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Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality
Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality by Eric Arnesen Harvard Univ. Press, 2001 332 pp.; $18.95, paper |
Eric Arnesen is emerging as one of the most original and independent-minded historians of American labor. The author of a fine book on dockworkers in New Orleans and a famous article discrediting the jargon-clogged movement known as "whiteness studies," he is especially good at exploring the ideologically charged territory where race and CLASS overlap. In Brotherhoods of Color, recounting the history of black railroad workers and their union leaders, he fills in a vital chapter in the struggle for civil rights.
One of the principal figures in this history will be familiar to most survivors of American History 101. A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, has long been featured in textbooks and documentaries as the éminence grise of the civil rights movement, one of the organizers of the March on Washington in 1963 (a project Randolph began planning during World War II). Randolph is already the subject of an engrossing biography by Jervis Anderson, but Arnesen fills in the background and context that only hard time in the archives can provide.
Arnesen's story reveals important patterns in the history of race and CLASS. For instance, he presents cases where the initiative behind anti-black discrimination came not from capitalists but from the white working CLASS. In the revealing case of Memphis yard workers around World War I, labor shortages allowed white workers to take low-level jobs formerly defined as black. But after the war, black workers fought to reclaim their positions, and management complied. White rank-and-filers responded with wildcat "hate strikes," which forced union leaders and government officials to endorse new rules that excluded more black workers than before.
The older Jim Crow system of reserving admittedly unpleasant, low-paid jobs for black workers at least gave them a piece of the pie. But during industrial contractions, the "black" jobs became desirable to white unions, and a tool for controlling the higher positions. White workers in Memphis exploited management's assumption that black workers could not rise to positions that required education, such as engineer. They insisted on a uniform seniority ladder, while restricting the lowest rungs to "promotable" men, thus achieving the exclusion of black workers. Evil could flow from the bottom up, as well as the top down, and working-CLASS power could produce reaction as well as progress.
Black workers were not passive bystanders. They sometimes made common cause with management, gaining whatever advantages they could. An important corollary to their willingness to be "scabs" when white workers went on strike was what Arnesen calls a "historically rooted antipathy toward organized labor held by a considerable number of African Americans." This sometimes inhibited their own organization of unions and bolstered the position of organizers like C.W. Rice, who led the National Federation of Railway Workers and edited the weekly Negro Labor News in the 1930s and '40s. Rice argued that in America black workers could "start at the bottom of an industry and rise, step by step, through the merit system, to the head of that same industry." Rice championed "company unions," set up by management as alternatives to worker-controlled unions. Company unions were often genuinely attractive, considering that most "real" unions excluded or exploited black workers. Sometimes black leaders could use these to undercut the more expensive labor represented by white unions, and win real gains for themselves as well as the bosses. Other black leaders denounced Rice as an Uncle Tom and a pawn of management, especially after cio-affiliated unions began accepting black members and fighting union racism. But Rice and other "independent" black union leaders had a big following.
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