We have been doing this type of shyt.
African Americans and the American Labor Movement
African Americans and the American Labor Movement
Federal Records and African American History (Summer 1997, Vol. 29, No. 2)
By James Gilbert Cassedy
The records of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) have been, and will remain, indispensable to the study of African American labor history. Thirty NARA record groups (approximately 19,711 cubic feet of documentary material) document the activities of federal agencies whose core missions pertained to labor and labor management relations. There are also many other record groups that contain material of interest to students of American labor history even though they document the activities of federal agencies whose primary concern was not the resolution of labor disputes or the control of labor management relations. Locating records that document the role of African Americans in American labor history can be difficult because the federal agencies and offices that created these records arranged their indexes and files by name of institutions such as the name of the company or the name of the union involved in a controversy. This overview briefly traces the growth of black labor relations and provides an introduction to the research value of several NARA record groups.
African Americans are known to have participated in labor actions before the Civil War. In the early nineteenth century, African Americans played a dominant role in the caulking trade, and there is documentation of a strike by black caulkers at the Washington Navy Yard in 1835.
1 Caulking was of great importance in shipbuilding, for a ship was not fit for service unless it was caulked to prevent leaking.
At the end of the Civil War, ex-slaves had to adjust to freedom and a new labor system. The National Archives contains millions of documents concerning this transition. Luckily, researchers can avail themselves of
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, a multivolume documentary editing project.
The
Freedom volumes were compiled from twenty-five National Archives record groups, including Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Record Group 105); Records of Civil War Special Agencies of the Treasury Department (RG 366); Records of the United States General Accounting Office (RG 217); the Records of the Adjutant General's Office, 1780's-1917 (RG 94); the Records of the Office of the Paymaster General (RG 99); and Records of District Courts of the United States (RG 21).
2
Other record groups are less obvious sources of information. The General Records of Department of State (RG 59) and the General Records of the Department of Justice (RG 60) contain documentation of the black dock workers in Pensacola, Florida, who, in the winter of 1873-1874, organized a Workingman's Association and successfully defended their jobs against Canadian longshoreman brought in by dock owners.
3
The formation of American trade unions increased during the early Reconstruction period. Black and white workers shared a heightened interest in trade union organization, but because trade unions organized by white workers generally excluded blacks, black workers began to organize on their own. In December 1869, 214 delegates attended the Colored National Labor Union convention in Washington, D.C. This union was a counterpart to the white National Labor Union. The assembly sent a petition to Congress requesting direct intervention in the alleviation of the "condition of the colored workers of the southern States" by subdividing the public lands of the South into forty-acre farms and providing low-interest loans to black farmers.
4 In January 1871, the Colored National Labor Convention again petitioned Congress, sending a "Memorial of the Committee of the National Labor Convention for Appointment of a Commission to Inquire into Conditions of Affairs in the Southern States."
5
Congress evidently showed little interest in either petition. Five years later the disputed presidential election of 1876 led to the Compromise of 1877 and the selection of Rutherford B. Hayes as President of the United States, the end of Reconstruction, and the beginnings of "Redeemer Rule" and "Jim Crow." When the Supreme Court handed down the
Plessy v.
Ferguson decision in 1896, giving official recognition to the "separate but equal" doctrine, the official relegation of blacks to second-class status was complete.
A systematic review of the records and reports of the Bureau of the Census (RG 29), the Bureau of Labor Statistics (RG 257), the U.S. House of Representatives (RG 233), and the U.S. Senate (RG 46) will reveal volumes of information concerning the lives of African Americans during this period. A small sampling of these reports and publications includes the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Bulletin No. 8,
Negroes in the United States (1905); the U.S. Bureau of Labor,
Sixteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner (1901); and the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Forty-ninth Congress, second session,
Testimony Before the Committee to Investigate the Relations Between Capital and Labor (1885). W.E.B. Du Bois provided some of the statistical data on black labor to the Bureau of Labor and wrote reports for the Census Bureau.
6
The decline in the relative position of African Americans vis à vis organized labor can also be seen in the railroad industry. During the Great Strike of 1877, for instance, rallies and marches in St. Louis, Louisville, and other cities brought together white and black workers in support of the common rights of workingmen. By 1894 Eugene Debs, leader of the American Railway Union in a strike against the Pullman Company, was unable to convince members of his union to accept black railroaders. Blacks in turn served as strikebreakers for the Pullman Company and for the owners of Chicago meatpacking companies against whom stockyard workers struck in sympathy with the Pullman Company employees.
7
In 1909 white employees of the Georgia Railroad, represented by the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, walked off their jobs, demanding that lower-paid black firemen be replaced by higher-paid whites. A Federal Board of Arbitration, appointed under the provisions of the Erdman Act of 1898, ruled two to one against the Brotherhood, stating that blacks had to be paid equal pay for equal work, thereby eliminating the financial advantage of hiring blacks. Erdman docket file 20, the
Georgia Railroad Co. v.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, is found in the Records of the National Mediation Board (RG 13).
8
#blm, tho.
I'm claiming it. 
AOC.
