For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 Robert H. Woodrum For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865. By Robert H. Zieger. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007. Pp. ix, 276.) In the course of his long and productive career, Robert H. Zieger has contributed much to the study of labor history. His classic works, The CIO: 1935-1955 and American Workers, American Unions (currently in its third edition), have introduced waves of aspiring scholars to the major themes in the field. Zieger's edited volumes, Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South and Southern Labor in Transition, served as vehicles for new and innovative scholarship and helped fuel an explosion of interest in Southern labor history. In his latest ambitious work, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865, Zieger turns his attention to the troubled relationship between African Americans and organized labor since the end of the Civil War. Zieger focuses much of his analysis on two themes: the struggle of blacks to obtain full citizenship in the workplace and wider society, and the role that organized labor has played in either helping or hindering these aspirations. Zieger rejects the narrow focus of recent surveys by "free market" historians, such as Paul Moreno, who view unions mainly as cartels that restrict the number of workers in the labor force, driving up wages and benefits in part by discriminating against African Americans. Zieger believes that unions are essential elements in a free and democratic society, and they have historically played a broader, more complex, and more beneficial role in American history than scholars like Moreno acknowledge. Zieger, however, does not downplay organized labor's racism, and he focuses much of his analysis on the contradiction between the movement's rhetoric of equality and the discriminatory practices of many unions. For Jobs and Freedom begins with an examination of the decades after Emancipation, when national labor organizations first grappled with the race issue in a substantive manner. Tentative efforts to create interracial movements emerged in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama, and on the waterfront in New Orleans. However, more durable and exclusionary practices emerged in the lily-white railroad brotherhoods and in many unions that affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), particularly in the building trades and in unions such as the International Association of Machinists (IAM). Many of these tendencies, Zieger finds, continued into the new century, through the era of World War I. More positive trends emerged as well, in the migration of millions of African Americans out of the South and into the urban areas of the North, and in [End Page 129] the rise of A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who began his long campaign against racism within the American labor movement in the decade after World War I. A burst of activism followed the Great Depression, with the passing of New Deal legislation favorable to unions and the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a rival to the AFL. The CIO, behind the success of John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), organized black workers, though leadership positions usually remained in the hands of whites. Unions with substantial black membership grew in the automobile, meat-packing, and other industries under the direction of the CIO. The number of African Americans in labor unions grew dramatically, according to Zieger, from sixty thousand to more than one million by the end of World War II. Many of these workers belonged to AFL unions, which were forced to modify their policies and reach out to black workers in part to keep up with the CIO. Legislatively, this era was mixed, according to Zieger, with Franklin Roosevelt's symbolic actions having little practical effect and some New Deal legislation actually excluding or harming black workers. Meanwhile, civil rights attorneys won important victories for black workers against discriminatory unions in the courts, beginning a difficult and long process of reform. Thus, at the end of the war, Zieger concludes that "African American workers had more reason to be optimistic than at...