Just after the Civil War, black dockers in Charleston and Savannah Georgia struck for wages and against a poll tax. The Charleston men had formed their own union, the Longshoremen’s Protective Union Association. By 1869, when black workers gathered in Baltimore to form a permanent labor organization in Maryland, they had adopted a double strategy – to form their own unions but also to fight for inclusion in the white unions.
The end of the Civil War created a dilemma for the American labor movement. On the one hand, the cry for racial equality had been met by the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, the 14th amendment, calling for “equal protection of the law”, and the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race. And the growth of the anti-slavery movement had raised consciousness among a number of white people about the principle of equality.
On the other hand, the newly freed blacks were going to compete with white workers for scarce jobs, in a situation of post-war depression, immigrants crowding into the labor market. Blacks, shut out of unions and of jobs, were often used as strikebreakers.
There were a number of instances in the South where white and black workers joined in strikes, but the unions would still not open their membership to blacks. This happened in 1865, when white and black workers on the levee in New Orleans struck together, and the first black daily newspaper in the United States, the New Orleans Tribune asked the Workingmen’s Central Committee of New Orleans (representing eleven all-white unions) “How will you get justice, if you yourselves are unjust to your fellow laborers?”
When white bricklayers went out on strike in New Orleans, black bricklayers, kept out of the union, continued to work. When the whites continued to exclude blacks from the unions, the black bricklayers refused to join the strike and it was lost.
The struggle for the eight-hour day led, at the end of the Civil War, to the first national trade union federation, the National Labor Union. Several of its leaders, including its president, William Sylvis, called for the inclusion of black workers, but this was not addressed by the first several annual conventions of the Union.
The Boston Daily Evening Voice, calling for “universal liberty” pointed to the success of the Saint Louis strike, where white and black workers joined together and won, whereas in New Orleans the policy of exclusion had to led to defeat.
But although the National Labor Union convention in 1865 welcomed the end of slavery and talked about labor being united, there was no talk about admitting blacks. The fear of whites that black would take their jobs was heightened as the post-war economic depression led to layoffs and wage cuts. In this situation, black workers felt that they must form their own unions.
Immediately after the Civil War, in 1865, blacks were driven from the Baltimore shipyards by white workers, aided by the city government and the police. This led them to form their own union. Isaac Myers, whom the great labor historian Philip Foner calls “the first important black labor leader in America”, proposed that they buy their own shipyard, which they successfully did, Frederick Douglass being one of the first stockholders.
For other black workers, raising such funds was too difficult. But they began to organize their own unions in the South. In 1867, they carried on a strike on the levee in Mobile, Alabama. And around the same time black longshoremen in Charleston formed the Longshoremen’s Protective Union Association, struck for higher wages, and won. The idea sread. In Savannah, Georgia, black dock workers went on strike after the city declared a poll tax on all dock workers. The council then repealed the tax.
In any case, the example set by the longshoremen in Charleston took hold, and black unions were formed by Brickmakers, by Hod Carriers and Laborers, and other trades. By 1869, when black workers gathered in Baltimore to form a permanent labor organization in Maryland, they had decided to use a double strategy – to form their own unions but also to fight for inclusion in the white unions.
So the struggle of workers for justice and equality goes back a long way.
