Union Growth and Exclusion of Blacks from the Crafts
Blacks have not always been conspicuously absent or scarce in the skilled crafts and trades.
Isaac Weld, in his eighteenth-century travels around the United States, observed that
"Amongst their slaves are found tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, smiths, turners,
wheelwrights, weavers, tanners, etc."'
Novelist James Weldon Johnson wrote, "The Negroes drove the horse and mule teams, they
laid the bricks, they painted the buildings and fences, they loaded and unloaded ships. When I
was a child, I did not know that there existed such a thing as a white carpenter or bricklayer or
plasterer or tinner."
According to Charles B. Rousseve: "Throughout the South where the majority of white men
were too lazy to work, by far the largest proportion of labor, skilled and unskilled, was
performed by Negroes, both freemen and the slave"2 John Stephen Durham wrote about
union exclusion of blacks from skilled crafts in the late 1800s:
In the city of Washington, for example, at one period, some of the finest
buildings were constructed by colored workmen. Their employment in large
numbers continued some time after the war. The British Legation, the Centre
Market, the Freeman's Bank, and at least four well-built schoolhouses are
monuments to the acceptability of their work under foremen of their own color.
Today, apart from hod-carriers, not a colored workman is to be seen on newbuildings, and a handful of jobbers and patchers, with possibly two carpenters
who can undertake a large job, are all who remain of the body of colored
carpenters and builders and stone-cutters who were generally employed a
quarter of a century ago.13
Commenting about stevedores, Durham said, "The effective organization of white laborers
was closely followed by the driving of Negroes from the levees at the muzzles of loaded rifles.
The iron industry is passing through the same Durham concluded, "[T]he real struggle of the
unions is in opposition to the general desire of the employing class of the South to give the
Negro whatever work he is capable of doing."5
Summarizing Durham's findings, Herbert Hill wrote: "Extending his inquiry into the North,
Durham found the effects of the Negro exclusion policy to be even `more manifest."'Philadelphia in 1838, the Society of Friends had compiled a directory of occupations in which
Negroes were employed. Significantly included were such skilled jobs as cabinetmaker,
plumber, printer, sailmaker, ship's carpenter, and stonecutter. By the end of the 1890's,
Negroes had been forced out of most of these and other craft occupations.16
Hill continued his documentation of the impact of unions on Negro craft employment
opportunities:
In the older seaboard cities of the South, Negroes had once been employed in a
great variety of occupations, skilled and unskilled. However, in the last decades
of the nineteenth century the process of Negro displacement had begun, and
trade unions were a most important part of this development.... In both South
and North the trade union opposes black labor wherever it can and admits it to
fellowship only as a last resort.'7
In
It does not take much to conclude that the decline in black employment in the crafts,
including electricians and plumbers, stemmed from a tradition of racial exclusion policies by
labor unions. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the United Association
of Plumbers and Steamfitters unions long excluded blacks from membership by tacit
agreement among their members."S As of 1920, the Electrical Workers Union 142,000 members
included no blacks, even though there were 1,343 black electricians. Similarly, the Plumbers
and Steamfitters Union membership of 35,000 included none of the 3,600 black plumbers
among its membership. Of the 6,000 black plasterers, the Plasterers Union had only 100
among its 30,000 members. The Sheet Metal Workers Union had no blacks among its 25,000
membership.'9
In stark contrast to today, black leaders of the past were deeply suspicious about union
motivation and recognized their harm and hostility to blacks. W. E. B. Dubois said, "nstead of
taking the part of the Negro and helping him toward physical and economic freedom, the
America labor movement from the beginning has tried to achieve freedom at the expense of
the Negro." Later he added, "The white employers, North and South, literally gave the Negroeswork when white men refused to work with him; when he's scabbed forbread and butter the employers defended him against mob violence of white laborers; they gave him educational
institutions when white labor would have left him in ignorance."20
Said Marcus Garvey, in urging blacks to undercut union wages as a means to employment and
combating union racism, "the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has in
America at the present time is the white capitalist."" Similarly, in 1924, Howard University's
Professor Kelly Miller urged blacks to "stand shoulder to shoulder with the captains of
industry" in opposition to labor unions.22 J. E. Bruce wrote that unions were a "greedy,
grasping, ruthless, intolerant, overbearing, dictatorial combination of half-educated white
men.... I am against them because they are against the Negro.23 Both Frederick Douglass and
Booker T. Washing ton were lifelong foes of
Some scholars have made the baseless argument that blacks earned the hostility of labor
unions by their willingness to work for lower wages." Unions could have easily fought this
tendency by admitting blacks as members. Charles S. Johnson says that, "When the trade
unions have been open to them, Negroes have entered as freely as white workers."26 Others
have asserted that blacks encountered union hostility because they allowed themselves to be
used as strikebreakers.27 This explanation overlooks the fact that strikebreaking was a
necessary expedient because unions denied blacks membership. Johnson says:
[M]any of the greatest advances which Negroes have made in industry, many of
their first opportunities, are due to strikes and their part in breaking them. They
were used to break the stockyard strike, and they have been employed there
ever since; they were largely responsible for the failure of the steel strike, and
they have been employed there ever since; and they now make up 17 percent of
steel mill workers; they were used in the great railroad strike of 1922, and about
700 Negroes, mostly skilled, are still employed by one system alone.... The list
could go on indefinitely.2S
John G. Van Duesen was convinced that "criticism of the Negro strikebreaker comes with poor
grace from unionists who subscribe to the policy of excluding Negroes from their Unions."29
