Race and the CIO: The Possibilities for Racial Egalitarianism During the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

minority workers in practice, have undergone immense change. During the 1930s and 1940s, many individuals and groups who supported racial equal ity, including W. E. B. Du Bois, considered the CIO the leading organiza tion in the struggle for Black freedom. Today, many people, including Herbert Hill, consider the CIO unions of the 1930s and 1940s barely better than the racially discriminatory American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions that excluded African-American workers from union membership and employment. In this latter rendition, CIO unions, even during their prime, were merely another vehicle for maintaining white employment, white possession of more desirable jobs, and other white privileges, their differences from AFL unions largely due to the industrial milieu in which the CIO operated. Thus, the CIO unions were themselves a major obstacle to African-American advancement-part of the problem, not part of the