-file of Detroit are already re-forming to march under Negro banners, still Democratic, but Negro Democratic, not COPE Democratic, with Negro caucuses selecting candidates and making decisions and asking for recognition intead of AFL-CIO or UAW, or Steelworkers' caucuses...

...The standard reaction was that it was incredible Meany could be so stupid, but said as if he were being accused of a far-out perversion, and as for Potofsky— if the president of the sisterhood at the Temple, in whatever community any one lives in, should turn out to be Nasser's mistress, no one would be more bowled over than the AFL-CIO types were to see Potofsky's name on the memorandum attacking Randolph...

...Besides winning a medal as the world's champion Hoffa-kicker from a hypocritical position, the president of the AFL-CIO, also ran off with first placb for himself and the AFL-CIO, that week anyhow, at the top of the list the Negro people, like every other minority group, keep of the public figures and agencies they would like to see flushed away...

...Actually, labor political claims of prowess are based almost entirely on the fact that Negro wards, under the urging of industrial unions, to a far greater degree than has been true in white working-class wards, have voted Democratic by majorities of 80 to 95 per cent year after year since 1944...

...Chief among the reasons Randolph and his associates put the AFL-CIO Executive Council in such jeopardy of choleric angina is that the Negroes have stopped talking about jobs the companies control and have started to demand equal opportunities in the jobs (as officers and staff members) the unions control...

...Personally, the editorials and Meany reminded me of a line in Time of Hope by C. P. Snow...

...But there is evidence in the UAW, in Steel, and certainly in unions like the Packinghouse Workers that there will be accommodations and disengagements from last ditches which suggest that some non-glandular transitions will be made...

...Among the aspirant politicians scrambling for places in the emerging political machine are AFL—CIO staff people, who find they are better received when in white professional neighborhoods than in the Negro areas where it is to the advantage of a canvasser not to mention his connection with the union movement...

...THE NEGRO COMMUNITY IN WASHINGTON is getting rather more attention today than it has since Major L'Enfant laid the city out, first because the city's adults acquired the vote during the last session of Congress, and second, because when the people do stand in line at the polls, more than half of them will be Negroes...

...Louis, Los Angeles, the cities where unions seemed to have found the formula for effective political action, an examination of the vote shows that the election victories have not been based on brilliant leadership or even on the marriage of COPE to motivational research and the use of depth interviews in opinion polling...

...Certainly, the most plausible explanation of the AFL-CIO hysteria that attends anything touching Randolph is that these phrenetics are the anxiety symptoms of insecure and frightened politicians whose time has run out...

...The next time they look at their books, they may find their balances have walked away...

...EXCEPT FOR RANDOLPH, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO is like the driven snow, as are most executive boards of most unions...

...UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE UNIONS, the precinct committeemen and the district delegates who are the critical personalities in getting the Negro vote out, also are very often the key people in the Randolph revolt...

...Whether it comes by land or sea, by peace or by war, for demographic reasons, or for reasons that relate to the movement of people through the labor force, a new union movement is coming, predominantly Negro...

...Demographic and economic forces, not the strange document adopted by the AFL—CIO Executive Council, and not A. Philip Randolph either, will one day put Negro officers at the desks in the AFL—CIO Building from which George Meany and William Schnitzler today look down on the White House grounds, and when the air is clear, even see the George Washington Memorial steeple in Alexandria, Virginia...

...But the AFL is contending with a militant political appetite, not with syllogisms...

...Since this vote was organized, mobilized and enrolled by the industrial unions, the UAW, the Rubber Workers, and the Steelworkers, it has not been unnatural that these successes were capitalized by union leaders...

...The persistant attack on Randolph and the insistent assertion of false claims about the AFL policy to people who know better because they were there when the doors were slammed in their faces have lost the AFL the confidence of Negroes apparently irretrievably...

...With the lamentable assistance of the Jewish anti-discrimination organizations which can't help themselves because they are captives of the unions, the AFL—CIO has recently been trying to put the history of bigotry among worker organizations into newspeak or Aesopian in an effort to deny what everyone knows, that Negroes are discriminated against even in the industries where the most advanced unions are organized, in Steel, Rubber, and the UAW, for example, and they are practically barred from employment by union practices in the least advanced unions, the building trades...

...At this moment, while unions still claim that they are the champions of minorities, and the super-jets of civil rights, George Meany is known as old Mister White Supremacy himself among Negroes, and more and more Negro workers charge bitterly that the union movement itself is just another white man's device to keep the man down...

...WHEN THE SCANDAL FINALLY HAPPENED, it came with the crack of a triangular sex scandal in an upper middle-class suburb...

...Hysteria is not inappropriate if you consider another development which has brought the defense of white privilege in the union movement within only a few moves of mate, that is the rapidly altering relationship between unions and Negroes politically...

...The showdown fracas might have been postponed except the AFL almost comically conked itself by a roorback fizzle that boomeranged...

...The AFL-CIO mimeograph machines will run dry blank pages before any volume of press releases will persuade Negroes that George Meany et al are treating them fairly on jobs and representation...

...A lovely view from one of the finest pieces of real estate in the national capital...

...Toward the middle of the week, the bearded, slightly seedy Potofsky stood at the head of the carpeted stairs that mounts into the smudged glitter of the Commodore lobby for hours at a time constantly jostled by the come-and-go of tourists, neither recognized nor spoken to...

...they are urban, they are literate, they are politically sophisticated, the Negro leadership council they have organized is evidence of that, and they speak Aesopian themselves...

...Just because they are so tight and nepotious and all white meat about their pork chops, they and their relatives are going to lose their fine and private places high up on the hog, sooner than need be, and with a loss of dignity, that could also be avoided, which might turn out like Mussolini's upside-down end, to be so degrading that it will be an historical embarrassment, to victors and vanquished alike...

...Underneath the bureaucratic super-structure, throughout the economy that encapsulates the unions, especially in the needle trades and in the metal factories, and in every urban center, the proportion of Negro workers has increased steadily over recent years until, at this moment, the Negroes who follow Randolph are quite right when they compare the union job machinery itself with the colonialist regime of Kenya, or the Rhodesias, or Angola, as an unrepresentative white officer class which, in a vulgar effort to survive, is increasingly concerned to frustrate a growing body of colored privates...

...The day before the AFL-CIO Executive Council decided to speak their own odd version of the truth to the Negro people, an opinionsounding in the center of the lobby at the New York City Commodore Hotel during the council meeting indicated the two major issues it faced were Hoffa and who's winning the ball game...

...Under this pressure, and never for one moment desisting in their denial of any guilt in the matter, unions will soon be forced to stop conniving at keeping Negroes out of their jurisdictions...