THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

...The decline of the Knights following the Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886 was paralleled by the rise of a new union and a new labor philosophy...

...To combat these evils, hundreds of Negro trade unionists banded together in 1959 to found the Negro American Labor Council, the most recent of the Negro's efforts to achieve equal employment opportunities...

...The labor movement itself has made some advances...

...A massive job retraining program is required on a scale infinitely more ambitious than anything now envisioned...

...During the 1830's, free Negroes organized the so-called "conventions movement," of which Frederick Douglass eventually was elected president...

...During the Forties, there were still twenty-six AFL affiliates where constitutions barred Negroes from membership— and thus from fruitful employment...

...For progress is relative, and we are in a period when rapid forward movement is required merely to stand still...

...Still, the Federation's 1893 and 1894 conventions stated: "We here and now reaffirm as one of the cardinal principles of the labor movement that the working people must unite and organize, irrespective of creed, color, sex, nationality, or politics...

...Today there can be no question of the Negro's capacity for equal performance or of the consequences, for all Americans, of the denial of equal opportunity...

...In 1887 there may have been as many as 90,000 Negroes out of a total membership of a half million...

...The reaction of Negro workers was the formation, in 1869, of the National Negro Labor Union...

...Few examples in history so vividly illustrate the fragility of political freedom without roots in economic security...

...The crises of the present are rooted in the failures of the past, and lessons unlearned are tragedies prolonged...

...Generally, those free Negroes who lived in Southern cities, where Negroes often had a monopoly of mechanical skills, fared better economically than those who lived in the Northern cities, where they faced competition from skilled immigrant labor...

...Loyal to the labor movement and recognizing it as the most progressive institution in our society, the NALC has fought vigorously to cleanse the trade unions of every vestige of Jim Crow...

...Naturally, many white trade unionists pointed to Washington's anti-labor statements as evidence that the Negro was an economic menace to the white worker...

...Then, too, the character of the age was determined infinitely more by the power and influence of capital than by relatively weak fledgling labor movements...

...The Negro was excluded from the industrial revolution that was sweeping the country, in the North as well as in the South...

...At the end of the Civil War, 100,000 of the 120,000 artisans in the South were Negroes...

...In August, 1962, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed 11.4 per cent of the Negro work force unemployed as compared with 4.6 per cent of white workers...

...Although Negroes had successfully established independent churches in the Nineteenth Century, inexorable economic laws militated, then as now, against the organization of workers along racial lines...

...Forty-seven per cent of working Negroes were in service and other unskilled non-farm jobs...

...The resolution was not binding, only advisory...

...Once again the Federal government had abandoned the Negro to economic oppression...

...Thus the March on Washington movement was born...

...Despite the march of the nation from agrarianism to industrialism in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, eighty-eight per cent of all Negroes in 1890 remained in agriculture and domestic service...

...The Negro's marginal economic position was catastrophically demonstrated during the great depression of the Thirties, during which nearly half of the Negroes in skilled occupations were displaced...

...Twenty-six international unions and seventeen state central bodies have established civil rights committees...

...In 1940, 4.4 per cent of Negro male workers were skilled...

...By 1890 the skilled Negro worker had virtually ceased to exist...

...Correspondingly, the figure for the semiskilled rose from 12 per cent to 22.4 per cent...

...Meanwhile, we have passed the stage where fair employment practices on the part of management, unions, and government can, in themselves, suffice...

...Aiming at unskilled as well as skilled workers, the Knights brought Negroes into some all-black locals, some mixed...

...Moreover, the Commission has reported: "Efforts of the Federal government to promote nondiscriminatory employment by government contractors and Federal agencies have not generally been effective in overcoming resistance to hiring Negroes in any but the lower categories...

...Segregation and discrimination in education, on all levels, must be abolished without delay, so that future generations of Negroes will not inherit the handicaps of the past and present...

...It is a foremost force in the drive to eliminate and prevent every form of race discrimination and race injustice in the American community...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal brought many benefits to the pauperized black man, but he remained industrially submerged on the eve of the armaments buildup that immediately preceded World War II...

...Even before the Civil War the question had arisen, though in less pressing form, with regard to the half million free Negroes...

...It also scolded Negro workers for strikebreaking, as if the AFL's racial policies were unrelated to that practice...

...In apprenticeship training, hiring policies, seniority lists, pay scales, and job assignments, discrimination persists in many locals, especially in the building trades...

...As late as October, 1940, after eight years of the New Deal, approximately one-fourth of the Negro work force was unemployed, as against thirteen per cent of the white work force...

...Nowhere is the crisis more starkly revealed than in unemployment figures, which point to an almost steady deterioration in the position of the Negro worker...

...The slaves freed on January 1, 1863, were liberated not only from their masters but from their livelihood as well...

...In 1935, more than half of the Negroes in Northern cities were on relief as compared with one-third in Southern cities...

...Nor was the problem, then as now, simply education...

...Thus the Negro found himself cut adrift into the Gilded Age, the nadir of big business morality...

...There is pressing need for large-scale public works programs to provide immediate jobs for the millions of unemployed Negroes...

...Whereas the unemployment rate during the years 1947-1955 did not exceed 8.9 per cent for Negroes and 4.6 per cent for whites, the rate in 1958 was 12.6 per cent and 6.1 per cent respectively...

...The Negro had been trained in small-scale construction and was handicapped when government-financed construction programs were undertaken in the early Thirties...

...When it became clear that we would not be cajoled, a reluctant President signed an executive order in June, 1941, reaffirming the government's policy of nondiscrimination and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Commission to investigate violations of this policy in defense industries...

...With the curtailment of war production, Negroes lost jobs more rapidly than did whites...

...Racial discrimination persisted in hiring, as it did in the administration of the welfare measures of the New Deal, especially in the South...

...More ominous than the figures themselves is the fact that the elevation rate of the Negro into more skilled occupations has fallen behind the rate of automation displacement...

...To achieve these ends will doubtless require a considerable political reorientation as well as a bold, new economic philosophy...

...One and a half million Negroes are now members of labor unions, and they have won increasing representation in labor's governing councils, even in the South...

...Thaddeus Stevens, a leader in the emancipation struggle, looking toward the transformation of the former slaves into a class of small independent farmers, advocated that the Federal government give them "forty acres and a mule...

...His schools for industrial education trained Negroes in handicrafts at a time when the nation as a whole was galloping toward mass industrial production...

...The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, was more eager to recruit Negroes...

...Yet, as a nation we passively observe the languishing of untapped talent in stagnant pools of unskilled labor continuously drained by automation into the sewers of unemployment...

...The Southern Negro had never seriously competed with the poor white for land, having been reduced almost immediately after emancipation to sharecropping, but he had offered competition in mechanical skills...

...At present, among those unemployed for more than fifteen weeks, 23.8 per cent are non-white...

...All three of these national labor movements, however, felt constrained at least to enunciate the principle of class solidarity without regard to race, whereas the large corporations of the period were generally silent or espoused some form of social Darwinism...

...There can be no equality in employment without equality in housing, education, voting rights, medical care, and public accommodations...

...Even as the Negro was enjoying the fullest participation in political life, helping to maintain Republican power in the South, the stage had been set for the time when, a score of years after Reconstruction, his landlord would march him to the polls with voting instructions, and later disfranchise him altogether...

...But, as Dr...

...In withdrawing its support of the equal opportunities principle, Congress paved the way for the decline of skilled Negro craftsmen and foremen...

...The New Deal never succeeded in achieving full employment for either race until the initiation of full war production...

...Certainly, where FEPC was successful, it was accompanied by government pressure, training opportunities, and the existence of full employment...

...According to the U.S...

...Many of the Negroes who did secure homesteads were driven off under President Andrew Johnson's program of restoring the land to white planters...

...It is not entirely coincidental that the surge of American capitalism, the freeing of the slaves, and the formation of the first national labor organizations should occur almost simultaneously, a confluence of events of significance for the future of the Negro...

...Statistics can be endlessly elaborated, and their meaning is always plain: The relative position of the Negro in the economy has remained astonishingly static over the years, and the future threatens worsening of even that woeful position...

...No comparable statement has come from any national manufacturing organization...

...The failure of Reconstruction to provide Negroes with an economic base foredoomed all efforts at political democracy in the South...

...Negroes played an important role in organizing the steel workers, and in New York City the Negro Labor Committee helped bring Negroes into a wide variety of CIO unions...

...The 1961 AFL-CIO Civil Rights resolution forthrightly proclaimed: "The AFL-CIO is in the forefront of the civil rights revolution in our land...

...Not only did Washington inadequately perceive the importance of political action in achieving economic rights, but his economic program for Negroes was obsolete even in its own day...

...Structural questions aside, however, the AFL lacked the broad idealistic spirit of the Knights of Labor, and for the latter's crusading spirit substituted a more narrowly economic and "practical" program...

...The fate of the NNLU was predictable...

...Still, resolutions are not enough...

...Having won the war against racism abroad, with the help of her thirteen million Negroes, the nation apparently no longer felt constrained to continue that war at home...

...The 1961 Civil Rights Commission Report provided documentation that discrimination persists in employment created by Federal grants-in-aid and loan programs, as well as in national guard and reserve units...

...In the absence of Federal legislation, a score of states and numerous cities have enacted their own fair employment practices programs...

...With the advent of World War I, masses of Negroes migrated North, many of them refugees from technological displacement in Southern agriculture, and Negroes for the first time made an entry into modern industry...

...It is becoming increasingly clear that no lasting political freedom or social equality is conceivable without the A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a vice president of the AFL-CIO, organized and directed the March on Washington Movement which led the late President Roosevelt to launch the Committee on Fair Employment Practices in 1941...

...The crisis confronting the Negro worker today can be summed up in one word: automation...

...Another fifteen per cent were in agriculture...

...This dusty statistic is an early example of a two-to-one economic relationship between Negro and white that has shown remarkable persistence down to the present...

...In 1853 this movement adopted an economic program calling for the establishment of an industrial college and for a type of apprenticeship training program for Negroes...

...This, too, has been true for decades...

...To what degree FEPC was responsible for the rise in Negro employment that followed has been debated...

...Negro workers remained isolated and were increasingly used as strikebreakers...

...Not surprisingly, the leaders of the new movement were those unions in which Negroes had all along been represented, particularly the United Mine Workers, which in 1900 could claim one-third of the total organized Negro labor force...

...The displacement of men by machines hits the unskilled and semi-skilled workers first and hardest, and these are the jobs to which Negroes traditionally have been relegated...

...President John F. Kennedy's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, established in March, 1961, is a considerable improvement over its predecessor, though it still lacks some of the powers of Roosevelt's FEPC...

...Homeless and propertyless, the great mass of Southern Negroes had no alternative but to return to the plantations, this time as tenant farmers and sharecroppers...

...By 1940 the CIO had received into membership 210,000 Negroes, who gradually acquired new industrial skills...

...The comparable figure for whites was thirty-four per cent...

...at the same time, various unions that constitutionally excluded Negroes from membership could not be curbed because of the federation structure of the national body...

...A hundred years ago, Abraham Lincoln had only a dim view of the Negro's potential in America and no clear vision of his economic future...

...In comparing incomes, the ratio is reversed: whites take home twice as much in wages as do Negroes...

...Thousands of Negroes throughout the country, spearheaded by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, mobilized for a 100,000-strong convergence on the nation's capital with a demand for equal employment opportunities in the defense industries...

...The Emancipation Proclamation not only freed the slaves but, in doing so, made the question of equal job opportunities a major social problem...

...Without full employment generally, the effectiveness of fair employment practices legislation would have been diminished as competition for jobs increased...

...It is foolish to deny as it is fruitless to proclaim that progress in employment opportunities has been made during the past century...

...The National Labor Union, formed in 1866, was a weak counterweight to the power and influence wielded by the industrialists, backed by the Supreme Court and other agencies of government...

...Before its destruction following the panic of 1873, the National Labor Union had recognized the danger posed by Negro strikebreakers and decided to or-ganize black workers, but into separate locals...

...At the same time the Negro made large gains in civil and economic rights, largely because of the mili-tance of industrial unionism, but the fundamental precariousness of his position was demonstrated once again at the end of World War II...

...Because of its disinterest in unskilled workers, the AFL could attract few Negroes...

...Direct action by Negroes at the 1948 Democratic Party convention was largely responsible for President Harry S. Truman's executive order ending segregation in the armed forces...

...Labor economists have informed me that in reality the number of Negro unemployed may run twice that percentage...

...So serious was the economic discrimination against free northern Negroes that in 1837 in Philadelphia, for example, Negroes comprised fourteen per cent of the poorhouse population, although they were only seven per cent of the population at large...

...The Negro relearned a basic lesson: Even from his friends he could expect little unless he backed up his demands with large-scale social pressures...

...Only isolated instances of segregated locals in the Southern textile industry marred the CIO's early nondiscrimination policies...

...Yet consistent discrimination by its affiliates whittled away at even this principle, so that by 1901 the Federation gave ground on the issue of social equality and approved the organization of racially separate locals...

...Thus the labor movement in the last third of the Nineteenth Century, with the general exception of the Knights, also hindered the integration of the Negro into the expanding economic life of the nation...

...At present there is no single skilled craft in which Negroes constitute even two per cent of the workers...

...It was during this period that Negroes became predominantly urbanized...

...Many efforts were made to have the march called off, and on one occasion I was summoned to talk with President Roosevelt at the White House...

...Only four per cent of all Negro college graduates in 1940 had an annual income of $2,500 or more...

...The Northern industrialists, however, who had gained control of the Republican Party, could not countenance the confiscation and division of large plantations...

...It is difficult, certainly, to see how progress can be made so long as Congress is effectively controlled by a coalition of Dixiecrats and conservative Republicans...

...The decline of the Knights of Labor, whose poli-cies had been favorable to Negro workers, was largely the work of redbaiting corporations in alliance with big business government, even as the rise of the AFL was facilitated by its conservative philosophy, less sharply counterposed to that of the new ruling class...

...Racism, the NALC insists, is incompatible with labor's needs and aspirations...

...All aspects of civil rights—political, social, and economic—are interwoven...

...Despite the antidiscrimination pronouncements of the New Deal administrators, Negroes continued to be barred from these industries...

...But progress does not controvert the fact that the Negro today faces an economic crisis without precedent...

...By 1900 the figure had dropped only to 86.7 per cent...

...The launching of the defense program in 1940, however much it may have aided white workers, did not lead to a significant increase in the employment of Negroes by arms producers...

...Today only the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen explicitly excludes Negroes...

...For the first time since the decline of the Knights of Labor, an active effort was made to bring Negro workers into the unions...

...Whichever forces — government, management, or labor—were more responsible for determining the Negro's fate, the results were clear...

...four years later the figure had risen to 7.3 per cent...

...Of comparable importance for the Negro workers was the rise of industrial unionism in the late Thirties...

...This economic alienation of the Negro was paralleled by his deepening social and political alienation...

...Booker T. Washington's willingness to acquiesce, at least temporarily, in the latter forms of alienation in an effort to overcome the former was short-sighted on two counts...

...the unions also shared responsibility...

...Negroes continue to be barred from some unions, segregated in others...

...In the North, which claimed ten per cent of the Negro population in this period, Negroes were systematically barred from all but the most menial tasks in the burgeoning mass industries...

...The mania for textile mills and tobacco factories that gripped the South in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century took on the character of a religious campaign as plant managers promised poor whites industrial salvation in the new, white-only enterprises...

...it is no less an evil than Communism and corruption, and must be met with equal severity...

...In 1931, sixty per cent of the Negro workers in Detroit were unemployed, as compared with thirty-two per cent of the white workers...

...Although Negroes constituted only five per cent of Detroit's male workers in 1926, they composed sixteen per cent of the unemployed...

...Still, Negroes remained concentrated in domestic service and unskilled occupations throughout the prosperous Twenties, and their position was less secure than that of white workers...

...Not only were the Federal government (through its Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction policies) and Northern and Southern capitalists responsible for the deterioration of the Negro's economic condition...

...Many of the Knights' organizers played courageous roles in the South, braving terrorist anti-labor tactics of a sort familiar to students of the CIO drives in the 1930's...

...The extent to which the Negro unemployment rate is traceable to automation is suggested in the statistics on chronic unemployment, most of which involves victims of technological displacement...

...As a matter of inflexible principle, Federal funds must be withheld from all institutions and enterprises, public or private, that practice, condone, or acquiesce in discrimination...

...Implicitly we recognize this in applying the term "business unionism" to the AFL and "social unionism" to the Knights...

...It is likely that Washington's anti-union philosophy was derived as much from his myopic economic vision as from any desire to accommodate to whites politically and socially...

...Unemployment among both races was understandably higher in the industrialized North than in the more agricultural South, but in the North, in 1937, Negro unemployment stood at thirty-nine per cent and white unemployment at eighteen per cent...

...Recent years have seen progress in the Negro's struggle for equal opportunities...

...integration of the Negro into the economic life of the nation...

...The plight of Negro labor was callously aggravated when Congress killed the FEPC in 1946...

...As late as 1955, only twelve per cent of the Negro work force, as compared with forty-two per cent of whites, had risen into professional, technical, managerial, and white-collar clerical and sales jobs...

...The rate of unemployment among the race was reduced and its earning capacity increased...

...Unlike the Knights, the American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886, had a decentralized structure consisting of essentially autonomous craft locals...

...In our own time the prolonged tragedy of Negro labor weighs heavily upon all Americans...

...The Negro is not the only loser...

...Thus, even before the Civil War, Negroes, feeling the squeeze of job discrimination and segregation, organized to fight for economic security and advanced programs that have a familiar ring today...

...In Detroit, sixty per cent of those workers currently unemployed are Negroes, although Negroes constitute only twenty per cent of the population...

...Efforts of the NNLU to affiliate with white labor were unsuccessful...

...It rests upon the present generation to complete the unfinished revolution of the Civil War and to realize, after unconscionable delay, its promise of freedom...

...Whitney Young of the National Urban League has recently reported, the average annual Negro income is now $3,233, fifty-four per cent of the average white family's income of $5,835, whereas ten years ago the proportion was fifty-seven per cent...

...How far have we come, and how far have we to go...

...Thus, despite all progress, the Negro unemployment rate has remained double that of whites for decades, and at the moment it is two and one-half times that of whites...

...Negroes not only lacked seniority, but many of them were concentrated in those war industries that were least convertible to peacetime production...

...Civil Rights Commission, automation is likely, ultimately, to create more skilled jobs than there will be men to fill them...