Black workers ambivalence toward Unions

Abstract

Abram Harris's dilemma of sixty years ago still troubles Black and white labor historians who are concerned with the issue of race and class consciousness. How does one describe the tumultuous conflicts which attended the introduction of Black workers to basic industries at the turn of the century and make those Blacks who struggled for a voice within large unions seem to be anything other than cock-eyed optimists? Were there unions aside from the Knights and the IWW who offered a square deal for the Black working man? Herbert Gutman was not the first scholar to look to the United Mine Workers Union to offer a beacon of hope in the otherwise uniformly exclusion istic practices of organized labor at the turn of the century. But the closest contemporary observers of the UMW during the period in question generally found, as has Professor Hill, that the nondiscrim inatory rhetoric of the UMW was rarely matched by their actual practices. My comments use the observations of early Black labor historians to suggest the need for renewed efforts to come to terms with the meaning of the lives of Black unionists at the turn of the century. The assidously cultivated image of the UMW as a union which was open to all miners was questioned first in the writings of three generations of Black social scientists. As early as 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois's detailed reports of Black miners' dissatisfaction with the union. UMW Journal editor I. M. Sexton, rejected Du Bois's infor? mants and asserted that any racial hatred between miners was due